The early moments of their relationship belong in a film comedy. Franz and Julie keep walking into each other, as they traverse the hotel’s deserted hallways, or enter the empty dining room, or rise from their respective tables, which are yards apart, or when they sit down in the cavernous drawing room. It becomes so funny that as soon as they see each other, they break out laughing. They laugh about their strange resemblance, about having the same shape of face, the same mouth, they laugh about their shyness, they laugh for no reason, and without stopping, they look at each other and can’t hold back the laughter that wells up and leaves them in confusion. Whenever they start giggling, Fräulein Olga Studl raises her hands to the heavens and mutters, “Those two, those two … what on earth is going on?”
They spend six weeks together. At night they hold long conversations. He tells her about his doubly failed engagement. She is just getting over the death of her fiancé, killed at the front. He finds Julie common and surprising, pretty (she reminds him of Grete Bloch), honest, likable, and shy. “She is a fragile counter girl,” he writes Max, “deeply ignorant and full of resignation.” He adds, somewhat cynically: “She is no less insignificant than this housefly, for example, flying toward the light.”
Franz’s eccentricities surprise Julie. He spends his nights writing to his friends, his sister, his parents. He rises at noon, eats only vegetables and dried fruits, drinks liters of milk. At night, he reads aloud for hours on end, pacing back and forth, gesticulating like an actor, his eyes shining with pleasure. He intrigues her with his insatiable curiosity, questioning her tirelessly about her work as a milliner. How does she go about creating a hat? Does she start from a sketch or from a piece of fabric? How long does it take to make one? Do her hats have veils? Flowers? Whom does she sell them to, and for how much?
With a tact that she appreciates, he also takes an interest in her father’s work as a shoemaker and a synagogue watchman in a poor hamlet. The number of Yiddish expressions that stud her speech, some of them quite shocking, disconcerts him, but he hides the fact.
They both feel that, despite their social and cultural differences, they are intimately suited to each other. They spend more and more time together. In the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket, Franz walks the length of the hallway leading to Julie’s room to slip a letter under her door. Once back in bed, he waits for the reply. When they greet each other, morning and night, he takes the risk of holding the young woman’s hand a little longer than normal. Soon, he is discussing marriage: “It is the highest goal, but it is not for me. My health is too poor.”
“Although my reasons are different, I am no longer interested in marriage either,” she says.
“Don’t you want to have children?”
“No, ever since the war and the death of my fiancé, I really don’t.”
“What kind of life do you want to live?”
“A life that would help me forget the misery I’ve known. All I dream about is the movies, the comic opera, fashion. Nothing else.”
“As we have both opted against marriage, we cannot stay together. The court of public opinion obliges us to separate.”
For several days, they bravely resist their mutual attraction. They avoid each other, take lunch and dinner at different times. Julie cuts short her evenings in the drawing room. Franz lingers longer in his bedroom. They must avoid each other or they would start using the familiar Du and fall into each other’s arms.
The time has come to part. A melancholy moment. Julie has asked one of her sisters to accompany her back to Prague. Franz catches only a glimpse of this woman, who seems a little disoriented but a thoroughly good person.
He remains alone at Schelesen for another three weeks, until the end of March. He doesn’t write Julie, not even a word. But now that she is gone, he is obsessed with her. He’s convinced that things can’t just be left as they are.
Shortly after his return to Prague, the two arrange to meet—how could it have been otherwise? They become lovers.
This was to be the start of a peaceful, happy period. They meet almost every day, but, in order not to be seen together, they take long walks in the forest, along the dark alleys of the Riegerpark, or after nightfall in the streets of Prague. They hide from others, and this cautiousness is humiliating to Franz.
When his sister Ottla becomes officially engaged and sets the date of her wedding for July 15,14 the fear of winding up alone makes him do something crazy: he proposes to Julie. She refuses. He insists, lays out arguments, wears away at the young woman’s resistance. He persuades himself that it would be a marriage of love and a rational one as well. Julie provides him the sense of safety that he needs.
He again combs Prague for an apartment, neighborhood by neighborhood.
One night he announces the news of his engagement to his parents. He wants to introduce them to his new fiancée.
“A shoemaker’s daughter?” says Hermann. “A woman whose father is the poorest man in all Bohemia? That’s who Herr My Son wants to marry? A revolting goose who snares you in a moment? Your sister is marrying a Catholic, but you have just dealt me an even more painful blow. You are trying to kill me, is that what you want?”
Hermann threatens to go into exile to avoid the dishonor of such a mismatch. He reminds his son that his engagement to Felice was twice broken off, that enormous sums were spent on his behalf for nothing, and that six months of rent went down the drain! Two failures are not enough for Herr My Son, now he must have a third? If you need a whore, go to the bordello. And if you can’t manage to do that alone at your age, I’ll take you there myself.
For the first time, Franz doesn’t let himself be terrorized. The torrent of insults and contempt from his father only reinforces his decision. The day he finds an apartment, a shabbily furnished one-bedroom on the outskirts of Prague, he sets a date for the wedding.
He arranges for the publication of the banns.
On Monday, Julie and he visit the apartment. They are sitting on the couch, huddled together. The young woman savors the moment. She has won this home after untold suffering. At her side is her husband-to-be, the promise of happiness. Tears of joy run down her face. Franz is also shaken. He has just realized how close he is to disaster. On Sunday, he will move in, live day after day with Julie, her dresses, her hats, and her underwear, her smells and her fripperies, her voice chattering away in this dingy, dark, overcrowded cell. He will stop writing. His heart thumps. His vision blurs. The walls, the ceiling, and the floor start to spin, his face, his body break out in sweat. He feels on the point of collapse.
On Friday, two days before the wedding, the landlord changes his mind. The apartment is no longer available.
He is saved.
For several weeks, Franz pretends that life is continuing as before. He walks with Julie in the Riegerpark, the botanical garden. They have lunch together often, swim together at Cernosic.
Finally he can’t go on, can’t ignore the warning signals drumming in his head. His insomnia is driving him crazy, he compares himself to a man burning alive. He offers Julie a pact of friendship and faith: “Let’s go on seeing each other as often as you like, but let’s discard the idea of marriage.”
In mid-November, unable to stand it any longer, he runs away. Where to? To Schelesen, where they met. Max accompanies him. Over a period of ten days, Franz composes the “Letter to His Father.”
When he returns to Prague, he shows it to Ottla, then gives it to his mother, who wisely refuses to pass it on to its intended recipient. Hermann Kafka would go to his grave unaware of the eighty-page letter his son wrote to him in the days following his aborted engagement to Julie. Hermann Kafka would never hear the reproaches his son leveled at him, and those he leveled at his son. Franz, typically enough for a lawyer, advocated for both parties. He prosecuted a double suit: the son’s lawsuit against the father and the father’s stinging rebuttal of his son.
Was it for his father that Franz intended this settling of account
s and this peace offering? It seems unlikely. Franz knew perfectly well (how often he complained of it!) that his father never opened any of his books, even A Country Doctor, which was dedicated to him. Hermann never read a page of it, not a single word. Every time Franz gave him a collection of his works, his father, without looking at it, without touching it, as though it were a disgusting thing, would utter this sentence, which became a family catchphrase: “Put it on my night stand.”
Franz knew what the fate of his letter would be in his father’s hands. Which explains, perhaps, why he spoke with such extraordinary freedom. Did it work as he had hoped it would? Did he approach close enough to the truth to make his life, his death, a little easier?
On his return from Schelesen, he starts seeing Julie again, but nothing is the same. He is distracted, abrupt, silent, shuttered. The days pass in boredom, idleness, silence, anxiety. The affair is treading water. But not for long.
14 Ottla, over the opposition of her parents, married Josef David, a Christian Czech. While Max Brod saw the marriage as a loss for Judaism, Kafka supported his sister: “You are doing something extraordinary, and to do something extraordinary correctly is extraordinarily difficult. But if you manage never to forget the responsibility that such a difficult act entails, you will do more than if you had married ten Jews.”
“I’m the most Western Jewish of them all. In other words, to exaggerate, not one second of calm has been granted me, nothing has been granted me, everything must be earned, not only the present and future, but the past as well—something that is perhaps given every human being—this too must be earned, and this probably entails the hardest work of all. If the Earth turns to the right—I’m not sure it does—then I would have to turn to the left to make up for the past. But as it is I don’t have the least bit of strength for these obligations; I can’t carry the world on my shoulders—I can barely carry my winter coat.”
—LETTER TO MILENA
Milena, the End of an Illusion
They meet at the Café Arco. Franz has gone there to buy himself the thing he loves most: a cup of hot chocolate under a mountain of cream. He is sitting at a table alone. She comes toward him: “Dr. Kafka? I’m Milena Jesenská, wife of Ernst Polak. You know him, I believe?”
She points toward her husband, who is talking to a large redheaded woman. Franz rises immediately to his feet, bows to the very young lady with the lovely blue eyes standing in front of him. Slender and blond, she looks squarely at him and smiles at his awkwardness. He has knocked over the sugar bowl without noticing it.
He stares at her, forgetting to answer her question.
“I’d like to translate several of your books into Czech: The Stoker, The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, and In the Penal Colony.”
“All that trouble? You shouldn’t.”
“Of course I should. Your books are the most important of the new crop of German literature. I’ve already translated The Stoker, and your editor, Kurt Wolff, has asked me to obtain your permission.”
“You’re a translator?”
“Yes, I just said that. And a journalist. May I send you the text for corrections?”
“Do you live in Prague?”
“No, in Vienna.”
They trade addresses. She waves good-bye, he watches her walk away.
He remembers the clothes she was wearing that day, her lively hands, her frail figure between the tables of the Café Arco. Yes, he still remembers that.
He leaves Prague in early April. He is going to Meran in the South Tirol for a rest. He is constantly weary. He repeatedly requests time off from work and can’t seem to end his affair with Julie. She clings to him and cries. Does he hope that being away for two months will put an end to her obstinacy? He has said nothing to her about the meeting at the Café Arco or the two letters he has received from Milena, two letters that are never out of his pocket and that he fingers like a talisman.
In Meran he settles into the Ottoburg Pension, run by Fräulein Fröhlich. From his balcony he sees climbing flowers at the height of his room and exuberant tropical vegetation in the garden below. A sparrow visits him at breakfast time. Franz tosses it a few breadcrumbs and watches the reaction. The bird stands in the sunlight on the balcony. It covets the life-giving food, the crumbs that lie in shadow on the threshold to Franz’s room. A few little hops and the bird could gobble them all down. But it is afraid to venture into unknown territory. It tentatively makes a few jumps forward, stops, advances a little farther, hops away, fluffs out its feathers to give itself courage. Desire propelling it, the sparrow jumps and lands a few centimeters from the feast. Then it retreats. It flies away, ruled by fear.
Toward mid-April, Franz starts to write Milena. He is no longer the dashing seducer who, on the night of August 13, 1912, rang at Max Brod’s door and decided, there and then, to win Felice. He is now thirty-nine years old, his hair has turned gray, he no longer takes the stairs four at a time. He spends most of his waking hours in a deck chair. He is easily winded from walking.
When he meets Milena, the woman he had never hoped to meet, especially now, especially so late, he knows his time is limited. This is no longer the season for pleasantries.
And Milena is not Felice.
She is only twenty-three when she enters his life like a hurricane. Twenty-three, but she already has an eventful past and a scandalous reputation. As a child she took care of her mother for months. She saw her suffer, waste away, and die in her arms. Her father, a famous stomatologist and a stiff, brutal man, refused to care for his wife himself.
Neglected and bereaved of her mother, the adolescent experimented with cocaine and ran with a fast crowd. One night she swam across the Moldau River fully dressed to meet a lover. She spent her afternoons in cafes, posed naked for painters, rented hotel rooms in which to meet her two closest friends, Staša and Jarmila (there was whispered talk of sapphic love). She offered them armfuls of flowers, dresses, ornaments. Money burned her fingers.
She was eighteen and attending a concert when she met Ernst Polak and decided to live with him. The young man was a womanizer, a gambler, and a night creature with a vague connection to writing. When Dr. Jesensky learned of his daughter’s attachment to a Jew and a cafe-table writer, he had her locked up in a psychiatric clinic outside Prague. She lived with the insane for nine months, obtained her release on reaching adulthood, and raced off to marry Polak. Dr. Jesensky cut off all ties to his daughter.
The two moved to Vienna. Now money is scarce and life hard. Milena writes columns for magazines and newspapers in Prague, brilliant columns that are avidly read by feminists. She teaches Czech, translates foreign novels. Days when she has no money, when she has nothing to eat but apples and tea, she puts on an old cap and walks to the main train station, where she hauls luggage for travelers. Her husband, “the man with forty mistresses,” openly cheats on her. Often the worse for drink, he mistreats Milena and runs up debts that she scrambles to repay. When she meets Kafka, her health is dicey, she has a recurring case of bronchitis, she has coughed up blood two or three times, her marriage is falling apart, and she has no money.
Franz and Milena begin writing each other in April, and they stop in November. Less than eight months. He writes to her in German, she answers in Czech, usually in pencil. A subject for complaint. Of his letters, about 150 survive. None of Milena’s.15 All that remains of hers are her articles—tributes to the little black dress, to fashion, to cafes, to the popular quarters on Sundays, to trains, to a film by Charlie Chaplin; a brilliant satire of marriage and communal life, “The Devil at the Hearth”; and the eight feverish, impassioned letters that she wrote to Max as her affair with the man she still called “Frank” was coming to an end. In his early letters to her, Franz appended his second initial to his first name. Milena never noticed the z. And he never corrected her. For her alone he was a different person.
Milena confides about what is going poorly in her life: her health. He becomes alarmed, begs her to leave Vienna a
nd find rest by a lake, perhaps in Meran, where he is staying.
“My God! Milena, if you were here!” he writes. “But I would be lying if I said that I missed you: for by the most cruel and perfect magic, you are here, even as I am, no, even more than I am. This is not a joke, I actually find myself thinking that you must miss me here, since you are very much here but asking yourself: Where is he? Didn’t he write that he was in Meran?”
She writes about her father and being cut off by him (Franz knows all about hard-hearted fathers, and on June 21 sends her his “Letter to His Father”), about her marital quarrels, her financial difficulties (he sends her money). In return, she asks him about his private life, his three engagements, his ties to Judaism, and his fears, all his fears.
From April to the end of June, they write each other every day, often several times a day, always by express mail. As they reach a feverish pitch, telegrams fly back and forth at a rapid rate. Franz addresses his letters to a fictional Frau Kramer, at the Poste Restante, where Milena goes to pick them up each morning and night. They both live in expectation, in impatient expectation, of learning more, and saying more: “This mania for letters is insane,” Franz writes her. “One tilts one’s head back, drinks the words down, knows nothing except that one doesn’t want it to stop. Explain that to me, Professor Milena.”
The attraction they feel for each other is so strong that by early June they are using the familiar Du and talking of love.
“Address me again with the word Du,” he writes. “And look me in the eye.”
Franz had often addressed the sturdy Felice as “My darling girl, my child.” Today he calls Milena: “My baby, my baby.” Yesterday he went so far as to call her “Mommy Milena.” The impetuous young woman, whom Franz has described to Max as “a living fire, such as I have never seen before,” summarily orders him never to use such ridiculous language again.
Kafka in Love Page 9