Franz is waiting, one would swear, for Milena to swoon and send flowers. Yet once again she says nothing. The proof? On January 20, 1922, four months later, he asks her this question: “Did you find something decisive against me in the Diaries?”
He perhaps wonders if Milena even took the trouble to open his notebooks. Might she have stuffed them into some corner of her vast armoire and forgotten them?
Does he decide to fish for a criticism, if only to make her read his heart laid bare?
On January 18, 1923, although he is gravely ill, he writes her an interminable letter of congratulations, verging on flattery. He has just read Milena’s “The Devil at the Hearth.” He cannot find the words to express his admiration: “A marvelous and moving article, in which the dazzling character of your thoughts is striking, touching.”
In opposition to Max, Oskar, Felix, and Ernst, who howled with appreciative laughter at Franz’s reading of “The Metamorphosis” and the first chapters of The Trial, women, at least those who fall in love with him, find that his works depict a world where man is only a pitiful shadow under the sun, a world of absurdity where every undertaking is destined to failure, where the innocent accept their guilt, where even the emperor’s messenger cannot deliver his message because “if he were ever to reach the bottom of the stairs, he would be no farther along, as he would still have to cross the courtyards. And after the courtyards, the second palace surrounding them, and then more stairs and courtyards, and after them a further palace. And so on for centuries and centuries.” Chilled to the bone, Franz’s women no longer know the man they love, can no longer separate fiction from fact.
And yet … immediately following Kafka’s death, Milena published an obituary that one cannot read, and reread, without being deeply moved. An admirable analysis of the man and his work, one of the most sensitive ever written.17
On May 8, 1922, he sees Milena for the last time. Their encounter stays with him like a sore that won’t heal. “Don’t be unhappy,” he tells himself in the Diaries. “Don’t put any pressure on yourself, but don’t be unhappy that you are putting no pressure on yourself, stop sniffing voluptuously at the opportunity for pressure.”
Despite his sermons, he is clearly in distress.
The question that haunts him is whether, since he was happy with Felice in Marienbad, he might not now find happiness with Milena in Prague. After their painful breakup in Gmünd.
He doubts it. Between himself and Milena is not a wall but a grave. Yet sexual desire inflames him, tortures him day and night. “To satisfy it,” he writes, “I would have to overcome my fear, my sense of modesty, and also my sadness.”
Rejected by Milena, banished, expelled from the world and the company of the living, incapable—as he believes—of forming bonds with anyone, he buries himself. He disappears into silence, the darkness of his burrow, the only place where he feels safe. In nine months, with the tracery of his pen, he builds The Castle,18 his third and final novel, the most personal, the most allegorical, the novel that makes one wonder: Is it the memory of a disillusion that hovers on the heights?
15 After Kafka’s death, she asked Max Brod to burn them.
16 By the French social realist Charles-Louis Philippe (1874–1909).
17 An extract can be found on pages 257–58.
18 The Castle, unfinished at Kafka’s death, was published by Kurt Wolff in Munich in 1926. Of the print run of 1,500 copies, few were sold.
“If I reach my fortieth year, then I’ll probably marry an old maid with protruding upper teeth, left a little exposed by the upper lip.”
—DIARY ENTRY
The Young Girl and Death
When he asks himself about his own identity, Franz Kafka recognizes that he is a Jew among non-Jews, a nonbeliever among believers, a German among Czechs. True, he writes in German, but never without the feeling that he is appropriating something that doesn’t belong to him. His hind legs, he says, are still stuck to the language of his forefathers.
In May 1917, which is the year he contracts tuberculosis, the year of his final break with Felice, Kafka becomes more involved with Judaism. Three years earlier he had said that he had nothing in common with the Jews, he barely had anything in common with himself. But in 1917 he is closely following the cultural and political trends affecting Prague’s Jewish intellectuals. He subscribes to the Zionist periodical Selbstwehr (Self-defense), which is edited by his friend, the philosopher Felix Weltsch.19 As each issue appears, he devours it from start to finish. He has avidly read all three volumes of Heinrich Graetz’s Popular History of the Jews.
He starts to learn Hebrew, at first on his own, using the forty-five lessons in the manual by Moses Rath. Then he turns to a series of professors. The first is Georg Mordecai Langer, who has ostentatiously cast off his Western education and now wears the dress and leads the life of a Hasid. The second is Rabbi Friedrich Thieberger, a Zionist philologist with a passion for photography. The third is a young woman originally from Jerusalem, Puah Ben Tovim.
The three teach him the secular language forged by the Lithuanian visionary Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. An immigrant to Palestine, Ben-Yehuda had been battling since the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 to have Hebrew declared the national language. By contrast, Theodor Herzl thought the language spoken in the Promised Land ought to be German.
Of the three teachers, Franz prefers Puah, because he feels more at ease with a young woman, because Hebrew is her mother tongue, and because she is the first bird of passage to arrive from Palestine. She comes to his house three times a week to conduct classes in his bedroom. Whenever Franz coughs, Frau Kafka comes running anxiously to the door. The sight of her son, his eyes choked with tears, stops her in her tracks. She withdraws, her head drooping. Puah doesn’t know whether to continue the lesson, as her pupil insists, or to interrupt it, as his mother would like.
He works so obstinately at his studies that he is soon attempting to read a novel by Brenner, Sterility and Failure, a difficult book and one not particularly to his liking. He can only read a page of it a day. But he takes wholehearted pleasure in Puah’s description of her life in Palestine and her job teaching mathematics in Prague, where she has come to spend the year. The young woman has the gift of leaving a little of her gaiety in her wake, and a little of her serene confidence.
Over the months, he fills five notebooks with grammar exercises and columns of vocabulary, with the German word on the left and the Hebrew on the right.20 On ten scattered sheets are the starts of stories, some letters in Hebrew, some doodles and sketches. Rescuing a threatened identity and the collective memory of a people now seems important to him.21
Every so often, in the manner of a recurring dream, he makes plans to emigrate to Palestine. His health would improve in the dry and sunny climate of the Mediterranean, and life would be relatively inexpensive. His favorite fruits, cherries, bananas, and strawberries, would be on the table every day. In Prague their cost is exorbitant. And the cost of living is too often ignored.
In October 1922, encouraged by Else Bergmann, the wife of another Hebrew student, he seriously considers taking the plunge. Is it not reasonable to leave Prague, rife as it is with anti-Semitism? Is it not natural to leave a place where one is the object of such hatred? To stay despite everything, he says, is to emulate the heroism of the cockroach, which nothing can drive from the bathroom.
The Czech newspaper Venkov serves its readers a daily diet of stories about the Jewish people over the centuries. All of them illustrate the great lack of fortitude of the Jews, their cowardice, their greed, their treacherousness. One night in mid-November, Franz watches from his window as mounted police and gendarmes with fixed bayonets disperse a crowd that has been attacking Jewish shops shouting, “Mangy race of Jews!” He is ashamed at having to live under police protection.
When he passes in front of the Jewish town hall and sees the hundreds of Russian and Polish immigrants queuing for visas to America, he wishes he were among those carefre
e children soon to cross the Atlantic. He knows that, like Moses, he will never enter the Land of Canaan. It is a fantasy, such as a person might have who knows that he will never leave his bed. But does one ever really know? Out of nothing, something whole can come.
Besides, one has to find a reason to hope.
In the meantime, Franz labors at the promised language, the writing of his ancestors.
His father did not hand down to him any religious instruction. Franz did celebrate his bar mitzvah at the Gypsy Synagogue on June 13, 1896.22 The day of Milena’s birth.
In October 1911, at the Café Arco, the most ordinary cafe in Prague, he met Yitzhak Löwy, an actor trying to revive the Yiddish language through his plays and lectures. Kafka became his most ardent admirer and would gladly have kneeled down in the dust to applaud him. He helped Löwy in every way he could, applying on his behalf for subsidies, selling tickets to his performances, and giving two lectures, one of them on Yiddish, the youngest European language, and the other on the Jewish theater.
In the second lecture, he introduces a personal reminiscence. When he was fourteen, he says, on a day when his parents thought him at synagogue, bent over the pages of the Talmud, he went to the theater for the first time to see Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. He was electrified. Yiddish theater mixes drama, tragedy, song, comedy, dance, everything together, it is life itself, he exclaims!23 He can no longer do without it. Even if it means telling lies and committing sins.
His two speeches cost him many nights of insomnia. He doesn’t have the actor’s superb effrontery, which allows him to exhibit himself and stand firm under the gaze of an audience. But no one else is willing to stand up and speak. Löwy, hot-tempered and resentful, has few friends and barely earns a living. His performances are never well attended.
When Hermann Kafka finds the actor visiting Franz in his house, he grows furious. His lips tighten into a line, his head shakes ironically, he reproaches his son for befriending a stranger who has nothing to offer, a vermin who would lead you back to Yiddish, the language of the poor and the backward. Our language, he says, is German, and our culture is German culture. He even forbids his son to invite this flea-ridden specimen to share a meal with them, his presence is an affront, intolerable.
“I don’t care if that Pole does hear me from your room. All your friends are good-for-nothings.”
Even Max Brod, the most brilliant and prominent intellectual in Prague, fails to find favor in Hermann’s eyes. Just yesterday, he had called his son’s inseparable friend a meschuggenner ritoch, a Yiddish expression meaning “crazy hothead.” Hermann Kafka is oblivious to his own contradictions. When he is angry, he turns to his mother tongue, the only one that was spoken in his wretched shtetl. Now that he is a prominent resident of Prague, the owner of a flourishing business, he is an Austrian citizen and nothing else.
All the more reason for Franz to learn Hebrew.
In early July 1923, he sets off for Müritz, a beach resort on the Baltic, for a rest. He has asked his eldest sister Elli to accompany him. He no longer feels capable of traveling or living alone, in Müritz or anywhere else.
They stay at the Haus Glickauf Hotel, where his room is right next to the room that Elli shares with her two children, Felix and Gerti. He is happy to be close to the sea. He hasn’t seen it for ten years. He finds it more beautiful, more varied, more alive, fresher. He writes his friends to tell them.
From his balcony, where sparrows have built their nest under the balustrade, he looks out through a belt of pines and birch trees to where children play along the shore. The children are blond, with blue eyes, they are healthy and run all over the place merrily. They live in a two-story house, Haus Huten. It is a vacation camp organized by the Jewish People’s Home in Berlin, the same organization where Felice, his first fiancée, agreed to volunteer a few years earlier. The memory of Felice no longer torments him, it is so distant. She married a few months after their final separation and now has two sons. Ottla keeps him informed.
For half the day and night, the forest, the sea, and the air around Haus Huten are filled with children’s singing. Elli meets the young women who work as camp counselors, all of whom are volunteers, and Felix and Gerti soon join the camp activities.
In the early afternoon, Franz goes down to the beach and plays with the children. These orphans from Russia and Poland, he writes, so vigorous, so passionate, and whom he speaks to in Hebrew, give him a sense of being on the verge of happiness.
One of the camp counselors, named Tile Rössler, is a lively, engaging adolescent, so thin, so frail, it is hard to believe she is even sixteen. She is also the only one to know who Dr. Kafka is. She worked part time at the Jurovics bookstore in Berlin, and she had put one of his books, The Stoker, on display in the shop window. She says that the Berlin critics are full of praise for the book, and that Dr. Kafka occupies an important position in Prague.
One day, late in the afternoon when he is playing with the children from the People’s Home, Tile introduces herself. He listens to her. She launches on a long narrative, happily answering his questions about the children, the organization of the camp, herself and her life in Berlin, the bookstore. And this man whom everyone admires for his elegance—he even dresses with care to go to the beach—this man addresses her using the informal Du.
Ever since, she has been on the lookout for him. As soon as she sees him sit down on the sand or walk, his blanket folded over his arm, toward his deck chair at the end of the jetty, she races to sit at his feet. And they resume their conversation. One day she says, “You see, I speak every language, only I speak it in Yiddish,” and she is proud to have made him laugh.
She has the idea of offering him a present. But what? She decides to make a clay pot for him in the children’s pottery workshop. When it comes out of the kiln, she paints it. Pleased with the result, she goes to the Haus Glickauf to give it to Dr. Kafka. She has sent word of her visit beforehand.
She waits in the lobby for him to come down from his room. A pianist with a blond mane is playing a Grieg sonata. The concierge is reading the newspaper. An elderly couple at a table near the bar sip glasses of white wine.
Dr. Kafka would later tell her that he had a perfectly clear memory of her on that day: “Leaning a little forward, a little abstracted, you were listening to the sonata by Grieg, bowing humbly to the music.”
He walks toward her saying, “I, too, have a present for you.”
Tile, flushed with emotion, has trouble stripping the tissue paper from the object he has handed her. As she tears at the wrapping, he says, “We should always take hold of delicate objects delicately.”
A ruby-colored glass cup filled with chocolates trembles in Tile’s hands.
She throws herself into his arms and rests her head on his chest.
“How did you know?”
The adolescent has been eyeing this cup in the pastry shop window, where it sparkled and glowed next to the plum tarts. Dr. Kafka had seen the girl and her friend Sabine with their noses pressed to the glass. As he walked past, he heard Tile say, “I’ll never be able to buy myself such a lovely thing.”
“You’ll smash this cup on your wedding day,” he says. “And I’ll always keep your vase. I won’t give it to anyone.”
Since receiving this extravagant present, Tile has been walking on air, singing the praises of her older friend.
On Friday, July 12, with the enthusiastic agreement of the other members of the home, Tile invites Dr. Kafka to join them for Sabbath dinner, to be followed by a show.
When he arrives at the oddly shaped house at the end of the afternoon, he enters the wrong door and finds himself in the kitchen, which is flooded with light from the setting sun. Bees circle in the heavy golden air and knock against the windowpanes. Franz’s attention is drawn to the bowed neck of a young woman scaling fish. Seeing her pull the entrails from a salmon, he says, “Such lovely hands to do such bloody work!”24
The counselor turns, recognizes hi
m. Her face grows red. She has seen him several times on the beach with his family all around him. She curtsies and introduces herself: “Dora Diamant.” She adds, “I know who you are. Tile talks of no one but you, and the home has been buzzing since this morning.”
She asks after his wife and children. He laughs: “My wife? My children?”
Her mistaken assumption and the amusement it provides perhaps cement the attraction they already feel for each other.
After dinner, Dora recites the forty-third chapter of Isaiah: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee.” She comments on the passage. Dr. Kafka, amazed by her knowledge of Hebrew and Judaism, can’t take his eyes off her.
The next day, and the days after that, he visits the home again.
Tile soon realizes that he has eyes only for the Polish girl. At mealtimes, he takes the seat next to her. On the beach, Tile sees them engaged in endless conversations. Since she introduced him to the home, he has shifted his attention to this plump young woman who speaks and reads Hebrew so well. All day the flat, skinny adolescent follows them at a distance. She sees them walk along the flowering dunes or out on the jetty into the lapping sound of the waves.
She surprises them sitting side by side, sheltering from the wind, their heads drawn together as they recite from a Hebrew text, their eyes meeting above the book.
Do they take themselves for a pair of mythical lovers, for Francesca and Paolo da Rimini?
Toward the end of July, Tile returns to Berlin, from where she writes two letters to her friend. Franz sends her a long reply on August 3.25 It is the affectionate, lighthearted letter of an older brother to his younger sister. So that there should be no misunderstanding, he talks to her about Dora, a “marvelous creature.”
The life story of this “marvelous creature” fascinates him, as the life story of the actor Löwy had earlier. Born in Poland, Dora fled her father’s house at the age of eighteen. She ran away from Bedzin and its imposing synagogue, which looms over the town and the castle.26
Kafka in Love Page 12