Kafka in Love

by Jacqueline Raoul-Duval

  Freed from Hasidic law, which imposes so many duties and restrictions on women and affords them so few rights, Dora lives for a year in Breslau. There she starts to read literature and study German, all the while working in a kindergarten. From there she emigrates to Berlin, the City of Light, with its population of 170, 000 Jews, many of whom play important roles in the social and cultural life of the city. The two largest newspaper groups, Ullstein and Mosse, are owned by Jews.

  Dora works at several jobs and volunteers at the People’s Home. Brave and determined (the two qualities Kafka admires most), she is wonderfully young (a little more than twenty), intelligent, gentle, devout, pious, and in excellent health. And she takes care of children. Blessings on this meeting!

  In the course of their talks, she tries to instill Franz with her strength: “Do what you have always wanted to do, leave Prague and move to Berlin. In the spring, we’ll emigrate to Palestine together. We’ll open a restaurant in Tel Aviv, ‘Spring Hill.’ ”

  In early August he leaves Müritz and Dora. Arriving in Berlin, he attends a performance of Schiller’s The Robbers on August 7, accompanied by Tile and two of her friends. The play makes little impression on him, other than to highlight his own exhaustion. The vacation in Müritz has done nothing to improve his health. He feels at the limit of his strength. He weighs 120 pounds, thinner than he has ever been.

  Where better to go and gain weight than to his beloved sister Ottla? She has rented a vacation house in Schelesen, where she is living alone with her daughter, Vera, and her newborn, Helen.

  He joins her there in mid-August and stays for more than a month. He realizes that, for the first time, he has forgotten her birthday. He has even forgotten the exact date, is it October 29 or October 30?

  “As far as I am concerned,” he says, “you don’t grow any older. I don’t believe in your being thirty-one years old.” He adds, “Be glad you are a woman.”

  She is the only person he talks to about Dora and their plans. Ottla encourages him, as she always has, to free himself of his chains.

  He is beset by doubts, assailed by forces antagonistic to him. He takes to his bed, feverish once more.

  “Rain is leaking into the hovel,” he tells his sister.

  Scarcely fattened up, he returns to Prague, winds up his affairs in a day and a half, asks his employer for early retirement. He packs his bags, a horribly complicated business, he would never have seen it through without the help of “Fräulein,” his beloved Marie Werner, the family’s old and faithful governess. Against his father’s advice (another quarrel!), under his mother’s worried gaze, and despite the gloomy forecasts of his brother-in-law Pepa, he gathers the last remnants of his strength and flees to Berlin.

  He has announced his arrival to Dora via telegram: “Will arrive Berlin Monday 24 September. Can you be at station?”

  For how long is he going away? Four or five days? Certainly not much more.

  He has climbed into the express train that sets off into the night. He savors his mad act of daring. The only comparison he can find is with Napoleon and his campaign into Russia. At the age of forty, he has managed to escape Prague, his family, the office, and the daily grind.

  When he arrives in Berlin, to whom does he announce his incredible victory? To Milena, who has sent him a letter from Italy.

  “Something wonderful has happened to me,” he writes. “What wonderful things exist in the world! I live almost in the country, in a small villa with a garden. I have never lived in such a beautiful apartment, I am afraid of losing it, it is much too beautiful for me.”

  He goes on to say that while at the beach on the Baltic he met a worker from the Jewish Home and that he has followed her to Berlin: “I am well and tenderly looked after, to the limit of possibility here on earth.”

  Is it likely that Milena received this news with a quiet heart, this picture of Franz happy in another’s arms?

  The villa with a garden that he writes Milena about was found by Dora in the residential district of Steglitz, at number 8 on elegant Miquelstrasse.

  When he ventures out on a warm evening to stroll along the avenues lined with splendid residences, the smells from the lush, old gardens wash over him with a sweetness and intensity he has experienced nowhere else, neither in Schelesen nor Merano nor Marienbad. He hardly strays beyond the immediate vicinity of the villa. The botanical gardens are a fifteen-minute walk away, the Grünewald forest only a little farther.

  A profound peace rules over this patrician suburb, the children he meets look healthy, beggars are scarce and not threatening at all.

  But there are rumblings from the center of Berlin. The news is horrible, horrible. Constant uprisings and strikes, factories closing every day, businesses going bankrupt, thousands of the unemployed demonstrating. Inflation spirals upward so dizzyingly that prices no longer rise from day to day but from hour to hour. A newspaper that cost 100,000 marks in August costs 150 million marks in September, and a loaf of bread costs four million marks. Hunger riots erupt across the country. One night, four bodies are carted off the streets of Berlin. Desperate mobs loot shops and corporate businesses. The whole nation sinks into poverty. The nationalist party blames the Treaty of Versailles and the huge debt that Germany has been saddled with, in order to crush it forever.

  Franz’s retirement pension of a thousand marks is no longer enough, despite a very advantageous exchange rate. His monthly payments arrive weeks behind schedule. He is forced, with bowed head, to ask his parents and sisters, Ottla in particular, to lend him small sums. And to send him supplies of sugar, butter (he eats a great deal of it to gain weight), honey, kefir, marmalade, tea, and chocolate from warm and well-stocked Bohemia.

  He can’t manage to make ends meet, and because of his illness he has greater needs than others. When they run out of alcohol fuel, Dora warms their dinner over candle stubs.

  Max peppers him with questions, but he refuses to talk about Dora. None of his friends can know that they are living together, a young woman’s reputation is at stake. His letters only glancingly allude to Fräulein Diamant.

  That fall starts off warm and bright. Franz pushes his walks as far as the botanical garden. He inhales the smell of the linden trees in flower, tours the tropical greenhouses, charts the changing colors of the foliage, and, along the silent walkways, hears the crinkling under his feet of the first dead leaves.

  One day as he enters through the gates of the park, he sees a young girl sobbing. He walks up to her. She is one of those little blond flowers with white skin and red cheeks that grow so abundantly in these parts. He asks her, “Why are you crying?”

  “I’ve lost my doll.”

  “You haven’t lost it,” he says.

  “Did you find it?”

  “No, no, I didn’t find it. Your doll went off on a trip.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She wrote me a letter.”

  “Show me.”

  “I left it at home. But if you like, I’ll bring it tomorrow, at three o’clock. Right here in front of this bench.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Franz. And yours?”

  “Malou.”

  Once back at his house, he asks himself what Ottla would say to her eldest daughter if by a stroke of bad luck the girl lost her doll, Lolotte, which she clutches to her heart even when she is sound asleep.

  The following day at the appointed time, Malou and Franz meet in front of the bench. He raises his hat in greeting and hands her an envelope, on which he has written her name and stuck a canceled stamp.

  Malou shrugs: “I don’t know how to read.”

  He reads it for her. The doll ends her letter with the words “Many hugs and kisses, I’ll write you every day.”

  Malou thinks for a moment before asking, “Does that mean you’ll bring me another letter tomorrow?”

  The next day and every day after, Franz brings her a new letter. As he starts to read, Malou’s heart races. Her do
ll is going to the theater, to the cinema, to the circus, to the opera, to Vienna, to Paris, she is riding horseback, dancing, singing in an orchestra, it makes your head whirl.

  Now the park trees raise their black branches into the low, dark sky. A cold wind swirls along the walkways and lifts great sprays of coppery leaves into the air like clouds of birds. A wool hat jammed onto her head, her hands deep in her coat pockets, Malou watches them distractedly. Franz, despite his woolens, his overcoat, and his big scarf, trembles with the cold. He interrupts his reading often and walks rapidly away, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth.

  “Stop coughing,” says Malou. “Read me the rest.”

  She holds out a sticky candy she has fished from her pocket. He comes back and finishes the letter in a quieter, more quavering voice.

  “You’re reading too fast today. Start over. It’s so wonderful.”

  The letters, like the days, grow shorter. Since her marriage, the doll has been so frightfully busy that she no longer finds the time to write. One day she announces that she is going to Tibet, which is so far away and perched so high that it is known as the Roof of the World. She will live in a village lost in the clouds, surrounded by snow and ice, to which no mailman ever climbs. “I’ll no longer be able to write you, dear Malou, but I won’t forget you,” are her last words.

  “Is the Roof of the World really very far?” asks Malou.

  Before Franz can reply, she twirls her skip rope over her head and nimbly flies off.27

  His landlady, a small, skinny woman who nonetheless wears a very tight corset, suddenly takes a dislike to him. On November 15, two months after they moved in, she evicts Franz and Dora, two insolvent foreigners. Their rent has gone up by a factor of ten because of inflation.

  They find a pleasant apartment not too far away, at 13 Grünewaldstrasse, at the house of Herr Seifert.28 But they abandon it for similar reasons on February 1, 1924. An icy wind is blowing on the day they move out to take up lodgings in Berlin-Zehlendorf, at 25 Heidestrasse. The landlady is Frau Busse, the widow of a writer. The rent is horrendously high, a third of a trillion!

  Unable to buy anything, they live in extreme deprivation. They never go to the theater, it is far too expensive. They never buy the newspaper, not even the Sunday edition. All for the better, as the news is so catastrophic that they actually avoid walking past the Town Hall, where the daily paper is posted.

  Two or three times a week, Franz goes to the Institute for Jewish Studies. It is a haven of peace. An entire building, with nice well-heated lecture rooms, a large library, few students, a good teacher of the Talmud, Herr Guttmann, all for free.

  So as to maintain contact with the suffering of the world, he ventures into the city occasionally. He returns with his face coated in dirt, as though from a battle. For the most part he rests, stretched out in the sun on the glass-enclosed veranda, while Dora takes classes in theater and dance at the Jewish Home, also for free.

  At night, by candlelight, they play like children. Franz, using his agile hands to project shadows on the wall, creates characters and invents dramatic plays and comedies that make the two laugh until the tears come. Sometimes they amuse themselves by dipping their hands into a basin of water. It is their family bath. Or else Franz, with a tray full of glasses and plates balanced on his palm, glides around the room to train for becoming a waiter, a skill he will need when they open their restaurant in Tel Aviv.

  Most often, to keep the young woman he loves under the spell of his charm, he reads to her from favorite authors. From Goethe, he reads particularly Hermann and Dorothea. From Kleist, The Marquise of O. As though bewitched, he reads this story to Dora, recites it, six times in a row.

  “Why such a favorite?” she asks. “Is it the literary quality of the text?”

  “Yes.”

  “The unusual story?”

  “Yes, also.”

  Perhaps it is due even more to the author, with whom he shares so many affinities: the passion for writing, the search for truth, the desire to start a family, which ends in a broken engagement. Kleist also endured illness and repeated failures, and he had the elegance to burn all his private papers, drafts, and unfinished works.

  By the lake at Riva, Franz had told Gerti about Pushkin’s tragic end. Today, he narrates Kleist’s to Dora. A death composed like a work of art.

  Heinrich von Kleist loves Henriette, the wife of Louis Vogel, with whom she has had a child. And Henriette loves the young poet. Driven by a sublime need for the absolute, nothing in this world can satisfy them, Heinrich and Henriette enter a suicide pact. On the Wannsee in 1811, he is thirty-four, Kleist puts a bullet through Henriette, then turns the pistol on himself.

  Franz reads Dora the two letters Henriette wrote on the eve of her death, one to her dear husband, the other to her closest friend: “Take care of my child.” He recites his own favorite, Kleist’s letter to his beloved sister Ulrike. Dora, her eyes full of tears, leans against the shoulder of the man she calls “my sweet love” and “my gentle Franz.”

  He writes to Max. To Ottla. He sends each new address to Felix Weltsch so as not to miss a single issue of Selbstwehr. His letters are few, stamps are expensive.

  And he has started writing again.

  A few friends visit him: Max has asked him to look after, distract, reason with, and console his mistress, Emmy Salveter, a former chambermaid, now an actress. Deeply in love, this ravishing young woman suffers enormously from Max’s absence. She rebels against his sense of duty, which forbids him to marry her, and insists that he come to Berlin.

  Franz receives her at home, while Dora is away, accompanies her on walks, visits her at her house. Too often, Emmy calls to say that she is coming over, then changes her mind at the last moment or else telephones to say that she will come at two instead of noon. She sets a date for her next visit, then catches a cold and doesn’t come. She is deeply troubled, and the unrest in Berlin disturbs her so much that she transmits her anxieties to Franz, who must then spend the night fending them off.

  One day, two handsome young people with charming manners knock at the apartment door. It is Tile Rössler with a young painter from Berlin. Tile stops dead on the threshold at the sight of Dora in a dressing gown.

  Puah Ben Tovim, who came to spend an afternoon with them, was able to mark her pupil’s progress in Hebrew.

  On November 25, Ottla arrives. She has left Vera and Helen in the care of her husband for two days. She wants to see how her brother is doing with her own eyes and meet Dora, whom she knows only through letters and the telephone.

  She is lugging a trunk with her, in which she has packed the linens and clothes that her brother asked her for, a long list! He left Prague thinking he would be gone only a few days and didn’t bring his winter clothes. She unpacks three unstarched shirts, three pairs of ordinary socks and one warm pair, his black suit, his big overcoat, his old blue raglan coat, two pairs of long underwear, a lightweight sheet, a pillowcase, a bath towel, an ordinary pair of gloves, two nightshirts, his dressing gown, his foot muff, his fingerless gloves, and a cap. Also three coat hangers. Ottla has added letter paper, pens, journals, and a bar of soap. She gives Dora some dishcloths and an embroidered linen tablecloth. Oddly, Dora almost breaks into tears. In the hard city of Berlin, this linen is a luxury she has almost forgotten.

  As his sister is leaving, Franz slips a doll into her luggage for Vera. In case Lolotte should decide to go off on a trip, you never know with dolls!

  He mentions Ottla’s visit to Max, saying, Everything she saw at our house appealed to her. He is mistaken. On reaching home, Ottla informs Franz that she is sending him a fifteen-kilo package and she has asked her mother to do the same.

  “Fifteen kilos,” says Franz. “That seems too much, fifteen kilos, what can possibly be in it? I don’t want to live at your expense.”

  Max arrives shortly after, curious to meet the mysterious Fräulein Diamant whom his friend has refused to say anything about. He is enormously impress
ed by her love for Franz. The two live in wonderful harmony, he feels. Kafka has never seemed so confident.

  Dr. Ernst Weiss, who is as active and as nervous as ever (it is the nervousness of a lively but embittered man), comes to visit them. He wants to thank Franz in person. When the publisher Carl Seelig asked Kafka for some new stories, Franz felt that he had nothing worth submitting and instead sent three texts by Weiss, whose praises he sang, along with a list of the books written by this “difficult but extremely talented author.”

  Kafka likes Ernst. He examines him, standing there so solidly, and says to himself that “this man stays in good health, in very good health, only by an act of will. If he wanted, he could be as sickly as anyone.”

  Franz Werfel shows up one day in the early afternoon, a manuscript under his arm. Small, chubby, blond with blue eyes, he projects the confidence of a genius whose place in the firmament is assured. Dora, who is happy to meet him, greets him at the door. Kafka and Werfel shut themselves in the office. After a very long time, Werfel emerges. He is in tears and rushes off without a word of good-bye. Kafka is just as upset. He murmurs, “How can a person write so badly, so very badly …”

  Werfel was expecting a shower of praise but met only with dismayed silence.

  When he is obliged to judge a text, Kafka is incapable of uttering even the whitest lie, whatever the cost.

  In early January the temperature drops to five degrees Fahrenheit. Franz becomes ill. High fever, shivering, exhausting fits of coughing morning and night, darken his mood.

  He resigns himself to calling the doctor despite his terror of the doctor’s fee, a sum that hovers in fiery figures above his bed. Before long, he is also having trouble with his digestion. He now keeps to his bed permanently.

  When Max returns a second time to see him, he is horrified at the rapid decline in his friend’s health and the stark deprivation in which he lives. Once back in Prague, he contacts Franz’s uncle, Dr. Siegfried Löwy, a country doctor who practices in the Moravian town of Triesch. A bachelor with a special fondness for his young relative (Franz spent many of his vacations with him), he rushes off to visit his nephew on February 29 and persuades him to leave Berlin as soon as practicable.