“If you stay here, in such poorly heated rooms, so poorly fed, you’ll never last the winter.”
On March 14, 1924, Max is once again in Berlin. He is attending the premiere of Jenůfa, Janáček’s opera, whose libretto he translated. Three days later, he brings Kafka back to Prague. Franz categorically refuses to let Dora accompany him. He wants at all costs to spare her his father’s sarcasms, his contempt, his disrespect.
At the station, her face a blur of tears, the young woman clings to him, saying, “I don’t want to leave you.”
“You’ll be joining me in a few days, as soon as my uncle has found a place for me in a sanatorium.”
He kisses her again and again: “I have never wanted to live as much as I do now. With you.”
He steps over the threshold of his parents’ apartment. He looks like a recidivist being returned to a cell from which he will not emerge alive. He thinks he hears his jailer snicker behind his back: “The return of the prodigal son! The triumphal entry! Broke, and he hasn’t got the strength to drag himself into bed! A total disaster! I warned you about what would happen. Once again, Herr Son has done exactly as he pleased, and this is what has come of it. When there are broken pots, I’m the one to pay for them.”
He would prefer not to see even his mother, who timidly offers him chicken broth, pudding, and kefir with raspberry sauce. He hates to see her back bent in servitude. Only Marie Werner, the Fräulein, who is reserved, fair-minded, and silent, calms the rage in his heart a little.
As a rampart against his parents he asks Max, in a clipped, authoritarian tone he has never used before—the time is past for amiability—to visit him every day: “Come back tomorrow at the same time,” he says at each visit.
Cloistered in his room, his eyes shut, he broods over his failure or, sick with grief, reviews the many faces of Dora, her gestures, her words of love. He feeds on these images. Waves of nostalgia constantly carry him back to Berlin, to his six months of freedom far from the supervision of his parents.
For the first time in his life, he had lived day after day with a woman. He opened his eyes, Dora was nearby, he closed his eyes, Dora was nearby, they lived in the same house, elbow to elbow, at the same table, they slept in the same bed, cupped against each other, he had never known such joy. He murmured in her ear: I am in the arms of an angel.
When he wrote, sinking his teeth into his desk like a dog with a bone, as he put it, showing her his fangs to make her laugh, Dora would nap in her chair in front of him, because he needed her to be present. Whereas he had never written a word in front of Ottla, Felice, Milena, or Max.
“You become someone else when you write,” Dora had said.
Sometimes, she had been afraid to look at his tensed face. Your features harden, your eyes are stern, cruel, painful, I don’t know how to say it … as though you were hunting ghosts … Is it a knife, a weapon, in your hand?
He had read her passages from “The Burrow,” on a night when he finished a chapter all in one sitting: “I live in peace in the most secret depths of my burrow, yet somewhere the enemy is tunneling a hole that will lead him straight to me. I don’t mean he has a better nose than I do, but there are relentless plunderers who rummage blindly … and I have so many enemies! I wouldn’t want, while I was scratching at the earth in despair and fury, to feel the teeth of a pursuer sinking into my thigh.”
He had raised his head.
Dora was looking at him, perplexed.
“You don’t have any enemies, no one wants to harm you, my love.”
He burst into laughter: “My sweet, dear girl, they’re only words. Come, you’re not going to take this scribbling seriously!”
Together in the preceding days they had burned page after page of his manuscripts to raise the temperature in their haybox. Was it three hundred pages, or maybe five hundred? Several times Dora had stopped him: “These manuscripts cost you so much work, over so many nights, why do you want to throw them in the fire?”
He remembers having thought of Kleist at that moment.
“Seeing the flames devour my manuscripts soothes me. The more I burn, the more I am freed of my demons, I slip between their fingers. I asked dear Max, very solemnly, as I am quite capable of doing, no? I ordered him to burn—in their entirety and without reading them—my notebooks, copybooks, manuscripts, and all my letters. I know he’ll respect my wish.”
On the third day after his return to Prague, there are disturbing signs: he has a monstrously sore throat. Burning sensations at the limit of what is bearable. His voice has changed, it is low and hoarse. So fast! he says.
Preserves, fruit, fruit juice, water, fruit juice, water, fruit juice, fruit, preserves, water, fruit juice, fruit, preserves, water, lemonade, cider, fruit, water. He can swallow nothing else. Only in small quantities.
His uncle, Dr. Siegfried Löwy, prescribes long and painful tests, to which the patient submits with a heavy heart. Franz can learn nothing specific about his condition. From the moment tuberculosis of the larynx is mentioned, the doctors speak in a cautious, stilted manner. “A swelling, an infiltration, nothing alarming, we still don’t know anything for certain,” this is what he is being told, even as he is experiencing violent pain. He weighs 108 pounds in his winter clothes.
He coughs for hours morning and night. He fills his spittoon in a minute.
“A feat worthy of the Nobel Prize, wouldn’t you say?” he says to Robert Klopstock, who has just come into his room.29
Franz met this medical student at the sanatorium in Matliary two years earlier and has been writing him without interruption since. Robert sometimes irritates him to the point of anger. The young man, who resumed his studies after the stay in Matliary, complains about everything, is forever making reproaches, and is always defeatist. True, he lives in poverty.
Franz has sent him money, arranged for his meals at the university dining hall, found him temporary posts. He has recommended him to Max, to Ottla, to his friends, he starts to worry when he has no news from him, gives him advice when he can, but “pieces of good advice,” he writes Robert, “are hung between the stars, which explains why there is so much darkness.”
Robert, who is as passionate about literature as about medicine, has been keen to translate a novel by Max Brod and several of Kafka’s stories into Hungarian, his native tongue, and Kafka has agreed to oversee the work. He’s such an appealing young man!
In the tones of a five-star general, Robert answers: “The only feat that deserves the Nobel Prize is for you to fight and get well. You still can!”
“You forget that I’m a bad soldier, no one would take me. Twice I tried to enlist, in June 1915 and June 1916. Twice the medical board declared me unfit.”
They talk about Matliary, about the inmates. Kafka thinks of his neighbor who played with the sun and mirrors like a suicide playing Russian roulette. The image of this tortured man, his mouth wide open on his ulcers and giving off a pestilential odor, still makes him nauseous.
“Will I be subjected to the same tortures?” he asks himself. “It’s one thing to write, one’s feet in slippers, ‘Torture is very important to me, my sole occupation is to experience and inflict it,’ and another to be tied to the stake. With flames licking one’s feet.
“Don’t you find it odd, Robert, that the god of pain was not the principal god of the early religions?”
As his friend is getting ready to leave, he grabs his hand: “Do you remember the promise you made me at the sanatorium? I insist that you renew it. Right away.”
Three weeks confined to his room.
Sprawled on his sofa and looking out his open window, he sees roofers at the top of the steeple on the Russian church. They are climbing, working, singing in the wind and rain. He watches them, astonished: “What are they but prehistoric giants?”
He is no longer opposed to the sanatorium since, as he says to his uncle, “I can’t oppose the fever, one hundred degrees has become my daily bread.”
He i
s relieved to leave his parents’ apartment and Prague. “One’s native city,” as he confided to a young friend, “is always inhospitable, a place of memories, of melancholy, of pettiness, of shame, of temptation, a place where one’s resources were put to poor use.”
At the sanatorium, Dora will be able to join him. Together, things will be easier.
“Let’s go,” he says, “the world belongs to me. Very well.”
Dora arrives at Wiener Wald a few hours after Franz. It is a university sanatorium, wonderfully situated, plush, oppressive.
She walks into the ward through the rows of beds, the patients with their livid complexions and hollow cheeks coughing and spitting in funereal chorus. She is looking for her Franz. She doesn’t hear him calling, his voice is only a murmur. She sees him, almost faints. Gaunt face, eyes burning with fever, hands of a bird, which she kisses frantically to hide her distress.
She keeps repeating, “I’ll never leave you again, dear love, I’ll never leave you.”
She hears him whisper in her ear, “I’m the one who will be leaving you.”
Despite insistent requests from Franz Werfel and repeated entreaties from Max, the director, Professor Hajek, refuses to assign Herr Kafka a private room: “All I can see in him is the patient in bed 18.”
For the fever he prescribes liquid pyramidon three times a day; for the coughing, demopon, which is ineffective, and atropine. Franz is given hard candies with analgesics, and his throat is sprayed with mentholated oil. His larynx is so swollen that when he swallows, Franz feels as if shards of glass are embedded in his throat. He can no longer eat.
Pointing to his throat, he asks the nurse, “What does it look like in there?”
She answers frankly, “A witch’s cauldron.”
Despite treatment, the fever never drops below 101 degrees. Professor Hajek confirms the diagnosis: tuberculosis of the larynx. And of the epiglottis.
The lungs are in such poor condition that Hajek soon refuses to keep the patient on, saying that he is beyond the help of any specialist.
“The only palliatives,” he says before turning away, “would be morphine and pantopon.”
The care is so hideously expensive that—for the first time—Franz asks Max to offer his most recent stories to a publisher right away (he double-underlines the words). “ ‘Josephine’ will have to rescue me,” he writes, “there is nothing else for it.”
Dora, unbeknownst to Franz, adds a few lines to the postcard: “Professor Hajek has decided that Franz’s condition is very serious, we are moving to Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna.”
The day before the departure, a few feet from his bed, a man is dying. The doctors had let the man wander around earlier with pneumonia and a fever of 106. Franz can hear his death rattle. His gasping is so loud that, at times, Franz must bury his head under his pillows, suffocating himself.
A priest and his helpers recite prayers at the patient’s bedside, hold his hand, speak to him in a comforting voice. When he sinks into a coma, they administer the last rites. They stay with him, whereas the doctors slipped away long ago and are asleep in their beds.
The next day, Franz relates his distress only to Max: “I’ve already cried several times today for no reason. My neighbor died during the night.”
To calm his fear, he closes his eyes, allows images to flash past. A landscape lashed by rain. A deserted road. In the distance, a car. Slowly it comes close. The beam of its headlights pierces the ground fog. It is an open-topped car. The chauffeur is wearing a mackintosh and a visored cap. Clutching the steering wheel, he peers at the road through aviator’s glasses. Behind him, lying crosswise, is a young woman, her hair and clothes streaming with water, her arms outspread, one hand gripping the door handle, the other holding the driver’s seat. Her face is indistinct.
The car swerves to avoid a rabbit that has leaped into the headlights. The young woman’s body slumps to the left. The bridegroom is revealed. Swathed in blankets like a mummy, he is stretched out on the back seat. He is sick and, judging from his appearance, incurable.
It’s a romantic movie!
He opens his eyes.
“The reality,” he says, “is quite different. A scene from a comedy. Dora’s knee is poking into my stomach, my feet are submerged in a pool of water, and my spittoon—it is just too funny!—has emptied onto my neck.”
Early in the morning of April 20, they leave Dr. Hajek’s sanatorium. An open-topped car is put at their disposal, nothing else being available.
Stormy weather threatens. They are barely on the road when a series of hailstorms sweeps through, accompanied by thunder and high winds, an incredible din, followed by brief lulls. Lying in the back of the vehicle, Kafka is perhaps thinking about Beethoven or Mahler, both of whom died while a storm raged. Probably one much like this.
During the trip, Dora stands teetering above him. He protests, “Sit down, you’re going to fly away.”
“Don’t try to talk, dear heart, nothing will separate me from you.”
During a respite, she hears Franz whisper to her, “The pneumatic tires hum on the asphalt like the projector at the cinematograph.”
He is fascinated by the cinematograph. In Berlin, he recounted his favorite movies to Dora scene by scene, some of them with their dialogue: Little Lolotte, which made him cry, The Catastrophe at the Dock, which he found too sad, The Gallant Guardsman, The Thirsty Gendarme, and Alone At Last, which amused him enormously. Slaves of Gold is a film that should be memorized from start to finish, he had said.
And yet in Prague, at a time when he was out every evening, he went to the cinematograph only rarely.
“Why?” Dora asked.
“I identified too strongly with the actors. When someone suffered or died on the screen, I would see myself suffer or die. Certain images haunted me to the point of obsession, my insomnia grew worse.”
He preferred documentaries. He remembers the last program he saw, one Sunday afternoon at the Lido-Bio. The first film, Shivat Zion, was on the work of the pioneers in Palestine, the deserts transformed into orchards, the clean new villages, the model schools and day care centers.
The next film caused waves of applause. It showed Jewish athletes, big, square-shouldered men with slender waists and gleaming muscles, exercising in the Karlsbad stadium. These demigods were training for footraces, for the high jump, the pole vault, the pommel horse, the rings, as though their parents and great-grandparents had practiced these sports all their lives. As though the Zionist utopia and the rebuilding of the body were linked.
This documentary made a durable impression on Franz, but without troubling his nights.
He confided to Dora another of his manias: in Prague, going home at night on the tram, he would lean out of the car as far as he could, within an ace of losing his balance, and, on the fly, in snatches, he would try to read every movie poster and examine every photograph. He never tired of it.
Once home again, in the bathroom, he would invent scenes from comic films for his sisters. They would laugh and beg him to continue.
All he needed was a single sentence to imagine a whole long story.
For example?
“The door opened a crack. A revolver appeared at the end of an outstretched arm.”
Another?
“Two children, alone in an apartment, climb into a steamer trunk, when suddenly the lid slams shut.”
“It was Sunday afternoon, and through the glass-paneled door Anna saw the landlady tuck up her skirts.”
“I don’t exactly understand you,” Dora had said. “The posters are something you play with, you inhale, you don’t want to miss one of them. But the movies you avoid, you’re afraid of them?”
He laughed: “You nod your head just the way Hasidic rabbis do!”
He enters the Kierling sanatorium on Dora’s arm. Thanks to recommendations from several prominent figures, he has been assigned a lovely room on the third floor with southern exposure, overlooking a
garden.
The bad weather continues, low clouds, rain, cold wind, but the air is wonderful, it feels as though one is inhaling health. The food is everything that could be hoped for, and Dora is allowed to prepare meals just as she pleases. Here, as at Professor Hajek’s, the rule is that Dora may spend the whole day with Franz and only has to leave him at night. She is staying at a nearby farm.
Franz Werfel, in gratitude, has sent him his latest book, Verdi: A Novel of the Opera,30 and some beautiful roses. Ottla has sent peonies, his favorite flower. From the farm Dora has brought back a lilac branch whose buds have just opened. Franz is intoxicated by their scent, spring has entered his room.
He is very weak but in good hands. The treatments start to take effect. His larynx is injected once or twice a day with alcohol, an extraordinarily painful procedure. He asks Dora to leave the room while the injections are being performed, refusing to have her present while he is tortured. For several hours afterward he finds relief. He can swallow again.
Two days after their arrival, they look up to see Robert Klopstock barrel into the room.
He had announced his intention to visit Franz at Dr. Hajek’s sanatorium. Franz had managed to dissuade him only with great effort. He had lectured him: “No acts of violence, Robert, no sudden trip to Vienna, you know how afraid I am of violence and yet you always start in!”
From Berlin, from Prague, from Wiener Wald, Franz has sent him health bulletins and the full details of his treatment. Robert knows exactly what is happening to the patient for whom he has decided to interrupt his medical studies. Here he comes, as tall as a tower—can he possibly have grown taller?—with his fine pink cheeks, his rumpled hair, and his big smile. His smile vanishes as he registers the changes since his last visit to Franz in Prague, which was only … how long ago? A few weeks?
Kafka in Love Page 14