An emaciated face and arms, a body with no thickness under the sheets, and eyes … eyes sunk in their sockets, which pain has filled with darkness.
Robert stutters, “You … whether you like it or not, I’m staying.”
“You’re crazy, completely crazy,” Franz murmurs. “I am not Bismarck. He could have a private physician, I cannot!”
Franz is delighted. The presence of this big young man, his white blouse like a coat of armor, the strength he radiates, reassure him. Robert is a good doctor, it’s agreeable to put oneself in his hands. And he will give Dora a respite, force her to go outside a little. Evenings, he’ll be able to distract her, she worries so much.
He calls their trio “the little family.” Robert and Dora do their utmost to provide tiny pleasures for him: at each meal, they serve him a glass of Tokaji, or a connoisseur’s wine, or a tankard of beer. Also, strawberries and cherries, whose fragrance their patient inhales for a long moment before eating.
Dora manages to mix an egg or some meat broth into his purées, she doesn’t rest until he has eaten everything. Preserves, fruit juices, and bottles of wine are lined up on his bedside table.
There are a few moments of gaiety.
Franz has asked his dear friend Max to send him books and journals. “The natural state of my eyes,” he writes, “is to be closed, but playing with books and periodicals makes me happy.”
When he was young, he drank in the catalogs of Albert Langen to the last word, then started in again at the beginning, making for inexhaustible reading. Passionate about books, he did not really want to own or read them. He wanted to see them, finger them, convince himself that they existed. He sometimes spent hours in front of the shop window at the Taubeles bookstore or at Taussig & Taussig, he never tired of it.
Max arrives at Kierling on Monday, May 12, after traveling for twenty-four hours and changing trains twice, once in Vienna and again in Klosterneuburg.
That day, the alcohol injections had wearied Franz to the point of fainting. Then his fever surged and he had endless coughing fits. Faced with Max, whose visit he had looked forward to with such joy, he lacks the strength either to smile or to hold out his hand. A few words, a barely audible murmur: “I have two saws across my throat.”
Max, distraught, makes a sorry sight. Ever since Prague, the trip had unfolded under the sign of death. Dora and Robert push him into the hallway. Themselves inconsolable, they do their best to console him.
A few days later, on May 20, Franz thanks his friend for the book he has sent and begs his forgiveness for having spoiled his visit.
“Farewell, thank you for everything. Warm greetings to Felix and Oskar.”
These are the last words of his last letter to Max.
When, in response to the pantopon, he sinks into slumber, dreams come to torment him, always the same ones. His father, not the aging man he is today but the giant he was in the prime of life, fills the stage. Next to him cowers his son, five or six years old, a packet of bones, frail and narrow, a stutterer in his father’s presence.
The child has been awakened by a nightmare, he cries out. His mother rushes in. He complains, “I’m thirsty.” She brings him a glass of water from the kitchen, kisses him: “Go back to sleep, my son.” She returns to her husband’s bed. The child is no longer sleepy. Partly to irritate his parents, partly to amuse himself, he starts sniffling again: “I’m still thirsty.” His mother doesn’t come. Stubbornly, he cries all the louder.
He wails. His father, monstrous in a floating white nightshirt, his head touching the ceiling, rises up before him: “Spoiled brat.” He raises his hand.
“Don’t hit me,” cries the child. A hand grabs him by the scruff of the neck, drags him to the pawlatsche, the inner balcony, and opens the French window. The child sobs, strikes out with his arms and legs.
“You little snotnose,” the father shouts, “I’ll squash you flat if you keep sniveling.” He shuts the window.
The boy stays out on the balcony alone, terrorized by the courtyard below him as dark as a well. He waits, his teeth chattering, for his mother to rescue him.
She doesn’t come.
Now a little older, nine or ten, he is at the public swimming pool. His father has decided to teach him to swim. They are together in a dark, narrow changing cabin, the colossus fills the space, his torso, arms, and thighs are those of a gladiator. His damp armpits emit a powerful, acrid smell that turns the boy’s stomach.
Naked, the two walk forward in the sun over creaking boards, one with his chest out, his head high, his legs apart, the other a small teetering stick figure whose eyes are at the level of a heavy cock, thick, tumescent, displaying a sinuous network of raised veins, blue and translucent, through which the boy can see blood pulse. Two enormous testicles, smooth as ivory balls, clap against one thigh and then the other.
Huge mitts hand him a sausage and a giant mug of beer. A thunderous voice tells him to eat it all, to drink it down to the foam.
He emerges from these dreams exhausted, glazed in sweat.
“Will my father dog me to the grave?” he asks Dora.
Since arriving at the sanatorium, he has written very few letters, he has neither the freedom nor the strength for it. Late April, a few lighthearted lines to his parents: “My treatment consists of very lovely compresses and inhalations.” With their permission, he allows himself to be a lazy correspondent. He assigns Dora and Robert the task of sending his parents news of him and of talking on the telephone to his beautiful, beloved Ottla, and to Elli, Valli, Max, and his friends.
Robert continually reports on the extraordinary, the inexhaustible love of Dora for Franz. “It’s an unlimited source of good,” he says. When Ottla thanks him for staying at her brother’s bedside, he exclaims in his poor German: “It is true privilege! When he turn his bright eyes full of life on us, me jolly happy, marvelous, magnificence of God, those two, so good together!”
Ottla is the only one of the three sisters who is able to come to Kierling. She stays just for the day. She brings her brother the red quilt he has asked for. He spends his whole day outside, on the veranda, and the air has grown colder.
Julie and Hermann Kafka write or telephone almost every day. When they announce by express letter that they intend to visit, Franz finds the strength to answer them immediately, so daunting is the prospect.
The letter is a long and good one. He first suggests the joy they would find in being quietly together for a few days in a beautiful place, a glass of beer in hand, as in the days when his father would bring him to the public swimming school. Then he allows that, for the moment, he is not worth seeing: “I’m not pretty to look at.” But he is starting to get stronger thanks to Dora and Robert, whose help it would be impossible to imagine from a distance. But, he goes on, “The shock of having tuberculosis of the larynx has weakened me more than it should have done, and in addition to my usual complaints I am having stomach upsets. And I cannot speak above a whisper. Too many reasons argue against your coming.”
In closing he reassures them: “The professor has noticed a big improvement, the signs are all good. Robert never leaves me for a moment, he puts all his strength into thinking about me instead of his exams.”
What if the warning is not enough? And what if his mother decides to make the trip alone, as she has hinted that she might? She would collapse at the sight of her son, it would be terrible for both of them.
Robert entreats Julie Kafka: “Frau, dear frau, you possibly provoke fatal agitation in your son.”
Is there a letter from Bedzin?”
Franz asks the same question every morning. The silence, growing longer daily, makes him anxious. Dora tries to reason with him: “You don’t know my father. He is a completely inflexible man, he has never compromised with the Law. You introduced yourself to him not as a believer but as a penitent. And don’t forget that I fled his roof. He no longer recognizes me as his daughter.”
“But you are his daughter. And
I have expressed my strong desire to have ancestors, a wife, descendants.”
“The Baal Shem Tov has taught me that every human being is in direct contact with God. An evening doesn’t pass, a morning, when I don’t recite the prayer that you now know as well as I do: ‘Praise unto Thee, Eternal One, our God and God of the universe, may all flow from your sacred hand.’ ”
The answer from Bedzin arrives. Herr Herschel Diamant, as on every occasion when he must make a decision, has consulted the rabbi he most respects, Mordechai Alter. The saintly man read Dr. Kafka’s letter and pronounced a single word: “No.”
Franz, his face a mask, hands the letter to Dora: “Another shipwreck. My final defeat.”
“Dear Franz, I am already your wife, body and soul. We cannot be joined more closely than we already are. I have no need of my father’s blessing. You are my husband before God.”
Dora has said nothing about the pressure being exerted on her by Dr. Hoffmann, his wife, and the hospital personnel. Every day they harass her: “You must get married. You must conform to basic rules of morality, of propriety. We cannot tolerate your disgraceful behavior in our sanatorium!”
One morning when Franz is terribly low, Dr. Hoffmann calls Dora into his office. He introduces her to a rabbi he has summoned from Vienna, shows her the marriage forms all filled out, hands her a prayer shawl. Dora is outraged. She leaves the office in tears, slamming the door in their faces.
She knows that Franz wants to marry her so that his parents, his father especially, will accept her as a daughter-in-law.31 And support her.
“They already love me,” she says to Robert, “I’m sure of it, you’ve heard them on the telephone, they don’t know how to thank me, how to show their gratitude.”
On May 26, 1924, he writes his last letter. To his most beloved parents. Six lines. He corrects a misunderstanding: “My desire to drink water in large glasses and eat fruits is no less than my desire for beer. But for the moment I am making only slow progress.”
Up to his death, he believed that he made only slow progress in everything he undertook: the piano, the violin, Italian, English, Hebrew, German studies, anti-Zionism, Zionism, carpentry, gardening, literature, his attempts to marry. His teacher, Herr Beck, had been right to warn his father: “Leave him in fifth grade, too much hurry can be very costly. This is a slow child.”
He tells himself, I have finished none of my novels, I have abandoned several of my stories in the middle of a word.
I am leaving behind only fragments.
I have brought none of my projects to fruition.
He thinks of “Billig,” the collection of travel guides that Max and he had imagined one day when they were wandering around Montmartre with empty pockets, guidebooks that would have replaced the tiresome Baedekers and given tourists the information they really needed: the addresses of inexpensive bistros, hotels, pastry shops, clothing stores, and museums. Their first titles: “Billig Paris” (Paris on the Cheap) and “Billig Switzerland.”
He remembers that he asked Max to jettison “Richard and Samuel,” the novel they had started writing together, and which Max had such high hopes for.
I finish nothing, not even my sentences, which …
He is almost voiceless. The doctors have recommended that he temporarily stop speaking. He communicates with Dora and Robert through written notes. At first he makes a game of it, writes only part of what he wants to say, they have to guess the rest. He nods if they are right, signals with his hand if they are wrong.
He takes an interest in the flowers that fill his room.
“Look at the lilac, fresher than morning,” he writes to Robert.32
“Show me the columbine. It is too brightly colored to be with the others.”
“The hawthorn is too hidden, too much in the shadows.”
“The lilac is wonderful, isn’t it? It is dying, but it still drinks, it still gets drunk.”
“Do you have a moment? Then please, give a little water to the peonies, they are so fragile.”
“A bird has gotten into the room. That’s why people like dragonflies.”
Several other scraps of paper refer to food and drink.
“Ask if there is some good mineral water, just out of curiosity.”
“A dying man doesn’t drink.”
“Why didn’t I try the beer at the hospital? Lemonade … everything was so plentiful.”
When he feels well, he remembers his vacations in Italy, Riva, and the Baltic. To the brief message he often adds a drawing or a map.
Others are about his parents, or about Dora and Robert.
“My father is pleased to receive an express letter, but it angers him too.”
“If a man marked for death can stay alive from happiness, then I will stay alive.”
“Put your hand on my forehead to give me courage.”
“There are always possibilities waiting to unfold.”
“Max’s birthday is on May 27, don’t forget.”
“How long can I stand for you to stand me?”
“Where is the eternal spring? I’ve thought of every possible miracle, but the illusion didn’t last.”
His last missive, written as the doctor left his room: “That’s how help always leaves, without giving any help.”
The pain in his throat is unbearable. The alcohol injections are no longer having an effect. Only the morphine and the pantopon offer relief, but for shorter and shorter periods. Robert refuses to increase the dosage for fear that Franz’s heart will give out.
Today he has stopped taking food and drink. He prefers to die of hunger and thirst, a thirst that drives him crazy, rather than swallow a mouthful of water that is not enough to satisfy him and inflicts a torture worse than thirst.
Dora constantly wets his lips, gives him the scent of his favorite fruits to inhale: strawberries, a slice of pineapple. She repeats under her breath like a litany: “My love,” “My sweet,” “Dear heart.”
She has gone up to Robert’s room.
“How can you rest when he is dying of hunger, when he’s been dying of thirst for the last two days?”
She hammers at his chest with her fists: “Do something, please, please, don’t abandon him, you’re a doctor, do something …”
She collapses onto Robert’s shoulder, her nerves relax, she sobs quietly, then more and more violently, as though venting waves of indignation, of incomprehension: “Where is the God of justice? Where is the God of compassion?”
Too moved to speak—and what would he say?—Robert wraps his arms around her, strokes her hair until, exhausted, she grows quiet. He hands her a glass of water in which he has dissolved a sleeping draft: “Rest here for a while. I’ll go downstairs and be with him.”
The morphine notwithstanding, Franz has eaten nothing for three days. He has drunk a little water. At this point he receives the proofs for A Hunger Artist, a collection that includes the title story and three others, “First Sorrow,” “A Little Woman,” and “Josephine the Singer.”
He has been expecting the proofs impatiently: “They waited until now to send me the material!”
He immediately starts reading the texts, pencil in hand. He works his way through them intently, seemingly not unhappy with his writing. He finishes one set of proofs. He starts in on the second. Robert watches him out of the corner of his eye, while pretending to read a medical journal. He sees the pencil and the proofs fall to the ground. He goes to pick them up, stops.
Kafka is crying.
He is in no condition to go on correcting. He is in no condition to read the story, written two years earlier: a young man, locked in a cage, fasts before a large and enthusiastic crowd, which grows sparser with the passing days. An artist, he is obliged to fast, he can do nothing else, he fasts for forty days straight and dies to general indifference. A janitor finally sweeps the cage clean of the vermin’s body mixed with dirty straw. Its place is taken by a splendid young panther, fed at regular intervals. Spectators now crowd
around the cage, unwilling to move on.
19 After working as librarian at Prague University, Weltsch emigrated to Palestine, where he became a librarian at Jerusalem University. He died in that city in 1964.
20 Puah Ben Tovim donated the Hebrew notebook Kafka left her to the National Library of Israel.
21 Neither his notebooks nor his letters in Hebrew have been published. Following his custom, Franz started his notebooks at both ends, with the two texts meeting in the middle (he often did the same in writing his Diaries).
22 The photograph of Franz taken on that day, an original silver negative (45 by 36 mm), was sold at auction in Paris on November 18, 2010, for 15,000 euros.
23 American musical comedy apparently grew out of the Yiddish theater.
24 In The Castle, when K. meets Frieda, who has come to feed the animals, he says to her, “With such delicate hands?” and he asks himself “if it is just flattery or if he has been smitten by hands that are, after all, perfectly ordinary.”
25 When Tile Rössler emigrated to Palestine, where she became a choreographer, she took this letter with her, as well as the brief note that accompanied the box of candies and the ruby cup that Kafka had given her.
26 When the Germans overran Bedzin in September 1939, they set fire to the synagogue, where hundreds of families had taken shelter. The building was reduced to ashes, and there were no survivors. A few blackened stones from the synagogue serve as a memorial to this massacre.
27 Kafka does not mention this meeting in any of his texts, nor the twenty or so letters that he wrote to console the young girl. He had often wanted to write a fairy tale, particularly in Riva. Did he feel, faced with this child, a moral obligation to distract her from her grief, knowing that he could? A fairy tale, after all, is not judged by the same criteria as a literary text. The story of the doll is told by Dora in the Diary that she wrote in London in 1951.
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