Book Read Free

Milena

Page 6

by Margarete Buber-Neumann


  Willy Haas paints the following portrait of Milena at that time: If any friend expressed a wish in her presence, and if she felt that this wish meant a great deal to him, she didn’t hesitate for one moment—she took immediate action. Once Willy Haas was in urgent need of a room; he had just fallen in love. Milena arranged for the loan of a good friend’s room and decorated it with armloads of flowers and shrubs. As a rule, she had hardly enough money for food, so she must have borrowed the large amount she spent on these flowers. Such generosity came naturally to Milena, and she expected the same of her friends, who only too often disappointed her.

  When Willy Haas came home from the First World War, he had eight hundred crowns’ worth of pay vouchers, which to his surprise he was able to redeem. On hearing that the war was over, most soldiers thought these vouchers were worthless and threw them away. But Haas, to be on the safe side, kept his. On his return, he went to see Milena and informed her of his good fortune. She was in urgent need of money and asked him to give her half. When he hesitated, she simply took the money away from him. For a few moments he was furious, but then he was ashamed. How could he have been so petty, how could he have hesitated for a second to do Milena a favor? He felt humiliated. Milena had taught him a lesson.

  In his afterword to Kafka’s Letters to Milena, Haas wrote: “She sometimes gave the impression of a noblewoman of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a character such as Stendhal found in the old Italian chronicles and put into his novels, the Duchess of Sanseverina or Mathilde de la Mole, for example: passionate, bold, cold, and intelligent in her decisions, but reckless in her choice of means when her passion was involved— and in her younger days this was almost always the case. As a friend, she was inexhaustible, inexhaustible in kindness, inexhaustible in resources, the source of which often remained a mystery, but also inexhaustible in the demands she made on her friends, demands which she as well as her friends took for granted…. Out of place amid the erotic and intellectual promiscuity of Viennese cafe society during the wild years after 1918, she was very unhappy.”*

  In those difficult years in Vienna, she was determined to make her own living. It was hard because she was untrained and had no profession. She gave Czech lessons, mostly to industrialists whose factories and property after the breakup of the Austrian Empire were situated in Czechoslovakia. One of these was the writer Hermann Broch. At first these lessons were her only source of income. Occasionally, when she was especially short of funds and Ernst Polak gave her no money for the household, she would go to one of the railroad stations and offer her services as a porter. She was willing to do work of any kind; if she suffered, it was from heartache. Her father had rejected her, and hardly a day passed without Ernst Polak humiliating her. Deeply wounded, she withdrew into herself. She felt the ground cut from under her feet. When Kafka wrote to her later: “You who really live your life down to such depths …” the depths are to be taken literally.

  Milena was convinced that Polak had ceased to desire her because she was poorly dressed, unable to compete with his fashionable admirers. But how was she to buy good clothes when she couldn’t even afford to eat properly? A girlfriend with well-to-do parents learned of her trouble and thought up a dangerous way of helping her. She stole a valuable piece of jewelry from her parents, sold it, and gave Milena the proceeds. Milena used most of the money to pay the debts which Polak had shamelessly run up entertaining other women and which even more shamelessly he had asked Milena to pay. The rest she spent on herself. She was obsessed with this one idea: Now she would be able to put Polak to the test, now she would find out whether he really didn’t love her anymore or whether he had merely grown tired of her because she was always wearing the same old dress, She went from shop to shop, putting together an outfit such as she had not known for years: the finest shoes, the most stylish dress, the most intriguing hat. Thus attired, she ran to the Cafe Her-renhof; with beating heart she approached the table where Ernst Polak was sitting with friends of both sexes, as he did every day. Everything depended on his reaction. Would he notice her, or as usual overlook her? When she stepped up to the table, Polak looked around, gaped at her, and said admiringly, “Why, Milena, how chic you are today!” She responded with a resounding slap in the face. “You’ll be surprised,” she said, “when you find out where it ail comes from.”

  It was only with great difficulty that the theft could be hushed up, and Milena was held responsible, as her friend had stolen for her. After that she was despised as well as isolated. There was no one who understood her, on whose shoulder she could weep. In her distress she resorted to drugs. One of her husband’s friends, the one who rolled up in the carpet to sleep, gave her cocaine.

  The man’s name was Stein. On a visit to Prague, he went to see Kafka, who speaks of him in one of his letters to Milena. “I saw Stein again yesterday. He is one of those men toward whom everyone is unjust. I don’t know why people laugh at him. He knows everybody, knows all the intimate details, and yet he is modest, his judgments are careful, intelligently nu-anced, respectful; true, they are a little too obvious, too naively vain, but that only adds to his worth if one has had the experience of secret, criminal, lustful vanity. I started talking about Haas, tiptoed past Jarmila; after a while I came to your husband, and finally I got around to you—by the way, it’s not true that I enjoy hearing you talked about, not at all, I just like to hear your name over and over again, all day long. If I had asked him, he would have told me about you, but as I didn’t ask him he contented himself with observing that to his sincere regret you are barely alive these days, that you’ve been destroyed by cocaine (how thankful I was at the moment to hear that you’re still alive). And incidentally, cautious and modest as he is, he added that he hadn’t seen that with his own eyes but only heard about it.”*

  It was not easy for a woman who lived as passionately as Milena did, who, as she herself said, was “a bundle of emotions,” to curb her wiid impulses and discipline herself. That she nevertheless succeeded bears witness to her strength of character. She threw herself into a line of work to which she was suited, translation from the Czech, and wrote her first articles. At first, no doubt, this was just one more attempt to relieve her financial straits. But then she became absorbed in her new work and thus, through creative effort, regained her balance. She sent her little articles to her friend Sataša in Prague, who in the meantime had become a contributor to the newspaper Tribuna. Milena waited with trepidation for the reply, as her first journalistic efforts struck her as incompetent and atrociously sentimental. However, they were accepted. She was proud to see herself in print and overjoyed at being able to contribute to the household expenses, though Polak took her contribution for granted. Once, in the midst of a quarrel, she made a big mistake. To impress her husband, she spoke of her journalistic success and showed him her articles. Polak read them and burst into loud laughter. She was wounded to the quick.

  * Kafka, Bnefe an Milena, pp. 44-45.

  * Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 274.

  * Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 193.

  7

  FRANZ KAFKA AND MILENA

  Either the world is so tiny or we are so enormous; in either case we fill it completely….

  —KAFKA, BR1EFE AN MILENA

  Even before Milena began to talk about her relationship with Franz Kafka, she told me one evening, as we were walking back and forth between the barracks in the pale evening light, the story of the commercial traveler Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. As I was later to discover, what she told me then was her own private version of Kafka’s novella. She was the commercial traveler, the helpless, misunderstood Samsa, metamorphosed into an enormous beetle and hidden by his family because they were ashamed of him. She went into special detail about the beetle’s illness and how, afflicted with a wound in his back, in which dirt and mites have become encrusted, he is left alone to die.

  In 1920 in Vienna, Milena read Kafka’s first stories. Even then she recognized his grea
tness, and she would look upon his work with profound veneration as long as she lived. Kafka’s prose, she thought, was perfection itself. During her Vienna years, her own unhappiness gave her a special feeling for his works, and that, no doubt, is what made her decide to translate them, though her knowledge of German was still less than perfect. She became the first translator into Czech of The Stoker, The Judgment, Metamorphosis, and Contemplation.

  She sent one of her translations to his publisher and received a personal answer from the author. In the first of Kafka’s letters to Milena to have been preserved,* he suggests that he may have offended her with his “notes”; apparently, he had criticized her translation, and his criticism seems to have moved Milena to go and see him. They had known each other before the decisive meeting, for they frequented the same literary circles in Prague. This may be inferred from one of the early letters, in which he writes: “It occurs to me that I can’t remember any particular of your appearance, only the way you walked between the little tables as you left the cafe, your figure, your dress, those I can still see.”†

  Kafka, whose doctors had diagnosed tuberculosis, was then taking a cure in Merano. Milena went to see him there. She wrote about this meeting in her little book The Way to Simplicity, which appeared in 1926, though without mentioning Kafka by name. In the chapter entitled “The Curse of Sterling Qualities,” she ventures the opinion that rigorously virtuous people are not necessarily the kindest, but often on the contrary are dangerous and evil, whereas men with so-called faults are not infrequently far kinder and more tolerant. She counts her own father among the “virtuous men,” and curiously enough speaks of herself as his “son.” “My father never told a lie in all his life, and that is quite an accomplishment. But though his son was deceitful now and then, he should not have been written off as a liar. My father, on the other hand, full of pride over his love of truth and drunk with self-esteem, is so merciless that from a pedagogical point of view it would have been better if he had been obliged to tell a lie once in his life. Then he wouldn’t have treated his son so cruelly.”*

  In her article Milena contrasts the man of “sterling qualities” with a truly good man, and that, to her way of thinking, was Franz Kafka. “I believe,” she wrote, “that the best man I have ever known is a foreigner, whom I met several times in company.” It soon becomes clear that this “foreigner” was Kafka, who was both a German and a Jew, for at the end of her little book she tells a story which Kafka himself had written her in a letter. “No one knew much about him, and people did not think him extraordinary. Once he was accused of some misdeed and he did not defend himself. But because he had such an honest and manly face and the accusation was a serious one, I could not believe it. It made me miserable to think that this man with the honest face and quiet eyes that looked one full in the face might have done anything despicable. So I made a point of finding out what had actually happened. His reason for not defending himself was that to do so he would have had to reveal something extremely fine and noble that he had done, something anyone else would have boasted of. I had never seen such a thing. Later I realized that he is in every way the most remarkable person I have ever known, and nothing has ever moved me as deeply as that little glimpse into his heart. He was infinitely noble, but he made a secret of it, as if he were ashamed of being in any way superior to others. He was incapable of doing anything that would have shown what he was really like, and the finest things he did were done diffidently, quietly, in secret, yes, really in secret, and not in such a way as to let everyone know he had done them in secret. When he died—I have no hesitation about saying that he was too good for this world, the phrase is justified in his case—I read in one of his diaries about an incident in his childhood. As I thought it the most beautiful thing I had ever read, I shall tell the story here: When he was little, his mother gave him a shilling. He was very poor, he had never had so much money, it was a big thing for him. He had earned the money and that made it even more of a big thing. He went out in the street to buy something with his money, and there he saw a beggar woman, who looked so appallingly poor that he wanted nothing more in the world than to give her his shilling. But that was in the days when a shilling was a small fortune to a beggar woman or a small boy. He so dreaded the praise and gratitude the beggar woman would lavish on him and the attention he would attract that he went away and changed the shilling. When he came back he gave the beggar woman a penny, ran around the block and, coming from the opposite direction, gave her a second penny. This he did twelve times and scrupulously gave her all twelve pennies, keeping none for himself. Then he burst into tears.

  “I think this is the most beautiful fairy tale I have ever heard, and when I read it, I made up my mind that I would never forget it as long as I lived.”*

  The love affair between Kafka and Milena began in Merano in 1920. It was a passionate, tragic love, as can be seen from Kafka’s surviving letters to Milena. When I read them, I was overwhelmed by memories of her. Everything Kafka said about her is unique in its truth. As the great writer saw her, so she was: the “loving one.” To her, love was the one thing that really counted in life. She felt deeply and intensely and was not ashamed of it. To her love was something clear and self-evident. She never resorted to feminine artifice and was incapable of coquetry. She had the rare gift of sensing the loved one’s feelings and she was often able to give him a full account of an emotional crisis he had gone through days before. “You know nothing about a person,” she once said to me, “until you’ve loved him.”

  The few of Milena’s written statements about Franz Kafka to have come down to us bear witness to her profound understanding both of his genius and of his tragic illness.

  Milena was twenty-four when they met; though life had treated her cruelly and she had matured beyond her years, she was young and healthy and, as she wrote later on, “very close to the earth.” She loved Franz Kafka, she was in love with his “honest, manly face,” his “quiet eyes that look you full in the face,” and in 1920, when Wilma Lovenbach came to see her in Vienna, she said to her friend, “Do you know Franz Kafka? A wonderful man.”

  She overwhelmed him with letters and telegrams, and the more he hesitated the more urgently she insisted on his coming to see her. They had four happy days together in Vienna. “The chestnut trees were in bloom,” she told me. But even at that meeting the first shadows seem to have fallen on their love. As she wrote much later in a letter to Max Brod, if she had been a “mere female,” their days in Vienna would probably have meant the end of their love.

  But the bond between Kafka and the young, strong Milena with her “life-giving power” was far more than physical. “Your most beautiful letters,” he wrote to her, “and that means a good deal, for all of them, almost every line of them, are the most beautiful thing that has ever come my way, are those in which you concur with my ‘fear’ and at the same time try to explain why there’s no need for me to be afraid. For I too, though I may sometimes look like the suborned advocate of my ‘fear,’ probably concur with it deep down; indeed, it is my substance and probably the best part of me. And since it is the best part of me, perhaps that alone is what you love. For what else is so lovable about me? But this is lovable.

  “And once when you asked how with fear in my heart I could call that Saturday ‘good,’ it is easily explained. Since I love you (and I do love you, you dull-witted thing, as the sea loves a tiny pebble on the bottom, my love inundates you in exactly the same way, and I’ll be a pebble with you, if heaven permits), I love the whole world, which includes your left shoulder, no, it was the right one first, so I kiss it if I choose (and if you’ll be kind enough to pull your blouse down), and this includes your left shoulder too, and your face above me in the woods and your face below me in the woods, and me resting on your almost bare bosom. So you’re right when you say that we were already one, and of that I have no fear at all; on the contrary, it’s all my pride and joy, and I don’t restrict it to the woods.

>   “But the fact is that between this day-world and the ‘half hour in bed’ that you once spoke of contemptuously as ‘men’s business’ there’s an abyss that I can’t bridge, probably because I don’t want to. The other side is an affair of the night, utterly and in every sense an affair of the night; on this side lies the world I possess, and now you want me to jump across, to leap into the night and take possession of it again. Can one take possession of anything again? Wouldn’t that be to lose it? Here is the world that I possess, and you want me to cross over for the sake of some sinister magic, some hocus-pocus, some philosophers’ stone, some alchemy, some wishing ring. No, no, no, I’m terribly afraid of it.

  “To try and catch in one night by magic, hastily, breathing heavily, helpless, possessed, to catch by magic what every day offers to my open eyes! (‘Maybe’ children can’t be had in any other way; ‘maybe’ children, too, are magic. Let’s leave the question open for now.) That’s why I’m so grateful to you (to you and everything else) and that’s why it is samožřejmé self-evident that by your side I am supremely quiet and supremely unquiet, supremely constrained and supremely free, and why, having understood this, I’ve given up all other life. Look into my eyes.”*

  Milena suffered all her life from guilt feelings and despised herself for every failure. Her breach with her father was a great blow to her and she never fully got over it. At the time of her love for Kafka, the wound was still open. Who could have understood her feelings better than Kafka, whose conflict with his own father tormented him as long as he lived? But their relationships with their fathers were very different. Milena’s was emotional and therefore stronger and more painful than Kafka’s. He never fully understood Milena’s feelings in the matter. On one occasion he wrote: “1 understand your despair over your father’s letter only insofar as every new reminder of this painful relationship, which has already lasted so long, is bound to renew your despair. After all, you can’t read anything new into his letter. Even I, who have never had a letter from your father, find nothing new in it. It is affectionate and tyrannical, he thinks he has to be tyrannical if he is to be affectionate. The signature means very little, it is only the emblem of the tyrant; above it, after all, he has written ‘lito’ [sorry] and ‘strasne smutne’ [terribly sorry], and that makes up for everything.

 

‹ Prev