Milena

by Margarete Buber-Neumann

  “Possibly, on the other hand, you are horrified by the disproportion between your letter and his; well, I haven’t seen your letter, but you should consider the disproportion between his ‘obvious willingness’ and your ‘incomprehensible’ obstinacy.

  “Are you in doubt about your answer? Or rather, were you in doubt? For you write that now you would know what to write. That is strange. If you had already answered and were to ask me, ‘What did I write?’ I would tell you without hesitation what I thought you had written.

  “Of course there can be no doubt that in your father’s mind there is no difference between your husband and me; in the eyes of a European we both have the same negroid features, but apart from the fact that you can’t say anything definite about it for the moment, why should you mention it in your answer? And why should a lie be necessary?

  “I think you can only answer what someone who, observing your life intently and with beating heart and seeing hardly anything else, would have to say to your father if he had spoken of you as he has: ‘All propositions,’ all ‘set conditions’ are absurd, Milena is living her own life and will not be able to live any other. Milena’s life may be sad, but it is undoubtedly as ‘healthy and calm’ as in a sanatorium. Milena merely implores you to accept this fact; otherwise she asks you for nothing, and least of all for an ‘arrangement.’ She merely asks you not to be stubborn, not to shut her out, but to do as your heart bids you and speak to her as equal to equal. Once you do that, you will have relieved Milena’s life of much of its sadness, and you won’t have to feel ‘sorry’ for her anymore.”*

  Milena was full of contradictions. She had a woman’s tenderness and a man’s determination. She was at once modest, chaste, and forward. She must soon have realized that her love for Kafka had no future. But it’s hard for a lover to give up hope. In one of his letters, Kafka wrote: “You mustn’t say that two hours of life are unquestionably better than two pages of writing….”† One can only infer that she said just that and meant it. And in another letter: “… and now Milena calls me with a voice that speaks with equal force to my reason and my heart … she is like the ocean, as powerful as the ocean which with its great mass of water, yet devoid of understanding, surges with all its might at the command of the dead and, what’s more, distant moon. She doesn’t know me, and perhaps it’s because she suspects the truth that she urges me to come.”‡ Kafka feared the magical influence on women of the distant moon.

  He came a second time. The lovers met at Gmünd on the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia. Those were troubled times, and it seems certain that Milena, who had become an Austrian through her marriage to Ernst Polak, was unable to obtain a Czech visa. But Gmünd was not the answer. Their love found no sexual consummation. In a letter Kafka tries to find an explanation: “I won’t write about Gmünd anymore, at least not on purpose. A good deal could be said about it, but in the end it would only amount to saying that our first day in Vienna would have been no better if I had left that same evening, though Vienna had the advantage over Gmünd that I arrived there half dead with fear and exhaustion, while in Gmünd, fool that I was, I was wonderfully self-assured without knowing it, as though nothing could happen to me ever again, like someone coming home to his own house; strange that with all the anxiety that never ceases to pervade me, I should be capable of this sort of slump into possessiveness; indeed, it may be my worst fault, in this and other matters….”* And much later, on January 18, 1922, he wrote in his diary: “What have I done with the gift of sex? It’s been a failure, no doubt about that. But it might have been successful. M. was right. Fear is wholly to blame….”†

  In a letter to Max Brod that shows her profound understanding of Kafka, Milena tries to explain why he was afraid of love: She writes: “I could spend days and nights answering your letter. You ask me why Franz is afraid of love. But I think it’s something different. He sees life very differently from other people, To him, for instance, money, the stock market, exchange bureaus, a typewriter are absolutely mystical things (as indeed they are, though not to our kind of people); to him they are the weirdest puzzle, and he doesn’t see them as we do. Take his work at the insurance company; does he regard it as just a job? To him any job—even his own—is as mysterious, as marvelous, as a locomotive is to a small child. The simplest things in the world are beyond him. Have you ever been in a post office with him? Have you seen him composing a telegram, then shaking his head, looking for the window that strikes his fancy, running from window to window without the faintest idea why, until he finds the right one. Then he pays, counts his change, finds he’s been given a crown too much, and gives it back to the girl at the window. He walks slowly away, counting his change again. On the bottom step it comes to him that the crown he has given back is really his. I’m standing there beside him and I don’t know what to say. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, wondering what to do. It would be hard to go back, because by that time there’s a long line at the window, ‘Why not let it go?’ I suggest. He gives me a horrified look. ‘How can I let it go?’ he says. ‘Not that I care about the crown. But it wouldn’t be right. There’s a crown too little. How can I let it go?’ He goes on and on, he’s terribly annoyed with me. The same thing happens in every store, every restaurant, with every beggar woman, in every conceivable variation. Once he gave a beggar woman two crowns and asked her to give him back a crown. She said she didn’t have a crown. We stood there for two minutes, wondering what to do. Finally it occurred to him that he could let her keep the two crowns. But we’d only gone a few steps when I saw that he wasn’t at all pleased. The same man would be only too glad to give me twenty thousand crowns. But if I asked him for twenty thousand crowns and we had to go somewhere to change money and we didn’t know where, he would ponder seriously what to do about a single crown that I didn’t really have coming to me. He has almost the same anxiety about women as about money. And the same with his job. Once I wired, phoned, and wrote, imploring him in God’s name to come and spend a day with me. I needed him badly just then. I begged him on bended knee. He lay awake whole nights, tormenting himself. He wrote me letters full of self-recrimination, but he didn’t come. Why not? Because he couldn’t ask for leave. He couldn’t ask his department head, the one he wholeheartedly admires (in all seriousness) because he can type so fast. He simply couldn’t tell him he was coming to see me. Why not tell him something else? Another horrified letter. What? Lie? Tell the department head a lie? Impossible. If you ask him why he loved his first fiancée, he says, ‘She was so efficient.’ And he beams with admiration.

  “Yes, this whole world is and remains a puzzle to him. A mystery. Something utterly beyond him, but which with his touchingly pure naïveté he admires for its efficiency. When I told him about my husband, who’s unfaithful to me a hundred times a year, but has a kind of fascination for me and a lot of other women, his face lit up with the same admiration as when he told me about his department head who was a fine man because he typed so fast or as when he spoke of his fiancée, who was so ‘efficient.’ Such things are strange to him. A man who types fast and a man with four mistresses baffle him as much as a crown at the post office or the crown he gave the beggar woman, they baffle him because they’re a part of my life. Because Franz can’t live. He is incapable of living. Franz will never get well. Franz will die soon.

  “The fact is that we all seem capable of living, because at some time or other we have taken refuge in a lie, in blindness, in enthusiasm, in optimism, in some conviction, in pessimism or something of the sort. He has never taken refuge in anything. He is absolutely incapable of lying, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He has nothing to take refuge in, no shelter. It’s as if he were naked and everyone else had clothes on. And what he says, what he is and experiences, is not even the truth. His being is resolutely self-contained and self-sufficient, devoid of all artifice that might enable him to misrepresent life, either its beauty or its misery. There is nothing heroic about his asceticis
m—and that makes it all the greater and nobler. All heroism is falsehood and cowardice. This is not a man for whom asceticism is a means to an end; it is a man whose fearful clearsightedness, purity, and inability to compromise compel him to be ascetic,

  “There are other highly intelligent people who are unwilling to compromise. But as they wear magic spectacles which distort their vision, they have no need of compromise. They can type fast and have lots of women. He stands beside them and marvels at them; he marvels at everything, including typewriters and women. He will never understand.

  “His books are amazing. He himself is infinitely more amazing “*

  The love affair, which had long been confined to letters, finally ended at Kafka’s wish. He was very sick, and Milena’s vitality weighed on him. She wanted all his love, including the physical love he dreaded. The greatness as well as the hopelessness of this passion can be inferred from the two despairing letters she wrote Max Brod after Kafka put an end to the affair. The first letter runs: “Forgive me for not being able to write in German, Perhaps you know enough Czech to understand. Forgive me for bothering you. But I’m at my wits’ end; my mind is a blank, I know nothing and feel nothing. It seems to me that something terrible has happened to me in these months, but I don’t know much about it. I don’t know anything about the world; I only feel that I would kill myself if I could somehow think about the very thing that eludes my mind.

  “I could tell you how and why all this happened; I could tell you all about myself and about my life; but what for?—and besides, I don’t know. All I know is this letter I have in my hand, that Franz wrote me from the Tatra. There’s a deadly request in it, which is really an order: ‘Don’t write, make sure we don’t meet, don’t protest, this alone can enable me to carry on with some sort of life, any other way would keep on destroying me.’ I don’t dare ask any questions or write a single word, nor do I know what I want of you. I don’t know—I don’t know what I want to know. Jesus Christ, I could squeeze my temples into my brain. Just tell me one thing, you have been with him recently, you must know: Am I to blame or not? I implore you for the love of God, don’t try to comfort me, don’t tell me that no one is to blame, don’t give me any psychoanalysis. I know all that, I know everything you could write….

  “Please try to understand what I want. I know all about Franz; I know what has happened and I don’t know what has happened; I’m on the brink of madness; I’ve tried to do right, to live, to think, to feel according to my conscience, but there is blame somewhere. That’s what I want you to tell me. … I want to know if I’m to blame that Franz is suffering and has suffered because of me as he did because of the other women he has known; I want to know if that made his illness worse and drove him to escape from me into his fear, so now I have to disappear; I want to know if I’m to blame, or if it’s the fault of his own nature. Am I making myself clear? I must know. You are the only person who may know something. I beg you to tell me the plain, unvarnished truth, even if it’s brutal to tell me what you really think….”*

  At the end ofher next letter to Max Brod she writes: “ … every day I go to the post office. I can’t get out of the habit….” For two years she kept going. The general delivery window was inseparable from her love. Kafka never wrote to her at home for fear of Ernst Polak. Once during the winter of 1922 Wilma saw her hurrying down the street. Driving past in her car, she called her by name, and Milena turned her head. Her eyes were blank, her face pale and drawn, and she seemed unaware of her surroundings. In another letter to Max Brod she tries to explain “how and why it all happened” and where she was at fault. “Thank you for your kindness,” it begins. “In the meantime I have more or less come to my senses. I can think again. That doesn’t make me feel any better. It goes without saying that I won’t write to Franz. How could I? If it’s true that we have a task to perform on this earth, I’ve performed mine very badly where he is concerned. How could I be so selfish as to harm him when I was unable to help him? As for his fear, I know it down to the last fiber. He had it before me, before he knew me. I knew his fear before I knew him. I armed myself against it by understanding it. In the four days he spent with me he lost it. We laughed at it. I am sure no sanatorium will succeed in curing him. He will never get well as long as he has this fear. And no psychological treatment can overcome his fear, because his fear will stand in the way of any treatment. His fear applies not only to me, but to everything that is shamelessly alive, to the flesh, for instance. The flesh is too naked, he can’t bear the sight of it.

  “In those days I managed to overcome that fear. When he felt it, he looked into my eyes, we waited awhile, as if we were out of breath, as if our feet hurt, and after a while it went away. No effort was needed; everything was clear and simple. I dragged him up a hill outside Vienna; he walked slowly, so I went ahead; he trudged along behind me; when I close my eyes, I can still see his white shirt and his sunburnt neck and the effort he was making. He walked all day, uphill and down; he walked in the sun, he didn’t cough once, he ate like a horse and slept soundly, he was just plain healthy, and during those days his sickness was no worse than a slight cold. If I had gone to Prague with him, I would have kept the same place in his heart. But both my feet were solidly planted in the ground of Vienna, I was unable to leave my husband, and maybe I was too much of a woman to submit to what I well knew would be a life of strict asceticism. And besides, I have an uncontrollable longing, a desperate longing for a very different life from the one I am leading and will probably go on leading, for a life with a child, a life close to the earth.

  “That was probably what got the better of everything, of love, of the will to fly, of admiration, and again of love. Anything more I could say about it would be a lie. But maybe that’s the least of it. And anyway, by then it was too late. My inner conflict was too evident, and that frightened him. Because that was just what he’d been fighting against all his life, from the other side. With me he was able to rest. And then it began to torment him even when he was with me. Against my will. I knew perfectly well that something had happened, something that could not be undone. I was too weak to do the one and only thing that I knew would have helped him. There I was to blame. And you know I was to blame. The very thing that people put down to Franz’s abnormality is what makes him superior. The women he knew before were commonplace women, capable only of a female existence. 1 prefer to think that all of us, the whole world and everybody in it, are sick, and that he alone is healthy, right-thinking, right-feeling, and pure. I know he doesn’t fight against life but only against that kind of life. If I had succeeded in going away with him, he would have been able to live happily with me. But I didn’t know all this until now. Then I was a commonplace woman like all the women in the world, a little female at the mercy of her instincts. And that was where his fear came from. He was right. For he is incapable of feeling anything that is not right. He knows ten thousand times more about the world than all the people in the world. And his fear is right. You’re mistaken, Franz will not write to me of his own accord. There’s nothing he could say. There’s not a single word he could say to me in his fear. I know he loves me. He is too good and too upright to stop loving me. He would think it wrong. He always regards himself as the weak and guilty party. And yet no one else in the whole world has his immense strength, his unswerving striving for perfection, purity, and truth. That is the truth. Down to my last drop of blood I know it. Only I can’t bring myself to see it fully and clearly. When I do, it will be terrible. I race through the streets, I sit whole nights at the window. Sometimes my thoughts jump about like the little sparks when you sharpen a knife, and my heart hangs on a fishhook, you know, one of those thin little hooks, and it digs into me with terrible cutting pain….”*

  The regular correspondence ended at Kafka’s bidding. But a few sentences that he wrote later to Max Brod tell us something about his feeling for Milena: “You will talk with Milena, I shall never again have that joy. When you talk to her abo
ut me, speak as if I were dead, I mean, where my ‘outside,’ my ‘extraterritoriality,’ is concerned. When Ehrenstein came to see me recently, he said more or less that in M. life was holding out a hand to me and I had the choice between life and death; that was a little too high-sounding, not in regard to Milena but to me, but essentially true; the only stupid part was that he seemed to believe that a choice was open to me. If there were still a Delphic oracle, I’d have consulted it, and it would have replied, ‘A choice between life and death? How can you hesitate?’ “*

  Milena went on sending Kafka letters and postcards at long intervals, and she went to see him a few times at his parents’ house in Prague. On January 19, 1922, Kafka noted in his diary: “… the last visits were as usual affectionate and proud, but a little tired, a little forced, like visits to a sickroom. Is this impression right? Did you find something decisive against me in the Diaries?”* To judge by an entry in Kafka’s diary, she came to see him for the last time in May 1922, but it is thought that she saw him later, when he was very ill. I don’t know. But I do know that she loved him to the end, as is shown by her deeply moving obituary: