I stood there and scanned the room. Suddenly the crowd shifted and I could make out a plump figure on the far side of the room. It was Uta. She was struggling along, her elbows protruding at awkward angles to shelter the two glasses of schnapps that she was ferrying towards me. The sight of her immediately caused a small knot of muscles in my neck and shoulders to contract in an unpleasant spasm, and I had the impulse to duck behind someone or run from the room. I turned my back to her, hoping, uselessly, to make myself invisible. My body tensed in anticipation of her approach.
Once, at some long-ago point in my life, I might have found Uta attractive, in desperate circumstances with limited light. She was blonde and round with sticky, pinkish skin and a penetrating voice of calculated vivaciousness. I had first come across her at one of the earlier public readings I had given from my novel. At that stage, I was still overwhelmed by the amount of attention I was receiving, particularly female attention, and had, I now saw, responded to her far too warmly. She began to shadow me and attend every reading I gave, besieging me with questions and coy turns of her head. Soon she was appearing regularly on my street at just the moment I was leaving the house to go to work. I would see her everywhere: on the tram, walking on the Laurenziberg, in cafés I frequented. When these tactics of hers brought no return of her affection she managed to befriend my sister Sophie, using her to gain access to my home. Sophie is a girl of infinite kindness and, through her, Uta rapidly won the acceptance of the rest of my family, who were soon loudly proclaiming her charms. To me she seemed like a pestilent cloud that blew through the city, to be avoided at all costs.
I sensed a commotion in the crowd behind me and braced myself for the inevitable tap, which soon came. I made an effort to affix an expression of friendly politeness to my face and turned, groaning inwardly and already planning my escape, but my eyes fell not upon Uta’s frizzed blonde hair and pouting lips but on another face altogether. It was shaped like a heart, with wide cheeks slanting to a little pointed chin, and eyes that were dark and warm: black, with flecks of gold. The eyebrows flew out over them in two straight wings, grave and intense, but the pink lips twitched up at the corners, parted, with two white tooth tips visible within.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman said to me, ‘but are you Herr Kafka?’
I was stunned, able only to look at her.† The beauty of her face burned into me like a flame, and I wondered that people did not collapse in the street at the sight of it. She was like a woman in a Philipp Veit painting: gentle, and with an air of such sweet melancholy that I wanted to reach out and touch her.
She spoke to me, and for a moment I simply stood and listened to the sound of her voice as though it were music, without understanding the words she uttered. The timbre of her voice was unusually low, with a pleasant burring undertone. If it were the voice of an instrument, it would be a cello, slow and quiet. When the meaning of her words reached me, I realised she was praising Franz’s story.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, interrupting her. ‘I am Brod. Max Brod. But Kafka is a very good friend of mine.’ I extended my hand, which until then had hung paralysed by my side. She shook it, and introduced herself as Fräulein Anja Železný, but I thought I caught a flash of disappointment in her eyes.
While I still held her hand clasped in mine, I felt another tap on my shoulder, and this time when I turned I was greeted with the face that I had been expecting earlier. The closeness of the room had deposited a shining film over Uta’s pink complexion and small beads of perspiration studded the down that grew on the upper corners of her mouth. She stood very close to me and handed me one of the glasses of schnapps, inserting her body at an angle that blocked me from Fräulein Železný.
She gave a pouting smile that left her eyes unmoved and began in a loud voice to talk some familiar nonsense of my family, seeking to display a closeness between us that was pure fiction. Uta’s voice droned on and on, with the high-pitched cadences of an unpleasant insect trapped in a summer room, beating its head against the hot glass of the windows. After a while I gave up trying to interject and fell silent, hoping for rescue.
With relief, I spotted Theodor fighting his way through the crowd towards me. Though I was keen to avoid Theodor’s questions about my work in progress, this feeling was now outweighed by my desperation to get away from Uta. I was also quite anxious to learn if he had met Franz yet. There still seemed to be no sign of Franz at the party, but the room was far too packed for me to be certain. Of course, by this stage it was inevitable that Theodor had read Franz’s work. I could even see a rolled copy of Hyperion in his hand. I greeted him with excessive warmth, grasping his hand with both of mine, and soon Uta drifted off sulkily. As I had expected, Theodor’s main objective was to reprimand me for my failure to produce a finished manuscript, but I smoothed over my difficulties with a slick of lies. I waved my hands about and made much of how well it was proceeding, and, surprising myself, was even able to improvise some ideas that sounded moderately plausible.
When it seemed that I had satisfied him, I asked, ‘So, have you had the fortune to meet with the great prodigy? Kafka, I mean.’
‘Ha! The great prodigy is a hard man to pin down, it happens. I have not yet had the pleasure. I try and try, but he strings me along like a heartbreaker.’ He shook his head in a sorrow that was not entirely false. Franz’s evasiveness clearly bewildered Theodor, who was used to being courted by would-be writers to the point of harassment. From time to time I noticed his eyes darting through the crowd behind me in a vain search, his eyebrows tensed and lips pursed.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of the fellow for weeks,’ he went on. ‘I write letters and invite him for lunch, I go to every party, but nothing. The man’s like a ghost.’
‘Perhaps someone else has got to him first,’ I said, voicing my own fears.
Theodor shook his head. ‘Impossible. I’m keeping a close eye on this one. I hope that he’s so hard to catch because he’s locked in a room somewhere, pumping out some more of these.’ He waved his copy of Hyperion. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘you should be happy that he’s not here: less competition.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But I must go. Will you tell him, if you see him, that I would very much like to meet him?’
He laughed when he saw my expression. ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ he said. ‘I still love your work the most.’
My face darkened with shame.
Theodor began to make for the door, but he was too slow, and soon he was corralled against the window by a little half-moon of hopeful writers, vying with each other for his attention, while he struggled to get away.
I should have been relieved that the meeting I had dreaded was not to take place that evening, but in fact I felt worse. Franz’s shunning of the party was as incomprehensible to me as it seemed to be to Theodor, and fed into my raging jealousy. I imagined Franz sitting high above me like some king, lofty and unconcerned, as he was courted from all sides, while I, below him, toiled along in the dusty wastes, labouring over every line, craving acknowledgment.
Standing alone in the crowd made me feel vulnerable to a renewed offensive from Uta; she was sure to be watching me from some hidden vantage point. I remembered Fräulein Železný, and looked around, but I am not a tall man and was rewarded only with maddening glimpses of slim arms or knots of dark hair. I noticed my legs beginning to ache again from the prolonged standing and considered leaving, but at that moment a movement in the crowd gave me a clear glimpse of Fräulein Železný: she was standing at one of the windows, looking out. She was as brightly lit as though she were on a stage,‡ but an instant later the bodies surged together again and she was lost from my view. I fixed on the direction of the windows and began to squeeze my way through, murmuring apologies as I pushed people aside with increasing urgency. It seemed to take hours to cross the room, and when I arrived at the window, instead of Fräulein Železný, I found only a little group of actors from the theatre, drunkenly toasting each other and spilling their schnap
ps on the floor. I saw the café doors swinging closed on the other side of the room as someone left the party. Was it Fräulein Železný? I felt sure it had been. The room seemed dulled and flattened somehow with her absence, as though someone had turned off a bright light, and people’s voices now seemed shrill and echoing.
I stood with my back against the wall, watching the undulating crowd, their heads and mouths animated in conversation, and hands lifting and lowering glasses to their mouths. I could see no one who I knew. I felt completely drained of energy. My legs and the right side of my body now radiated with a pain that would not be ignored. I quietly collected my coat and left, without bothering to take my leave of anyone.
Outside the damp air of the river blew in my face and a dirty fog had rolled in. The Franzensbrücke rose up indistinctly, like a fairy-tale bridge that would melt under your feet when you tried to cross it, and its lamps hung like tired moons. I walked slowly up Postgasse, steadying myself against the walls as I went.
My body was tight with anxiety on the walk home and my mind ran over and over the problem of Franz. Although Franz and Theodor had not met, and thus I should be glad, I was not. I saw that the encounter between the two men had merely been delayed, pulled out into the future, where it lay in wait for me once more.
Where could he have been that night? If I were him, I would certainly have wanted to celebrate my first publication, to bask in the attentions of Theodor and the others at the party. I remembered Franz’s insistence when he had thrust those stories upon me all those months ago; surely this slow unfurling of recognition was what he had been aiming for? It was both puzzling and rankling. I could still see the look of naked longing on Theodor’s face as he scanned the room for Franz; he had certainly never looked for me in that way, even in the beginning—not that I had ever given him the opportunity to seek me out. I had always been the more eager one, the one doing the chasing. Franz’s absence began to seem like a personal insult to my own fierce ambition.
By now I had arrived home. Everyone was asleep. Even Elsa, the housemaid, had retired for the night, and the only sound was the uneven ticking of the loud clock that stood in the parlour. I creaked my way slowly up the stairs to my bedroom. As soon as I opened the door, my eyes fell on a glowing white object that lay in the middle of the floor. Without even turning on the lamp, I could see that it was a parcel, and when I picked it up I saw that it was from Franz. It was a thick bundle of papers—more stories—and the letter enclosed made no mention of the party he had missed. Why he would bother to send these stories to me after my lack of response to the previous ones was a mystery. Why court me at all when he had no difficulty getting published without my assistance? It was nonsensical. It seemed almost threatening. His persistence made me wary, but, contrary to my instinct to run, I decided that befriending him might be the best course of action.
__________________
* In the manuscripts Franz Kafka appears as ‘F.K.’ or ‘F-’; we have replaced this with his first name in the interest of consistency.
† This sentence is crossed out in the manuscript.
‡ In the space below the text there are several small pencil sketches of a woman’s head in profile.
2.
SEEING THEODOR AT THE PARTY HAD MADE ME ANXIOUS* TO continue again with my own writing, which I had neglected for some weeks. At that time I had put down some ideas that I had thought were quite promising, and had filled several notebooks with pages of notes and plans, but I was still having difficulty fitting everything together. My first book had been a work of fiction of the most conventional sort, but I had, in the interim, written some essays on different philosophical subjects, particularly on Schopenhauer, and I wanted my second work to be a grand avant-garde novel that would blend philosophy and fiction into a totally new form. I was especially interested in Schopenhauer’s ideas of representation and reality, and felt that incorporating these into the inner life of a fictional character was the perfect way to examine them.
But no—when I read back over the paragraph I have just written I realise that it is misleading. It is true that my first novel was conventional, and it is true that I had grand ideas about Schopenhauer and fiction, and had been excited and interested in the idea for this second novel, but the fact was that I had by this time become bored; bored and also desperate. The success of my first novel, Schloß Nornepygge, had completely transformed my existence; I could almost say that I had barely been alive before it, when I was only Max Brod: postal official. And, as Theodor was constantly reminding me, my name as a novelist was slowly fading, by the day, by the minute, and I dreaded being relegated to obscurity as one dreads poverty or illness.
When I returned home from work the day after the party, I told Elsa that I was not to be disturbed and locked myself in my study. I am a habitual worker when it comes to writing and most of my work has been completed in that study, at the old writing table that had been my grandfather’s. The table was of such a size that it seemed to possess a personality of its own, like a large and docile animal crouched in the centre of the room, waiting for me to arrive. I occasionally felt the urge to pat its leather top as one would pat a faithful old horse or dog.
I sat down and took out my notes, hopeful and ready to begin. But when I looked at them I found that what had seemed a few weeks ago to be coherent and promising plans were now nothing but pages of vague scribblings of unconnected ideas. I could no longer trace my old thoughts, and the threads that had seemed so clear to me earlier now wandered directionless and I could not follow their logic. Even my own handwriting was suddenly difficult to decipher. I tried to focus. I sat up straight in my chair and grasped the pages firmly. I bent my head over my notes and forced myself to read again from the beginning, but my mind kept switching off, and soon I was staring at the paper without seeing the words upon it.
My gaze drifted to the wall in front of me, my mind as blank as if it were sedated. I took in the minute details of the wallpaper’s topography. My eyes, outside of my control, travelled up and down the light stripes of the wallpaper’s design, shifting them in and out of focus. I became aware of the tick of the clock in the parlour, which slowly grew louder and then became syncopated with the scrabble and gnaw of some insect’s jaws at work on the inner beams of the house.
Schopenhauer. I conjured up the image of the man, the photograph that was etched on the frontispiece of my copy of The World as Will and Representation. He looked sternly out from under the great cliffs of his eyebrows, undisturbed by the clouds of fluffy white hair that shot wildly out from either side of his head. His mouth was a grim line of concentration.
‘Max,’ his voice boomed out at me, ‘concentrate. Will. Will to live. Will to write.’
At that moment I had no will. Only perhaps the will to sleep. I felt the profound exhaustion of one who has been working for hours.
I began to tidy the papers on my desk, telling myself that when it was all straight and neat, then I would be able to begin. I felt quite virtuous as I sat sorting out papers and exercise books, creating a little ordered pile and making more of the surface of the table free. I pulled out a fat bundle and saw that it was Franz’s manuscript. The thickness of the pages between my fingers made my jaw clench tight with a spasm of raw envy. Cautiously, in the manner of one examining a wound, I took the papers out of their wrapping and began to read. The story was too good. When I had finished, I put it down on the table. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears. I watched my hand steal out and take hold of the pen and lower it to the page. A line emerged from the pen, a line of shining blue ink that intersected with the dried black shapes on the paper. A word was crossed out. I crossed it out again. Then another. The blood was pounding through my head, but my hand moved with precision. A curving blue line now ran across the page, making small tears in the paper. Then the next page lay before me, dry and black and white at first, but soon covered with glossy blue, unreadable. Page after page came faster and faster, and the rustle of t
he papers had soon drowned out the roaring in my head.
I must have fallen asleep or lost consciousness, for I heard a voice saying my name close in my ear. The next moment I was looking upon an arid desert landscape that was spread out below me, over which I seemed to be flying. I became absorbed in its features, boulders and mountain ranges, but after a moment the perspective shifted and the landscape resolved itself into the underside of the chair upon which I had been sitting, and I found that I was lying curled on the floor with my head underneath it. I lay for a moment, looking at the unfinished wood and dusty canvas of the underside of the seat. My mind and body retained the dim ghost of some euphoria, of a dream that had fled from me but left its evasive imprint. Lying in its warm glow I felt completely relaxed and relieved of all burdens. This feeling gradually faded and soon my body began to feel cold and stiff, host to a catalogue of familiar pains and discomforts. I rolled awkwardly out and straightened myself up into a sitting position.
Paper was scattered across the desk and formed tessellated patterns on the carpet. I began to gather up the torn pages of Franz’s story. Some had fallen face down beside the writing table, and when I lifted them up I saw that the carpet beneath them was stained with ink. The writing that covered the pages, dense blue lines of it, was now smudged, but still legible.
I began to read it with difficulty, and, as I read, I felt a sensation of lightness and expansion in my head. My body became unreal to me, my hands, my fingers, blue-tipped holding the papers, were foreign, no longer belonging to me. The phrases that I read, though they were plainly before me in my own handwriting, were new to me. I had never seen them before.†
The story was completely unlike anything I had ever written, crystallising private sides of myself that were barely conscious to me and that I would never dare commit to paper. An uneasy sensation grew in me, one of being watched by an observer hidden in the dim and silent room. My skin contracted and I began to shiver. Phantom shadows danced in the gloomy corners of the room and I turned up the lamp, feeling ridiculous. I forced my movements into deliberate slowness, trying to reassure myself, but my breath and heartbeats were ragged. A loud bang came suddenly from the fastened window. It was only the night-time wind, I knew, pushing at the glass that was loose in the frame, but I jumped as though I were under fire. My hands shook as I tried to collect the fallen pages from all around me. My ears began to ring and I soon abandoned my measured pace and hastily grabbed at the pages of Franz’s ruined manuscript. I bundled them up roughly and crumpled them into an untidy pile on the writing table. They hissed at me for my rough treatment of them. I took the pages covered in my writing and shoved them in the drawer and locked it, as though I feared some contagion that dwelled in their pages might leak out and poison the air.
The Lost Pages Page 2