by Jay Cantor
“You never ordered me not to write her.”
He called her a liar and said he couldn’t go on treating her, that no one could, because she didn’t really want to be cured of her attachment to Milena.
She sat up from the couch and turned toward him, and it was his ashen face that looked as though it had been slapped. As in a fairy tale, he’d shrunk in size, too. “The comrades,” she said. “They’ve gotten to you, haven’t they?”
For a moment, this good German must have remembered a bit of his better self. “You have to understand, Eva. You were in Ravensbruck—” As if to say, That was your good fortune. “There are certain things I had to do to survive out here that I wouldn’t want anyone to know about, things my reputation—”
She left his office immediately, and felt almost giddy as she did, as if she’d been saved from a trap. This was the present her doctor offered her—men who were partial, boastful, craven, confused, and conquered, not one of them the equal of her Milena, who hadn’t done the very thing her doctor had, betrayed her because of threats from Communists, threats not to her reputation but to her life.
20
AND HER DOCTOR’S COWARDICE meant she could rush to Prague, where she could counsel Jana, perhaps get her out before the Communists took complete control of the government. She bought the tickets the same afternoon. She walked home and imagined herself outside the cathedral in the postcard, where she would talk sternly but fondly to Jana. Later, she would confiscate the pills in the yellow jug and help get her ready to return to school with her in Germany.
But the day after she’d secured a visa, the party had taken over Czechoslovakia, and within a week, Jana sent a letter: Please don’t write me anymore. Eva had wept for all the details of Milena’s life she would never hear, but her tears taught her, too, that despite her imagined postcard lectures to Jana, Eva was herself not much changed; she had cared only about what Jana could give her.
Her own daughter had been fortunate that a court had taken her from Eva, and Milena’s daughter was fortunate that the party had closed the door on Eva, who wouldn’t ever be able to visit, and draw Jana back into the past, the two of them the last devotees of the cult of Milena. Best for Jana, for her daughter, for her former comrades, for her coward of a doctor, if Eva never spoke to any of them again. She didn’t belong with them, or in the land of the living, but maybe only in a place carved inside herself, the hut in Finland, perhaps, where, even if you were capable of sight, there were nothing but fields of snow that asked next to nothing from you, and offered less in return.
Maybe she would settle in this hut and write the book she’d promised Milena, the one about the camps and about Milena. That could be Eva’s world within the hut.
For God’s sake, no, her doctor said, more agitated and concerned than she might have expected, though she supposed that in his imaginary form he didn’t risk much by talking to her. You mustn’t lock yourself away with her. No one’s worth that sacrifice.
Well, at that, Franz Kafka, she imagined, would have responded with a companionable but bitter laugh, like brandy made into sound. He’d tell the doctor that he might know about others and the love they evoked, but he’d never understood their living flame, the reckless, caring, courageous Milena Jasenska, a woman in whom even the Hunger Artist had found his food.
Her death, Kafka would agree, would leave a sane person with only one wish left, and writing her and Milena’s book would let Eva satisfy that desire, let her climb into the grave with Milena and all the things she’d given Eva, her long fingers stroking the sides of Eva’s breast, the look of the startled crows, the yellow of a child’s pajamas, the helpless wounding angels that would provide mute company as she and they were ushered out of life altogether.
Or, more likely, writing and revising would make her memories less painful and less vivid, leave the yellow paler, the crows more worn and distant, and Eva would emerge from the hut with a manuscript and years left to live, a woman mild and purposeless—except for the times when the comrades would slander Milena, and what was left of Eva Muntzberg would give them a sharp galvanic kick.
Eva didn’t look forward to either ending. But in any case, to write a book, a person has to eat and keep warm. She got her coat, left her hut in Finland, and went down the stairs to a café in Heidelberg, to provision herself with some overheated coffee and stale pastry before she set to work.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If one has the good fortune (is it good fortune?) to encounter Franz Kafka—in his fiction, in his diaries, in a biography, or in accounts by friends—one meets a sickly, anguished, very considerate man, a vivid, unsettling presence who had many profound (though usually not bitter) discontents—with language, with his father (oh, maybe that one could get a little bitter), with God, with politics, with his body, and with a great deal else besides, all lived out imaginatively, humorously, and mercilessly to himself, and sometimes, alas, to others. Nonetheless, Kafka had many fond friends, some of whom loved him deeply.
Their affection may have helped Kafka to bear, but not to resolve, his discontents, that, and, of course, his necessary, seasick experience of writing them, a task he took on as if it was rescue, or might lead there, even though, of course, he knew that there wasn’t any such thing. Still, he set out again and again; maybe, if he embodied himself in a language that absolutely would not do but would have to, if he lived all of himself (which he also found by writing) as a question, he could keep moving in fiction and in life, if not forward, then around, like K. trying to find the way to the Castle, unsettled and able to unsettle others, yet truly eager himself to settle down, supposing that there was honestly someone anymore who might give him that right (though that honestly seemed also to guarantee, never).
His honest, stupendously self-critical attempt to answer those questions is his living presence; it provides an illumination of the intricacy of impossible predicaments, and an example of a sad, heroic persistence in what seem like ridiculous and necessary tasks. (For example, those moments when you might feel God is absent or dead, but you still feel a biting, inescapable remorse for which you have no way to atone and so set off to find Him again, or finally bury Him.) When you share that sort of mood—and his work is his way to bring about those unfortunate feelings in you, his way to make companions for himself—Kafka becomes encouragement, and, more than that, he becomes company.
The stories in this book have been meant as a way to express my gratitude for that company.
Which means I would also very much like to thank those who, along with Kafka (and his magnificent companion, Max Brod, who saved that work for us from his final self-punishment), made possible my encounter with him, with his friends, his lovers, and the horrifying times in which they lived and died. These include, though it’s hardly a full list, Kafka’s biographers, among them, again, Max Brod, and also Ernst Pawel, Nicholas Murray, Ronald Hayman, Louis Begley, and Reiner Stach. I am also very grateful indeed for Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant by Kathi Diamant, and for the accounts by those who knew Kafka, or knew those who had known him, most especially Kafka’s Milena, by her daughter, Jana Cerna, and Milena by Margarete Buber Neumann, memories of memories of those thankful for their intimate contact with this troubling, vivid, and seemingly impossible fellow.
In fact, even now, I begin to doubt such a person ever could have been, and must hurry to return to his stories, and the stories about him, to reassure myself that he existed, and exists.
A Note About the Author
Jay Cantor is the author of three novels, The Death of Che Guevara, Krazy Kat, and Great Neck, and two books of essays, The Space Between and On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother. A MacArthur Fellow, Cantor teaches at Tufts University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.
Other titles by Jay Cantor available in eBook format
The Death of Che Guevara • 978-0-307-77844-4
Great Neck • 978-0-307-42611-6
Krazy Kat • 978-0-3
07-77843-7
For more information visit www.aaknopf.com
ALSO BY JAY CANTOR
FICTION
The Death of Che Guevara
Krazy Kat
Great Neck
NONFICTION
The Space Between
On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother
GRAPHIC NOVEL
Aaron and Ahmed: A Love Story
(with James Romberger)