Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

  Yes, your letter has a third sentence as well, which may be directed against me even more than the ones I quoted. The sentence about sweets which upset the stomach.

  Thursday

  So today is—moreover unexpectedly—the letterless day I have feared so long. So seri1ously did you mean what you wrote Monday that the next day you were unable to write. But I still have your telegram to cling to.

  [Prague, August 6, 1920]

  Friday

  So you’re not doing well—the worst ever since I’ve known you. And this insurmountable distance between us, together with your suffering, makes me feel as though I were in your room and you were barely able to recognize me as I wandered helplessly back and forth between the bed and the window, trusting nobody, no doctor, no treatment, and knowing nothing, simply staring at this dreary sky which now, for the first time—after all the playfulness of earlier years—reveals its true nature: forlorn and just as helpless as myself. You’re lying in bed? Who’s bringing you your meals? What kind of meals? And these headaches. Write me something about them when you get a chance. I once had a friend, an Eastern Jew, actor,137 who every three months had terrible headaches lasting for days. Apart from that he was entirely healthy, but on those days if he went out on the street, he would have to support himself against the house walls, and there was nothing else one could do for him but walk up and down for half an hour, waiting. The healthy forsake the sick, but the sick also forsake the healthy. Do the pains recur regularly? And the doctor? And since when have you been having them? And now you’re probably taking pills as well? Bad, bad, and I can’t even say child.

  IN THE MARGIN: I’m enclosing the 6 Legionnaire stamps: one thanks is enough, but put it in a letter, since it’s warmer there.

  It’s a shame your departure has been postponed again; now you won’t leave until a week from Thursday.138 Well, I won’t have the pleasure of seeing you revive among lake, forest, and mountains. But how much more pleasure do I want, greedy, greedy man? It’s a pity you have to go on torturing yourself in Vienna for so long.

  We’ll discuss Davos another time. I don’t want to go there because it’s too far away, too expensive, and too unnecessary. If I do leave Prague, and I’ll probably have to, it would be best for me to go to some village. But where will anyone take me in? I’ll still have to give it some thought; in any case, I definitely won’t leave before October.

  Last night I met a certain Stein, you may know him from the cafés, people always compare him with King Alphonso.139 He’s now an intern with a lawyer, was very glad to see me, wanted to discuss some official business, and would otherwise have had to telephone me the next day. ‘Well what is it?’ ‘It’s concerning a divorce, in which I’m also somewhat involved, that is, I’m being asked to intervene.’ ‘In what way?’ I really had to reach for my heart. But then it turned out it was only the parents of one of my poets who were getting a divorce, and that the mother, whom I don’t know in the least, had asked Dr. Stein to ask me to work on the poet some so he would treat her, his mother, a little better and not revile her so.

  An odd marriage, incidentally.140 Imagine—the mother had already been married once; she had a child, the poet, during this earlier marriage by her current husband. So the poet’s last name is that of her first husband and not the father. But then they did marry and now after many years are separated once again, at the instigation of the husband, the poet’s father. The divorce is already complete. Because of the current housing shortage, however, the woman cannot find an apartment for herself, so for this reason alone they continue living together as a married couple. However, this conjugal living (the result of not having an apartment) has not brought the husband to reconcile himself with his wife or even to abandon the divorce proceedings. Aren’t we humans pitiful to the point of comedy? I know the husband: a kind, reasonable, very capable and affable man.

  By all means send me the list of things you want done—the longer the better.141 I’ll crawl into every book, into every item it contains just in order to travel inside it to Vienna (the director doesn’t mind that) and please give me as many opportunities to travel as possible. You could also lend me the essays that have already appeared in the Tribuna. Incidentally, I’m almost looking forward to your vacation myself, except for the bad mail service. You will write me what it’s like there, won’t you—your life, your apartment, your walks, the view from your window, what you eat—so that I can share it all with you a little.

  [Prague, August 7, 1920]

  Saturday

  Am I really kind and patient? I don’t know about that, but I do know that such a telegram does the whole body good, so to speak; still, it’s just a telegram and not a proffered hand.

  But it also sounds sad, tired, spoken from the sickbed. And it really is sad; what’s more, no letter came today—another day without a letter, you must be doing very poorly. Who can give me any guarantee that you sent the telegram yourself and aren’t spending the whole day in bed, cooped up in your room, which I inhabit more than my own?

  Last night I committed a murder for your sake: a wild dream, bad, bad night. I hardly remember anything more about it.

  So now your letter arrived after all. It’s clear, all right. True, the others weren’t any less clear, but one didn’t dare press further to attain their clarity. By the way, since when are you capable of lying? Your forehead is not the kind that can tell lies.

  I don’t blame Max. Of course, whatever may have been in his letter, it was wrong: nothing, not even the best of people, shall come between us. This is also why I committed a murder last night. Someone, a relative, said in the course of a conversation I don’t remember but which mainly concerned something this person or that could not accomplish—anyway some relative finally said ironically: ‘So maybe Milena.’ Whereupon I somehow murdered him and came home, all worked up. My mother kept running after me. Here at home a similar conversation was taking place; finally I cried out, hot with rage: ‘If anyone says anything bad about Milena, for instance Father (my father), I’ll kill him too, or else I’ll kill myself.’ Then I woke up, but there had been no sleep and no awakening.

  To get back to your earlier letters, they basically resembled your letter to the girl.142 And the evening letters were nothing but grief over the morning letters. One evening you wrote that everything is possible, except my losing you; actually only a slight push was needed and the impossible would have happened. And perhaps this push did occur and perhaps it did happen.

  In any event: this letter is relief; one felt one was being buried alive beneath the earlier letters; at the same time one felt compelled to lie still, since perhaps one was dead after all.

  So none of this actually surprised me, I expected it, I prepared for it as well as I could, in order to bear it in case it came. Now that it is coming I’m still not sufficiently ready, naturally; but I haven’t been blown over yet. Nonetheless, the other things you write about your situation and about your health are absolutely terrifying and much stronger than I am. Well, we’ll talk about all that when you come back; maybe the miracle you’re expecting really will occur there, at least the physical miracle. Incidentally, I have such faith in you concerning this that I don’t even want any miracles to occur; I calmly entrust you to the forest, lake and to the food, you who are miraculous by nature, violated and inviolable—if it only weren’t for everything else.

  When I think your letter over—I’ve just read it once—what you write about your present and future, what you write about your father, what you write about me, the only conclusion which can be drawn is one I have already stated with perfect clarity: I am your real misfortune, and no one else but myself—except I must qualify this to say: your outward misfortune—for if it weren’t for me you might have left Vienna as early as three months ago, and if not three months ago then now for sure. I know you don’t want to leave Vienna; even if I weren’t around you wouldn’t want to, but that’s exactly why it might be said—when seen from an extreme
bird’s-eye view—that my emotional significance for you consists in my making it possible for you to stay in Vienna (among other things of course).

  But one doesn’t even have to go so far as to get involved in sticky subtleties: it’s enough to consider the obvious fact that you’ve already left your husband once, that it would be all the easier for you to leave him now, since the current pressure is much greater, and that, naturally, you could only leave him just to leave, and not for someone else.

  All these reflections, however, lead nowhere except to candor.

  Two requests, Milena—one small and one large. The small one: stop wasting stamps, and if you continue sending them I’ll stop giving them to the man. I’ve underlined this request in red and blue, which is the greatest severity I am capable of—so that you know for later.

  The large request: break off the correspondence with Max, I can’t very well ask him to do so. It’s fine in a sanatorium when, after the doctor has made his rounds, the guest asks in confidence how ‘our patient’ is really doing. But even in the sanatorium the sick man is probably snarling at the door.

  Of course I’ll be glad to take care of everything. Only I’d think it would be better to buy the tricot in Vienna, since it will probably require an export permit (at one post office recently they didn’t even want to take books without an export permit, at the next they accepted them without a word), well, maybe they’ll know in the store.—I will continue to send a little money with the letters. I’ll stop immediately when you say ‘enough.’

  Thank you for permission to read Tribuna. Last Sunday I saw a girl buying a copy at Wenzelsplatz, very obviously just because of the fashion article. She wasn’t especially well dressed, not yet. It’s a shame I didn’t take more notice of her, so now I can’t follow her development. No, you’re wrong to underrate your fashion articles. I’m really grateful to you that I can read them in the open (since like a scoundrel I’ve been reading them in secret often).

  [Prague, August 8, 1920]

  Sunday

  The telegram. Yes, it’s probably best we meet. Otherwise how long would it take to put things in order. Where did all this break in on us? It’s hard to see more than one step ahead. And how this must have made you suffer—in addition to everything else. And I could have stopped it long ago; I could see it clearly enough, but my cowardice was stronger. And wasn’t I also lying by answering letters as if they belonged to me, when I clearly realized they did not? I hope it wasn’t this kind of ‘lying’ answer which blackmailed you into going to Gmünd.143

  I’m not at all as sad as you might think from my letter; there’s just nothing else to say at the moment. It’s grown so still; one doesn’t dare break the silence with a single word. So we’ll be together Sunday after all, 5, 6 hours—too little for talking, enough to share the silence, hold hands, look into each other’s eyes.

  [Prague, August 8–9, 1920]

  Sunday evening

  There’s something which has always bothered me in the way you reason, something which is particularly clear in your last letter—an undeniable fault you can check for yourself. When you say (as is the case) you love your husband so much you cannot leave him (even for my sake, I mean it would be horrible for me if you did it anyway), I believe you and agree. When you say that although you could leave him, he still needs you deep inside, and cannot live without you, and so therefore you cannot leave him, I also believe you and agree. But when you say he can’t deal with the outside world without you and that is why you cannot leave (this having been made the main reason), then either you are saying this to cover up the reasons named above (not to strengthen them; those reasons don’t need any strengthening) or else it is just one of the brain’s pranks (you describe them in your last letter) which cause the body to writhe, and not only the body.

  IN THE MARGIN: Thank you for the stamps; this way it’s at least bearable, but the man isn’t working at all, just looking at the stamps, enraptured, as I am doing with the letters one floor below. The ones for 10 h, for instance, are available on thick paper and thin, but the thin ones are rarer; today you sent the thin stamps, kind soul.

  Monday

  I was just about to write some more along the lines of what I had begun above when 4 letters arrived—by the way, not all at once—first the one where you regret having mentioned your fainting spell, a little later the one you wrote right after you fainted, together with the one, well the one which is very beautiful, and still later the letter concerning Emilie. I can’t make out in which order they were written, you’ve stopped writing down the days.

  I’ll try answering the question of ‘strach—toucha.’fn14 I probably won’t succeed in my first attempt, but if I keep coming back to it, I may manage after several letters. It would help if you read my (incidentally bad and unnecessary) letter to my father. Maybe I’ll take it along to Gmünd.

  If we restrict ‘fear’ and ‘longing’ the way you do in your last letter, the question is not easy, but very simple to answer. In that case I ONLY have ‘fear.’ It’s like this:

  I recall the first night. At the time we lived in the Zeltnergasse, opposite a clothing store, a shopgirl was always in the door. I was constantly pacing back and forth in my room upstairs, a little over 20 years old, nervously preparing for the first State examination, trying to cram facts that made no sense to me into my head. It was summer, very hot, probably this time of year, completely unbearable. I kept stopping in front of the window, my mouth full of disgusting Roman law; finally we came to an understanding using sign language. I was to pick her up at 8:00, but when I went down that evening somebody else was already there. That didn’t really change much, however; I was afraid of the whole world, hence afraid of this man as well; I also would have been afraid of him had he not been there. Although the girl did indeed take his arm, she nonetheless gave signs for me to follow them. This way we came to the Schützeninsel, where we all drank beer; I sat at the next table. They then walked to the girl’s apartment, slowly, with me in tow; it was somewhere near the Fleischmarkt. There the man took his leave, the girl ran into the house, I waited a while for her to reappear and then we went to a hotel on the Kleinseite. It was all enticing, exciting, and disgusting, even before we reached the hotel, and it wasn’t any different inside. And as we walked home over the Karlsbrücke toward morning—it was still hot and beautiful—I was actually happy, but this happiness was only because my eternally grieving body had given me some peace at last, and above all because the whole thing had not been more disgusting, more dirty than it was. I met the girl once again—2 nights later, I think—everything went as well as the first time, but then right away I left for the summer holidays. In the country I played around a bit with another girl, and could no longer bear the sight of the shopgirl in Prague; I never spoke to her again, she had become (from my point of view) my evil enemy, although in reality she was friendly and good-natured. She kept on following me with her uncomprehending eyes. And although the girl had done something slightly disgusting in the hotel (not worth mentioning), had said something slightly obscene (not worth mentioning), I don’t mean to say this was the sole reason for my animosity (in fact, I’m sure it wasn’t); nonetheless the memory remained. I knew then and there I would never forget it and at the same time I knew—or thought I knew—that deep down, this disgust and filth were a necessary part of the whole, and it was precisely this (which she had indicated to me by one slight action, one small word) which had drawn me with such amazing force into this hotel, which I would have otherwise avoided with all my remaining strength.

  And it’s stayed that way ever since. My body, often quiet for years, would then again be shaken by this longing for some very particular, trivial, disgusting thing, something slightly repulsive, embarrassing, obscene, which I always found even in the best cases—some insignificant odor, a little bit of sulphur, a little bit of hell. This urge had something of the eternal Jew—senselessly being drawn along, senselessly wandering through a senselessly obsce
ne world.

  On the other hand there were times when my body wasn’t calm, when actually nothing was calm, but when I nonetheless felt no pressure whatsoever; life was good, peaceful, its only unease was hope (do you know a better one?). I was always alone at such times, for as long as they lasted. Now for the first time in my life I am encountering such times when I am not alone. This is why not only your physical proximity but you yourself are quieting-disquieting. This is why I don’t have any longing for smut (during the first half of my stay in Meran I kept making plans day and night—against my own clear will—about how I could seduce the chambermaid—and even worse. Toward the end of my stay a very willing girl ran right into my arms; I more or less had to translate her words into my own language before I could even begin to understand her). More to the point, I just don’t see any smut—nothing of the kind that stimulates from the outside, but there is everything that can bring forth life from within; in short, there’s some of the air breathed in Paradise before the Fall. Enough of this air that there is no ‘longing,’ but not enough that there isn’t any ‘fear.’—So now you know. And that’s also why I ‘feared’ a night in Gmünd, but this was only the usual ‘fear’ (which unfortunately is quite sufficient) I have in Prague as well; it wasn’t any special fear of Gmünd.

  And now tell me about Emilie, I can still receive the letter in Prague.

  I’m not enclosing anything today, not until tomorrow. After all, this letter is important, I want it to reach you safely.

  The fainting is only one sign among many. Please definitely come to Gmünd. You can’t come if it rains Sunday morning? Well, in any case, I’ll be there in front of the station Sunday morning. You don’t need a passport, do you? Did you already check? Do you need anything I could bring? Does your mentioning Staša mean I should go see her? But she’s hardly ever in Prague. (Of course when she is in Prague it’s even more difficult to go see her.) I’ll wait until you mention her again, or until Gmünd. By the way, as far as I remember, Staša mentioned it as though it were completely obvious: yes, your father and your husband had spoken together, and often.