Kafka in Love (10 page)

On July 8, they go to Tepl, where Franz has a lawsuit to settle for work. Their relations continue to be abysmal. From the little town, where they spend only a few hours, Franz finds the time to scribble a line or two to Max: “What a creature I am! What a creature I am! I torture her—and torture myself—to death!”

On July 9, nothing has changed, the clouds have not parted—how could they? And yet, after a series of horrible days and worse nights, a miracle occurs. They live airy days together such as Franz had never thought to see again.

They get along so well, they feel so strong in their love, that on July 10 Franz writes—it must be at Felice’s request—to Frau Bauer. Once again he has the right to call her “Dear Mother.” He announces the “assurance for the future” of his relationship with Felice.

On July 12, he sends a message to Ottla that things are going much better between him and Felice.

The next day, they go to Franzensbad, a spa near Marienbad where Julie Kafka is taking the waters with her daughter, Valli.

“We will get married as soon as the war ends and we will live in a suburb of Berlin,” he announces. The interview with his mother, at which Felice is also present, proceeds so perfectly smoothly … that it terrifies him.

What has happened? The several-page letter that he sends Max (his confidant) on July 12 gives some insight. His fear of seeing Felice in her full “reality” (should we read “nudity”?) has evaporated. He has realized that he didn’t know her at all, that she was reaching out to him. He has accepted her help. He has entered into a relationship with his fiancée such as he has never known before. Once in her intimacy, he saw the confident gaze of a woman.

“How beautiful the softened glow of her eyes, this blossoming from the well of womanhood. I have no right to resist it. For the first time I believe in the possibility of married life,” he writes.

Such reserve in telling his story! Such difficulty in saying that the locks had popped! They made love.

For the first time? We don’t know. What is certain is that Felice gave him confidence that night. He overcame
his fear of the “long, narrow, terrible slit.” He discovered, he would say, the beauty of the slim, noble body of his fiancée. And the same pleasures seem to have been renewed on the following nights. Five days of happiness.

Felice returns to Berlin on July 14. He remains in Marienbad alone until July 24. Though he complains of violent headaches, he is calmer, more relaxed, more sensual, quicker, more decisive. He advises his uncle to spend his vacation in Marienbad, a place as peaceful as the Garden after the expulsion of man. He sends him, along with a guidebook to the city, a list of good things and good places: “Take breakfast at the Dianahof (sweetened milk, eggs, honey, butter), grab a bite at the Maxtal (curdled milk), lunch briefly at the Neptun, eat fruits at the greengrocer’s, take a quick nap, have milk in a plate at the Dianahof, drink a quick curdled milk at the Maxtal, dine at the Neptun (vegetable omelette, Emmenthal, a portion of raw eggs and a portion of fresh peas), then sit on a bench in the municipal park to count your money, visit the pastry shop, and then sleep as much in one night as I was able to sleep in all the twenty-one that I spent here.”

The forest air has stimulated his appetite. Franz bankrupts himself buying good lunches, strolls along eating juicy black cherries. He has put on weight, is writing,
walks for hours in the woods. Bare-chested, he lies down full length in ditches lined with warm, thick grass. He stays there, alone, in the sun, sheltered from view. Such happiness! This landscape of low hills is his favorite landscape, the sea and mountains are too heroic for him.

He learns from Max that his Hebrew professor, Georg Langer, is in Marienbad with a distinguished personage, the Rabbi of Belz, one of the leaders of Hasidism. Out of curiosity, and to please Max, he joins the dozen people escorting the sainted man on one of his evening strolls. The next day, he sends Max a long account of the actions and gestures of the rabbi, an enigmatic man who rarely spoke.

Once back in Prague, the prospect of marriage awakens his anxieties all over again. He says to himself: We feel close to each other, we think we grasp each other solidly, whereas we are grasping the wind.

In his letters to Felice over the next four months, he talks about nothing but the Jewish People’s Home, where she has agreed to volunteer. His tone is despotic, he expects a kind of submission or obedience from her. He is savoring, he says, the happiness of commanding another human being.

He requests photographs of his fiancée surrounded by all the little girls she is teaching: “The photographs show
many traits that one would never see with one’s own eyes,” he tells her.

He gives her advice on every aspect of these young refugees from Eastern Europe, whose lives fascinate him down to the smallest detail. He sends them books almost daily, comments on every volume, heaps praise on Dickens’s
Little Dorrit
, and tops off his packages with candies, chocolate, cocoa, and games.

He even writes her: “It’s a little as though these girls were my children. The Home brings us so close together, creates such a strong spiritual link between us, that I want to pay for any expenses you incur on behalf of these children. Give them your help.”

H
is only other topic of conversation is the Goltz Gallery in Munich, which organizes evenings of modern literature and has invited Max Brod and Kafka to read from their works. Max decides to read poems, and Franz will read “In the Penal Colony,” which he believes to be the best thing he wrote in 1914.

He suggests to Felice that she join him in Munich. He doesn’t yet know the date of the reading, he is not even sure it will take place. But he keeps returning to the subject of the trip. It will take place—no, there will be no
trip. I’ll go—no, I won’t have obtained the visa nor the necessary permission from the censorship bureau.

“Miracle upon miracle,” everything falls into place. Felice gives an excuse why she can’t go. He insists. She gives in. He leaves Prague alone on Friday, November 10, very early in the morning. Max is staying behind. The Post Office Bureau, where he has a high-ranking job, has refused to allow him two days off. He assigns Franz the task of reading his poems.
⁹

Franz arrives in Munich late in the afternoon. Felice is waiting for him at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. That night at eight o’clock, Franz reads his “sordid story” without the slightest emotion, he says, as though the text meant nothing to him, his mouth colder than the mouth of an empty stove.
¹⁰
Whereas in general, he warms up to the point of frenzy. His friends still remember his reading of “The Metamorphosis” as energized and intoxicating.

The reading at Munich is a staggering failure. Felice, like most of the other listeners, is horrified at the
cruelty of the punishments inflicted on the inmates of the penitentiary, where everyone is guilty, where there is no other penalty than death, where suffering never leads to redemption.

The next day, a Saturday, at lunchtime, they enter an abominable pastry shop. Felice, angry, tells him abruptly what she thinks of his text, and the devil take the hindmost. Her hostility wounds him deeply. In lively tones he tells her: “My sense of guilt is always strong enough, you don’t need to excite it further. But I am not strong enough to take such abuse. And this is not the only one of my texts to be painful. Everything I have written up to now is also like that. Our times, and mine in particular, are extremely painful. Mine for longer than anyone else’s. God knows to what depths I would have descended if I had been allowed to write as much as I wanted!”

“Thank God you’ve been kept from it! No one needs to hear such atrocities.”

“Atrocities are everywhere, even at our door. I sent you Arnold Zweig’s book,
Ritual Murder in Hungary
. Did you read it? I burst into tears at certain passages. I had to put it down.”

“Your penal colony is even more disgusting than that Jewish tragedy! The harrow that carves the law into a prisoner’s flesh, what sadism! How could you!”

“The Law cannot be taught, it must be absorbed into one’s blood. But you haven’t liked anything I’ve written. Not one of my collections has met your approval. Not even
Meditation
, whose royalties—with your consent—are paid to you.”

“That has nothing to do with it! And you’re the one, I shouldn’t have to remind you, who wanted it that way. I never asked you for anything. And let’s talk, why don’t we, about the sums your publisher sends me!”

Building to a pitch of irritation, she reproaches him for having made her come to Munich: “I wanted to see you in Berlin. But once again, you only thought of yourself, of your own pleasure, not mine. I’m getting to know just how selfish you are.”

“I can’t accept the fact that you—you in particular—reproach me for selfishness, and that you do it so lightly, as though it were the most obvious thing.”

H
e leaves at dawn on Sunday.

While their first separation had blocked his creative energy, the disaster and the argument in Munich trigger an extraordinary spate of productivity. Other than the fourteen stories that compose
A Country Doctor
, he also writes “The Bridge,” “The Hunter Gracchus,” “Astride the Coal
Scuttle,” “The Great Wall of China,” “The Neighbor,” “An Everyday Incident,” “The Truth About Sancho Panza,” “The Silence of the Sirens,” and “Reflections on Sin.”

He has never worked so well or in such agreeable conditions. During the day, he lives in the lovely little house lent to him by Ottla on Alchemists Street. It’s wonderful to live there, and wonderful to walk home around midnight to sleep in the apartment he rents at the Schönborn Palace, a handsome structure on Mala Strana with two beautiful high-ceilinged rooms, red and gold; he could be living in Versailles. He describes it to Felice at length at the beginning of January.
¹¹

In July, the Kafka family celebrates the pair’s second engagement, less sumptuously than the first, the war has been raging for three years. The day after the ceremony, the engaged couple leave for Arad, in Transylvania, where one of Felice’s sisters lives. The two stop over for a day or two in Budapest, the trip is long, not very restful, and their relationship is up and down.

He returns to Prague alone after a brief stay in Vienna.

He sleeps a little better.

The wedding is set for September.

Freedom … Freedom!
 

H
e doesn’t know exactly when during the night it started. He tells Ottla four o’clock in the morning, and Felice five o’clock. He was sleeping and a strange sensation wakes him, a flow of saliva in his mouth, an unusual taste. He sits up, spits it out. And then he lights his lamp to see what he has vomited up. Odd, it’s a clot of blood, bright red and glistening. Excited as one always is by something new, at the same time frightened, he gets up. Immediately he spits up a second clot. Then a third, then a thin, continuous trickle of blood. He paces back and forth in his room, goes to the window, opens
it wide, looks outside, breathes in the warm air, dawn is a long way off. He looks distractedly at his watch, walks back toward his bed. More blood keeps coming. He drinks a little water, rinses his mouth to clear it of the unpleasant taste. He stares at the towel soaked with blood, which has now turned to a dark, almost black, shade of red. He tells himself he has just lost the battle that he has waged for the last five years, he is not Napoleon, he will not emerge from Corsica. His headaches and insomnia have worn him out. It is a crushing defeat, an unconditional capitulation, which he signs with his blood.

Behind this sense of failure, behind this bitterness, he feels excitement mounting in him, an exhilarating sense of freedom. The battle is over. It is the end of five years of torment, the end of the headaches, the end of the insomnia, that have driven him crazy. From the rubble arises a wonderful sensation of freedom, a sudden lightness. He soars, at peace with himself. He goes back to bed, sleeps until morning.

He has never slept better.

The next day, the blood starts up again, less abundantly. He decides to say nothing to his parents. He goes to his doctor, Dr. Mühlstein, who diagnoses an acute bronchitis.