Kafka in Love (12 page)

Max is worried, it is the first time since he has known Franz that he has ever seen him cry, cry openly, the tears rolling down his cheeks. Between sobs, he hears him say: “Isn’t it terrible that it should come to this, isn’t it terrible?”

Julie, the Forgetting
 

S
panish influenza, rampant across Europe, strikes him in early October. His temperature soars to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and remains there. His mother tends to him day and night, thinks he will die, cries at his bedside. She remembers her two sons Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of six and eighteen months.

Franz recovers, then relapses. His lungs deteriorate. When he gets over the flu, he is so weakened that his doctor prescribes a long rest cure in the countryside.

On November 30, 1918, his mother drops him off in Schelesen, a village north of Prague that Franz knows. At
this time of year, he is the only guest at the small hotel kept by Fräulein Olga Studl. He stays there four months, at sixty krone a day.

He spends the days lying in a deck chair on his balcony, breathing the fresh air, swathed in blankets, looking out at the wooded hills. The quiet is broken only at lunchtime by the snarling of the hotel’s dogs, Meta and Rolf, fighting over the remains of Franz’s meal, which he tosses out the window to them.

One day in January, a second guest arrives. It is a young woman of twenty-eight, Julie Wohryzek. Winter is at its height, and the hotel, the hills, the forests are buried in crystalline snow, which sparkles as far as the eye can see. It could be Lapland, and there is no traveling except by horse-drawn troika. But the intense cold outdoors keeps the two convalescents prisoners inside “this truly enchanted habitation.”

The early moments of their relationship belong in a film comedy. Franz and Julie keep walking into each other, as they traverse the hotel’s deserted hallways, or enter the empty dining room, or rise from their respective tables, which are yards apart, or when they sit down in the cavernous drawing room. It becomes so funny that as soon as they see each other, they break out laughing. They laugh about their strange resemblance, about
having the same shape of face, the same mouth, they laugh about their shyness, they laugh for no reason, and without stopping, they look at each other and can’t hold back the laughter that wells up and leaves them in confusion. Whenever they start giggling, Fräulein Olga Studl raises her hands to the heavens and mutters, “Those two, those two … what on earth is going on?”

They spend six weeks together. At night they hold long conversations. He tells her about his doubly failed engagement. She is just getting over the death of her fiancé, killed at the front. He finds Julie common and surprising, pretty (she reminds him of Grete Bloch), honest, likable, and shy. “She is a fragile counter girl,” he writes Max, “deeply ignorant and full of resignation.” He adds, somewhat cynically: “She is no less insignificant than this housefly, for example, flying toward the light.”

Franz’s eccentricities surprise Julie. He spends his nights writing to his friends, his sister, his parents. He rises at noon, eats only vegetables and dried fruits, drinks liters of milk. At night, he reads aloud for hours on end, pacing back and forth, gesticulating like an actor, his eyes shining with pleasure. He intrigues her with his insatiable curiosity, questioning her tirelessly about her work as a milliner. How does she go about creating a hat? Does she start from a sketch or from a
piece of fabric? How long does it take to make one? Do her hats have veils? Flowers? Whom does she sell them to, and for how much?

With a tact that she appreciates, he also takes an interest in her father’s work as a shoemaker and a synagogue watchman in a poor hamlet. The number of Yiddish expressions that stud her speech, some of them quite shocking, disconcerts him, but he hides the fact.

They both feel that, despite their social and cultural differences, they are intimately suited to each other. They spend more and more time together. In the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket, Franz walks the length of the hallway leading to Julie’s room to slip a letter under her door. Once back in bed, he waits for the reply. When they greet each other, morning and night, he takes the risk of holding the young woman’s hand a little longer than normal. Soon, he is discussing marriage: “It is the highest goal, but it is not for me. My health is too poor.”

“Although my reasons are different, I am no longer interested in marriage either,” she says.

“Don’t you want to have children?”

“No, ever since the war and the death of my fiancé, I really don’t.”

“What kind of life do you want to live?”

“A life that would help me forget the misery I’ve known. All I dream about is the movies, the comic opera, fashion. Nothing else.”

“As we have both opted against marriage, we cannot stay together. The court of public opinion obliges us to separate.”

For several days, they bravely resist their mutual attraction. They avoid each other, take lunch and dinner at different times. Julie cuts short her evenings in the drawing room. Franz lingers longer in his bedroom. They must avoid each other or they would start using the familiar
Du
and fall into each other’s arms.

The time has come to part. A melancholy moment. Julie has asked one of her sisters to accompany her back to Prague. Franz catches only a glimpse of this woman, who seems a little disoriented but a thoroughly good person.

He remains alone at Schelesen for another three weeks, until the end of March. He doesn’t write Julie, not even a word. But now that she is gone, he is obsessed with her. He’s convinced that things can’t just be left as they are.

Shortly after his return to Prague, the two arrange to meet—how could it have been otherwise? They become lovers.

This was to be the start of a peaceful, happy period. They meet almost every day, but, in order not to be seen together, they take long walks in the forest, along the dark alleys of the Riegerpark, or after nightfall in the streets of Prague. They hide from others, and this cautiousness is humiliating to Franz.

When his sister Ottla becomes officially engaged and sets the date of her wedding for July 15,
¹⁴
the fear of winding up alone makes him do something crazy: he proposes to Julie. She refuses. He insists, lays out arguments, wears away at the young woman’s resistance. He persuades himself that it would be a marriage of love and a rational one as well. Julie provides him the sense of safety that he needs.

He again combs Prague for an apartment, neighborhood by neighborhood.

One night he announces the news of his engagement to his parents. He wants to introduce them to his new fiancée.

“A shoemaker’s daughter?” says Hermann. “A woman whose father is the poorest man in all Bohemia? That’s who Herr My Son wants to marry? A revolting goose who snares you in a moment? Your sister is marrying a Catholic, but you have just dealt me an even more painful blow. You are trying to kill me, is that what you want?”

Hermann threatens to go into exile to avoid the dishonor of such a mismatch. He reminds his son that his engagement to Felice was twice broken off, that enormous sums were spent on his behalf for nothing, and that six months of rent went down the drain! Two failures are not enough for Herr My Son, now he must have a third? If you need a whore, go to the bordello. And if you can’t manage to do that alone at your age, I’ll take you there myself.

For the first time, Franz doesn’t let himself be terrorized. The torrent of insults and contempt from his father only reinforces his decision. The day he finds an apartment, a shabbily furnished one-bedroom on the outskirts of Prague, he sets a date for the wedding.

He arranges for the publication of the banns.

On Monday, Julie and he visit the apartment. They are sitting on the couch, huddled together. The young woman savors the moment. She has won this home after untold suffering. At her side is her husband-to-be, the
promise of happiness. Tears of joy run down her face. Franz is also shaken. He has just realized how close he is to disaster. On Sunday, he will move in, live day after day with Julie, her dresses, her hats, and her underwear, her smells and her fripperies, her voice chattering away in this dingy, dark, overcrowded cell. He will stop writing. His heart thumps. His vision blurs. The walls, the ceiling, and the floor start to spin, his face, his body break out in sweat. He feels on the point of collapse.

On Friday, two days before the wedding, the landlord changes his mind. The apartment is no longer available.

He is saved.

For several weeks, Franz pretends that life is continuing as before. He walks with Julie in the Riegerpark, the botanical garden. They have lunch together often, swim together at Cernosic.

Finally he can’t go on, can’t ignore the warning signals drumming in his head. His insomnia is driving him crazy, he compares himself to a man burning alive. He offers Julie a pact of friendship and faith: “Let’s go on seeing each other as often as you like, but let’s discard the idea of marriage.”

In mid-November, unable to stand it any longer, he runs away. Where to? To Schelesen, where they met. Max
accompanies him. Over a period of ten days, Franz composes the “Letter to His Father.”

When he returns to Prague, he shows it to Ottla, then gives it to his mother, who wisely refuses to pass it on to its intended recipient. Hermann Kafka would go to his grave unaware of the eighty-page letter his son wrote to him in the days following his aborted engagement to Julie. Hermann Kafka would never hear the reproaches his son leveled at him, and those he leveled at his son. Franz, typically enough for a lawyer, advocated for both parties. He prosecuted a double suit: the son’s lawsuit against the father and the father’s stinging rebuttal of his son.

Was it for his father that Franz intended this settling of accounts and this peace offering? It seems unlikely. Franz knew perfectly well (how often he complained of it!) that his father never opened any of his books, even
A Country Doctor
, which was dedicated to him. Hermann never read a page of it, not a single word. Every time Franz gave him a collection of his works, his father, without looking at it, without touching it, as though it were a disgusting thing, would utter this sentence, which became a family catchphrase: “Put it on my night stand.”

Franz knew what the fate of his letter would be in his father’s hands. Which explains, perhaps, why he spoke
with such extraordinary freedom. Did it work as he had hoped it would? Did he approach close enough to the truth to make his life, his death, a little easier?

On his return from Schelesen, he starts seeing Julie again, but nothing is the same. He is distracted, abrupt, silent, shuttered. The days pass in boredom, idleness, silence, anxiety. The affair is treading water. But not for long.