Kafka in Love (13 page)

Milena, the End of an Illusion
 

T
hey meet at the Café Arco. Franz has gone there to buy himself the thing he loves most: a cup of hot chocolate under a mountain of cream. He is sitting at a table alone. She comes toward him: “Dr. Kafka? I’m Milena Jesenská, wife of Ernst Polak. You know him, I believe?”

She points toward her husband, who is talking to a large redheaded woman. Franz rises immediately to his feet, bows to the very young lady with the lovely blue eyes standing in front of him. Slender and blond, she looks squarely at him and smiles at his awkwardness. He has knocked over the sugar bowl without noticing it.

He stares at her, forgetting to answer her question.

“I’d like to translate several of your books into Czech:
The Stoker, The Judgment, The Metamorphosis
, and
In the Penal Colony
.”

“All that trouble? You shouldn’t.”

“Of course I should. Your books are the most important of the new crop of German literature. I’ve already translated
The Stoker
, and your editor, Kurt Wolff, has asked me to obtain your permission.”

“You’re a translator?”

“Yes, I just said that. And a journalist. May I send you the text for corrections?”

“Do you live in Prague?”

“No, in Vienna.”

They trade addresses. She waves good-bye, he watches her walk away.

He remembers the clothes she was wearing that day, her lively hands, her frail figure between the tables of the Café Arco. Yes, he still remembers that.

He leaves Prague in early April. He is going to Meran in the South Tirol for a rest. He is constantly weary. He repeatedly requests time off from work and can’t seem to end his affair with Julie. She clings to him and cries. Does he hope that being away for two months will put an end to her obstinacy? He has said nothing to her about the
meeting at the Café Arco or the two letters he has received from Milena, two letters that are never out of his pocket and that he fingers like a talisman.

In Meran he settles into the Ottoburg Pension, run by Fräulein Fröhlich. From his balcony he sees climbing flowers at the height of his room and exuberant tropical vegetation in the garden below. A sparrow visits him at breakfast time. Franz tosses it a few breadcrumbs and watches the reaction. The bird stands in the sunlight on the balcony. It covets the life-giving food, the crumbs that lie in shadow on the threshold to Franz’s room. A few little hops and the bird could gobble them all down. But it is afraid to venture into unknown territory. It tentatively makes a few jumps forward, stops, advances a little farther, hops away, fluffs out its feathers to give itself courage. Desire propelling it, the sparrow jumps and lands a few centimeters from the feast. Then it retreats. It flies away, ruled by fear.

Toward mid-April, Franz starts to write Milena. He is no longer the dashing seducer who, on the night of August 13, 1912, rang at Max Brod’s door and decided, there and then, to win Felice. He is now thirty-nine years old, his hair has turned gray, he no longer takes the stairs four at a time. He spends most of his waking hours in a deck chair. He is easily winded from walking.

When he meets Milena, the woman he had never hoped to meet, especially now, especially so late, he knows his time is limited. This is no longer the season for pleasantries.

And Milena is not Felice.

She is only twenty-three when she enters his life like a hurricane. Twenty-three, but she already has an eventful past and a scandalous reputation. As a child she took care of her mother for months. She saw her suffer, waste away, and die in her arms. Her father, a famous stomatologist and a stiff, brutal man, refused to care for his wife himself.

Neglected and bereaved of her mother, the adolescent experimented with cocaine and ran with a fast crowd. One night she swam across the Moldau River fully dressed to meet a lover. She spent her afternoons in cafes, posed naked for painters, rented hotel rooms in which to meet her two closest friends, Staša and Jarmila (there was whispered talk of sapphic love). She offered them armfuls of flowers, dresses, ornaments. Money burned her fingers.

She was eighteen and attending a concert when she met Ernst Polak and decided to live with him. The young man was a womanizer, a gambler, and a night creature with a vague connection to writing. When Dr. Jesensky learned of his daughter’s attachment to a Jew and a
cafe-table writer, he had her locked up in a psychiatric clinic outside Prague. She lived with the insane for nine months, obtained her release on reaching adulthood, and raced off to marry Polak. Dr. Jesensky cut off all ties to his daughter.

The two moved to Vienna. Now money is scarce and life hard. Milena writes columns for magazines and newspapers in Prague, brilliant columns that are avidly read by feminists. She teaches Czech, translates foreign novels. Days when she has no money, when she has nothing to eat but apples and tea, she puts on an old cap and walks to the main train station, where she hauls luggage for travelers. Her husband, “the man with forty mistresses,” openly cheats on her. Often the worse for drink, he mistreats Milena and runs up debts that she scrambles to repay. When she meets Kafka, her health is dicey, she has a recurring case of bronchitis, she has coughed up blood two or three times, her marriage is falling apart, and she has no money.

F
ranz and Milena begin writing each other in April, and they stop in November. Less than eight months. He writes to her in German, she answers in Czech, usually in
pencil. A subject for complaint. Of his letters, about 150 survive. None of Milena’s.
¹⁵
All that remains of hers are her articles—tributes to the little black dress, to fashion, to cafes, to the popular quarters on Sundays, to trains, to a film by Charlie Chaplin; a brilliant satire of marriage and communal life, “The Devil at the Hearth”; and the eight feverish, impassioned letters that she wrote to Max as her affair with the man she still called “Frank” was coming to an end. In his early letters to her, Franz appended his second initial to his first name. Milena never noticed the
z
. And he never corrected her. For her alone he was a different person.

Milena confides about what is going poorly in her life: her health. He becomes alarmed, begs her to leave Vienna and find rest by a lake, perhaps in Meran, where he is staying.

“My God! Milena, if you were here!” he writes. “But I would be lying if I said that I missed you: for by the most cruel and perfect magic, you are here, even as I am, no, even more than I am. This is not a joke, I actually find myself thinking that you must miss me here, since you are very much here but asking yourself: Where is he? Didn’t he write that he was in Meran?”

She writes about her father and being cut off by him (Franz knows all about hard-hearted fathers, and on June 21 sends her his “Letter to His Father”), about her marital quarrels, her financial difficulties (he sends her money). In return, she asks him about his private life, his three engagements, his ties to Judaism, and his fears, all his fears.

From April to the end of June, they write each other every day, often several times a day, always by express mail. As they reach a feverish pitch, telegrams fly back and forth at a rapid rate. Franz addresses his letters to a fictional Frau Kramer, at the Poste Restante, where Milena goes to pick them up each morning and night. They both live in expectation, in impatient expectation, of learning more, and saying more: “This mania for letters is insane,” Franz writes her. “One tilts one’s head back, drinks the words down, knows nothing except that one doesn’t want it to stop. Explain that to me, Professor Milena.”

The attraction they feel for each other is so strong that by early June they are using the familiar
Du
and talking of love.

“Address me again with the word Du,” he writes. “And look me in the eye.”

Franz had often addressed the sturdy Felice as “My darling girl, my child.” Today he calls Milena: “My baby,
my baby.” Yesterday he went so far as to call her “Mommy Milena.” The impetuous young woman, whom Franz has described to Max as “a living fire, such as I have never seen before,” summarily orders him never to use such ridiculous language again.

Reading Milena’s calm letters to him, he is happy: “It is rain on my burning head.” But when she castigates him, sends him goading messages (as she most often does), which are as inimical to him as holy water to the devil, he looks for a piece of furniture to crawl under and suffers wave after wave of anxiety.

“The letters, arising from incurable torment,” he writes, “only cause incurable torment. The written kisses do not arrive at their destination, they are sipped by phantoms along the way.”

By June 12, he can no longer stand the zigzagging of their letters.

“They have got to stop, Milena, they are driving us crazy. One no longer knows what one is writing, what the other is responding to, and, in any case, one trembles.”

The following day he changes his mind: “Write to me every day just the same, two little lines, or one, or a single word, but if I do not get this single word I suffer inordinately.”

When he writes that he is leaving Meran and returning to Prague, Milena asks him, begs him, to pass through Vienna. His letters are no longer enough. Franz takes fright, particularly as he has just received a telegram from Julie, which he can hardly bring himself to read: “Meeting in Karlsbad June 8, please confirm.” He telephones his fiancée: I am too worn out to make the journey. And he is afraid, horribly afraid, of going to Vienna, of not measuring up to the illusion that his letters and his books have fostered.

“I don’t want, I don’t want (no, I am not stuttering), I don’t want to pass through Vienna, the mental effort is more than I can bear, I have been ill since my three engagements. My headaches and all the old nights have turned my hair almost white. Consider that I am thirty-eight years old (double it, since I am Jewish), compared to your twenty-three Christian years.”

“Come,” she writes, “I am in such a funk, I need you actually here. I’m tired of looking at a face that is just a sheet of paper covered in words.”

“I’m frightened. I’m not tired, but I’m frightened of the extraordinary fatigue that would result from the extraordinary nervous strain.”

“Remember what you wrote me: ‘And one time, and ten times, and a thousand times, and all the time I want to be near you.’ ”

“I was saying what I thought, Milena. But there are many things that escape me, and possibly everything escapes me.”

“Come, hold me in your arms. I love you.”

“Every hour of my life to come looks at me and snickers: You received that letter, and you haven’t been to Vienna? Haven’t been to Vienna? Haven’t been to Vienna? Haven’t been to Vienna?”

“Come.”

“I can’t yet say whether I am coming to Vienna, but I’m fairly certain that I won’t.”

“You’ll come.”

“Today, I might say that I will surely come to Vienna. But tomorrow? I reserve my freedom.”

“I’m expecting you.”

“If I come to Vienna, I’ll send a telegram on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“You’ll come.”

“Milena, if you don’t receive an express letter on Thursday, it will mean that I have gone directly back to Prague. I have spent two nights without sleep.”

“I want to see you.”

“I’ll be in Vienna on Tuesday, barring the unforeseen.”

A
t ten a.m. on Tuesday, June 29, 1920, Franz arrives at the South Station. He drops his bags at the Hotel Riva (“Riva,” a good omen), although there is a garage nearby with put-putting car engines. He sits down to a cup of hot chocolate and an assortment of cakes and composes a telegram: he tells Milena he has arrived in the city and sets a meeting for the next morning in front of his hotel at ten o’clock. His breakfast eaten, he drops the letter off at the Poste Restante, then tries to put the day to good use by visiting the sights, preparing for his meeting, and quieting his nerves. He is afraid that his presence, the sight of this long, thin person, will bring Milena to the ground with a thump, break the epistolary enchantment.