Kafka in Love (15 page)

Who raps him on the head with her ruler.

“How can the soul relieve its oppression except with a little meanness?” he writes her. Realizing her ingratitude, she apologizes by telegram. Too late. He is dazed by her unreason. He can no longer draw the venom from her reproaches, which arrive in bursts. He can no longer bring himself to read Milena’s letters. He prays for the young woman to disappear out the window, as he no longer has the strength to live with a hurricane in his bedroom.

Resentment, remorse, exhaustion, the end of an illusion—that, most likely, is what was brewing in Gmünd.

One among a thousand possible scenes: Kafka fears this meeting so much that he hasn’t slept for several days. When he gets off the train, his legs wobble with anxiety. Milena walks toward him, she is wearing his favorite dress, the good-bye dress. At the sight of this man with graying hair and a slow walk, who looks at her with staring eyes (he wants to say: “Milena, by walking toward me you are plunging into the abyss”), this young woman,
twenty-four years old, draws back in spite of herself. The man in Gmünd is not the man in Vienna, the tender, gay, alert lover whom she had adored. The man extending his arms to her is gravely ill. The enormous, the irresistible disappointment she feels is immediately reflected in the face of the stranger confronting her.

Six hours together, first stretched out on a patch of grass, then, when it starts to rain, lying like statues on a bed with suspect sheets in a shabby hotel by the station, a hotel for traveling salesmen.

Franz, his eyes shut, holds tightly to Milena’s hand as though afraid of drowning. She does not bare her shoulder, he does not touch his lips to her naked breast. She caresses his face as though caressing a child with fever. Between the silences, he returns to the same subject.

“If you were unable, or unwilling, to leave your husband although your marriage was going badly, it isn’t because Ernst is sick or because you’re dependent on him. It’s to avoid living with me. I am your scourge, and instead of separating you from your husband, I have brought you closer together, a truth that obsesses me. The rest is just lies. Let’s stop talking about the future, we’ll never live together, never even live in the same city. Let’s think only about the present.”

“Stop torturing me!” she says.

“I’ve told you many times, Milena, I do nothing but suffer torture and inflict it.”

“What is the reason for this?”

“To wrest truth from myself, extort confession.”

B
efore leaving the room, the young woman may have lingered in the bathroom. Wracked by remorse, by guilt, she remembers Max’s letter asking her to treat Franz gently. She hasn’t heeded this warning, she has constantly heaped reproaches on him, she tells herself he is going to die soon, he doesn’t have the capacity to live. Franz is the only man in the world who never accepts a compromise. No one has the enormous strength he has, his undeviating need for truth. His purity.

On their return to the station, Franz decides to send a postcard to Ottla, his sister, friend, and confidante. Why the card, when it will arrive after him? To leave some proof of his meeting with Milena? He is so tired that he declares the task beyond him. Making his proof even stronger, he asks Milena to write out a line or two of dictation. Below, she writes: “He was unable to finish. Yours, cordially.” Ottla kept this card, on which Milena’s handwriting appears, but not her signature—a married woman’s caution.

A
fter Gmünd, she goes to Saint-Gilgen for a rest. During the two weeks of her stay and through the long month of November, Franz and Milena ask themselves the same question: Why is our relationship coming to an end?

Kafka attributes the problem to himself.

“But the real reason,” he tells her, “is the inability to get beyond these letters. A thousand letters from you, a thousand wishes from me, won’t change a thing.”

Once again he speaks to her of his fear, a fear that extends to everything: fear of what’s big, fear of what’s small, fear of night, fear of not-night, a convulsive fear of uttering a single word, fear of venturing into a world bristling with traps, fear of the future, fear of everything that lives without modesty, fear of being abandoned, an awful fear of suffering. And above all, fear of never being equal to what is expected of him, an insurmountable fear of disappointing the women he loves, a nagging worry of impotence. When they made love on the grass in Vienna, he had felt his throat constrict several times. When fear overcame him, Milena would look him in the eyes, together they would wait a moment, he would recover his breath, and everything would once more become simple and clear.

To Milena, and only to Milena, he gives an account of his first sexual experience, which, he claims, is at the root of his sexual fears. He is twenty years old and a law student. On a hot summer day, as he is beating his brains out to learn a chapter on Roman law by heart, he looks out the window and sees the salesgirl from the candy store across the street. She is getting a breath of air on the sidewalk. The girl looks at him, he looks at her. They smile at each other. Using hand signals they agree to meet. At eight o’clock when he arrives she is talking to a man with whom she walks off, signaling Franz to follow. The two sit in a cafe, where they order a beer. Franz takes a nearby table and does the same. The couple then sets off toward the girl’s house with Franz following.

For him it is irritating, exciting, horrible. The man leaves. Shortly after, Franz and the salesgirl go to a hotel. They emerge only at dawn. He sees her again two days later. His body, which has been in agonies for months, is contented, happy. Franz leaves on vacation not long afterward. On his return, he cannot bear to see the girl, pleasant though she is, he cannot say a word to her or offer her an excuse, nothing.

Why? At the hotel, the girl, all unconsciously, had made a nasty gesture—a gesture, he tells Milena, there is no call to specify. And she had said something dirty to
him, also not worth mentioning. Yet both excited him frantically.

Afterward, his body—he talks about it as though it were an object in his keeping—was overtaken at irregular intervals by a keen desire, the desire for this dirty, repulsive something. The memory of these two bits of filth, the little gesture and the little phrase, was never erased, and for a long time he thought that this sordidness and horror were an integral part of the whole. The memory of it stayed with him forever after, a bad smell, a whiff of sulfur, a bit of hell lingering in the heart of pleasure.

“It is a little thing that determined my sexual life, just as in the great battles of history,” he jokes, “where the fate of little things has been decided by little things.”

Only in his journals does he confess his taste for brothels: “I walked by the brothel as though it were the house of a beloved,” he writes. On his daily walks through Prague, he chooses streets with prostitutes. It excites him to walk past them.

Sometimes he accosts one. In June there were six in all. He knows nothing more agreeable or more innocent than the fulfillment of this desire, he feels no remorse about it. He is drawn to large and slightly older girls, wearing unfashionable clothes whose flounces and furbelows give them something of an air of luxury. Or girls
with hefty behinds. There is one that nobody apart from himself would find at all attractive. She stands on the street corner in a tight-fitting yellow coat. When he encounters her, he turns around several times to look back at her. Yesterday he saw a girl who was truly ugly. He was quite drawn to her all the same.

With Max Brod in Paris he visited brothels. He describes their organization, the electric bell at the front door. He finds the drawing rooms too crowded with girls, who hem you in too closely and make it hard to choose.

“I can’t understand how I found myself back on the street, can’t understand how it all happened so quickly.”

Did pleasure come too quickly?

Since coming to know Milena, he is no longer drawn absurdly into a world of squalor. His longing for sordidness has gone. He is no longer afraid.

Actually, in Gmünd, his fear returned at the very thought that Milena might never be his. He lost her.

On November 20, 1920, he ends their exchange of love letters. Milena accedes. Her hope, she says, is simply to separate from him completely.

I
n mid-December he flees. On his doctor’s advice, he checks in to a sanatorium in Matliary, a resort in the
Tatra Mountains at three thousand feet. Its clientele includes the ailing, but also tourists, who come to hunt. Extending his leave of absence again and again, Franz stays there for ten months, until August 26, 1921.

To Max Brod, to Ottla, to his friends, he sends lively descriptions—written with such gaiety!—of the rooms he lives in before finally finding one that suits him. He offers portraits of the other guests, some thirty in number, and relates their conversation. He is an adept and genuine listener, and his tablemates speak freely before him. Mealtime discussions are often fueled by anti-Semitism. The legendary pusillanimity of the Jews is a frequent target, the cowardly subterfuges they used to avoid conscription during the war. “As to Jews who are also Communists,” he writes Max, “they are drowned in the soup and carved up with the roast. Everyone laughs appreciatively, then apologizes to me once more.”

He describes his diet in detail (liters of milk and cream but no meat, which inflames his hemorrhoids). He complains (again, as always) of the noise coming from the kitchen, the restaurant, the other rooms, the next-door balcony “where a young man (what a race!) hums Hebraic melodies, his hand thrust into his fly.”

To escape this cacophony that is driving him mad—his hearing, made keen by anxiety, picks up everything—he
takes refuge, as he had at Zürau earlier, with Ottla, in a lovely prairie surrounded by woods, an island between two streams. There, steeped in silence like a fish in an aquarium, he wonders if the noises made by his neighbors irritate him because they point to the emptiness of his own existence and the solitude he revels in.

To Max alone, he mentions his state of health, the boils on his buttocks that are so deeply embedded they won’t heal, his flirtations, two walks with a young lady in the forest, nothing happened, he says, just a few long looks; the violent snowstorm that has been raging for two weeks and has pinned him deep in his bed. His fever is rising, he can no longer read, nor write, nor sleep, nor stay awake, he is too worn out, he coughs constantly. As he is recovering from this bout of influenza, he is pole-axed by intestinal fever.

The letters from Matliary resemble the stylistic exercises from Zürau, in which he described his epic struggle against the mouse people. One of them tells of visiting a neighboring patient, a Czech with tuberculosis of the larynx. The man invites him into his room one day and explains in a cavernous voice how, using mirrors, he captures the rays of the sun to irradiate the ulcers in the back of his throat, at the risk of burning himself severely. He then opens his mouth wide to display his sores to his
visitor. Kafka feels himself sinking into a faint, as though a wave were breaking over him. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, using the walls of the room to guide himself, he flees onto the balcony, where he recovers somewhat in the cold air. He then exits the patient’s room without really taking his leave. Just a few words, “What a lovely evening!” to explain his outing onto the balcony, and “I feel quite tired” to justify his exit.

What he saw in that bed, he says, is “far more terrible than an execution, worse even than torture. All the misery of that life—the fever, the suffocation, the mirrors, the drug taking—has no other goal than to prolong the torture, which the patient freely inflicts on himself. And to this slow-burning pyre come parents, doctors, and visitors who cool and refresh the torture victim, console him, encourage him to endure further suffering. Then once back in their rooms, terrified, they wash their hands—as I have just done.”

There are others in Matliary besides patients at death’s door. Franz encounters young ladies, healthy young men, pretty serving girls, and numerous tourists. In February he develops a genuine friendship with one of the other guests, Robert Klopstock, a young man of twenty-one who has interrupted his medical studies to care for his lungs, which are lightly affected by tuberculosis. A native
of Budapest, he is ambitious, intelligent, and literary, a tall man, wide of girth, blond, with pink cheeks. He is almost too corpulent (especially compared to Franz, who is having trouble regaining the pounds he lost earlier). Robert comes to Franz’s room every night to wrap him with the utmost care in cold-water compresses. They talk for hours. Franz grows more and more interested in the young man. He asks Ottla to send him books, drawn, as he specifies, from his own library.

He writes to Max: “Can you help him with his career? He is Jewish but no, he is not a Zionist. Dostoyevsky and Jesus are his masters.”

S
ince the letter of November 20, Milena has heard nothing further from him. Breaking her promise to Max, she writes Franz. He answers with just a few lines: “Don’t write to me and avoid any chance that we might meet. Do this, I beg you, without saying another word. Only this will let me go on living a little, the rest can only destroy me.”