Kafka in Love (16 page)

Milena obeys but, toward mid-April, on a difficult night, she writes him again. She implores him to give her news of himself one last time. He learns from Max that, seriously ill, she has reconciled herself with her father
and gone to live with him. He immediately writes Max: “Let me know when she will be in Prague and for how long, I do not want to run into her.”

Despite his resolve, he sees Milena again in late August. And in early October, he entrusts her with his thirteen large notebooks (she is the only other person to have read his
Diaries
, perhaps the only other person to have held them in her hands, during his lifetime). In late November, she comes to visit him four times at home. At this point, he hardly ever rises from bed. The visits are affectionate and dignified, but a bit weary, a bit stilted, as sickbed visits are.

In the lobby she encounters his parents. They greet her icily, Hermann Kafka in particular, who mutters under his breath as she goes by.

When Franz looks at the young woman sitting across from him, he remembers their first meeting at the Café Arco.

He thinks: I am a live memory, that is one cause of my insomnia, always Milena, or perhaps not Milena, but a light in the shadows.

D
id the shadows hold the memory of a humiliation that he never explicitly admitted?

Does it not seem strange that in all the letters Kafka writes to Milena (some 150) there is no echo of any admiration on her part for his work? Whereas he heaps praise on the most trivial of her newspaper articles.

It was after reading
The Stoker, The Metamorphosis
, and
A Country Doctor
that Milena decided to translate them. And it was these texts that, like Ariadne’s thread, led her to Kafka and bound her to him.

During the months she worked on them, she sought the most faithful Czech equivalent for each of the words he had written, attentive to the rhythms of the sentences and the author’s hidden intentions. No one, consequently, had read the texts more attentively than she.

She submits each of her translations to him. He immediately congratulates her, praises her, calls her “Professor Milena.” He dreams of being her student, assures her that she has transformed his “bad, his extraordinarily bad stories” and made them readable. He hardly dares to bring up a few egregious mistranslations.

At the beginning of their correspondence in May, he tells “Dear Frau Milena” the story of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s first success. The Russian writer has just finished his first novel,
Poor Folk
. His roommate, Grigorowitsch, also a writer, reads it at once and is entranced by it. He steals the manuscript and runs off to show it to
the most celebrated critic in Russia. At four in the morning Dostoyevsky’s doorbell rings. It is his friend with the great critic, Nekrasov, who, meeting Dostoyevsky for the first time, embraces him, kisses him on the cheek, and calls him “Russia’s hope.” They spend two hours together, talking mostly about the novel.

Kafka adds that Dostoyevsky, who would later remember this as one of the great nights of his life, leans out the window and watches the two men as they walk away at dawn. Choked with emotion, he starts to cry, repeating over and over: “What splendid men! How good they are, how noble, to have come during the night without waiting. Oh, how wonderful that is, how noble!”

That is not all.

On August 1, Franz dreams of Milena, a sad dream, which he tells her about in great detail. They are walking together on a street in Prague. Milena, her face heavily powdered, and the powder clumsily applied, is acting coldly toward him. The cause of her coolness he does not know. They meet a man at the cafe who looks like Dostoyevsky and who responds openly, cordially, amply, whenever Franz asks him a question. And who ignores him each time he stops questioning him.

These two stories have no effect. Milena refuses to play the part of Nekrasov. Tired of waiting for a compliment,
or even a word of encouragement, he settles for a reproof: “Scold me thoroughly,” he writes, “for you know how to do everything, but scold me better than the rest.”

Whereas he upbraided Felice for offering no reaction to his first collection, Franz doesn’t dare question Milena directly. They discuss literature. Robert Louis Stevenson, about whom Kafka knows nothing, is Milena’s favorite author, along with Chekhov. Franz also admires Chekhov, at times passionately. On the other hand, he disparages a novel that Milena has several times urged him to read and praised to the skies:
Marie Donadieu
.
¹⁶

He continues nonetheless to extend opportunities to her. He tells her with what haste, what emotion, he has read each of her articles, he can’t stand to miss a single one. He offers comments on them, keeps them like precious relics. He buys a dozen copies of each, as he does with her translations of his stories.

He sends her his “Letter to His Father.” In early October 1921 he gives her the bulky blue notebooks of his
Diaries
, of which even Max has read only rare passages.

Franz is waiting, one would swear, for Milena to swoon and send flowers. Yet once again she says nothing. The proof? On January 20, 1922, four months later, he asks
her this question: “Did you find something decisive against me in the
Diaries
?”

He perhaps wonders if Milena even took the trouble to open his notebooks. Might she have stuffed them into some corner of her vast armoire and forgotten them?

Does he decide to fish for a criticism, if only to make her read his heart laid bare?

On January 18, 1923, although he is gravely ill, he writes her an interminable letter of congratulations, verging on flattery. He has just read Milena’s “The Devil at the Hearth.” He cannot find the words to express his admiration: “A marvelous and moving article, in which the dazzling character of your thoughts is striking, touching.”

In opposition to Max, Oskar, Felix, and Ernst, who howled with appreciative laughter at Franz’s reading of “The Metamorphosis” and the first chapters of
The Trial
, women, at least those who fall in love with him, find that his works depict a world where man is only a pitiful shadow under the sun, a world of absurdity where every undertaking is destined to failure, where the innocent accept their guilt, where even the emperor’s messenger cannot deliver his message because “if he were ever to reach the bottom of the stairs, he would be no farther along, as he would still have to cross the courtyards. And after the courtyards, the second palace
surrounding them, and then more stairs and courtyards, and after them a further palace. And so on for centuries and centuries.” Chilled to the bone, Franz’s women no longer know the man they love, can no longer separate fiction from fact.

And yet … immediately following Kafka’s death, Milena published an obituary that one cannot read, and reread, without being deeply moved. An admirable analysis of the man and his work, one of the most sensitive ever written.
¹⁷

O
n May 8, 1922, he sees Milena for the last time. Their encounter stays with him like a sore that won’t heal. “Don’t be unhappy,” he tells himself in the
Diaries
. “Don’t put any pressure on yourself, but don’t be unhappy that you are putting no pressure on yourself, stop sniffing voluptuously at the opportunity for pressure.”

Despite his sermons, he is clearly in distress.

The question that haunts him is whether, since he was happy with Felice in Marienbad, he might not now find happiness with Milena in Prague. After their painful breakup in Gmünd.

He doubts it. Between himself and Milena is not a wall but a grave. Yet sexual desire inflames him, tortures him day and night. “To satisfy it,” he writes, “I would have to overcome my fear, my sense of modesty, and also my sadness.”

Rejected by Milena, banished, expelled from the world and the company of the living, incapable—as he believes—of forming bonds with anyone, he buries himself. He disappears into silence, the darkness of his burrow, the only place where he feels safe. In nine months, with the tracery of his pen, he builds
The Castle
,
¹⁸
his third and final novel, the most personal, the most allegorical, the novel that makes one wonder: Is it the memory of a disillusion that hovers on the heights?

The Young Girl and Death
 

W
hen he asks himself about his own identity, Franz Kafka recognizes that he is a Jew among non-Jews, a nonbeliever among believers, a German among Czechs. True, he writes in German, but never without the feeling that he is appropriating something that doesn’t belong to him. His hind legs, he says, are still stuck to the language of his forefathers.

In May 1917, which is the year he contracts tuberculosis, the year of his final break with Felice, Kafka becomes more involved with Judaism. Three years earlier he had said that he had nothing in common with the
Jews, he barely had anything in common with himself. But in 1917 he is closely following the cultural and political trends affecting Prague’s Jewish intellectuals. He subscribes to the Zionist periodical
Selbstwehr
(Self-defense), which is edited by his friend, the philosopher Felix Weltsch.
¹⁹
As each issue appears, he devours it from start to finish. He has avidly read all three volumes of Heinrich Graetz’s
Popular History of the Jews
.

He starts to learn Hebrew, at first on his own, using the forty-five lessons in the manual by Moses Rath. Then he turns to a series of professors. The first is Georg Mordecai Langer, who has ostentatiously cast off his Western education and now wears the dress and leads the life of a Hasid. The second is Rabbi Friedrich Thieberger, a Zionist philologist with a passion for photography. The third is a young woman originally from Jerusalem, Puah Ben Tovim.

The three teach him the secular language forged by the Lithuanian visionary Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. An immigrant to Palestine, Ben-Yehuda had been battling since
the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 to have Hebrew declared the national language. By contrast, Theodor Herzl thought the language spoken in the Promised Land ought to be German.

Of the three teachers, Franz prefers Puah, because he feels more at ease with a young woman, because Hebrew is her mother tongue, and because she is the first bird of passage to arrive from Palestine. She comes to his house three times a week to conduct classes in his bedroom. Whenever Franz coughs, Frau Kafka comes running anxiously to the door. The sight of her son, his eyes choked with tears, stops her in her tracks. She withdraws, her head drooping. Puah doesn’t know whether to continue the lesson, as her pupil insists, or to interrupt it, as his mother would like.

He works so obstinately at his studies that he is soon attempting to read a novel by Brenner,
Sterility and Failure
, a difficult book and one not particularly to his liking. He can only read a page of it a day. But he takes wholehearted pleasure in Puah’s description of her life in Palestine and her job teaching mathematics in Prague, where she has come to spend the year. The young woman has the gift of leaving a little of her gaiety in her wake, and a little of her serene confidence.

Over the months, he fills five notebooks with grammar exercises and columns of vocabulary, with the German word on the left and the Hebrew on the right.
²⁰
On ten scattered sheets are the starts of stories, some letters in Hebrew, some doodles and sketches. Rescuing a threatened identity and the collective memory of a people now seems important to him.
²¹