Kafka in Love (21 page)
Authors: Jacqueline Raoul-Duval
The letter is a long and good one. He first suggests the joy they would find in being quietly together for a few days in a beautiful place, a glass of beer in hand, as in the days when his father would bring him to the public swimming school. Then he allows that, for the moment, he is not worth seeing: “I’m not pretty to look at.” But he is starting to get stronger thanks to Dora and Robert, whose help it would be impossible to imagine from a distance. But, he goes on, “The shock of having tuberculosis of the larynx has weakened me more than it should have done, and in addition to my usual complaints I am having
stomach upsets. And I cannot speak above a whisper. Too many reasons argue against your coming.”
In closing he reassures them: “The professor has noticed a big improvement, the signs are all good. Robert never leaves me for a moment, he puts all his strength into thinking about me instead of his exams.”
What if the warning is not enough? And what if his mother decides to make the trip alone, as she has hinted that she might? She would collapse at the sight of her son, it would be terrible for both of them.
Robert entreats Julie Kafka: “Frau, dear frau, you possibly provoke fatal agitation in your son.”
I
s there a letter from Bedzin?”
Franz asks the same question every morning. The silence, growing longer daily, makes him anxious. Dora tries to reason with him: “You don’t know my father. He is a completely inflexible man, he has never compromised with the Law. You introduced yourself to him not as a believer but as a penitent. And don’t forget that I fled his roof. He no longer recognizes me as his daughter.”
“But you are his daughter. And I have expressed my strong desire to have ancestors, a wife, descendants.”
“The Baal Shem Tov has taught me that every human being is in direct contact with God. An evening doesn’t pass, a morning, when I don’t recite the prayer that you now know as well as I do: ‘Praise unto Thee, Eternal One, our God and God of the universe, may all flow from your sacred hand.’ ”
T
he answer from Bedzin arrives. Herr Herschel Diamant, as on every occasion when he must make a decision, has consulted the rabbi he most respects, Mordechai Alter. The saintly man read Dr. Kafka’s letter and pronounced a single word: “No.”
Franz, his face a mask, hands the letter to Dora: “Another shipwreck. My final defeat.”
“Dear Franz, I am already your wife, body and soul. We cannot be joined more closely than we already are. I have no need of my father’s blessing. You are my husband before God.”
D
ora has said nothing about the pressure being exerted on her by Dr. Hoffmann, his wife, and the hospital personnel. Every day they harass her: “You must get
married. You must conform to basic rules of morality, of propriety. We cannot tolerate your disgraceful behavior in our sanatorium!”
One morning when Franz is terribly low, Dr. Hoffmann calls Dora into his office. He introduces her to a rabbi he has summoned from Vienna, shows her the marriage forms all filled out, hands her a prayer shawl. Dora is outraged. She leaves the office in tears, slamming the door in their faces.
She knows that Franz wants to marry her so that his parents, his father especially, will accept her as a daughter-in-law.
31
And support her.
“They already love me,” she says to Robert, “I’m sure of it, you’ve heard them on the telephone, they don’t know how to thank me, how to show their gratitude.”
O
n May 26, 1924, he writes his last letter. To his most beloved parents. Six lines. He corrects a misunderstanding: “My desire to drink water in large glasses and eat fruits is no less than my desire for beer. But for the moment I am making only slow progress.”
Up to his death, he believed that he made only slow progress in everything he undertook: the piano, the violin, Italian, English, Hebrew, German studies, anti-Zionism, Zionism, carpentry, gardening, literature, his attempts to marry. His teacher, Herr Beck, had been right to warn his father: “Leave him in fifth grade, too much hurry can be very costly. This is a slow child.”
He tells himself, I have finished none of my novels, I have abandoned several of my stories in the middle of a word.
I am leaving behind only fragments.
I have brought none of my projects to fruition.
He thinks of “Billig,” the collection of travel guides that Max and he had imagined one day when they were wandering around Montmartre with empty pockets, guidebooks that would have replaced the tiresome Baedekers and given tourists the information they really needed: the addresses of inexpensive bistros, hotels, pastry shops, clothing stores, and museums. Their first titles: “Billig Paris” (Paris on the Cheap) and “Billig Switzerland.”
He remembers that he asked Max to jettison “Richard and Samuel,” the novel they had started writing together, and which Max had such high hopes for.
I finish nothing, not even my sentences, which …
He is almost voiceless. The doctors have recommended that he temporarily stop speaking. He communicates with Dora and Robert through written notes. At first he makes a game of it, writes only part of what he wants to say, they have to guess the rest. He nods if they are right, signals with his hand if they are wrong.
He takes an interest in the flowers that fill his room.
“Look at the lilac, fresher than morning,” he writes to Robert.
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“Show me the columbine. It is too brightly colored to be with the others.”
“The hawthorn is too hidden, too much in the shadows.”
“The lilac is wonderful, isn’t it? It is dying, but it still drinks, it still gets drunk.”
“Do you have a moment? Then please, give a little water to the peonies, they are so fragile.”
“A bird has gotten into the room. That’s why people like dragonflies.”
Several other scraps of paper refer to food and drink.
“Ask if there is some good mineral water, just out of curiosity.”
“A dying man doesn’t drink.”
“Why didn’t I try the beer at the hospital? Lemonade … everything was so plentiful.”
When he feels well, he remembers his vacations in Italy, Riva, and the Baltic. To the brief message he often adds a drawing or a map.
Others are about his parents, or about Dora and Robert.
“My father is pleased to receive an express letter, but it angers him too.”
“If a man marked for death can stay alive from happiness, then I will stay alive.”
“Put your hand on my forehead to give me courage.”
“There are always possibilities waiting to unfold.”
“Max’s birthday is on May 27, don’t forget.”
“How long can I stand for you to stand me?”
“Where is the eternal spring? I’ve thought of every possible miracle, but the illusion didn’t last.”
His last missive, written as the doctor left his room: “That’s how help always leaves, without giving any help.”
T
he pain in his throat is unbearable. The alcohol injections are no longer having an effect. Only the morphine and the pantopon offer relief, but for shorter and shorter periods. Robert refuses to increase the dosage for fear that Franz’s heart will give out.
T
oday he has stopped taking food and drink. He prefers to die of hunger and thirst, a thirst that drives him crazy, rather than swallow a mouthful of water that is not enough to satisfy him and inflicts a torture worse than thirst.
Dora constantly wets his lips, gives him the scent of his favorite fruits to inhale: strawberries, a slice of pineapple. She repeats under her breath like a litany: “My love,” “My sweet,” “Dear heart.”
S
he has gone up to Robert’s room.
“How can you rest when he is dying of hunger, when he’s been dying of thirst for the last two days?”
She hammers at his chest with her fists: “Do something, please, please, don’t abandon him, you’re a doctor, do something …”
She collapses onto Robert’s shoulder, her nerves relax, she sobs quietly, then more and more violently, as
though venting waves of indignation, of incomprehension: “Where is the God of justice? Where is the God of compassion?”
Too moved to speak—and what would he say?—Robert wraps his arms around her, strokes her hair until, exhausted, she grows quiet. He hands her a glass of water in which he has dissolved a sleeping draft: “Rest here for a while. I’ll go downstairs and be with him.”
T
he morphine notwithstanding, Franz has eaten nothing for three days. He has drunk a little water. At this point he receives the proofs for
A Hunger Artist
, a collection that includes the title story and three others, “First Sorrow,” “A Little Woman,” and “Josephine the Singer.”
He has been expecting the proofs impatiently: “They waited until now to send me the material!”
He immediately starts reading the texts, pencil in hand. He works his way through them intently, seemingly not unhappy with his writing. He finishes one set of proofs. He starts in on the second. Robert watches him out of the corner of his eye, while pretending to read a medical journal. He sees the pencil and the proofs fall to the ground. He goes to pick them up, stops.
Kafka is crying.
He is in no condition to go on correcting. He is in no condition to read the story, written two years earlier: a young man, locked in a cage, fasts before a large and enthusiastic crowd, which grows sparser with the passing days. An artist, he is obliged to fast, he can do nothing else, he fasts for forty days straight and dies to general indifference. A janitor finally sweeps the cage clean of the vermin’s body mixed with dirty straw. Its place is taken by a splendid young panther, fed at regular intervals. Spectators now crowd around the cage, unwilling to move on.
19
After working as librarian at Prague University, Weltsch emigrated to Palestine, where he became a librarian at Jerusalem University. He died in that city in 1964.
20
Puah Ben Tovim donated the Hebrew notebook Kafka left her to the National Library of Israel.
21
Neither his notebooks nor his letters in Hebrew have been published. Following his custom, Franz started his notebooks at both ends, with the two texts meeting in the middle (he often did the same in writing his
Diaries
).
22
The photograph of Franz taken on that day, an original silver negative (45 by 36 mm), was sold at auction in Paris on November 18, 2010, for 15,000 euros.
23
American musical comedy apparently grew out of the Yiddish theater.
24
In
The Castle
, when K. meets Frieda, who has come to feed the animals, he says to her, “With such delicate hands?” and he asks himself “if it is just flattery or if he has been smitten by hands that are, after all, perfectly ordinary.”
25
When Tile Rössler emigrated to Palestine, where she became a choreographer, she took this letter with her, as well as the brief note that accompanied the box of candies and the ruby cup that Kafka had given her.
26
When the Germans overran Bedzin in September 1939, they set fire to the synagogue, where hundreds of families had taken shelter. The building was reduced to ashes, and there were no survivors. A few blackened stones from the synagogue serve as a memorial to this massacre.
27
Kafka does not mention this meeting in any of his texts, nor the twenty or so letters that he wrote to console the young girl. He had often wanted to write a fairy tale, particularly in Riva. Did he feel, faced with this child, a moral obligation to distract her from her grief, knowing that he could? A fairy tale, after all, is not judged by the same criteria as a literary text. The story of the doll is told by Dora in the
Diary
that she wrote in London in 1951.
28
Of the three residences, it is the only one that survives. A plaque between the two windows on the ground floor commemorates the fact that Kafka lived there for three months.
29
Dr. Robert Klopstock emigrated to the United States, where he became a distinguished professor of medicine, a lung specialist. He died in New York City in 1972.
30
The dedication reads: “To Franz Kafka, venerated poet and friend, with all my wishes for a prompt recovery, Werfel.”
31
Thanks to Max Brod, Dora received Kafka’s German-language royalties as though she were his wife.
32
Robert kept Kafka’s “conversation slips.” The ones addressed to him use the formal mode of address. Only a portion of them have been published.