Kafka in Love (4 page)

Then on the night of September 22–23, two days after he sends his first letter to Berlin, the wave sweeps in again and lifts him up. He writes “The Judgment” in a single sitting from ten at night to six in the morning. When he puts his pen down, the sky is just starting to lighten. He is so happy that he takes the time to write down his impressions in his
Diaries
at length: “I advanced parting the waters in front of me. Only in this way can writing be done, only with this continuity, with this complete opening of the body and the soul. Everything can be expressed, even the strangest ideas.”

As he is stretching afterward, the maid, Ruzenka, crosses the entrance hall, her eyes swollen with sleep. He calls on her to witness the moment: “I’ve been writing all night!”

Then, like an athlete taking a victory lap around the stadium, he turns off his lamp and goes hammering on the doors of his sisters.

This story, “The Judgment,” makes tears come to his eyes when, on the following day, he reads it to his friends at Oskar Baum’s house.
²
Until the day of his death, he
continued to believe this story, which he owed to Felice, could “stand,” whereas so much else of what he wrote he ordered to be burnt.

The text is dedicated to Fräulein Felice B., to the young lady he saw one night for barely an hour.

Berlin, Seven Months Later
 

F
rom September 1912 to March 1913, Franz and Felice write letters back and forth without interruption and without major developments. Except for one critical thing: Franz keeps writing at the same feverish pitch. He pushes out “The Metamorphosis” in a period of twenty days (from November 17 to December 7) “like an actual delivery, covered in filth and mucus.” The paternity of this story, which Elias Canetti called one of the major masterpieces of the twentieth century, Franz attributes to Felice.

He writes after nightfall. He waits for his parents, whose apartment he lives in, to finish their noisy card
parties and for the household to fall asleep. He shuts himself in his room, which he describes in his
Diaries
inch by inch as though filming it. A small room, narrow, with a sofa, and a bed covered in a red quilt. His desk is littered with a thousand objects, a shaving mirror, a clothes brush, an open coin purse, a solitary key, a necktie half wrapped around a detachable collar, pencils, an empty matchbox, a paperweight, a ruler, many collar studs, some razor blades, and several tie clips. From the open drawer spill brochures, old newspapers, catalogs, postcards, and half-torn letters.

On his walls he has hung two works of art that he sees whenever he raises his head: a print of
The Plowman
by the painter Hans Thoma, and a cast of a headless maenad, her body draped in flowing robes and brandishing a leg of beef.

When his own legs grow numb, Franz gets up from his desk and stands at the window looking out on the street. His head back, his cheek pressed against the window catch, he watches the river stream by in front of him, the banks where the grass is starting to turn yellow or turn green, the sky starting to change colors, and the cars parading past, drawing him back into the world of men.

Franz is an insatiable reader and lives surrounded by books. We know just how much he valued his library: one
night when he was out, his mother entered his room and took a novel by Oskar Baum that Franz had intended to lend his sister Elli. When Franz found out, he flew into an absolute rage, almost swearing at his mother: “Leave me my books! I have nothing else.”

He reads biographies, memoirs, novels, essays, and poetry collections, rereading the works he particularly admires two or three times or more. He asks Felice what she is reading, deplores her choices, and recommends that she read Flaubert (he dreams of reading
Sentimental Education
³
out loud to an audience in a single sitting, taking as many days and nights as necessary, in French of course), Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, Grillparzer, Kropotkin, Gogol, Kleist, Dickens, Jammes, Berlioz’s autobiography … the list is endless. “We should read only books that bite and sting, a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.”

He writes down an anecdote he can’t bring himself to tell Felice: it is unlawful to think of the Torah in the bathroom, and for that reason you can read profane books there. A certain K. had a great deal of profane knowledge, he had learned everything he knew in the bathroom. No detail is trivial, Franz adds, as long as it is accurate.

On December 11, 1912, he sends Felice
Meditation
, which has just been published. He waits feverishly for her comments, avidly reading the letters he receives from her almost every morning. Nothing, not a word about the book. Days go by. Still nothing. On December 18 he injects a slight nudge: “I am so happy to think that my book is in your possession.” He waits. Still nothing. Felice prattles on about everything except his book. She is not interested in what is best in me, he thinks. Her indifference humiliates him, tortures him. On December 23 he brings the issue into the open: “You have not said anything yet about my book.”

Felice says nothing, she has not had the curiosity to open it, though she reads voraciously and waxes enthusiastic about dozens of books. Franz finds the names of so many writers in her letters that he is jealous and would like to pick a quarrel with them, all of them. One day she praises Schnitzler to the skies, and Franz is furious. He writes her in the middle of the night. His tone is icy: “I don’t like him at all and don’t hold him in respect. He can never drop low enough in the public’s opinion.”

On Sunday, December 29, he explodes: “Why don’t you tell me in two words that you don’t like my little book? It would be understandable that you don’t know what to make of it, and I might still hope that it would
some day appeal to you. A hesitant opinion on your part would seem quite natural to me, but you have said nothing. Twice you announced something, but then said nothing. You don’t like my book as such, but since I wrote it you must like it all the same—in which case a person gets around to reading it.”

He spends that Sunday in misery.

After this humiliating exchange, Franz no longer speaks of his work to Felice, or says very little. Before, he would give her a full daily account, detailed, enthusiastic, and funny. He had hoped for praise, a little admiration. He receives nothing but stinging silence.

He writes her every day but makes no plans to see her. Instead, he voices vague regrets: “You flew into the elevator, the night we met, instead of whispering in my ear despite the presence of Herr Brod: ‘Come with me to Berlin, leave everything and come.’ ” At times he accuses himself of inertia: “Why, fool that I am, did I stay at the office or at home, instead of jumping on the train with my eyes shut, to open them only when I am near you?”

Most likely prompted by Felice, he hints at the beginning of December that he might visit Berlin at Christmastime. However, nothing is less certain. The trip starts to seem even more doubtful. “But,” he pleads, “you too,
Felice, will have relatives visiting who might bar me from Berlin.”

In January there is no longer any question of seeing each other. On February 5 he is evasive: “At Easter, would you have an hour free for me on Sunday or on Monday and, if so, do you think it would be a good idea for me to come?”

Two days later he writes: “Dearest, I don’t want to see your relatives, I am not strong enough for that. So think about it carefully, Felice. Your parents, your father, your brother, and your sister from Dresden will surely be at home, and I can therefore easily imagine that you wouldn’t have the time.”

Do these seem like the words of a lover? Or a thinly disguised attempt to avoid a meeting that he does not look forward to? He confesses: “You are right, Felice, I have often had to force myself to write you in the last few days.”

The reason for this change?

“My American novel.
⁴
The story I am writing takes place entirely in the United States of America. It is my
first somewhat longer work after fifteen years of frustrated effort. It must be completed, and so, with your blessing I plan to spend the brief moments I might otherwise employ writing inaccurate, alarmingly incomplete, imprudent, dangerous letters to you, on this task where everything has grown calm and is headed along the right path. But don’t abandon me, Felice, to my terrible loneliness.”

In choosing between Berlin and New York, between the pleasure of seeing the woman he loves and bringing a character into the world, naming him (“Karl Rossmann”), giving him a life in a bustling city on the other side of the planet (to which he knows he will never go), Franz does not hesitate for a second. Felice has supplied him the strength, the exaltation that he needs. She produced the spark, and the motor has caught and started to run. She performed magnificently the task that he set for her on the night they met. He loves her all the more for it. Or rather, he needs the passion that he feels for her.

A passion without love.

Exhilarated by his writing, he jokes: “Dearest, I beg you with my hands raised in supplication not to be jealous. If the people in my novel notice your jealousy, they will abandon me. And consider a bit that if they leave me, I will be obliged to follow them, even if it means going all the way to hell, where they are at home. No, I
will not sever myself from my novel even when you are here. Surely not.”

A few days later he crows: “Cry, dearest, cry, the time to cry has come! The hero of my little story has just died. It may comfort you to know that he died quite peacefully and reconciled to all.”

Then in March, Franz collapses. He is working too much. The office, the asbestos factory, his reading, his correspondence with Felice, Max, Oskar Baum, Felix Weltsch, Ernst Weiss, and his sisters leave him no peace, his insomnia is worsening, his health is failing. His novel is stalled.

He confesses his crushing doubts to Max. But his old friend has married Elsa, and a married friend is no longer a true friend. Franz misses seeing Max every night, going on trips with him.

On January 12, his second sister, Valli, also marries. He feels more and more alone. A man without a wife is not a human being, the Talmud’s imprecation haunts him.

Felice is his only port in the storm. If he wants to stay attached to her, he has to do more than write, he cannot go on avoiding her. In March the trip to Berlin becomes a necessity.

Franz’s first visit to Berlin, more than seven months after their original meeting, can be told in a few words. A
lightning visit, announced as problematic, which Franz cancels and then reinstates as a possibility: “Still undecided.” And which he then confirms on Friday night by express letter.

On Saturday, March 22, 1913, he leaps into the train with his eyes closed. When he opens them again in Berlin, it is 10:30 at night and Felice is not on the platform. Reeling with fatigue, for as usual he has traveled third class, Franz goes to the Hotel Askanischer Hof. No word of welcome awaits him there. Anxious at the thought of actually seeing the woman he has been writing for seven months, he is unable to sleep.

The next morning at 8:30, he sends her a note: “What has happened, Felice? Here I am in Berlin, but I will have to leave again this afternoon at 4 or 5. The hours are passing, and I hear nothing from you. Please send me an answer back with the boy.” The bicycle messenger returns with the words: “I will telephone you in a quarter of an hour.”

By the time they meet, strained and excited, it is almost eleven o’clock. He gives her a hug and a furtive kiss on the cheek. They walk in the Tiergarten, it is chilly, the trees have hardly opened their buds. Felice has a funeral to attend at noon. She doesn’t want to be late, they run like lunatics, it’s the best moment of their meeting,
they laugh, their movements are unhampered, they hold hands. At the cemetery, they part company. Franz watches the young lady walk off between two strange men as the procession gets under way. He doesn’t consider following her, staying at her side. They have agreed to talk by telephone at three o’clock, and Felice has made a promise: she will accompany Franz to the station. He has lunch, visits his good friend, the surgeon and writer Ernst Weiss, and returns to the hotel well before three. There he waits. From the lobby, he looks out at a cold, persistent rain that will continue falling until dusk. He considers going out to buy a newspaper, the
Berliner Tagenblatt
, but he is afraid to come across a news item that would upset him. He has not yet forgotten the report of a recent trial: a certain Marie Abraham, twenty-three, driven by hunger and poverty, strangled her daughter Barbara, nine months old, with the man’s necktie that she used as a garter. The image of this young mother breaking her baby’s neck haunts him. Though Franz prides himself on never crying, he sobbed over this news brief.