Kafka in Love (8 page)

I
n March, Felice appears intent on mending their relationship again.

“Forget the horrid words I said to you in the park, I was overwrought, nervous, and upset about what had happened to my brother Ferry. You know how much I love him, what’s happening to him is terrible, I’ll tell you when I see you, he had to leave Berlin suddenly. Franz, if you want me, if the love I have for you is enough, I am willing to be your wife. Can you take me as though nothing had happened?”

“Felice, I do take you, with everything that has happened, and I will keep you though I should lose my mind. I love you to the limits of my strength.”

They see each other again at Easter for a quiet engagement party. The gathering of the two families occurs in Berlin, at the Bauers’ house. Once again, their reunion is short and unhappy. The engaged couple are never alone. Franz doesn’t even manage to kiss Felice, who seems not to mind.

She sets the date of their wedding for September.

He is surprised: “Why wait six months? Let’s move the wedding forward.”

She refuses.

The official announcement of their engagement appears in the daily newspapers in Berlin and Prague. Franz, who composed the announcement, jokes: “Those four lines sound to me like a public announcement, to the effect that, on Whitsunday, F.K. will perform a figure-skating exhibition at the music hall!”

All their subsequent attention is given to organizing the reception, planned for June 1.

On May 6, Felice is in Prague. She visits the latest apartment Franz has found, after combing the city for weeks. She doesn’t like it. The couple agree about nothing: neither their choice of furniture nor the life they will lead. Felice insists that Franz eat meat, that he sleep in a room that is adequately heated, that he give more time to the asbestos factory, and that he stop writing at night. The enormous sideboard that she buys frightens Franz. “It is a perfect funeral monument,” he says.

His parents are the ones who eventually find him a reasonable apartment and who pay the landlord the first six months’ rent.

Will they also lay me in my grave? Franz asks himself.

The closer the date of the official engagement comes, the more he suffers from insomnia, headaches, and nervous attacks.

O
n May 27, Julie Kafka and her youngest daughter, Ottla, set off for Berlin ahead of the others. Franz and his father are to arrive three days later.

On Whitsun Monday, an elegant reception is held at the Bauers’ with a multitude of guests, a sumptuous buffet. But the bride-to-be looks tired, suddenly aged, her skin roughened, blemished. Her teeth, in worse condition than before, are filled with gold. Franz is distracted, agitated, downcast, and slips out onto the balcony to be alone. His face ashen, he feels handcuffed, like a criminal surrounded by policemen. He thinks only of fleeing, somewhere, anywhere, escaping from the trap that he has thrown himself into. He seems not to notice Grete at all or the sad eyes that she lifts toward him.

In the following days, he is incapable of writing to Felice. All his letters are for Grete. He demonstrates to her, in the end convincingly, that he neither wants nor is capable of marrying, that he has no aptitude for marriage, that everything in him revolts against the
proposed union. His letter of July 3 is so clear that Grete is terrified.

Imagine her feelings, her embarrassment.

What is she to do now that she has heard this terrible, this magnificent admission? Keep quiet? Warn Felice? Betray her friend? Take her place?

The Trial
 

O
n this Sunday, July 12, 1914, it is so fine a day in Berlin that, on stepping off the train, Franz hires a hackney to take him to the Hotel Askanischer Hof, where he is accustomed to staying. Entering the lobby, he is surprised to find Felice. It is the first time that she has come to meet him.

She is not alone.

Her sister Erna, her friend Grete Bloch, and the surgeon Ernst Weiss are grouped around her.

Is it an ambush? he wonders. Grete must have told calumnies about me to Felice, and together they have set
a trap for me. He examines them. They look embarrassed and avoid his gaze. Grete nervously mops her neck with a handkerchief. Felice maintains an icy expression. She extends a limp hand to him. Is he no longer allowed to kiss her cheek? Only his friend, Ernst Weiss, seems at ease, as though impatient to operate.

They enter a private conference room and shut the door behind them.

Felice sits across from her fiancé. This long-limbed man, quiet and elegant, irritates her. She runs her fingers through her hair, stifles a yawn, squirms in her chair, and tugs on her skirt, which is pinching her at the waist. She has grown heavier. She reproaches herself for not having followed Dr. Müller’s gymnastics regimen for women, which Franz sent her.

She is the first to speak: “It’s time to sort things out, Franz. Since May 28, even before our engagement, you have not written me, not a single word. All your letters went to Grete, whose friendship with me you’ve been trying to wreck. I no longer know where I am in this, or who you are, or who you love, or what game you’re playing. Grete and I have decided to ask very specific questions, and to demand very specific answers. Grete, would you go first?”

Unlike Felice, Grete is emotional. Her face is flushed
and she speaks hesitantly, in a choked voice. Her eyes remain glued to the bit of paper in her hand.

“Dr. Kafka, since our meeting in Prague on November 1, you have written me sixty-seven letters. In your most recent letters, you have gone to great lengths to convince me that you cannot possibly marry. Everything in you rebels against such a union. I deeply regret that I insisted on seeing your engagement as a benefit to you both, and deeply regret encouraging you to proceed down that path. In doing so, I assumed an enormous responsibility, which I never should have taken on. And that is why I sent Felice some of your letters. I underlined in red the passages that alarmed me. I couldn’t stay silent any longer. I no longer dared look Felice in the eye. My complicity in—”

“Fräulein Bloch,” says Ernst Weiss, interrupting, “these letters were addressed to you personally, were they not? Did you ask Dr. Kafka for permission to pass them on to Fräulein Felice Bauer? Did you even warn him that you intended to do it?”

“I warned him. After I sent them.”

“You’d known Fräulein Bauer for a long time when she asked you to plead her case?”

“Five months.”

“Five months? You live in Vienna and Fräulein Bauer in Berlin, so you can hardly know each other very well.
Yet in spite of that, you agreed to undertake a delicate mission for her?”

Grete makes no answer. Dr. Weiss resumes: “Why did you continue to correspond with Dr. Kafka? You spoke of sixty-seven letters, I believe? And you replied to them? Why did you not end your role as mediator earlier?”

“I didn’t, I hoped, Dr. Kafka …”

She doesn’t complete the sentence. She guiltily remembers sending Dr. Kafka two of Felice’s letters to her and trembles at the prospect of exposure. What would her friend do if she found out? It had been easy enough to predict the effect of those two letters on Dr. Kafka. In them, Felice confessed that secretly—but the secret had now been betrayed—she harbored grave doubts about her feelings toward Franz.

Grete says nothing. All eyes turn toward Dr. Kafka. What will he say in response? He mumbles a few barely comprehensible words: “Nothing. True.”

Felice upbraids her fiancé: “Oh no, you’re not going to sit there and say nothing. That would be too easy!”

She pulls from her purse the incriminating evidence: a wad of letters with passage after passage underlined in red.

“You completely stopped writing me, your fiancée. I became just a pretext for writing to another woman, a
woman you seduced shamefully, in every way possible, asking ten thousand questions, about her, her brother, her cat, her mother, her office, her girlfriends, offering ten thousand compliments and pieces of advice. Was it to ask her about me that you wrote in this letter [she reads in a heavily ironic tone]: ‘Dear Fräulein Grete, how do you look after your teeth? Do you brush them after each meal?’ In this one you call her ‘Child of Spring,’ you tell her your dreams, you imagine her reclining on a checked bedspread.”

She rummages among the papers in front of her. She exclaims, “You were curious about the dress Grete planned to wear at my engagement but showed no interest at all in mine. ‘Your dress, dear Fräulein Grete, will be viewed with the most, well, the most affectionate eyes.’ You had the nerve to write her that. And this, which is even worse: ‘You cannot be fully aware of what you mean to me. I have been actually, visibly languishing for you. Once we are married, you will come and live with us from the very beginning. You shall hold my hand, and I, in order to thank you, must be allowed to hold yours.’ And what am I to do while you hold her hand so that you can endure my presence? Am I to watch you lust after another woman? Or am I just to go to the devil?”

How to get out of this room? Franz asks himself, his face ashen. How to get away from this noise, this face distorted by hatred?

He remembers the prostitute he often visits, a big girl in outmoded clothes with fanciful adornments that give her an air of luxury. One night as they were getting dressed, he asked her about her work. He remembers her voice, her Austrian accent. She said that when a client was old, or brutal, or smelly, while he grunted at her ear, his heavy, sweating body glued to hers, she was always able to leave her sagging cot and the man fucking her and the miserable shack where she lived. All she had to do was to imagine a scene, always the same scene, Franz didn’t ask what it was, and she would leave her body at its business and sail far away to a place that was always the same, and always magical.

Dissociating oneself. Will I be able to do it too? Did I manage to get away for a few moments from the torrent of reproaches that Felice has been heaping on me? He closes his eyes so as not to see the hellish gleam of gold that glints in her mouth. He hears Felice hammer on but in a muffled voice, as though a heavy curtain had fallen between them: “…  her photograph, several photographs, not enough for you … ‘the most charming, the
most lovely thing I’ve ever received! And your portrait, contemplate’ … from morning to night, and you …”

Think about Gerti, he tells himself, about her smile in the canoe. About her ribbons, her childish lips, her long lashes. About our walks.

Words float like clouds, or rather, it is he who floats, far away, out of reach.

“…  You tyrannized me, you tormented me with your doubts, your neurasthenia, you tried to make me adopt your asceticism. And what about your unbelievable behavior before our engagement? How could you let your parents hire a detective to investigate my family’s financial situation, their moral standing, and even mine? How can I ever forgive you this despicable lack of trust?”

Her resentment, which has long smoldered, flares out. Speaking energetically, her back straight, she spares her fiancé no details, reminding him of the many daily torments, the tears she has been shedding for months. Before the three dumbstruck judges, she even tosses into the ring the news of her wayward fiancé’s transgressions.

He looks at Felice, her dull hair, her stern gaze. What did she say?

“Your affair … a child … Riva.”

“It’s time to bring this to a close,” says Grete. “You must break off your engagement.”

Ernst Weiss, delighted, speaks volubly to this purpose. Erna timidly proposes that a happier outcome might be possible.

Each has spoken. The eyes of the four judges turn toward Dr. Kafka, motionless under the barrage. Around him is a wall of silence. He has folded his arms across his chest. Is he containing the beating of his heart? Petrified, he seems incapable of thinking, looking, speaking, taking part in what is going on around him, which is nothing less than a punishment in the public square.

No one dares break the silence. They are all waiting for him to come back to life.

He rises, and the others follow suit. To everyone’s surprise, he walks toward Grete, who has sprung him from his engagement.

“You must hate me,” she says.

“You’re wrong, and even if the whole world hated you, I would not. You assumed the role of judge, it was horrible for you, for me, for everyone. In reality, I sat in your position, and I sit there permanently. The reproaches that you and Felice heaped on me are ones I have considered a hundred times. But you should not have exhibited my letters. Never would I have exposed yours to others.”

“Please give them back. I should get rid of them, I should burn them all.”

“No. I am keeping them, but don’t worry in the slightest.”

He takes his leave of Felice: “You have every right to be angry with me. But why did you subject me to this trial? This public flogging? This humiliation? I felt like a dog!”

That evening, he invites the kind and compassionate Erna to dine with him at the Belvedere, a restaurant along the river.

“I would like to give you some consolation,” she says.