Kafka in Love (17 page)

Every so often, in the manner of a recurring dream, he makes plans to emigrate to Palestine. His health would improve in the dry and sunny climate of the Mediterranean, and life would be relatively inexpensive. His favorite fruits, cherries, bananas, and strawberries, would be on the table every day. In Prague their cost is exorbitant. And the cost of living is too often ignored.

In October 1922, encouraged by Else Bergmann, the wife of another Hebrew student, he seriously considers taking the plunge. Is it not reasonable to leave Prague, rife as it is with anti-Semitism? Is it not natural to leave a place where one is the object of such hatred? To stay
despite everything, he says, is to emulate the heroism of the cockroach, which nothing can drive from the bathroom.

The Czech newspaper
Venkov
serves its readers a daily diet of stories about the Jewish people over the centuries. All of them illustrate the great lack of fortitude of the Jews, their cowardice, their greed, their treacherousness. One night in mid-November, Franz watches from his window as mounted police and gendarmes with fixed bayonets disperse a crowd that has been attacking Jewish shops shouting, “Mangy race of Jews!” He is ashamed at having to live under police protection.

When he passes in front of the Jewish town hall and sees the hundreds of Russian and Polish immigrants queuing for visas to America, he wishes he were among those carefree children soon to cross the Atlantic. He knows that, like Moses, he will never enter the Land of Canaan. It is a fantasy, such as a person might have who knows that he will never leave his bed. But does one ever really know? Out of nothing, something whole can come.

Besides, one has to find a reason to hope.

In the meantime, Franz labors at the promised language, the writing of his ancestors.

His father did not hand down to him any religious instruction. Franz did celebrate his bar mitzvah at
the Gypsy Synagogue on June 13, 1896.
²²
The day of Milena’s birth.

In October 1911, at the Café Arco, the most ordinary cafe in Prague, he met Yitzhak Löwy, an actor trying to revive the Yiddish language through his plays and lectures. Kafka became his most ardent admirer and would gladly have kneeled down in the dust to applaud him. He helped Löwy in every way he could, applying on his behalf for subsidies, selling tickets to his performances, and giving two lectures, one of them on Yiddish, the youngest European language, and the other on the Jewish theater.

In the second lecture, he introduces a personal reminiscence. When he was fourteen, he says, on a day when his parents thought him at synagogue, bent over the pages of the Talmud, he went to the theater for the first time to see Meyerbeer’s
Les Huguenots
. He was electrified. Yiddish theater mixes drama, tragedy, song, comedy, dance, everything together, it is life itself, he exclaims!
²³
He can no longer do without it. Even if it means telling lies and committing sins.

His two speeches cost him many nights of insomnia. He doesn’t have the actor’s superb effrontery, which allows him to exhibit himself and stand firm under the gaze of an audience. But no one else is willing to stand up and speak. Löwy, hot-tempered and resentful, has few friends and barely earns a living. His performances are never well attended.

When Hermann Kafka finds the actor visiting Franz in his house, he grows furious. His lips tighten into a line, his head shakes ironically, he reproaches his son for befriending a stranger who has nothing to offer, a vermin who would lead you back to Yiddish, the language of the poor and the backward. Our language, he says, is German, and our culture is German culture. He even forbids his son to invite this flea-ridden specimen to share a meal with them, his presence is an affront, intolerable.

“I don’t care if that Pole does hear me from your room. All your friends are good-for-nothings.”

Even Max Brod, the most brilliant and prominent intellectual in Prague, fails to find favor in Hermann’s eyes. Just yesterday, he had called his son’s inseparable friend a
meschuggenner ritoch
, a Yiddish expression meaning “crazy hothead.” Hermann Kafka is oblivious to his own contradictions. When he is angry, he turns to his mother tongue, the only one that was spoken in his wretched
shtetl. Now that he is a prominent resident of Prague, the owner of a flourishing business, he is an Austrian citizen and nothing else.

All the more reason for Franz to learn Hebrew.

I
n early July 1923, he sets off for Müritz, a beach resort on the Baltic, for a rest. He has asked his eldest sister Elli to accompany him. He no longer feels capable of traveling or living alone, in Müritz or anywhere else.

They stay at the Haus Glickauf Hotel, where his room is right next to the room that Elli shares with her two children, Felix and Gerti. He is happy to be close to the sea. He hasn’t seen it for ten years. He finds it more beautiful, more varied, more alive, fresher. He writes his friends to tell them.

From his balcony, where sparrows have built their nest under the balustrade, he looks out through a belt of pines and birch trees to where children play along the shore. The children are blond, with blue eyes, they are healthy and run all over the place merrily. They live in a two-story house, Haus Huten. It is a vacation camp organized by the Jewish People’s Home in Berlin, the same organization where Felice, his first fiancée, agreed to volunteer
a few years earlier. The memory of Felice no longer torments him, it is so distant. She married a few months after their final separation and now has two sons. Ottla keeps him informed.

For half the day and night, the forest, the sea, and the air around Haus Huten are filled with children’s singing. Elli meets the young women who work as camp counselors, all of whom are volunteers, and Felix and Gerti soon join the camp activities.

In the early afternoon, Franz goes down to the beach and plays with the children. These orphans from Russia and Poland, he writes, so vigorous, so passionate, and whom he speaks to in Hebrew, give him a sense of being on the verge of happiness.

One of the camp counselors, named Tile Rössler, is a lively, engaging adolescent, so thin, so frail, it is hard to believe she is even sixteen. She is also the only one to know who Dr. Kafka is. She worked part time at the Jurovics bookstore in Berlin, and she had put one of his books,
The Stoker
, on display in the shop window. She says that the Berlin critics are full of praise for the book, and that Dr. Kafka occupies an important position in Prague.

One day, late in the afternoon when he is playing with the children from the People’s Home, Tile introduces
herself. He listens to her. She launches on a long narrative, happily answering his questions about the children, the organization of the camp, herself and her life in Berlin, the bookstore. And this man whom everyone admires for his elegance—he even dresses with care to go to the beach—this man addresses her using the informal Du.

Ever since, she has been on the lookout for him. As soon as she sees him sit down on the sand or walk, his blanket folded over his arm, toward his deck chair at the end of the jetty, she races to sit at his feet. And they resume their conversation. One day she says, “You see, I speak every language, only I speak it in Yiddish,” and she is proud to have made him laugh.

She has the idea of offering him a present. But what? She decides to make a clay pot for him in the children’s pottery workshop. When it comes out of the kiln, she paints it. Pleased with the result, she goes to the Haus Glickauf to give it to Dr. Kafka. She has sent word of her visit beforehand.

She waits in the lobby for him to come down from his room. A pianist with a blond mane is playing a Grieg sonata. The concierge is reading the newspaper. An elderly couple at a table near the bar sip glasses of white wine.

Dr. Kafka would later tell her that he had a perfectly clear memory of her on that day: “Leaning a little forward,
a little abstracted, you were listening to the sonata by Grieg, bowing humbly to the music.”

He walks toward her saying, “I, too, have a present for you.”

Tile, flushed with emotion, has trouble stripping the tissue paper from the object he has handed her. As she tears at the wrapping, he says, “We should always take hold of delicate objects delicately.”

A ruby-colored glass cup filled with chocolates trembles in Tile’s hands.

She throws herself into his arms and rests her head on his chest.

“How did you know?”

The adolescent has been eyeing this cup in the pastry shop window, where it sparkled and glowed next to the plum tarts. Dr. Kafka had seen the girl and her friend Sabine with their noses pressed to the glass. As he walked past, he heard Tile say, “I’ll never be able to buy myself such a lovely thing.”

“You’ll smash this cup on your wedding day,” he says. “And I’ll always keep your vase. I won’t give it to anyone.”

Since receiving this extravagant present, Tile has been walking on air, singing the praises of her older friend.

On Friday, July 12, with the enthusiastic agreement of the other members of the home, Tile invites Dr.
Kafka to join them for Sabbath dinner, to be followed by a show.

When he arrives at the oddly shaped house at the end of the afternoon, he enters the wrong door and finds himself in the kitchen, which is flooded with light from the setting sun. Bees circle in the heavy golden air and knock against the windowpanes. Franz’s attention is drawn to the bowed neck of a young woman scaling fish. Seeing her pull the entrails from a salmon, he says, “Such lovely hands to do such bloody work!”
²⁴

The counselor turns, recognizes him. Her face grows red. She has seen him several times on the beach with his family all around him. She curtsies and introduces herself: “Dora Diamant.” She adds, “I know who you are. Tile talks of no one but you, and the home has been buzzing since this morning.”

She asks after his wife and children. He laughs: “My wife? My children?”

Her mistaken assumption and the amusement it provides perhaps cement the attraction they already feel for each other.

After dinner, Dora recites the forty-third chapter of Isaiah: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee.” She comments on the passage. Dr. Kafka, amazed by her knowledge of Hebrew and Judaism, can’t take his eyes off her.

The next day, and the days after that, he visits the home again.

Tile soon realizes that he has eyes only for the Polish girl. At mealtimes, he takes the seat next to her. On the beach, Tile sees them engaged in endless conversations. Since she introduced him to the home, he has shifted his attention to this plump young woman who speaks and reads Hebrew so well. All day the flat, skinny adolescent follows them at a distance. She sees them walk along the flowering dunes or out on the jetty into the lapping sound of the waves.

She surprises them sitting side by side, sheltering from the wind, their heads drawn together as they recite from a Hebrew text, their eyes meeting above the book.

Do they take themselves for a pair of mythical lovers, for Francesca and Paolo da Rimini?

T
oward the end of July, Tile returns to Berlin, from where she writes two letters to her friend. Franz sends
her a long reply on August 3.
²⁵
It is the affectionate, lighthearted letter of an older brother to his younger sister. So that there should be no misunderstanding, he talks to her about Dora, a “marvelous creature.”

The life story of this “marvelous creature” fascinates him, as the life story of the actor Löwy had earlier. Born in Poland, Dora fled her father’s house at the age of eighteen. She ran away from Bedzin and its imposing synagogue, which looms over the town and the castle.
²⁶

Freed from Hasidic law, which imposes so many duties and restrictions on women and affords them so few rights, Dora lives for a year in Breslau. There she starts to read literature and study German, all the while working in a kindergarten. From there she emigrates to Berlin, the City of Light, with its population of 170, 000 Jews, many of whom play important roles in the social and cultural life of the city. The two largest newspaper groups, Ullstein and Mosse, are owned by Jews.

Dora works at several jobs and volunteers at the People’s Home. Brave and determined (the two qualities Kafka admires most), she is wonderfully young (a little more than twenty), intelligent, gentle, devout, pious, and in excellent health. And she takes care of children. Blessings on this meeting!

In the course of their talks, she tries to instill Franz with her strength: “Do what you have always wanted to do, leave Prague and move to Berlin. In the spring, we’ll emigrate to Palestine together. We’ll open a restaurant in Tel Aviv, ‘Spring Hill.’ ”

I
n early August he leaves Müritz and Dora. Arriving in Berlin, he attends a performance of Schiller’s
The Robbers
on August 7, accompanied by Tile and two of her friends. The play makes little impression on him, other than to highlight his own exhaustion. The vacation in Müritz has done nothing to improve his health. He feels at the limit of his strength. He weighs 120 pounds, thinner than he has ever been.

Where better to go and gain weight than to his beloved sister Ottla? She has rented a vacation house in Schelesen, where she is living alone with her daughter, Vera, and her newborn, Helen.

He joins her there in mid-August and stays for more than a month. He realizes that, for the first time, he has forgotten her birthday. He has even forgotten the exact date, is it October 29 or October 30?

“As far as I am concerned,” he says, “you don’t grow any older. I don’t believe in your being thirty-one years old.” He adds, “Be glad you are a woman.”

She is the only person he talks to about Dora and their plans. Ottla encourages him, as she always has, to free himself of his chains.

He is beset by doubts, assailed by forces antagonistic to him. He takes to his bed, feverish once more.

“Rain is leaking into the hovel,” he tells his sister.

S
carcely fattened up, he returns to Prague, winds up his affairs in a day and a half, asks his employer for early retirement. He packs his bags, a horribly complicated business, he would never have seen it through without the help of “Fräulein,” his beloved Marie Werner, the family’s old and faithful governess. Against his father’s advice (another quarrel!), under his mother’s worried gaze, and despite the gloomy forecasts of his brother-in-law Pepa, he gathers the last remnants of his strength and flees to Berlin.