Kafka in Love (20 page)

Dora, unbeknownst to Franz, adds a few lines to the postcard: “Professor Hajek has decided that Franz’s condition is very serious, we are moving to Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna.”

The day before the departure, a few feet from his bed, a man is dying. The doctors had let the man wander around earlier with pneumonia and a fever of 106. Franz can hear his death rattle. His gasping is so loud that, at
times, Franz must bury his head under his pillows, suffocating himself.

A priest and his helpers recite prayers at the patient’s bedside, hold his hand, speak to him in a comforting voice. When he sinks into a coma, they administer the last rites. They stay with him, whereas the doctors slipped away long ago and are asleep in their beds.

The next day, Franz relates his distress only to Max: “I’ve already cried several times today for no reason. My neighbor died during the night.”

T
o calm his fear, he closes his eyes, allows images to flash past. A landscape lashed by rain. A deserted road. In the distance, a car. Slowly it comes close. The beam of its headlights pierces the ground fog. It is an open-topped car. The chauffeur is wearing a mackintosh and a visored cap. Clutching the steering wheel, he peers at the road through aviator’s glasses. Behind him, lying crosswise, is a young woman, her hair and clothes streaming with water, her arms outspread, one hand gripping the door handle, the other holding the driver’s seat. Her face is indistinct.

The car swerves to avoid a rabbit that has leaped into the headlights. The young woman’s body slumps to the
left. The bridegroom is revealed. Swathed in blankets like a mummy, he is stretched out on the back seat. He is sick and, judging from his appearance, incurable.

It’s a romantic movie!

He opens his eyes.

“The reality,” he says, “is quite different. A scene from a comedy. Dora’s knee is poking into my stomach, my feet are submerged in a pool of water, and my spittoon—it is just too funny!—has emptied onto my neck.”

E
arly in the morning of April 20, they leave Dr. Hajek’s sanatorium. An open-topped car is put at their disposal, nothing else being available.

Stormy weather threatens. They are barely on the road when a series of hailstorms sweeps through, accompanied by thunder and high winds, an incredible din, followed by brief lulls. Lying in the back of the vehicle, Kafka is perhaps thinking about Beethoven or Mahler, both of whom died while a storm raged. Probably one much like this.

During the trip, Dora stands teetering above him. He protests, “Sit down, you’re going to fly away.”

“Don’t try to talk, dear heart, nothing will separate me from you.”

During a respite, she hears Franz whisper to her, “The pneumatic tires hum on the asphalt like the projector at the cinematograph.”

He is fascinated by the cinematograph. In Berlin, he recounted his favorite movies to Dora scene by scene, some of them with their dialogue:
Little Lolotte
, which made him cry,
The Catastrophe at the Dock
, which he found too sad,
The Gallant Guardsman, The Thirsty Gendarme
, and
Alone At Last
, which amused him enormously.
Slaves of Gold
is a film that should be memorized from start to finish, he had said.

And yet in Prague, at a time when he was out every evening, he went to the cinematograph only rarely.

“Why?” Dora asked.

“I identified too strongly with the actors. When someone suffered or died on the screen, I would see myself suffer or die. Certain images haunted me to the point of obsession, my insomnia grew worse.”

He preferred documentaries. He remembers the last program he saw, one Sunday afternoon at the Lido-Bio. The first film,
Shivat Zion
, was on the work of the pioneers in Palestine, the deserts transformed into orchards, the clean new villages, the model schools and day care centers.

The next film caused waves of applause. It showed Jewish athletes, big, square-shouldered men with slender waists and gleaming muscles, exercising in the Karlsbad stadium. These demigods were training for footraces, for the high jump, the pole vault, the pommel horse, the rings, as though their parents and great-grandparents had practiced these sports all their lives. As though the Zionist utopia and the rebuilding of the body were linked.

This documentary made a durable impression on Franz, but without troubling his nights.

He confided to Dora another of his manias: in Prague, going home at night on the tram, he would lean out of the car as far as he could, within an ace of losing his balance, and, on the fly, in snatches, he would try to read every movie poster and examine every photograph. He never tired of it.

Once home again, in the bathroom, he would invent scenes from comic films for his sisters. They would laugh and beg him to continue.

All he needed was a single sentence to imagine a whole long story.

For example?

“The door opened a crack. A revolver appeared at the end of an outstretched arm.”

Another?

“Two children, alone in an apartment, climb into a steamer trunk, when suddenly the lid slams shut.”

“It was Sunday afternoon, and through the glass-paneled door Anna saw the landlady tuck up her skirts.”

“I don’t exactly understand you,” Dora had said. “The posters are something you play with, you inhale, you don’t want to miss one of them. But the movies you avoid, you’re afraid of them?”

He laughed: “You nod your head just the way Hasidic rabbis do!”

H
e enters the Kierling sanatorium on Dora’s arm. Thanks to recommendations from several prominent figures, he has been assigned a lovely room on the third floor with southern exposure, overlooking a garden.

The bad weather continues, low clouds, rain, cold wind, but the air is wonderful, it feels as though one is inhaling health. The food is everything that could be hoped for, and Dora is allowed to prepare meals just as she pleases. Here, as at Professor Hajek’s, the rule is that Dora may spend the whole day with Franz and only has to leave him at night. She is staying at a nearby farm.

Franz Werfel, in gratitude, has sent him his latest book,
Verdi: A Novel of the Opera
,
³⁰
and some beautiful roses. Ottla has sent peonies, his favorite flower. From the farm Dora has brought back a lilac branch whose buds have just opened. Franz is intoxicated by their scent, spring has entered his room.

He is very weak but in good hands. The treatments start to take effect. His larynx is injected once or twice a day with alcohol, an extraordinarily painful procedure. He asks Dora to leave the room while the injections are being performed, refusing to have her present while he is tortured. For several hours afterward he finds relief. He can swallow again.

Two days after their arrival, they look up to see Robert Klopstock barrel into the room.

He had announced his intention to visit Franz at Dr. Hajek’s sanatorium. Franz had managed to dissuade him only with great effort. He had lectured him: “No acts of violence, Robert, no sudden trip to Vienna, you know how afraid I am of violence and yet you always start in!”

From Berlin, from Prague, from Wiener Wald, Franz has sent him health bulletins and the full details of his
treatment. Robert knows exactly what is happening to the patient for whom he has decided to interrupt his medical studies. Here he comes, as tall as a tower—can he possibly have grown taller?—with his fine pink cheeks, his rumpled hair, and his big smile. His smile vanishes as he registers the changes since his last visit to Franz in Prague, which was only … how long ago? A few weeks?

An emaciated face and arms, a body with no thickness under the sheets, and eyes … eyes sunk in their sockets, which pain has filled with darkness.

Robert stutters, “You … whether you like it or not, I’m staying.”

“You’re crazy, completely crazy,” Franz murmurs. “I am not Bismarck. He could have a private physician, I cannot!”

Franz is delighted. The presence of this big young man, his white blouse like a coat of armor, the strength he radiates, reassure him. Robert is a good doctor, it’s agreeable to put oneself in his hands. And he will give Dora a respite, force her to go outside a little. Evenings, he’ll be able to distract her, she worries so much.

He calls their trio “the little family.” Robert and Dora do their utmost to provide tiny pleasures for him: at each meal, they serve him a glass of Tokaji, or a connoisseur’s wine, or a tankard of beer. Also, strawberries and cherries,
whose fragrance their patient inhales for a long moment before eating.

Dora manages to mix an egg or some meat broth into his purées, she doesn’t rest until he has eaten everything. Preserves, fruit juices, and bottles of wine are lined up on his bedside table.

There are a few moments of gaiety.

Franz has asked his dear friend Max to send him books and journals. “The natural state of my eyes,” he writes, “is to be closed, but playing with books and periodicals makes me happy.”

When he was young, he drank in the catalogs of Albert Langen to the last word, then started in again at the beginning, making for inexhaustible reading. Passionate about books, he did not really want to own or read them. He wanted to see them, finger them, convince himself that they existed. He sometimes spent hours in front of the shop window at the Taubeles bookstore or at Taussig & Taussig, he never tired of it.

Max arrives at Kierling on Monday, May 12, after traveling for twenty-four hours and changing trains twice, once in Vienna and again in Klosterneuburg.

That day, the alcohol injections had wearied Franz to the point of fainting. Then his fever surged and he had endless coughing fits. Faced with Max, whose visit he had
looked forward to with such joy, he lacks the strength either to smile or to hold out his hand. A few words, a barely audible murmur: “I have two saws across my throat.”

Max, distraught, makes a sorry sight. Ever since Prague, the trip had unfolded under the sign of death. Dora and Robert push him into the hallway. Themselves inconsolable, they do their best to console him.

A few days later, on May 20, Franz thanks his friend for the book he has sent and begs his forgiveness for having spoiled his visit.

“Farewell, thank you for everything. Warm greetings to Felix and Oskar.”

These are the last words of his last letter to Max.

W
hen, in response to the pantopon, he sinks into slumber, dreams come to torment him, always the same ones. His father, not the aging man he is today but the giant he was in the prime of life, fills the stage. Next to him cowers his son, five or six years old, a packet of bones, frail and narrow, a stutterer in his father’s presence.

The child has been awakened by a nightmare, he cries out. His mother rushes in. He complains, “I’m thirsty.” She brings him a glass of water from the kitchen, kisses him: “Go back to sleep, my son.” She returns to her
husband’s bed. The child is no longer sleepy. Partly to irritate his parents, partly to amuse himself, he starts sniffling again: “I’m still thirsty.” His mother doesn’t come. Stubbornly, he cries all the louder.

He wails. His father, monstrous in a floating white nightshirt, his head touching the ceiling, rises up before him: “Spoiled brat.” He raises his hand.

“Don’t hit me,” cries the child. A hand grabs him by the scruff of the neck, drags him to the
pawlatsche
, the inner balcony, and opens the French window. The child sobs, strikes out with his arms and legs.

“You little snotnose,” the father shouts, “I’ll squash you flat if you keep sniveling.” He shuts the window.

The boy stays out on the balcony alone, terrorized by the courtyard below him as dark as a well. He waits, his teeth chattering, for his mother to rescue him.

She doesn’t come.

Now a little older, nine or ten, he is at the public swimming pool. His father has decided to teach him to swim. They are together in a dark, narrow changing cabin, the colossus fills the space, his torso, arms, and thighs are those of a gladiator. His damp armpits emit a powerful, acrid smell that turns the boy’s stomach.

Naked, the two walk forward in the sun over creaking boards, one with his chest out, his head high, his legs
apart, the other a small teetering stick figure whose eyes are at the level of a heavy cock, thick, tumescent, displaying a sinuous network of raised veins, blue and translucent, through which the boy can see blood pulse. Two enormous testicles, smooth as ivory balls, clap against one thigh and then the other.

Huge mitts hand him a sausage and a giant mug of beer. A thunderous voice tells him to eat it all, to drink it down to the foam.

He emerges from these dreams exhausted, glazed in sweat.

“Will my father dog me to the grave?” he asks Dora.

S
ince arriving at the sanatorium, he has written very few letters, he has neither the freedom nor the strength for it. Late April, a few lighthearted lines to his parents: “My treatment consists of very lovely compresses and inhalations.” With their permission, he allows himself to be a lazy correspondent. He assigns Dora and Robert the task of sending his parents news of him and of talking on the telephone to his beautiful, beloved Ottla, and to Elli, Valli, Max, and his friends.

Robert continually reports on the extraordinary, the inexhaustible love of Dora for Franz. “It’s an unlimited
source of good,” he says. When Ottla thanks him for staying at her brother’s bedside, he exclaims in his poor German: “It is true privilege! When he turn his bright eyes full of life on us, me jolly happy, marvelous, magnificence of God, those two, so good together!”

Ottla is the only one of the three sisters who is able to come to Kierling. She stays just for the day. She brings her brother the red quilt he has asked for. He spends his whole day outside, on the veranda, and the air has grown colder.

Julie and Hermann Kafka write or telephone almost every day. When they announce by express letter that they intend to visit, Franz finds the strength to answer them immediately, so daunting is the prospect.