Kafka in Love (3 page)

“Today I received your last three letters almost at once. Your goodness is infinite. I shall most likely write you several more times again today. Farewell, then, but only for a few hours.”

The tone grows progressively less ceremonious. The “Dear Fräulein Bauer” of the early letters gives way to “Dear Fräulein Felice,” then to “Dearest Fräulein Felice.” Suddenly, on November 14, he writes, “Dearest, dearest,” and boldly shifts to the familiar
Du
. A few days later he writes, “Dearest, very dearest! Most cherished of my temptations, my beloved, to answer your question: yes,
I fell in love with you at once, that night at Max’s, right from the start, from the first glance. I love you so much it makes me groan.”

“Dearest, very dearest! I dreamed about you again. A mailman was bringing me your two letters, one in each hand, his arms moving in precision, like the jerking of piston rods in a steam engine. I kept pulling page after page from the envelopes but they never emptied. It was a magical dream!” He signs the letter: “Your Franz.”

From the first and over the course of months, he paints the young woman a portrait of himself: faithful, pitiless, ludicrous, funny, and, as he says explicitly, untruthful.

“You take me for much younger than I am, I almost feel like hiding my age. I will be 30 on July 3. I do look like a boy, though.”

In his
Diaries
, he engages in more detailed scrutiny, having looked at himself attentively in the mirror. “My face appeared to me better than I know it to be. True, it was dusk and the light was coming from behind me, so that only the down on the rims of my ears was lit. A pure face, nicely shaped, its contour almost beautiful. The black hair, eyebrows, and eye sockets jump out livingly from the dormant mass of the face. The eyes are not ravaged, there is no trace of that, but neither are they
childlike, rather unbelievably energetic, but perhaps only because they were observing, since I was just then observing myself and trying to frighten myself.”

He tells Felice that he is the thinnest man in the world, but that he is no longer ashamed of his body since he started going to the swimming pool.

And he answers each of her questions: “Would you like to know my timetable? Very regular. From 8 to 2 at the office, lunch until 3 or 3:30, then a nap in bed until 7:30, followed by ten minutes of exercises, naked at the open window, then an hour’s walk, alone or with a friend, then dinner with all of my family. Then at 10:30 (sometimes later) I start to write. This continues, depending on my strength, desire, and luck, until 1, 2, or 3 in the morning.”

He appends to the letter (by way of warning?) a poem by Yüan Tzu-tsai:

He makes no secret of his oddness: “My mode of life? It would seem crazy and unbearable to you. I dress any old way. The same suit does for the office, the street, and my desk at home, summer and winter. I am more hardened to the cold than a tree stump and have not yet worn an overcoat this year, light or heavy, though it is now mid-November. Among pedestrians muffled up in their warm clothes, I look like a lunatic in my little summer hat and summer suit without a vest (I am the inventor of the suit without a vest).”

“Needless to say, I don’t smoke and I don’t drink alcohol, coffee, or tea.” But, perhaps as a reassurance to Felice, he adds that when people around him are drinking black coffee or beer it makes him feel happy. Nothing gives him more pleasure than to see others eating something he would never put in his mouth.

Wanting to give the full picture, he continues: “I eat three meals a day, but nothing between meals, literally nothing. In the morning stewed fruit, biscuits, and milk. At 2:30, out of filial pity, the same as the others, a bit less than the others. Winter evenings at 9:30: yogurt, wholegrain bread, butter, walnuts and hazelnuts, chestnuts, dates, figs, raisins, almonds, pumpkin seeds, bananas, apples, pears, oranges. And I never get my fill of lemonade.
But dearest Felice, please don’t reject me because of this, accept me kindly.”

In his
Diaries
, he lets loose and confesses his hankerings, real and imaginary: “This craving that I almost always have, if ever I feel my stomach empty, to heap up in me images of terrible feats of eating. I especially satisfy this craving in front of pork butchers. If I see a sausage labeled as an old, hard farmhouse sausage, I bite into it in my imagination with my teeth and swallow quickly, regularly, and mechanically. The despair that always follows this act, imaginary though it is, increases my haste. I shove long slabs of ribs into my mouth un-chewed, then bring them out again the other end, pulling them through my stomach and intestines. I empty whole grocery stores, filthy ones, cram myself with herrings, pickles, and all the spicy, gamey, unhealthy foods. Hard candies pour into my mouth like hail from their cast-iron pots.”

He gives a minute description of his daily life, his outings, his idleness, his obsessions, and his weaknesses.

“The bathroom,” he tells Felice, “gives me much pleasure. I was so bored last night that I went to the bathroom to wash my hands three times in succession. And I sometimes spend a whole afternoon with my hair. And with
my brush, made by an English firm, G. B. Kent & Sons. I’m quite taken with it.”
¹

He reproaches himself for being too fond of creature comforts. When the housemaid forgets to bring him hot water in the morning it disturbs him profoundly. He has long been obsessed with his comfort and ensures it by begging, crying, and forgoing more important things.

To his young lady in Berlin, to Max, to his friends, to his parents, Franz complains year after year about the noise around him: “My room is the headquarters of all the commotion in the apartment. I hear the doors slam. My sister Valli shouts through the hallway as though it were a Paris street to ask whether Father’s hat has been brushed. There is loud talking in the rooms on either side, women’s voices to the left, men’s voices to the right. I have the impression that the people are wild beings, blabbering with no sense of meaning, speaking only to disturb the air and watch their words float past. The large room is full of clamor, the sound of a card game and, later, of Father’s normal conversation, conducted without much coherence but in resonant tones.”

The automobiles in the street make a terrible noise. A monstrous ruckus. Franz is forced to stuff his ears with wax. “It’s awful to plug one’s ears during one’s lifetime!”

He provides a quick sketch of his family. He has three sisters: Elli, the oldest, who is married; Valli, the middle one, who has just become engaged; and Ottla, the youngest, who is his favorite. She is pure, true, and honest, with a perfect balance of humility and pride, devotion and independence, shyness and courage.

His mother spends all her time in the store helping her husband. Franz sees little of her and only at night, when she returns exhausted after an endless day of work. “My mother,” says Franz, “is the loving slave of my father, a giant, and my father is the loving tyrant of my mother. The harmony between them is perfect.”

Speaking of his mother, he realizes that he has not always loved her as she deserves, because the German language has prevented him from doing so. “The Jewish mother is not a
Mutter
,” he writes. “To call her
Mutter
makes her foreign and a little comical.
Mutter
is peculiarly German, it contains Christian splendor, but also Christian coldness.”

One night he announces to Felice that his oldest sister has just had her first child. His mother returned at one a.m. with the news that a baby boy had been born. His
father marched through the apartment in his nightshirt throwing open all the doors, waking his son, his daughters, even the maid, and proclaiming the child’s birth as though the child had not simply come into the world but already lived a life full of honor and been buried with great pomp. “I didn’t feel the least affection for this nephew, only envy, a fierce envy,” says Franz, “because I will never have children.”

Was Felice troubled by this warning?

I
n each of his letters, Franz bombards Felice with questions: What time do you arrive at the office? What do you eat for breakfast? What do you see from your office window? What are you wearing? Give me the names of your male and female friends, tell me what the weather is like, what show did you go see? Did you have dinner before or after the theater? Where did you sit? How do you spend your Sundays, what books are you reading? What is this tango that you are dancing, is it an import from Mexico? How can you dictate something to two girls at once? What colleague did you run back to the house with on the thirtieth? Why did you not go for a walk all day?

My head, he says, is as full of questions as a field is of flies.

Insatiably, as though drawing nourishment from her, he extorts the promise to write him every day. “Write me a new letter right away. Answer all my questions exactly, I want answers as sharp and quick as snakes. Good-bye, and remember to keep a little diary. I am obliged to write you, or I would die of sadness.”

He echoes this thought in his
Diaries
: “To have beside one a person who would have this understanding, a wife perhaps, would mean to have support on all sides, to have God.”

By the early part of November, when they have been corresponding barely two months, a lament arises and grows louder and louder: What have I done that you torment me in this way? Today again nothing, neither in the first mail nor the second. How you make me suffer! When just a word from you would make me happy. Just two lines, a greeting, an envelope, a card, I beg you! Since Friday I have sent you 14 or 15 letters. Madness.

When his suffering becomes unbearable, he sends her an urgent telegram, and the handful of words he gets in return restore his calm for a few hours. He uses the telephone only rarely, his heart pounding as he waits for the connection, but he finds it distracting to speak in front of others at the office, he stammers, he can’t hear a thing.

“You’d do better to stop staring at the earpiece and put your ear to it,” said one of his colleagues mockingly. Franz hung up the telephone and fled, as though he’d been caught doing something wrong.

Before long he is begging Felice to put a stop to their exchange of letters, he cannot stand the torment: “If I want to go on living, I cannot continue vainly waiting for news of you. Don’t write me anymore.”

When a letter arrives for him the next day, he is seized with remorse and begs Felice to forgive his harassment: “May I kiss you? On this deplorable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air. You will write again, won’t you?”

He sends her innocent roses, to clear the air of his criminal words.

Then he asks her to write him only once a week, on Saturday, as he cannot bear to receive her daily letters. Three days later, he is begging her repeatedly to write him every day.

They exchange photographs. The first one that Felice receives makes her burst out laughing: Franz is only five years old, dressed as a girl, and glaring at her. A few days later, he sends her a photograph of two naked babies: his sisters. He is hoping that Felice will send him a picture of herself at that age, but in vain. Finally he sends her a
picture of himself in front of his house: a young dandy in a necktie, wearing an open, dark overcoat, a gray suit, and a homburg that casts a shadow over his face. His eyes are hidden. Yet Felice cannot tear her own eyes away from his gaze. The narrow pants, perfectly creased, emphasize the thinness of his legs. His round-toed shoes, which are solid and new, gleam. His hands are crossed over his stomach. Felice puts the portrait in a frame on her night table. It watches over her at night as she falls asleep.

He for his part becomes rapt contemplating photographs of his Felice and constantly asks her to send more: “A face,” he says, “can be grasped only through a thousand photographs.” He also wants pictures of her sisters, her aunt, her niece, and her friends. As soon as they reach him, he fires off questions to her: Where were the photographs taken, by whom, at what time of day, and what is around them, beyond the frame? The unseen surroundings interest him more than what is visible. “The photographs are beautiful and necessary, but they are also a torment. You can never provide me with enough explanations.”

After their first meetings, Franz stops asking her for pictures. He has looked at her too long in the flesh for photographs to be of any use. He no longer wants to look at them: Felice appears flat and commonplace. “I have
gazed,” he explains, “into your real, your human face with its inevitable faults and lost myself in it. How can I emerge and find my way around mere photographs?”

H
e complains about the office, that pit of pain, that tedious paper mill tearing at his flesh. He complains about the asbestos factory his father bought with his son-in-law but wants his son to manage instead of writing inanities. He complains about everything that keeps him from writing. “My life consists and has always consisted of attempts to write, usually unsuccessful. But when I don’t write, I am on the floor and fit only to be swept up.” He adds this statement, the first of many of its kind: “My strength being very limited, I was forced to give up a little bit on every side, so that I would have just enough energy for what strikes me as my main goal. My nights can never be long enough for the business of writing, which, incidentally, is highly voluptuous.”

When he meets Felice in August, he has been lazing around for months and has done nothing but sprawl on his couch. He has even been neglecting his
Diaries
, barely writing an occasional sentence: “My left hand embraced the fingers of my right hand out of pity. I was on bad terms with myself because I had gone too long without writing.”