Kafka in Love (9 page)

“I am not unhappy, or rather, I am unhappy to be as I am, about which I am inconsolable.”

“Why did you not defend yourself in front of the others?”

“I had nothing decisive to say.”

He hums a tune from
Carmen
, “a closed mouth, no fly can enter.”

“And it’s possible,” he continues, “that if I had had anything decisive to say, I’d have kept my silence. As an act of defiance.”

“Why?”

“All was lost. I could see Felice’s unhappiness. She isn’t to blame. For two years, she has suffered on my account as no criminal should ever have to suffer. She couldn’t understand that for me, the only escape from hell is through literature. But let’s leave all that.”

He orders wine and, for himself, a slice of roast beef, thick and cooked rare. Erna voices her surprise: “I thought you were a vegetarian. Felice has so often complained of it!”

“She insisted that I eat meat. Despite all the pressure that she brought to bear, I never did give in. I’ve always made a point of evading power, all forms of power. At my parents’ table, I don’t eat as they do, I eat in rebellion against them! And yet tonight, with you, I am becoming a carnivore again. And I am drinking wine. Strange as it seems, setbacks actually make me stronger.”

“What did you do this afternoon, after …?”

“After the trial at the hotel? I went to the Stralauer Ufer swimming pool. I saw men there with powerful bodies, running madly. I swam for a long time. I lay on the deck in the sun and felt the ebb and flow of tiredness in my joints.”

Touched, Erna smiles. “Are you leaving tomorrow night?”

“Yes. Would you like me to pass through Berlin again on my way back from Lübeck? I’d so like to see you again! We could go to Potsdam together. In the meantime, would you give me permission to write you?”

The next morning he sends a letter of farewell by messenger to Carl and Anna Bauer, Felice’s parents. That
evening, Erna accompanies Franz to the train station. With a troubling expression, she offers him her hand, says she believes in him and still has confidence in him. He is gladdened by her words.

“I’ll write you from Lübeck,” he promises.

He would wait two weeks before making a brief, elliptical allusion in his
Diaries
to what he always referred to afterward as the “Askanischer Hof Trial.”

Two weeks during which he would ruminate the humiliation he suffered on that day. It was as if the shame of it would outlive him.

Humiliation. The theme of the novel that he starts to write.

That Night, or the Marienbad Enigma
 

H
e spends two weeks on the beach in Marielyst, Denmark, barefoot, in the company of Ernst Weiss and his mistress Rahel Sansara, after meeting the couple by chance in Lübeck. The bickering of the two lovers sometimes annoys him. The hotel is only adequate. Meals don’t extend to fruits or vegetables, so he eats only meat, it’s horrible, he feels sick. But the beach is almost deserted, the days are sun-filled, the three of them go swimming every day.

There is a photograph of Franz sitting cross-legged on the sand. Next to the bearlike Ernst Weiss, he appears an
adolescent—sullen, distracted, aimless. From morning to night he mulls over the reproaches flung at him by Felice. The humiliation she inflicted on him in public still burns, as though he had rolled in nettles. He is at times relieved to have escaped marriage, at times dispirited at having lost his fiancée. He feels as hollow, he says, as a seashell about to be crushed under his big toe.

On his return trip he stops in Berlin. According to plan, he sees Erna, who proves as amiable as ever.
⁷
They visit Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, linger in Voltaire’s bedroom, and generally get along so well that they decide to travel together at Christmas.

On Sunday, July 26, 1914, Franz arrives back in Prague, where the mobilization of the military is under way. Disappointed at being turned down for military service—a stint in the army would have freed him from the office, from Prague, from his listlessness—Franz pays little attention to the declarations of war, the troop movements, and the mad bloodthirst intensifying in Europe, as the floodgates of evil prepare to open.

On August 2, learning of Austria’s entry into the war, he spends the afternoon at the swimming pool.

He looks on disparagingly at military parades, “among the most repulsive accompaniments to the hostilities.” A cold, often cynical observer, he lambasts “the stupidity of the soldiers, the criminal blindness of the crowd.”

His brother-in-law, by contrast, is called up to serve his country. Franz’s sister Elli decides to move back in with her parents, along with her two children, Felix and Gerti. Franz turns over his room in his parents’ house to his sister and moves into her old apartment.

For the first time in his life, he has a place to himself, a quiet three-bedroom. His routine is as inflexible as ever: at the office until 2:30 p.m., lunch at his parents’ house, then home to read the newspaper and the day’s mail, followed by a long siesta until 9:00 p.m. He then walks to his parents’ for a family dinner and at 10 p.m. rides the tram home. Chained to his desk, he then works on his new novel until he drops from exhaustion. He glimpses Max for a few minutes on his way home from work but no one else. His novel progresses so well that he asks for a week’s vacation in October, followed by a second week. He works until five in the morning, sometimes even until 7:30. It is his way of fighting. Absorbed in the pleasure of writing, he is metamorphosed. In the afternoon he indulges in long solitary walks along the paths of Chotek
Park, the most lovely spot in Prague, with its birds, its palace and arcades, its old trees that cling to their last year’s leaves, its half-light. He wolfs down a story by Strindberg,
Entzweit
, a gem.
⁸

Before long, he is reading Max the first chapter of
The Trial
, and he sends an inventory of the texts he has been working on: “Memories of the Kalda Railway,” “The Village Schoolmaster,” “The Substitute.” “Here I am,” he says, “with five or six stories lined up before me like horses in front of a circus ringmaster.” He finishes only “In the Penal Colony” and the last chapter of
Amerika
: “The Oklahoma Theater.”

N
o news of Felice since the “Askanischer Hof Trial.”

He doesn’t seek her out. In late October, he receives a letter from her, another letter of regret: regret at having been hostile, nervous, and at the end of her strength.

“Can you explain to me,” she writes, “what your position was? What it is today?”

The balance of power has shifted. Now, it is Felice who is begging Franz to write.

He spends several evenings answering her. Reading the many pages he produced, one senses a change, hears a certain weariness, as though Franz were a teacher patiently addressing a student whom a fly has distracted.

“For me, nothing has changed in the last three months, absolutely nothing, either for good or ill, you are still the greatest friend to my work and its greatest enemy.”

He explains that there are two beings at war within him: one is more or less congruent with the man that Felice would like to marry, and this man loves her beyond all measure; the other fights against her tooth and nail because of the hatred and fear she feels toward his work and his way of life. And nothing about either one of these men can be changed without destroying both.

He adds: “If I said nothing at the Askanischer Hof, it’s because I couldn’t shake from my mind your aversion to the way I organize my life.”

And he has a duty to protect his work, which alone gives him the moral right to live.

“Our letters never benefited us much,” he writes. “Even the most beautiful contained a hidden worm; I’ll
write you infrequently, we must not start torturing each other again.”

Fewer than thirty letters and postcards are exchanged in 1915. But there is again talk of a meeting, again talk of getting married. On January 23 and 24, they rendezvous at a halfway point, in Bodenbach. Felice had gone to the trouble of getting herself a passport. She was forced to make a long detour and spend a sleepless night on the train.

Now they are face to face. She wears a jacket that he finds very handsome. Each of them notices that the other has not changed. In the hours they spend together, they pick up their discussion where they left off before the breakup. Neither will budge. Felice still insists on a comfortable apartment, one to which she can bring her personal taste (he trembles at the idea), ample meals (it could be worse), with bedtime at 11:00 p.m. (out of the question) and a heated bedroom (he is already suffocating). To demonstrate that reason is on her side, she adjusts Franz’s watch to the correct time: “Setting a watch an hour and a half ahead makes no sense,” she says. “It’s absurd.”

She asks him not a single question about his work. Nothing. Not a word. And he relents not a bit in his demands. All day they talk at cross-purposes. That night,
each retires to bed alone. They occupy adjoining rooms, with a key on either side of the door. At a moment when Franz is experiencing nothing but boredom and emptiness, Felice cries out: “How happy we are together here!”

Not knowing what to do to occupy the hours they must still spend together, Franz reads her the first chapters of
The Trial
. She listens and says nothing, lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. She asks him blandly if she can take the manuscript home to transcribe. She had hoped for something more than this endless reading aloud.

They part.

We have not spent one good moment together, not one minute of total freedom, he tells himself on the train that carries him home. Each of them loves the other just as he or she is, but neither believes, given the other’s nature, that they could ever live together.

On May 24, four months later, there is a second meeting in Bohemian Switzerland. It is Whitsuntide, Felice arrives in the company of Grete Bloch (is this not odd?) and her sister Erna, who has recently married. Franz (wanting to leave a record?) sends Ottla a postcard with his signature and those of the three women accompanying him.

The following month, in June, they meet again, this time—at Franz’s behest—alone. Little has survived of
these two days in Carlsbad: Felice sings several songs for Franz, her voice remarkably true. He in turn hums “À Batignolles,” his favorite French song. Once more, Paris casts its spell on him.

In 1916 the rhythm of their correspondence picks up. He writes to Felice several times a week, almost always on a postcard. Letters, which have to be censored by the military authorities, would take weeks to arrive. With the war on, Franz has hardly a moment to himself. “Even more responsibilities, more worries, more insomnia, more headaches (brief dagger thrusts above and to the right of my eye),” that is the tenor of his life now. The management of the wretched asbestos factory has fallen to his lot, as the brother-in-law who ran it has been drafted. At the office, for lack of personnel, his hours have increased. He now works eight hours a day. And to crown it all, his father makes him help out in the store, since most of the employees are at the front. He works hard from morning till night. He no longer has a second to himself, or the strength to write. He is desperate, a rat in a cage.

In April, tired of reading letters that don’t lead to anything, Felice asks to see him. Cautious, Franz warns, “Think back to our earlier meetings, and you’ll stop wanting another.”

He announces his intention of spending the summer vacation in Marienbad, an incredibly beautiful place with large and handsome forests on all sides. He often goes there for business, only last month he was there again. Felice proposes it as a meeting place.

“I am in extraordinary agreement,” he answers.

On the evening of July 1, he has the great pleasure of closing his files, dictating a few final memoranda, saying good-bye to one and all, and leaving his office in impeccable good order.

In Marienbad, Felice is waiting for him at the station. His room at the Hotel Neptun, though, is hideous and looks onto a courtyard. Things are starting off badly. The first night is one of distress. The next day, both are determined to make their stay a success, and they move into a palace, the Hotel Schloss Balmoral. There, Franz is given a large and lovely room. But their quarrels ruin everything. To escape the cul-de-sac they are in, they walk a great deal, at times under the pouring rain, at times under clearing skies. He amuses himself by reading the Bible.

He tries to restrict his conversations with Felice to one subject that excites him beyond measure: the Jewish People’s Home in Berlin, founded in May by Siegfried Lehmann, Max Brod, and Martin Buber. He urges Felice so insistently to become a teacher there that she agrees
to consider the possibility. Franz is elated and immediately asks Max to send her a prospectus. The organization is designed to promote greater contact between Eastern and Western Jews, and to provide an education to the orphaned children pouring into Berlin from Russia and Poland.

Franz encourages Felice: “There is more honey to be drawn from this work than from all the flowers in the forests of Marienbad.”