Kafka in Love (18 page)

He has announced his arrival to Dora via telegram: “Will arrive Berlin Monday 24 September. Can you be at station?”

For how long is he going away? Four or five days? Certainly not much more.

H
e has climbed into the express train that sets off into the night. He savors his mad act of daring. The only comparison he can find is with Napoleon and his campaign into Russia. At the age of forty, he has managed to escape Prague, his family, the office, and the daily grind.

When he arrives in Berlin, to whom does he announce his incredible victory? To Milena, who has sent him a letter from Italy.

“Something wonderful has happened to me,” he writes. “What wonderful things exist in the world! I live almost in the country, in a small villa with a garden. I have never lived in such a beautiful apartment, I am afraid of losing it, it is much too beautiful for me.”

He goes on to say that while at the beach on the Baltic he met a worker from the Jewish Home and that he has followed her to Berlin: “I am well and tenderly looked after, to the limit of possibility here on earth.”

Is it likely that Milena received this news with a quiet heart, this picture of Franz happy in another’s arms?

T
he villa with a garden that he writes Milena about was found by Dora in the residential district of Steglitz, at number 8 on elegant Miquelstrasse.

When he ventures out on a warm evening to stroll along the avenues lined with splendid residences, the smells from the lush, old gardens wash over him with a sweetness and intensity he has experienced nowhere else, neither in Schelesen nor Merano nor Marienbad. He hardly strays beyond the immediate vicinity of the villa. The botanical gardens are a fifteen-minute walk away, the Grünewald forest only a little farther.

A profound peace rules over this patrician suburb, the children he meets look healthy, beggars are scarce and not threatening at all.

But there are rumblings from the center of Berlin. The news is horrible, horrible. Constant uprisings and strikes, factories closing every day, businesses going bankrupt, thousands of the unemployed demonstrating. Inflation spirals upward so dizzyingly that prices no longer rise from day to day but from hour to hour. A newspaper that cost 100,000 marks in August costs 150 million
marks in September, and a loaf of bread costs four million marks. Hunger riots erupt across the country. One night, four bodies are carted off the streets of Berlin. Desperate mobs loot shops and corporate businesses. The whole nation sinks into poverty. The nationalist party blames the Treaty of Versailles and the huge debt that Germany has been saddled with, in order to crush it forever.

Franz’s retirement pension of a thousand marks is no longer enough, despite a very advantageous exchange rate. His monthly payments arrive weeks behind schedule. He is forced, with bowed head, to ask his parents and sisters, Ottla in particular, to lend him small sums. And to send him supplies of sugar, butter (he eats a great deal of it to gain weight), honey, kefir, marmalade, tea, and chocolate from warm and well-stocked Bohemia.

He can’t manage to make ends meet, and because of his illness he has greater needs than others. When they run out of alcohol fuel, Dora warms their dinner over candle stubs.

Max peppers him with questions, but he refuses to talk about Dora. None of his friends can know that they are living together, a young woman’s reputation is at stake. His letters only glancingly allude to Fräulein Diamant.

T
hat fall starts off warm and bright. Franz pushes his walks as far as the botanical garden. He inhales the smell of the linden trees in flower, tours the tropical greenhouses, charts the changing colors of the foliage, and, along the silent walkways, hears the crinkling under his feet of the first dead leaves.

One day as he enters through the gates of the park, he sees a young girl sobbing. He walks up to her. She is one of those little blond flowers with white skin and red cheeks that grow so abundantly in these parts. He asks her, “Why are you crying?”

“I’ve lost my doll.”

“You haven’t lost it,” he says.

“Did you find it?”

“No, no, I didn’t find it. Your doll went off on a trip.”

“How do you know that?”

“She wrote me a letter.”

“Show me.”

“I left it at home. But if you like, I’ll bring it tomorrow, at three o’clock. Right here in front of this bench.”

“What’s your name?”

“Franz. And yours?”

“Malou.”

Once back at his house, he asks himself what Ottla would say to her eldest daughter if by a stroke of bad luck
the girl lost her doll, Lolotte, which she clutches to her heart even when she is sound asleep.

The following day at the appointed time, Malou and Franz meet in front of the bench. He raises his hat in greeting and hands her an envelope, on which he has written her name and stuck a canceled stamp.

Malou shrugs: “I don’t know how to read.”

He reads it for her. The doll ends her letter with the words “Many hugs and kisses, I’ll write you every day.”

Malou thinks for a moment before asking, “Does that mean you’ll bring me another letter tomorrow?”

The next day and every day after, Franz brings her a new letter. As he starts to read, Malou’s heart races. Her doll is going to the theater, to the cinema, to the circus, to the opera, to Vienna, to Paris, she is riding horseback, dancing, singing in an orchestra, it makes your head whirl.

N
ow the park trees raise their black branches into the low, dark sky. A cold wind swirls along the walkways and lifts great sprays of coppery leaves into the air like clouds of birds. A wool hat jammed onto her head, her hands deep in her coat pockets, Malou watches them distractedly. Franz, despite his woolens, his overcoat, and his big scarf, trembles with the cold. He interrupts his reading
often and walks rapidly away, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth.

“Stop coughing,” says Malou. “Read me the rest.”

She holds out a sticky candy she has fished from her pocket. He comes back and finishes the letter in a quieter, more quavering voice.

“You’re reading too fast today. Start over. It’s so wonderful.”

The letters, like the days, grow shorter. Since her marriage, the doll has been so frightfully busy that she no longer finds the time to write. One day she announces that she is going to Tibet, which is so far away and perched so high that it is known as the Roof of the World. She will live in a village lost in the clouds, surrounded by snow and ice, to which no mailman ever climbs. “I’ll no longer be able to write you, dear Malou, but I won’t forget you,” are her last words.

“Is the Roof of the World really very far?” asks Malou.

Before Franz can reply, she twirls her skip rope over her head and nimbly flies off.
²⁷

H
is landlady, a small, skinny woman who nonetheless wears a very tight corset, suddenly takes a dislike to him. On November 15, two months after they moved in, she evicts Franz and Dora, two insolvent foreigners. Their rent has gone up by a factor of ten because of inflation.

They find a pleasant apartment not too far away, at 13 Grünewaldstrasse, at the house of Herr Seifert.
²⁸
But they abandon it for similar reasons on February 1, 1924. An icy wind is blowing on the day they move out to take up lodgings in Berlin-Zehlendorf, at 25 Heidestrasse. The landlady is Frau Busse, the widow of a writer. The rent is horrendously high, a third of a trillion!

Unable to buy anything, they live in extreme deprivation. They never go to the theater, it is far too expensive. They never buy the newspaper, not even the Sunday edition. All for the better, as the news is so catastrophic that they actually avoid walking past the Town Hall, where the daily paper is posted.

Two or three times a week, Franz goes to the Institute for Jewish Studies. It is a haven of peace. An entire building, with nice well-heated lecture rooms, a large library, few students, a good teacher of the Talmud, Herr Guttmann, all for free.

So as to maintain contact with the suffering of the world, he ventures into the city occasionally. He returns with his face coated in dirt, as though from a battle. For the most part he rests, stretched out in the sun on the glass-enclosed veranda, while Dora takes classes in theater and dance at the Jewish Home, also for free.

At night, by candlelight, they play like children. Franz, using his agile hands to project shadows on the wall, creates characters and invents dramatic plays and comedies that make the two laugh until the tears come. Sometimes they amuse themselves by dipping their hands into a basin of water. It is their family bath. Or else Franz, with a tray full of glasses and plates balanced on his palm, glides around the room to train for becoming a waiter, a skill he will need when they open their restaurant in Tel Aviv.

Most often, to keep the young woman he loves under the spell of his charm, he reads to her from favorite authors. From Goethe, he reads particularly
Hermann and Dorothea
. From Kleist,
The Marquise of O
. As though
bewitched, he reads this story to Dora, recites it, six times in a row.

“Why such a favorite?” she asks. “Is it the literary quality of the text?”

“Yes.”

“The unusual story?”

“Yes, also.”

Perhaps it is due even more to the author, with whom he shares so many affinities: the passion for writing, the search for truth, the desire to start a family, which ends in a broken engagement. Kleist also endured illness and repeated failures, and he had the elegance to burn all his private papers, drafts, and unfinished works.

By the lake at Riva, Franz had told Gerti about Pushkin’s tragic end. Today, he narrates Kleist’s to Dora. A death composed like a work of art.

Heinrich von Kleist loves Henriette, the wife of Louis Vogel, with whom she has had a child. And Henriette loves the young poet. Driven by a sublime need for the absolute, nothing in this world can satisfy them, Heinrich and Henriette enter a suicide pact. On the Wannsee in 1811, he is thirty-four, Kleist puts a bullet through Henriette, then turns the pistol on himself.

Franz reads Dora the two letters Henriette wrote on the eve of her death, one to her dear husband, the other
to her closest friend: “Take care of my child.” He recites his own favorite, Kleist’s letter to his beloved sister Ulrike. Dora, her eyes full of tears, leans against the shoulder of the man she calls “my sweet love” and “my gentle Franz.”

H
e writes to Max. To Ottla. He sends each new address to Felix Weltsch so as not to miss a single issue of
Selbstwehr
. His letters are few, stamps are expensive.

And he has started writing again.

A few friends visit him: Max has asked him to look after, distract, reason with, and console his mistress, Emmy Salveter, a former chambermaid, now an actress. Deeply in love, this ravishing young woman suffers enormously from Max’s absence. She rebels against his sense of duty, which forbids him to marry her, and insists that he come to Berlin.

Franz receives her at home, while Dora is away, accompanies her on walks, visits her at her house. Too often, Emmy calls to say that she is coming over, then changes her mind at the last moment or else telephones to say that she will come at two instead of noon. She sets a date for her next visit, then catches a cold and doesn’t come. She is deeply troubled, and the unrest in Berlin
disturbs her so much that she transmits her anxieties to Franz, who must then spend the night fending them off.

One day, two handsome young people with charming manners knock at the apartment door. It is Tile Rössler with a young painter from Berlin. Tile stops dead on the threshold at the sight of Dora in a dressing gown.

Puah Ben Tovim, who came to spend an afternoon with them, was able to mark her pupil’s progress in Hebrew.

On November 25, Ottla arrives. She has left Vera and Helen in the care of her husband for two days. She wants to see how her brother is doing with her own eyes and meet Dora, whom she knows only through letters and the telephone.