Kafka in Love (22 page)

The Last Day: June 3, 1924
 

A
noise? A silence? Something must have awakened her. Leaning toward him, she listens to him breathe. Are his breaths too short? Irregular? She is afraid to turn on the light, he sleeps so shallowly. He went to sleep around midnight, relaxed, calm. Despite the pressure from Robert—“Go get some sleep, you need it, you’ll be exhausted”—she has once again spent the night in his room. Chained to the bedside of a skeleton. The hands resting on the red quilt are no more than talons, and the bones show through the skin of the mummy’s face.

She is afraid of dozing off. She goes out on the veranda, whose door is always slightly ajar. The night is warm. Scents rise from the surrounding gardens. A breath of air occasionally comes to her from the fields. She has looked out at this swath of countryside so many times that she can almost see it in the darkness, the cluster of tamaracks here, the houses and the steeple there, the sandy track. Her senses sharpened, she goes back inside to sit at the head of the bed.

Toward four a.m., a shrill whistle pierces her. She leaps to the telephone. Robert comes running. He immediately awakens the doctor on duty.

Two years before, Kafka had written in his
Diaries:
“There is without question something agreeable in being able to write calmly: Suffocation is a thing of inconceivable horror.”

The inconceivable horror, suffocation, is happening. Air is no longer entering his lungs, despite the pneumothorax. Stretched rigid on the bed, from which he has violently thrown back the covers, his mouth wide open, no cry emerging from it, no sound, his eyes wild, bulging, Kafka begs for a breath of air, his emaciated arms extended toward the doctor. Dora, her hands pressed to her mouth, moans as though from stomach cramps. She steps forward, falls at the foot of the bed, faints.

A
little before noon, Robert asks her to post an express letter to Franz’s parents. She limply refuses: “I don’t want to leave him.”

Robert insists. Tired of arguing, tired of hoping for a miracle, she obeys. A relief. She can’t bear to be a helpless witness to this martyrdom, she can’t bear to see this horribly emaciated body. The only part of him still living is his eyes. Eyes that implore her to put an end to his suffering.

Robert Klopstock is the only witness to this inconceivable horror. Suffocation. He sees his friend, with a brusque gesture, ask the nurse to leave the room. He sees him rip out his breathing tube and throw it against the wall with surprising force.

He sees him suffocate, he sees the throat distend, offer itself to be sacrificed. He hears his friend pant, he hears him say: “You have always promised me that you would. You are torturing me, you have always tortured me, and you continue to! I will die all the same!”

Robert feels his legs go weak. He tells himself, I am twenty-five years old, I am a doctor, how can I kill the man that I admire most in all the world? That I love like a father, a teacher who has given me, taught me so much?
But can I just allow the excruciating pain of his death agony to go on indefinitely?”

He prepares a syringe.

“More, more, isn’t it obvious that your dosages have no effect?”

Robert doesn’t answer, he is silently crying. Suddenly he hears Franz cry out: “Kill me, or else you’re a murderer!”

N
ow he is hallucinating. He calls to his sister: “Elli, don’t come so close. There, yes, that’s better.”

Robert doesn’t turn away. He sees the face relax, the body grow calm, slide into the silence of the shadows.

D
ora comes back from the post office with a bunch of flowers. She leans toward her fiancé’s face, kisses him on the cheek.

“Do you want to smell the roses, my Franz, their delicious scent?”

She thinks she hears him breathe. She thinks she sees the left eye open. She gently hugs the man she loved so much.

She no longer hears his heart beat.

Franz Kafka has escaped.

F
ranz Kafka was buried at Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery on June 11, 1924, at four o’clock in the afternoon. The day was cold, the sky was growing dark as a procession of about a hundred people gathered around the grave, the women in black veils, the men in top hats. While the rabbis intoned the kaddish and the coffin was lowered, Dora cried out, slipping from Max’s supporting grip, and fainted.

Hermann Kafka disliked displays of this sort. He turned away from Dora lying on the ground and walked
to the edge of the grave. He was the first to throw a handful of powdery, pebble-filled soil onto his son’s casket. He avoided looking at his daughter Ottla, stiff, silent, her eyes as blank as a ghost’s.

M
ax Brod claimed that on the way back, as he was passing the town hall, he had noticed that the clock had stopped: the hands pointed to four o’clock exactly.

E
ight days later at 11:00 in the morning on June 19, 1924, at a memorial service held in a small theater and attended by more than five hundred people, Max Brod and a number of other writers spoke and offered eulogies.

An actor, Hans Hemuth Koch, read two of Kafka’s texts. The first, “A Dream,” begins: “Joseph K. was dreaming. It was a beautiful day, and he was going for a walk. But hardly had he set out when he found himself in the cemetery.”

The second, “An Old Parchment,” ends with these words: “Workers and peasants! The safety of the nation lies in our hands. But the task is beyond our powers. We have in fact never claimed to be capable of such a task. It is a misunderstanding, and it is causing our death.”

After 1924
 

HERMANN AND JULIE KAFKA

Hermann Kafka died in 1931, and his wife, Julie, in 1934. Both lie buried beside their son. The names of all three and some verses in Hebrew are carved on the modest obelisk marking their grave.

ELLI, VALLI, AND OTTLA

Elli, her husband, Karl Hermann, and their three children, Felix, Gerti, and Hanne; and Valli, her husband, Josef Pollak, and their daughter Lotte were all deported
to Lodz in Poland, where they were killed in 1944 during the liquidation of the ghetto.

Ottla convinced her husband, Joseph David, who was classified as an Aryan, to divorce her in order to save their two daughters, Vera and Helen Davidova. Shortly after, Ottla registered herself as a Jew. In August 1942 she was arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. The following year, she volunteered to escort a convoy of 1,260 orphans that she understood was traveling to Denmark. On arriving at Auschwitz on October 7, they were all sent directly to the gas chambers. Ottla Kafka’s name is the sixth on the list of that day’s victims.

A plaque resting against the headstone of the family grave commemorates Elli, Valli, and Ottla, all three of whom died at the hands of the Nazis.

Of Kafka’s seven nieces and nephews, only three survived: Vera, Helen, and Marianne.

Marianne, Valli’s eldest daughter, married a man named George Steiner and fled to London. By an extraordinary coincidence, Marianne encountered Dora in a London real estate office and recognized her. Learning that Dora was in terrible financial straits, Marianne offered her the English-language royalties of her uncle’s works.

FELICE BAUER

In 1931 the German parliament seated 107 members of the Nazi Party, and Felice fled Berlin for Switzerland with her husband and two children. In her suitcase she packed the hundreds of letters and telegrams Franz had sent her. Few are missing. The letters are so numerous that they might fill a suitcase all to themselves. Does she, in Geneva, reread a few of them on nostalgic evenings? Or does she tell herself that the past is past, leave it be?

By 1936, the position of Jews in Europe seemed so precarious that Felice emigrated to the United States. Before embarking, she rented a safe-deposit box for her papers. As a businesswoman, she could not fail to know that they constituted a valuable property. She hadn’t forgotten that Max Brod saved the smallest scrap written by Franz as a relic. To her own letters she added those given to her by Grete Bloch on her way through Geneva.

The letters lay undisturbed in the safe-deposit box for nearly twenty years. In 1955, Felice sold the rights to Schocken Books of New York. They would be published only in 1967, seven years after her death and forty-three after Kafka’s. Like all German Jews, Felice knew the publisher Salman Schocken, a wealthy philanthropist who had created the publishing house Schocken Verlag in Berlin. When Hitler passed a decree in 1933 that
Jewish writers could be published only by Jewish publishers, Max Brod immediately contacted Salman Schocken to persuade him to buy the rights to Kafka’s books from the non-Jewish publishers who were no longer allowed to sell them. As an inducement, Max offered him global rights to Kafka’s published works, as well as to any posthumous works. Felice therefore had no choice but to turn to Schocken.

A brief word about this unusual man. Expelled by Hitler, Salman Schocken emigrated first to Palestine, where he founded a new publishing company and bought the newspaper
Ha’aretz
. In 1940 he moved to the United States, a country better suited to his ambitions, and left Schocken House in the hands of his son, Gustav. Strong in his faith, Salman created Schocken Books as soon as he arrived in New York. His first collaborator was Hannah Arendt, a German immigrant.
³³

Bought in 1980 by Random House, Schocken Books is today a division of Bertelsmann, a German consortium!

It was most likely to Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, who edited the book, that Felice offered her letters and
those of Grete’s in her possession. The scene can be imagined: an elderly but still sprightly lady introduces herself to the two men and unpacks before their astonished, their dazzled, their incredulous eyes the confessions and most intimate secrets of the author of “The Metamorphosis.” We can guess the emotions that coursed through them, the feverish nights they spent deciphering the letters, putting them in order. Day after day, they witnessed his descent into hell, his torments, his devouring passion. Writing to have the right to live.