Kafka in Love (5 page)

He could go to a cafe and read or write. But no, he stays in his chair by the telephone, like a soldier in his sentry box.

Berlin is a city that Franz knows. He would like to live there if he could ever get away from Prague and the
clutches of his family. In 1910 he saw a production of
Hamlet
with Bassermann in the title role. In his mind he sees him again, alone on the stage. He tries to imagine why an actor of such great talent would accept a role in
The Other One
, a very mediocre film that he saw with Max.

Perhaps he nods off in his chair, perhaps Karl Rossmann comes and sits beside him, perhaps he flits around himself like a bird chased from its nest.

At four o’clock he runs to the station, walks the length of the platform in both directions. The train starts, Felice has not come. The rain that is still pattering down might have prevented her, he tells himself, but no one could have stopped her from calling me on the telephone.

He has traveled sixteen hours to catch a glimpse of her. And he didn’t bring himself to say what he had to say. Several times he has hinted at it in his letters, but to no effect. Felice has not wanted to understand or even to suspect. Face to face with her, he said nothing.

Once back in Prague, he dithers for several days, unable to come out with his “great confession.” On April 1, he finds the strength to write. The letter starts abruptly, without any form of address, as though he were not speaking to Felice but to himself, as though he needed to cough up the words that were choking him: “My real fear—nothing worse could be said or heard—is that I will
never be able to possess you. At best, like an endlessly faithful dog, I would go only so far as to kiss your limply surrendered hand, which will not be an act of love, but a sign of the despair felt by an animal condemned to silence and eternal separation. I would feel the breath and life of your body at my side, yet be further from you than I am now, here in this room. I would be excluded from you forever.”

He signs, then rereads, what he believes to be his death sentence.

He is preparing for bed and starting to get undressed when his mother gives a little knock on the door: “May I come in?”

He smiles at her. “You aren’t bothering me.”

This late and unaccustomed visit seems to offer a plot development.

“Have you written your Uncle Alfred?”

Franz reassures his mother: “I mailed my letter to him yesterday.”

Emboldened by his thoughtfulness, she goes to him and plants a good-night kiss on his cheek, which she hasn’t done for years.

“That’s good,” says Franz, and pats his mother’s hand.

“I never dared,” says his mother. “I thought you didn’t like it. But if you do like it, I like it very much, too.”

Touched, she slips out the door. Once alone, Franz sits again at his desk, pulls the letter from its envelope, and adds a postscript. He tells Felice about his mother’s unexpected visit, the words they exchanged, her kiss. Setting down a fragment of life has the effect of changing his mood, restoring his freedom as a writer.

The next day, proud of his courage, he writes to Max: “Yesterday, I sent my great confession to Berlin. She is truly a martyr!”

And Felice’s reaction? “You are drifting away from me, at a time when you are critically necessary to me.”

“I am critically necessary to you?”

Franz is elated, he has no cause for fear, he did not receive the answer that his letter deserved. He sighs with relief: “I, dearest, drift away? I, who breathe only through you? I look for you everywhere. In the street, the gestures of all sorts of people remind me of you. I, drift away, I who die of longing for you?”

He confesses that when he was washing his hands in the dark passage that very morning, he felt such a strong desire from thinking about her that he had to step across to the window … to seek comfort from the gray sky.

Felice must have been shocked by this image: Franz masturbating as he looked out at the clouds. Next she must have wondered, if he gets an erection thinking
about me, why does he keep repeating with such humiliating obstinacy that he will never be able to possess me?

She doesn’t quite dare ask him the question. She is unable to speak about sexuality, or to hear it mentioned. Her upbringing, her social class, forbid it. When Franz had spoken, that night at the Brods’, about his vacation at Jungborn with the nudists, she had felt gooseflesh: completely naked people, he had said, strolled through the trees, stretched, ran, scratched themselves, stroked their naked bodies. The picture still made her sick, even these many months later. Franz, to his eternal credit, made a point of saying that he always wore his bathing suit.

In the next weeks, the more Franz castigates himself, the more Felice refuses to understand what he is talking about. He begs her: “Don’t shut your eyes, don’t give in to illusions, I will never change. My need to keep up an uninterrupted exchange of letters with you comes not from love but from my unhappy disposition.”

She swears that if she continues to write him, it is not—as he thinks—out of pity. She is bound to him.

Tired of wrangling, they pass on to other subjects. The talk is of the incidents of daily life, of friends, books, the weather. Felice has promised to take swimming lessons, Franz is unhappy that she is making no progress. He asks
her: “Are you learning with the help of a pole or do they have you on an apparatus?”

He describes his new neighbor to her, a Czech who writes erotic novels, a splendid and enviable man with a natty little French goatee, a slouch hat straight from Montmartre, and a cape draped over his arm. On another day, he mentions that he broke his fine shaving mirror. It made him shake with annoyance.

Felice has toothaches, Franz is worried. On the day of the extraction, he is anxious and cannot sleep. One’s head spins.

T
ruly, everything is as it was. Please don’t worry unnecessarily,” Felice writes, exasperated by Franz’s insistence. “Everything is as it was” has a wonderful ring to it, but Franz is convinced of the contrary, even when Felice manages to shake his firmest convictions. He has tried to push her away in the hopes of sparing her greater suffering. He has failed. He is thoroughly relieved—he would have been destroyed if she had expelled him (“expelled” is the term he uses), and he is distraught that
she has not done so. He struggles with his anxiety attacks and his fits of despair. He could have built the pyramids, he jokes, with the effort it takes him “to cling to life and reason.”

To settle his nerves, he decides to take a practical course in gardening. Manual labor calms him, as he knows. A year or two earlier, he had tried his hand at carpentry. The experiment had been a success. He liked everything about the work, from the smell of the wood chips to the rasp of the saw. The workshop had been flooded with light, the craftsmen calm, sturdy people, intent on their tasks, taciturn but good company. Only the press of other obligations had made Franz give it up.

At the end of the workday he goes for the first time to Nusle, a lively suburb of Prague. He discovers, on stepping off the tram, a neighborhood of modest houses surrounded by open and unfenced vegetable gardens. There is a great deal going on around him. Children are playing in the streets, fighting over American swings, young girls are singing next to a merry-go-round, somewhere a brass band is playing, workingmen on their way home talk in clusters and drink beer, while others hoe their garden plots.

The vegetable gardener is waiting for him in front of his land at the appointed place. He hands Franz a spade and shows him how to use it, to spread his legs slightly
and bend his knees, lean forward from the waist, keep the neck relaxed.

“Use the spade as a lever, uproot the whole thing.”

The man looks at his pupil’s white, slender hands and thinks that he’s an idle fellow, unlikely to stay the course.

“Small motions, slower, you don’t want to hurt your back. Drive the spade with your foot.”

Franz is wearing only a shirt and trousers. It is cold, and a fine April rain falls intermittently. He continues assailing and moving the heavy soil all the same. Soon he is sweating and developing blisters on his hands, but he feels a happy fatigue. “This dull, honest, useful, silent, solitary, healthy, strenuous work,” he writes Felice that evening, “is not without significance to someone who has led a desk-and-sofa life, allowing himself continually to be assailed and deeply moved.” On subsequent days the crunching sound of the earth stays in his ears.

His body becomes heavier, straighter, his sense of his own dignity is reinforced. “I feel,” he writes to Max, “like a Fury that has been tamed.”

H
e breathes more easily because Felice has not replaced him. He was so frightened! On a business trip to Frankfurt, she attended a trade exhibition where she came
in contact with a great many people and answered none of his letters. Franz imagined that she had met a vigorous, well-dressed, healthy, and amusing young man who took his place. He went through the hell of being abandoned. He panicked, ran to his good friend Max: “Please write to Felice, I absolutely must know.”

The fear of losing her was strangling him. The next day he received a few words from her. Life returned.

“Love me a little, Felice. Do you feel how much I love you? Do you feel it?” he writes, forgetting the thousand warnings he has given her.

Subsequently, he asks for, he insists on, a second meeting in Berlin at Whitsun, in mid-May.

“I must, must, see you, Felice.”

He agrees to everything. Meet her parents? At home? Attend the reception they are giving for the engagement of her brother, Ferry? Good idea. Everything seems like a good idea.

He is already concerned about the clothes he will wear on his visit: a black suit? He would feel more comfortable in his normal summer suit.

“Should I bring flowers for your mother? And what kind of flowers?”

A stream of questions. He returns to the subject so often after Felice no longer wants to discuss it, directs her
so insistently to think more deeply about it, that Felice starts writing less often. In her short, laconic letters, he sees only the words “in haste” and “again in haste.”

“My eyes hurt at the very sight of these words.”

“You’re the one hurting me, I am sad and tired,” she answers.

Sad and tired. How could she not be? Franz’s indecision, his contradictions, his tyranny, his demands, his complaints have worn her down.

By introducing him to her family, the young woman is leading him toward marriage, and he knows it. For the moment, he is preoccupied with one thing only: Felice has not thought enough, or perhaps not thought at all, about the confession he sent her. Her quick dismissal of it obsesses him, casts a pall on their future.

What does he expect from her? Either she must drive him from her life or else accept the prospect of marriage without coitus, free him from an obligation he feels unable to meet. He even suggests that they not live in the same city. Discussing this with her is the real reason for the second meeting.

He arrives in Berlin early on the morning of Sunday, May 11, 1913. He will leave again on Monday, May 12, in the evening. It is Whitsun, the weather mild and spring-like. He arrives at the home of Carl and Anna Bauer
in the middle of the afternoon. His knees wobbling, he walks across their drawing room toward Felice. A shudder of aversion runs through him. He sees gold gleaming in his beloved’s mouth as she opens it to greet him: “this gleaming gold, a truly hellish luster for this inappropriate spot, and that grayish yellow porcelain” horrify him. He lowers his eyes, wants only to escape. At that precise moment, he feels with certainty through his whole body that no, he will never be able to possess this young woman.

There are many people in the drawing room. Franz is in such a state of confusion that he is persuaded the people around him are giants, shaking their heads in resignation at his own small size. Felice, in high spirits, flits from person to person. The moment she stands next to Franz, her liveliness fades, her gaze wanders, she endures his silence or the stupid things he has to say. She finds that he looks unwell.

“You seem exhausted,” she says.

He doesn’t hear her. The suspicious glances that Frau Bauer casts at him frighten him particularly. Dressed all in black, sad, watchful, stiff, a stranger among her own family and friends, Frau Bauer looks disapprovingly, almost contemptuously, at the strange specimen her daughter has brought home. A man who seems ill at times, at others absent, dumb mostly.

Then all at once, before the copious buffet laid out in the dining room, before the astonished guests, Franz stops being tongue-tied. In an excited voice, he tells the gathering about his vegetarianism. He pointedly helps himself to just a few vegetables, drinks only water. Only Erna, Felice’s sister, shows any sympathy. The others turn their backs on him.

Noticing the vacuum he has created around himself, Franz senses disaster. He has not managed to steal even a quick kiss from Felice, and she has hardly given him the chance. When, haggard and crestfallen, Franz decides to leave the reception, Felice accompanies him as far as the hall. Franz grabs her hand, pulls off her glove, and kisses her bare palm. He thinks he sees an angry frown on the young woman’s face. He flees, his head reels, something in his breast is breaking.

The next morning, they meet alone in the street for a few minutes. Felice, distracted and in a bad mood, has no idea where she stands. Her parents, her brother, her close relatives, her friends were all eager to meet this young man “of the two hundred letters” who was dying of love. What they saw was a ghost. They barely hide their disappointment. Standing stiffly on the sidewalk, her face a mask, her eyes avoiding his, Felice is clearly bored. Franz, at a loss, can’t find the words he came to say.