Kafka in Love (6 page)

“I cannot live without her. Nor can I live with her.” This thought runs through his head as he throws his clothes into his bag. He is back in his room at the Hotel Askanischer Hof, preparing to return to Prague. He cannot possess this woman, but he wishes that he were entirely within her, or she within him. The separation into two people is unbearable.

Once more at home, he writes her the next morning and almost every day thereafter (May 12, 13, 16, 18, 23, 24, 25, 27, and 28). He also writes her almost every day in June (June 1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, and 29). In July he writes her another sixteen letters. All of them urge her to reflect on the situation more, to be franker, more mature. He mentions glancingly, in the last line at the bottom of a page, a detail of negligible importance: “I am correcting the page proofs for the first chapter of my American novel,
The Stoker: A Fragment
, which is about to be published in an inexpensive series, 80 pfennigs.”

“But,” he adds, “the moment I talk about anything other than you, I feel lost.”

Not only has Felice made no comment to him about his texts, she has not even mentioned the articles in the German press praising his writings. He is forced to ask her to obtain them for him in the hopes that she will
read the reviews and think more highly of his talents as a writer.

She is clearly tired of hearing about his terrible confession, and appears not to believe a word he says, to the point of completely ignoring his finely wrought and stubbornly presented arguments. Is she no longer reading his letters?

On June 16 there is an arresting new development. After laying out interminable arguments, he asks her for the first time, “Do you wish to be my wife? Do you?”

These two question marks seem to leave him stunned. He is unable to write another word that day, the next, or the day after. Apparently destroyed by the proposal, it is only on the fourth day following that he is able to resume his question to the woman who has been his intended since the moment he first glimpsed her.

He finishes his letter with this strange avowal: “I have to say that I am horribly afraid of our future and of the unhappiness that could result from our life together.”

It is clear that he expects his proposal of marriage to draw a refusal. Each of their disastrous meetings in Berlin has persuaded him that Felice is unsure of her feelings toward him. Yet she accepts his proposal. Lower-middle-class girl that she is, she requires that he formally ask her
father for her hand, although she is twenty-seven years old. She is absolutely set on observing this convention.

Franz promises several times to write her father but puts off the chore day after day and week after week. He has a more immediate task at hand. Caught short by Felice’s acceptance, he starts in on a most unusual trial. Never has a lawyer presenting a brief against himself been more eloquent or offered so many decisive arguments. He must lose this trial on which his future as a writer hangs. His life depends on it.

He starts off pleading his case in a minor key, but the volume increases until it deafens Felice. The young woman has just said, “Yes, I want to be your wife.”

He answers, “Then you are prepared in spite of everything to take up this cross, Felice? Attempt the impossible?”

“Yes, you will make a good, kind husband.”

“You’re wrong, you wouldn’t manage to live two days at my side. I am a soft worm crawling on the ground, I am taciturn, unsociable, gloomy, brooding, selfish, and a hypochondriac. Could you bear to lead the life of a monk, as I do? I spend most of my time locked away in my room, or else wandering the streets alone. Could you stand to be completely separated from your parents, your friends, and everyone else, since I cannot conceive of our life together
in any other way? I want to spare you unhappiness, Felice. Step out of the accursed circle into which I have forced you, blinded as I was and am by love.”

He advances the calamitous fact of his perpetual tiredness. She is strong, does she not recognize that he is in poor health?

“What comes between you and me,” he says, “is the doctor. I am frail. Insomnia and constant headaches have robbed me of my strength.”

“Don’t keep on about it,” answers Felice. “Stop tormenting me.”

He then writes to her describing what married life will be like: “You won’t get much help from me. I leave the office around 3, eat lunch, sleep until 6 or 7, bolt something down, then shut myself in my study. Could you really stand such a husband?”

“Yes.”

“Think carefully, Felice, think carefully! You would lose Berlin, the office, the work you enjoy, an existence almost free of care, life in the bosom of your family. In Prague, a provincial town, you will hear a language you don’t speak, you will live in a petit bourgeois household, without any brilliant society, you will have to forgo pretty dresses, travel third class, sit in poor seats at the theater.”

He warns her of another danger: since the only good in him is literature, he will spend their free time, their nights, and their vacations at his writing, leaving her to be alone.

“I know your inclination for writing.”

“My inclination?” (He chokes with indignation.) “My inclination? I hate everything that is not literature! If I had to stop writing, I would stop living.”

Tired of the abuse, Felice interrupts this useless and exhausting correspondence. They have agreed on nothing when, by common consent, they decide to take their vacations separately. She will go north, to the island of Sylt in the Baltic Sea. He will go south, to Italy.

Riva, the Italian Interlude
 

O
n September 6, Franz accompanies his director at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, Dr. Robert Marschner, to Vienna. Marschner has a very high opinion of his subordinate;
⁶
and Franz in turn admires him (but then he bows down before everybody!) because the man types so fast and shares his taste for poetry. One day, while callers waited in the hallway for their
appointments, Franz and Robert read poems aloud behind the closed door of the office.

Spending a week together, they visited the International Congress for First Aid and Accident Prevention. Also taking place on September 6 was the Eleventh Zionist Congress, attended by the daughter of Theodor Herzl. Franz sat in on a few sessions out of curiosity. He left them disappointed, having heard only the usual shrill arguments. To Max, a militant Zionist, he sends a dispiriting account.

On September 14 he leaves Vienna, a city he dislikes. “It is a vast, moribund village,” he writes, “where the gay become morose and the morose even moroser.”

Finally on vacation, he spends a night alone in Trieste and proceeds to Venice by boat. Crossing in a gale, he is seasick, and it is raining hard when he lands in the City of the Doges. Wet through and through, he runs from church to church, barely able to see the facades of the palaces, hidden as they are behind sheets of gray water. He spends two melancholy days there. In Verona it is even worse. He is surrounded by entwined couples. “The idea of a honeymoon,” he writes to Max Brod, “fills me with horror. Couples are an odious sight to me. If I want to make myself sick, I have only to imagine myself with a woman, my arm around her waist.”

He seeks refuge in a cinematograph theater, perhaps the Pathé di San Sebastiano, and the film that he sees (he doesn’t give its title) brings tears to his eyes.

From this city of lovers, he sends a few lines that he thinks might be the last: “What are we to do, Felice? We must part ways.”

N
ow to the interlude.

An Italian interlude on the magical shores of Lake Garda at Riva. It is a warm, luminous autumn, the water and the parks are soft in color, lightly veiled in mist. Franz has taken up residence at a sanatorium that offers hydrotherapy treatments under Dr. von Hartungen. Along the lakeshore are deck chairs, where guests spend endless hours in the sun. Franz goes for a long swim every day, often to one of the nearby islands.

Meals are taken communally around a large table. Forced to make conversation with his neighbor, a retired general who peppers him with questions, Franz’s feelings of emptiness and grief grow more acute.

At the start of the second week, a young girl, her auburn hair tied back in a red ribbon, takes a seat beside him at lunch. She wears a garnet-colored velvet dress, set off by a white lace collar, and has the fragility, the
troubling innocence, of a child. When Franz, suddenly voluble, asks her questions, her round cheeks and neck turn red. He is fascinated by the perfection and whiteness of her teeth, the softness of her skin, he longs to untie the ribbon and touch the hair that falls to her shoulders.

She is a foreigner, Swiss-born, living in Genoa. Very thin and graceful, immature, Gerti Wasner is so lovely, her every feature so delicate: her wrists, her ankles, the oval of her face, the shadow of her long eyelashes. She is so unlike sturdy, homely Felice, so young, so divinely young, that Franz never leaves her side. They row together on the lake, Franz at the oars. He is dazzled by Gerti, her deep voice, green eyes, perpetually bright gaze. They walk along the shore. At naptime they lower themselves into adjoining deck chairs. He tells her about Felice and their breakup, about his humdrum existence in Prague. One day he reads to her. He knows by experience how susceptible young women are to his voice, to the eyes he raises to check that they are falling into his net, and remaining prisoners there. He has chosen to read
The Queen of Spades
to her.

“Who is this Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin?” the girl asks when he closes the book.

She knows nothing about the writer and wants to learn everything. Franz also likes to know every aspect of the
lives of famous men. He tells Gerti about the poet’s origins, about Gannibal, his Ethiopian great-grandfather, a black man in white Russia who was also Tsar Peter’s godson.

He recites some of his favorite lines from Pushkin’s poetry, from
The Stone Guest
, from “The Bronze Horseman.” There are so many, and each is in a different style. He describes Pushkin’s brilliant life, his literary triumphs, his political exiles, and his death, that tragic duel.

“Why? With whom?”

“Pushkin had an exceedingly beautiful wife, Natalya Goncharova. A splendid name, don’t you agree?”

He repeats it, savoring each syllable.

“D’Anthès, a French aristocrat, made love to her too openly, and Pushkin’s jealous heart took exception to it. There was a duel. D’Anthès pierced his lung. He lay for forty-six hours on his deathbed while the people of Saint Petersburg prayed for him under his window. He died in horrible agony, his last words being: ‘My life is over. It hurts to breathe.’ He was thirty-eight years old.”

Gerti is moved. So is Franz. Young girls have always had a strange power over him. They affect him because it is their fate to become women and lose their beauty, their innocent grace. He cannot help admiring a young girl who deserves it and loving her until his admiration runs out.

He wants to know everything about Gerti: about her, her family, Switzerland, Genoa. He is attentive to her slightest wishes, and so thoughtful that the young girl discovers and explores the limits of her power. They revel in the desire that each provokes in the other.

Since meeting her, Franz is no longer the same man. He jokes, invents stories, does imitations of the other guests, mimics the quavering voice of the retired general. Gerti laughs, her head tipped back. For the first time, he writes, he understands a Christian girl and lives almost entirely within the sphere of her influence.

The sphere of her influence? Is he referring to the games Gerti suggests, in which he good-naturedly takes part, however childish they might seem? At night, when each has retired, Gerti, who lives in the room above Franz, lets down a long ribbon, which Franz grasps. They both lean far out of their windows to catch a glimpse of each other. Some nights, Franz knocks on the ceiling and waits for Gerti’s answering knock. Lying motionless on his bed, his ears cocked, he hears her walk overhead, hum, cough. He follows her every movement until she falls asleep.

They have only ten days. Then they will go their separate ways, and it will all be over. A love without future, without anxiety, without physical embrace, a chaste love, with glances that penetrate and make them almost
tremble. Franz has known a similar enchantment only once before, one long-ago summer: her name was Selma, she was fifteen, he seventeen.

Gerti knows that Franz is a writer. One day he asks if she likes fairy tales, he would like to write some for her. He doesn’t tell her that at that moment he is imagining her sitting in the dining room, hiding his tales in her lap under the table. He sees her reading between courses and blushing horribly. Horribly? Why? Is he thinking of ribald tales?

Gerti refuses his offer outright. She makes him promise three things: “We will never see each other again. We will never write each other, not even a single line. And you will neither write nor say anything about me.”