Kafka in Love Read online

  Felice holds out a hand and Franz takes it, pressing it to him.

  “Do you know this magazine? Max and I plan to go to Palestine next year. Would you like to join us?”

  “What a strange idea … Are you joking?”

  She frees her hand.

  “Not in the slightest, I’ve never been more serious.”

  “It’s not a trip that you decide on at the drop of a hat! Do you speak Hebrew?”

  “No, not really. But my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, who gave me my Hebrew name, Amschel, was a famous Talmud scholar, and I’m studying modern Hebrew. Will you come? I’d like it if you made a promise. A formal promise.”

  “I don’t know. Let me think about it. And bid my hosts good night.”

  Having followed her into the hallway, Franz watches as Felice puts on a wide-brimmed beige-and-white hat, which she anchors in place with three long pins. Herr Brod offers to accompany her back to the hotel.

  “May I join you?” asks Franz.

  In the narrow street with its uneven cobbles, Herr Brod and Felice walk side by side. Franz follows them, strangely tongue-tied. Halfway to the hotel, he wonders if he might be able to bring this young woman flowers at the station. But where is he to find flowers at the crack of dawn? Gripped by anxiety, desire, and confusion, he trips on the sidewalk several times for no reason and steps out into the street. As they start down Perlgasse, Felice turns to him.

  “Where do you live?”

  “You want my address?”

  He feels a burst of joy, she is going to write him, agree to join his trip to Palestine.

  “Your address? No, I’d like to make sure that I’m not taking you too far out of your way in going to my hotel. And keeping you up too late.”

  “I’m never in a hurry to go home. I sleep very little. My nights consist of two parts: one wakeful, the other sleepless.”

  Felice resumes her conversation with Herr Brod. Franz hears them wasting time comparing the traffic in Prague to the traffic in Berlin. Herr Brod then offers the young woman travel advice, naming several train stations where she can find a bite to eat. Felice announces that she plans to have breakfast in the dining car. She is hoping to find her umbrella, which she left in the train several days before.

  They enter the lobby of a luxury hotel, The Blue Star. Franz is so absorbed that he slips into the same compartment of the revolving door as Felice and steps all over her feet. He babbles his apology. They say good-bye in front of the open door of the elevator. Franz reminds her of their travel plans. Felice catches sight of the doorman and arranges for a car to bring her to the station in the morning. They make their good-byes a second time. Felice says, “You are going to remind me again …”

  Franz interrupts her. “No, no, I have just one last question: How long can you keep chocolate before it goes bad?”

  A Passion Without Love

  On September 20, 1912, he writes his first letter to Felice Bauer. On letterhead of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he holds an important post. A letter that is two pages long, typed on a typewriter he is unfamiliar with, and started after his sixth hour at the office. He reminds her of his name, Franz Kafka, their meeting at the Brods’, and their plan to travel to Palestine together. In case she sees no reason to accept him as her traveling companion and as a guide, burden, tyrant, or whatever else he might become, he suggests that in the meantime she accept him provisionally as her correspondent. He adds that he is not punctual and that, in exchange, he does not expect to receive regular letters.

  He signs: “Yours very sincerely, Dr. Franz Kafka.” (He is a doctor of law.)

  This first letter remains unanswered.

  Franz writes a second one, in longhand. He has much to say: it is a warm, sunny day, the window is open, he is humming a tune. He explains to Felice Bauer that for five weeks he begged high and low for her office address in Berlin, that anxieties rain down on him continuously, that he composed his first letter over the course of ten nights, so difficult did he find transcribing what he had in his head before going to sleep. He signs the letter: “Yours, Franz Kafka.”

  Felice does not answer these five handwritten pages. But she keeps both letters.

  Determined to break through the silence erected by the young woman against him, Franz seeks the help of his friends. Both Max and his sister, Sophie Friedmann, who is married to a cousin of the Bauers, write to Felice to vaunt their friend’s merits and suggest the high consideration in which he is held. After three weeks and a second letter from Sophie, Felice finally relents. Franz is elated. Her letter, he says, makes him feel absurdly happy, and he puts his hand on it to feel that it really belongs to him.

  He then embarks on a frenetic correspondence. From October 23, when he receives her first reply, to December 31, he sends Felice one hundred letters, often two or three a day.

  The first ones are delicious: “I tremble like a lunatic when I receive your letters, my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you.”

  “Dear Fräulein Felice, it is one-thirty in the morning. There is hardly a quarter of an hour of my waking day when I don’t think of you, and many when I do nothing else. Since the evening when we met, I’ve felt as though I have a hole in my chest through which everything flows into me and is sucked out of me. You are intimately associated with my writing.”

  “Today I received your last three letters almost at once. Your goodness is infinite. I shall most likely write you several more times again today. Farewell, then, but only for a few hours.”

  The tone grows progressively less ceremonious. The “Dear Fräulein Bauer” of the early letters gives way to “Dear Fräulein Felice,” then to “Dearest Fräulein Felice.” Suddenly, on November 14, he writes, “Dearest, dearest,” and boldly shifts to the familiar Du. A few days later he writes, “Dearest, very dearest! Most cherished of my temptations, my beloved, to answer your question: yes, I fell in love with you at once, that night at Max’s, right from the start, from the first glance. I love you so much it makes me groan.”

  “Dearest, very dearest! I dreamed about you again. A mailman was bringing me your two letters, one in each hand, his arms moving in precision, like the jerking of piston rods in a steam engine. I kept pulling page after page from the envelopes but they never emptied. It was a magical dream!” He signs the letter: “Your Franz.”

  From the first and over the course of months, he paints the young woman a portrait of himself: faithful, pitiless, ludicrous, funny, and, as he says explicitly, untruthful.

  “You take me for much younger than I am, I almost feel like hiding my age. I will be 30 on July 3. I do look like a boy, though.”

  In his Diaries, he engages in more detailed scrutiny, having looked at himself attentively in the mirror. “My face appeared to me better than I know it to be. True, it was dusk and the light was coming from behind me, so that only the down on the rims of my ears was lit. A pure face, nicely shaped, its contour almost beautiful. The black hair, eyebrows, and eye sockets jump out livingly from the dormant mass of the face. The eyes are not ravaged, there is no trace of that, but neither are they childlike, rather unbelievably energetic, but perhaps only because they were observing, since I was just then observing myself and trying to frighten myself.”

  He tells Felice that he is the thinnest man in the world, but that he is no longer ashamed of his body since he started going to the swimming pool.

  And he answers each of her questions: “Would you like to know my timetable? Very regular. From 8 to 2 at the office, lunch until 3 or 3:30, then a nap in bed until 7:30, followed by ten minutes of exercises, naked at the open window, then an hour’s walk, alone or with a friend, then dinner with all of my family. Then at 10:30 (sometimes later) I start to write. This continues, depending on my strength, desire, and luck, until 1, 2, or 3 in the morning.”

  He appends to the letter (by way of warning?) a poem by Yüan Tzu-tsai:

  A cold night, absorbed in my b
ook,

  I have forgotten bedtime. The fragrances

  Sprinkled on my gold-embroidered bedcover

  Have dissipated, the fire has gone out.

  My lover, who has contained her wrath

  Until now, snatches the lamp from me:

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  He makes no secret of his oddness: “My mode of life? It would seem crazy and unbearable to you. I dress any old way. The same suit does for the office, the street, and my desk at home, summer and winter. I am more hardened to the cold than a tree stump and have not yet worn an overcoat this year, light or heavy, though it is now mid-November. Among pedestrians muffled up in their warm clothes, I look like a lunatic in my little summer hat and summer suit without a vest (I am the inventor of the suit without a vest).”

  “Needless to say, I don’t smoke and I don’t drink alcohol, coffee, or tea.” But, perhaps as a reassurance to Felice, he adds that when people around him are drinking black coffee or beer it makes him feel happy. Nothing gives him more pleasure than to see others eating something he would never put in his mouth.

  Wanting to give the full picture, he continues: “I eat three meals a day, but nothing between meals, literally nothing. In the morning stewed fruit, biscuits, and milk. At 2:30, out of filial pity, the same as the others, a bit less than the others. Winter evenings at 9:30: yogurt, wholegrain bread, butter, walnuts and hazelnuts, chestnuts, dates, figs, raisins, almonds, pumpkin seeds, bananas, apples, pears, oranges. And I never get my fill of lemonade. But dearest Felice, please don’t reject me because of this, accept me kindly.”

  In his Diaries, he lets loose and confesses his hankerings, real and imaginary: “This craving that I almost always have, if ever I feel my stomach empty, to heap up in me images of terrible feats of eating. I especially satisfy this craving in front of pork butchers. If I see a sausage labeled as an old, hard farmhouse sausage, I bite into it in my imagination with my teeth and swallow quickly, regularly, and mechanically. The despair that always follows this act, imaginary though it is, increases my haste. I shove long slabs of ribs into my mouth un-chewed, then bring them out again the other end, pulling them through my stomach and intestines. I empty whole grocery stores, filthy ones, cram myself with herrings, pickles, and all the spicy, gamey, unhealthy foods. Hard candies pour into my mouth like hail from their cast-iron pots.”

  He gives a minute description of his daily life, his outings, his idleness, his obsessions, and his weaknesses.

  “The bathroom,” he tells Felice, “gives me much pleasure. I was so bored last night that I went to the bathroom to wash my hands three times in succession. And I sometimes spend a whole afternoon with my hair. And with my brush, made by an English firm, G. B. Kent & Sons. I’m quite taken with it.”1

  He reproaches himself for being too fond of creature comforts. When the housemaid forgets to bring him hot water in the morning it disturbs him profoundly. He has long been obsessed with his comfort and ensures it by begging, crying, and forgoing more important things.

  To his young lady in Berlin, to Max, to his friends, to his parents, Franz complains year after year about the noise around him: “My room is the headquarters of all the commotion in the apartment. I hear the doors slam. My sister Valli shouts through the hallway as though it were a Paris street to ask whether Father’s hat has been brushed. There is loud talking in the rooms on either side, women’s voices to the left, men’s voices to the right. I have the impression that the people are wild beings, blabbering with no sense of meaning, speaking only to disturb the air and watch their words float past. The large room is full of clamor, the sound of a card game and, later, of Father’s normal conversation, conducted without much coherence but in resonant tones.”

  The automobiles in the street make a terrible noise. A monstrous ruckus. Franz is forced to stuff his ears with wax. “It’s awful to plug one’s ears during one’s lifetime!”

  He provides a quick sketch of his family. He has three sisters: Elli, the oldest, who is married; Valli, the middle one, who has just become engaged; and Ottla, the youngest, who is his favorite. She is pure, true, and honest, with a perfect balance of humility and pride, devotion and independence, shyness and courage.

  His mother spends all her time in the store helping her husband. Franz sees little of her and only at night, when she returns exhausted after an endless day of work. “My mother,” says Franz, “is the loving slave of my father, a giant, and my father is the loving tyrant of my mother. The harmony between them is perfect.”

  Speaking of his mother, he realizes that he has not always loved her as she deserves, because the German language has prevented him from doing so. “The Jewish mother is not a Mutter,” he writes. “To call her Mutter makes her foreign and a little comical. Mutter is peculiarly German, it contains Christian splendor, but also Christian coldness.”

  One night he announces to Felice that his oldest sister has just had her first child. His mother returned at one a.m. with the news that a baby boy had been born. His father marched through the apartment in his nightshirt throwing open all the doors, waking his son, his daughters, even the maid, and proclaiming the child’s birth as though the child had not simply come into the world but already lived a life full of honor and been buried with great pomp. “I didn’t feel the least affection for this nephew, only envy, a fierce envy,” says Franz, “because I will never have children.”

  Was Felice troubled by this warning?

  In each of his letters, Franz bombards Felice with questions: What time do you arrive at the office? What do you eat for breakfast? What do you see from your office window? What are you wearing? Give me the names of your male and female friends, tell me what the weather is like, what show did you go see? Did you have dinner before or after the theater? Where did you sit? How do you spend your Sundays, what books are you reading? What is this tango that you are dancing, is it an import from Mexico? How can you dictate something to two girls at once? What colleague did you run back to the house with on the thirtieth? Why did you not go for a walk all day?

  My head, he says, is as full of questions as a field is of flies.

  Insatiably, as though drawing nourishment from her, he extorts the promise to write him every day. “Write me a new letter right away. Answer all my questions exactly, I want answers as sharp and quick as snakes. Good-bye, and remember to keep a little diary. I am obliged to write you, or I would die of sadness.”

  He echoes this thought in his Diaries: “To have beside one a person who would have this understanding, a wife perhaps, would mean to have support on all sides, to have God.”

  By the early part of November, when they have been corresponding barely two months, a lament arises and grows louder and louder: What have I done that you torment me in this way? Today again nothing, neither in the first mail nor the second. How you make me suffer! When just a word from you would make me happy. Just two lines, a greeting, an envelope, a card, I beg you! Since Friday I have sent you 14 or 15 letters. Madness.

  When his suffering becomes unbearable, he sends her an urgent telegram, and the handful of words he gets in return restore his calm for a few hours. He uses the telephone only rarely, his heart pounding as he waits for the connection, but he finds it distracting to speak in front of others at the office, he stammers, he can’t hear a thing.

  “You’d do better to stop staring at the earpiece and put your ear to it,” said one of his colleagues mockingly. Franz hung up the telephone and fled, as though he’d been caught doing something wrong.

  Before long he is begging Felice to put a stop to their exchange of letters, he cannot stand the torment: “If I want to go on living, I cannot continue vainly waiting for news of you. Don’t write me anymore.”

  When a letter arrives for him the next day, he is seized with remorse and begs Felice to forgive his harassment: “May I kiss you? On this deplorable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air. You will write again, won’t you?”r />
  He sends her innocent roses, to clear the air of his criminal words.

  Then he asks her to write him only once a week, on Saturday, as he cannot bear to receive her daily letters. Three days later, he is begging her repeatedly to write him every day.

  They exchange photographs. The first one that Felice receives makes her burst out laughing: Franz is only five years old, dressed as a girl, and glaring at her. A few days later, he sends her a photograph of two naked babies: his sisters. He is hoping that Felice will send him a picture of herself at that age, but in vain. Finally he sends her a picture of himself in front of his house: a young dandy in a necktie, wearing an open, dark overcoat, a gray suit, and a homburg that casts a shadow over his face. His eyes are hidden. Yet Felice cannot tear her own eyes away from his gaze. The narrow pants, perfectly creased, emphasize the thinness of his legs. His round-toed shoes, which are solid and new, gleam. His hands are crossed over his stomach. Felice puts the portrait in a frame on her night table. It watches over her at night as she falls asleep.

  He for his part becomes rapt contemplating photographs of his Felice and constantly asks her to send more: “A face,” he says, “can be grasped only through a thousand photographs.” He also wants pictures of her sisters, her aunt, her niece, and her friends. As soon as they reach him, he fires off questions to her: Where were the photographs taken, by whom, at what time of day, and what is around them, beyond the frame? The unseen surroundings interest him more than what is visible. “The photographs are beautiful and necessary, but they are also a torment. You can never provide me with enough explanations.”

  After their first meetings, Franz stops asking her for pictures. He has looked at her too long in the flesh for photographs to be of any use. He no longer wants to look at them: Felice appears flat and commonplace. “I have gazed,” he explains, “into your real, your human face with its inevitable faults and lost myself in it. How can I emerge and find my way around mere photographs?”