They meet at the Café Arco. Franz has gone there to buy himself the thing he loves most: a cup of hot chocolate under a mountain of cream. He is sitting at a table alone. She comes toward him: “Dr. Kafka? I’m Milena Jesenská, wife of Ernst Polak. You know him, I believe?”
She points toward her husband, who is talking to a large redheaded woman. Franz rises immediately to his feet, bows to the very young lady with the lovely blue eyes standing in front of him. Slender and blond, she looks squarely at him and smiles at his awkwardness. He has knocked over the sugar bowl without noticing it.
He stares at her, forgetting to answer her question.
“I’d like to translate several of your books into Czech: The Stoker, The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, and In the Penal Colony.”
“All that trouble? You shouldn’t.”
“Of course I should. Your books are the most important of the new crop of German literature. I’ve already translated The Stoker, and your editor, Kurt Wolff, has asked me to obtain your permission.”
“You’re a translator?”
“Yes, I just said that. And a journalist. May I send you the text for corrections?”
“Do you live in Prague?”
“No, in Vienna.”
They trade addresses. She waves good-bye, he watches her walk away.
He remembers the clothes she was wearing that day, her lively hands, her frail figure between the tables of the Café Arco. Yes, he still remembers that.
He leaves Prague in early April. He is going to Meran in the South Tirol for a rest. He is constantly weary. He repeatedly requests time off from work and can’t seem to end his affair with Julie. She clings to him and cries. Does he hope that being away for two months will put an end to her obstinacy? He has said nothing to her about the meeting at the Café Arco or the two letters he has received from Milena, two letters that are never out of his pocket and that he fingers like a talisman.
In Meran he settles into the Ottoburg Pension, run by Fräulein Fröhlich. From his balcony he sees climbing flowers at the height of his room and exuberant tropical vegetation in the garden below. A sparrow visits him at breakfast time. Franz tosses it a few breadcrumbs and watches the reaction. The bird stands in the sunlight on the balcony. It covets the life-giving food, the crumbs that lie in shadow on the threshold to Franz’s room. A few little hops and the bird could gobble them all down. But it is afraid to venture into unknown territory. It tentatively makes a few jumps forward, stops, advances a little farther, hops away, fluffs out its feathers to give itself courage. Desire propelling it, the sparrow jumps and lands a few centimeters from the feast. Then it retreats. It flies away, ruled by fear.
Toward mid-April, Franz starts to write Milena. He is no longer the dashing seducer who, on the night of August 13, 1912, rang at Max Brod’s door and decided, there and then, to win Felice. He is now thirty-nine years old, his hair has turned gray, he no longer takes the stairs four at a time. He spends most of his waking hours in a deck chair. He is easily winded from walking.
When he meets Milena, the woman he had never hoped to meet, especially now, especially so late, he knows his time is limited. This is no longer the season for pleasantries.
And Milena is not Felice.
She is only twenty-three when she enters his life like a hurricane. Twenty-three, but she already has an eventful past and a scandalous reputation. As a child she took care of her mother for months. She saw her suffer, waste away, and die in her arms. Her father, a famous stomatologist and a stiff, brutal man, refused to care for his wife himself.
Neglected and bereaved of her mother, the adolescent experimented with cocaine and ran with a fast crowd. One night she swam across the Moldau River fully dressed to meet a lover. She spent her afternoons in cafes, posed naked for painters, rented hotel rooms in which to meet her two closest friends, Staša and Jarmila (there was whispered talk of sapphic love). She offered them armfuls of flowers, dresses, ornaments. Money burned her fingers.
She was eighteen and attending a concert when she met Ernst Polak and decided to live with him. The young man was a womanizer, a gambler, and a night creature with a vague connection to writing. When Dr. Jesensky learned of his daughter’s attachment to a Jew and a cafe-table writer, he had her locked up in a psychiatric clinic outside Prague. She lived with the insane for nine months, obtained her release on reaching adulthood, and raced off to marry Polak. Dr. Jesensky cut off all ties to his daughter.
The two moved to Vienna. Now money is scarce and life hard. Milena writes columns for magazines and newspapers in Prague, brilliant columns that are avidly read by feminists. She teaches Czech, translates foreign novels. Days when she has no money, when she has nothing to eat but apples and tea, she puts on an old cap and walks to the main train station, where she hauls luggage for travelers. Her husband, “the man with forty mistresses,” openly cheats on her. Often the worse for drink, he mistreats Milena and runs up debts that she scrambles to repay. When she meets Kafka, her health is dicey, she has a recurring case of bronchitis, she has coughed up blood two or three times, her marriage is falling apart, and she has no money.
Franz and Milena begin writing each other in April, and they stop in November. Less than eight months. He writes to her in German, she answers in Czech, usually in pencil. A subject for complaint. Of his letters, about 150 survive. None of Milena’s.15 All that remains of hers are her articles—tributes to the little black dress, to fashion, to cafes, to the popular quarters on Sundays, to trains, to a film by Charlie Chaplin; a brilliant satire of marriage and communal life, “The Devil at the Hearth”; and the eight feverish, impassioned letters that she wrote to Max as her affair with the man she still called “Frank” was coming to an end. In his early letters to her, Franz appended his second initial to his first name. Milena never noticed the z. And he never corrected her. For her alone he was a different person.
Milena confides about what is going poorly in her life: her health. He becomes alarmed, begs her to leave Vienna and find rest by a lake, perhaps in Meran, where he is staying.
“My God! Milena, if you were here!” he writes. “But I would be lying if I said that I missed you: for by the most cruel and perfect magic, you are here, even as I am, no, even more than I am. This is not a joke, I actually find myself thinking that you must miss me here, since you are very much here but asking yourself: Where is he? Didn’t he write that he was in Meran?”
She writes about her father and being cut off by him (Franz knows all about hard-hearted fathers, and on June 21 sends her his “Letter to His Father”), about her marital quarrels, her financial difficulties (he sends her money). In return, she asks him about his private life, his three engagements, his ties to Judaism, and his fears, all his fears.
From April to the end of June, they write each other every day, often several times a day, always by express mail. As they reach a feverish pitch, telegrams fly back and forth at a rapid rate. Franz addresses his letters to a fictional Frau Kramer, at the Poste Restante, where Milena goes to pick them up each morning and night. They both live in expectation, in impatient expectation, of learning more, and saying more: “This mania for letters is insane,” Franz writes her. “One tilts one’s head back, drinks the words down, knows nothing except that one doesn’t want it to stop. Explain that to me, Professor Milena.”
The attraction they feel for each other is so strong that by early June they are using the familiar Du and talking of love.
“Address me again with the word Du,” he writes. “And look me in the eye.”
Franz had often addressed the sturdy Felice as “My darling girl, my child.” Today he calls Milena: “My baby, my baby.” Yesterday he went so far as to call her “Mommy Milena.” The impetuous young woman, whom Franz has described to Max as “a living fire, such as I have never seen before,” summarily orders him never to use such ridiculous language again.
Reading Milena’s calm letters to him, he is happy: “It is rain on my burning head.” But when she castigates him, sends him goading messages (as she most often does), which are as inimical to him as holy water to the devil, he looks for a piece of furniture to crawl under and suffers wave after wave of anxiety.
“The letters, arising from incurable torment,” he writes, “only cause incurable torment. The written kisses do not arrive at their destination, they are sipped by phantoms along the way.”
By June 12, he can no longer stand the zigzagging of their letters.
“They have got to stop, Milena, they are driving us crazy. One no longer knows what one is writing, what the other is responding to, and, in any case, one trembles.”
The following day he changes his mind: “Write to me every day just the same, two little lines, or one, or a single word, but if I do not get this single word I suffer inordinately.”
When he writes that he is leaving Meran and returning to Prague, Milena asks him, begs him, to pass through Vienna. His letters are no longer enough. Franz takes fright, particularly as he has just received a telegram from Julie, which he can hardly bring himself to read: “Meeting in Karlsbad June 8, please confirm.” He telephones his fiancée: I am too worn out to make the journey. And he is afraid, horribly afraid, of going to Vienna, of not measuring up to the illusion that his letters and his books have fostered.
“I don’t want, I don’t want (no, I am not stuttering), I don’t want to pass through Vienna, the mental effort is more than I can bear, I have been ill since my three engagements. My headaches and all the old nights have turned my hair almost white. Consider that I am thirty-eight years old (double it, since I am Jewish), compared to your twenty-three Christian years.”
“Come,” she writes, “I am in such a funk, I need you actually here. I’m tired of looking at a face that is just a sheet of paper covered in words.”
“I’m frightened. I’m not tired, but I’m frightened of the extraordinary fatigue that would result from the extraordinary nervous strain.”
“Remember what you wrote me: ‘And one time, and ten times, and a thousand times, and all the time I want to be near you.’ ”
“I was saying what I thought, Milena. But there are many things that escape me, and possibly everything escapes me.”
“Come, hold me in your arms. I love you.”
“Every hour of my life to come looks at me and snickers: You received that letter, and you haven’t been to Vienna? Haven’t been to Vienna? Haven’t been to Vienna? Haven’t been to Vienna?”
“Come.”
“I can’t yet say whether I am coming to Vienna, but I’m fairly certain that I won’t.”
“You’ll come.”
“Today, I might say that I will surely come to Vienna. But tomorrow? I reserve my freedom.”
“I’m expecting you.”
“If I come to Vienna, I’ll send a telegram on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“You’ll come.”
“Milena, if you don’t receive an express letter on Thursday, it will mean that I have gone directly back to Prague. I have spent two nights without sleep.”
“I want to see you.”
“I’ll be in Vienna on Tuesday, barring the unforeseen.”
At ten a.m. on Tuesday, June 29, 1920, Franz arrives at the South Station. He drops his bags at the Hotel Riva (“Riva,” a good omen), although there is a garage nearby with put-putting car engines. He sits down to a cup of hot chocolate and an assortment of cakes and composes a telegram: he tells Milena he has arrived in the city and sets a meeting for the next morning in front of his hotel at ten o’clock. His breakfast eaten, he drops the letter off at the Poste Restante, then tries to put the day to good use by visiting the sights, preparing for his meeting, and quieting his nerves. He is afraid that his presence, the sight of this long, thin person, will bring Milena to the ground with a thump, break the epistolary enchantment.
They spend four days together, from June 30 to July 4.
Four radiant days, to hear Milena tell it.
“If I close my eyes, I see you again in Vienna, near me, I see your white shirt and your suntanned neck, you were climbing the hill, your steps rang out behind me. You walked all day, you went up, you went down, you stayed in the sun, your head on my bare breast, you didn’t cough once, you ate poorly, you were alert, gay, you slept all night.” (How would she know? They never spent a night together.)
Franz is more reserved. True, he hasn’t forgotten the forest where they took a long walk, the clearing where they lay on the warm grass, Milena’s face above and then below his own, the sweetness of their physical contact, all too brief, and the fixing of their bodies’ boundaries. He hasn’t forgotten the wind that, on the way home, puffed out the sleeves of Milena’s dress, Vienna on the horizon, the carriage ride through the popular quarters, the climb up the little paved street, the alleys in the evening light, and the happiness of lying on Milena’s bare shoulder.
“How nice it is to be with you,” he kept saying.
He often thinks of the wonderful stationery store they visited, where they stood pressed against one another. He is sorry he didn’t stay there longer. He can still see the massive armoire in Milena’s bedroom, he doesn’t like that armoire, it reminds him of the one Felice bought, a funerary monument. All these young women, why do they need these gigantic pieces of furniture? What is to be buried there, once they are married?
Milena has mentioned Franz to her husband, and Ernst has sworn, in the style of a music-hall skit, that he will sock, no, strangle the hapless lover. Franz is still laughing about it. “If only he would do it!” he says to Milena.
He knows, even before leaving Vienna, that he is losing the battle. Each night he makes his way back to the Hotel Riva alone, and he spends his mornings alone. A bell rings in his ear: Milena isn’t with you. She won’t leave her husband for you. Your prayers will have no effect.
He thinks back to his meetings in Berlin with Felice. Every one of them was a disaster. Although his letters strengthened, tightened their relationship, his presence, like an acid, dissolved it. Was the same process happening here? he asks himself. On July 4, Milena rises at dawn and accompanies him to the station dressed in her prettiest dress, her good-bye dress. But when he kisses her on the platform (was it too public, too insistent?) the young woman recoils ever so slightly, and he knows that he has lost Milena. The novel they constructed together with so much passion, so many letters and letters and more letters, so many declarations and confessions, each offering his self, and her self, voluptuously to the other, is only a novel, a shimmering mirage on the horizon.
“I can’t leave my husband for the moment.”
It is the truth. The excuses Milena offers are weak: “Ernst is sick, he has no money, he can’t live alone. And who will shine his boots?”
When he arrives back in Prague, Franz finds a letter on his desk from Julie, she asks to see him at three o’clock in front of her building. He decides to tell her everything. Arriving at six o’clock (he has sent word that he will be late), he notices that she looks quite unhealthy but is unmoved by it. Accustomed to speaking the truth, even to the smallest detail and whatever the consequences, he says, “I am with Milena, I am dissolved in Milena, I am only with Milena.”
Done like an executioner.
Julie’s face breaks apart, she trembles all over, she grows angry: “That woman already has a husband, and what’s more a husband she loves. She goes behind his back to see you. You live in Prague, she lives in Vienna, and she needs you on top of everything? Let me write to her, she’ll understand that I have only you. If I lose you, I have nothing, no reason to live.”
“You’ll still have my friendship and my affection, you know that perfectly well.”
“I want to see what she’s been writing you. Show me her letters.”
“Out of the question.”
“Give me her husband’s address.”
She begs him, driven by a bottomless despair. To appease her, and to bring the interview to a close, he gives her permission to write Milena.
It is after nightfall when they part. The next morning, Franz sends Julie an urgent message: “Don’t send the letter to Vienna before we’ve talked about it.”
Julie wrote the letter at dawn. She has just posted it when the telegram from Franz arrives. Panicked, she runs to the main post office. She is so relieved to intercept her letter that she gives all her money to the teller. That night, she turns the letter over to Franz.
Their meeting on that night is their last, they will never see each other again. Two rounds of letters follow in the days to come, then all between them is finished.
What does he do with Julie’s pleading letter? He sends it, without breaking the seal, to Milena. And Milena answers the tearful girl.
What does Julie do with her rival’s curt reply? She sends it to Franz without comment, only marking it up in pencil. She has double-underlined the sentence: “Forget all about him! He has never spoken a word to me about you, or so much as hinted at your existence in his letters.”
A cruel lie! In his first letters to Milena, Franz mentioned Julie, whom he calls “the girl.” He gave a faithful report of their engagement, their meetings, their talks, he even asked Milena to help him break off the relationship! He realizes how foolishly he has behaved only as his affair with Julie is coming to an end. He asks for forgiveness, but only from Milena.
We lose direct track of Julie after July 15, 1920, the day when, showing much good sense, she shows Franz the door. We know that she opened a millinery shop. Franz urges Ottla to visit it and buy a hat there.
A few years later, plagued by hallucinations, Julie is committed to the Weleslawin psychiatric asylum, the very institution Milena had been sent to by her father. There Julie dies. But in what year? 1930, 1931, 1932? Did she burn her fiancé’s few letters to expel him from her life, as she had been expelled from his? None survives.
What we know about his relation with the pretty milliner, whom he describes as “almost an enchantress by nature,” comes from the letter he wrote to her sister. This is the woman he glimpsed at Schelesen when she came to accompany Julie back to Prague. Why such a long account, some twenty pages, to a woman he didn’t know and who wanted nothing from him? Someone, furthermore, who never spoke a word to him though she most certainly knew about her sister’s romance and its termination. Was he trying to justify himself? Or leave a trace of the bond they shared, the events that drove them apart? Was it the impulse of a memoirist, intent on capturing the people he meets, the accidents of history, the bits of life?
Grete freed Franz from Felice, Milena got rid of “the girl” for him. Both did it in the same way, using weapons he had put in their hands: his letters.
After Vienna and the first crack in their relationship, Franz and Milena continue to write each other just as often as before, and just as lengthily. But Franz’s tone is no longer the same. His love, obsessive as ever, brings him only suffering: “You, Milena, are what I love most, you are a part of me (even if I am never to see you again), but you are the knife with which I probe my wound.”
His tone is sad, almost bitter, when he says: “Milena, don’t let the memory of our four radiant days lead you into making a mistake. We owed many of our beautiful moments to your certainty of returning to your husband each night. I am no longer contesting him for possession of you. The battle is all happening inside you. Rather than freeing you from Ernst, I have strengthened your mutual ties.”
And this: “If, during those four days, I had convinced you, you would no longer be in Vienna but in Prague.”
“It’s true, you asked me to leave Ernst and come with you. I didn’t do it, I couldn’t! I am too weak, too much a woman, to live the monastic life you lead, to take part in your strict asceticism. I have both feet on the ground, and a wretched love of life.”
“The only way to save another person is through one’s presence. There is no other way, Milena, and you know it.”
“You’re right. If I had gone with you when you were begging me not to abandon you, I would have given you proof of my love. This proof is something that you will always miss, and your fear will feed on it.”
“My fear is the best thing about me, it makes up my substance, and perhaps it is also what you love in me.”
In late July, Milena expresses a desire to meet without delay. There follows a tedious discussion about the date of the journey and its duration, one day or two? About the train schedules, “My head has turned into a railway station,” he says. They choose to meet at the halfway point, on the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia. A few days before the departure, Milena falls sick. She cancels the trip. She admits to Franz that she hasn’t found a plausible lie to tell her husband, whose violence she fears.
Then she decides that they will see each other on Sunday, August 14, for six hours, between two trains. By leaving Vienna at seven o’clock in the morning, she can reach Gmünd at eleven. She will return by a late-afternoon train and be back in Vienna that night. Her husband will never know of her escapade.
Gmünd is a disaster. Why? Neither of the lovers gives even the briefest account of it. Five or six times, Franz says to Milena: “The subject of Gmünd will have to be broached in our letters, or discussed between us.”
But he never addresses it. Nor is Milena anxious to revisit what happened, or failed to happen, in Gmünd. A memory that neither party is interested in discussing, what is the point?
Other than the fact that they saw each other for six hours, what remains of this day? This brief and surprising exchange:
“Have you been unfaithful to me in Prague?”
“Milena, I don’t even understand what the question could mean.”
And this command from Franz: “Stop writing letters to Max. I don’t want anyone to slip between us, or to influence us. If my state of health concerns you, I am the one who is sick. I alone can give you news of my health.”
Indications suggest that in the border town of Gmünd, the two lovers (who are no longer lovers) talked at length, but as though they were strangers.
“Mostly,” he writes Milena, “there were misunderstandings [about what?] and shame, a practically ineradicable shame [shame of what? Of his extreme tiredness, his impotence? Only desire is real, he had said], and lies [‘if I had come to fetch you in Vienna, you would be by my side, the rest is lies’].” Everything is his fault, he is so far below her: “Next to you, I feel dirty.”
To take a step backward: What happened in the six weeks separating Vienna and Gmünd? In the multitude of details about this period there are perhaps elements of an answer.
The moment Franz leaves Vienna, his head empty, tired (another defeat!), the imperious and demanding Milena sends him a long list of errands. He runs from shop to shop in search of the knit jersey or the ten books that she has asked for. He stands in line for the export permit he must obtain for each of the packages, into which he slips a little money.
For two long days in a heat wave with the temperature at one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and the trams on strike, he wanders among the graves in the cemetery looking for the resting place of Jeniček, Milena’s brother, who died as an infant. Franz’s head spins from peering at headstone inscriptions whose gold has faded away. After a long and tedious search, he discovers that the baby was buried not under his father’s name, Jesensky, but under his mother’s. Milena had not mentioned this detail.
Does he ask himself as he lays a bunch of carnations on the edge of the stone why Milena sent him to the grave of this infant, dead more than twenty years? To punish him? For what? To mourn their love and the child he has not given her, will never give her?
She directs him to arrange a meeting with Laurin, the garrulous editor of the Tribuna, for which she writes. He must also make repeated visits to two of her childhood friends. The first of them he finds horrid: “Whenever I want to imagine hell,” he says to Milena, “I think of Staša.”
The other, Jarmila, looks like a specter, an angel of death. She is in the midst of a tragic story: her husband, Joseph Reiner, discovers that she has had a love affair (perhaps platonic) with one of his friends. He kills himself. The news of his suicide casts a shadow over Franz and Milena: What if Ernst should do the same?
A further, more difficult mission is to obtain a reconciliation with Milena’s father. Milena is ill and short of funds, she would like her father to send her a regular allowance. Franz doesn’t feel strong enough to confront haughty Professor Jesensky. Instead, he negotiates with the professor’s assistant and mistress, Vlasta. After several rounds of back-and-forth, he obtains the desired result: Milena can take a rest cure by the lake at Saint-Gilgen as she had wanted.
When he gives her the news, she is indignant: “You’ve gone about it with such stupidity, such carelessness, such rotten clumsiness!”
He has spent six weeks running all over town in a heat wave, climbing endless spiral staircases, putting up with the babbling, the visits, and the thoughtless remarks of Staša and Jarmila, he has met for whole afternoons with people who revolted him and made him nervous. Drained of energy, he then spent his evenings in an armchair unable to move a muscle, his chest on fire, his body glazed with sweat, a sweat that gushed, it seemed to him, from his forehead, his cheeks, his temples, his scalp, his whole skull. He stared through the window, inert, at the building across the way, a one-story house that he couldn’t take his eyes off.
Max comes calling one night. He is so alarmed by his friend’s state of exhaustion that, without telling Franz, he writes a letter to Milena with strict instructions to be gentle with their friend: “His illness is much worse, did you not know?”
After nightfall, when the summer air has cooled and when he has stopped coughing, Franz sits down at his desk. His migraines notwithstanding, he composes a detailed account of his various errands, interjecting little jokes, punchy remarks about this person and that, in the hopes of eliciting some signs of gratitude, a smile, a compliment, from Professor Milena.
Who raps him on the head with her ruler.
“How can the soul relieve its oppression except with a little meanness?” he writes her. Realizing her ingratitude, she apologizes by telegram. Too late. He is dazed by her unreason. He can no longer draw the venom from her reproaches, which arrive in bursts. He can no longer bring himself to read Milena’s letters. He prays for the young woman to disappear out the window, as he no longer has the strength to live with a hurricane in his bedroom.
Resentment, remorse, exhaustion, the end of an illusion—that, most likely, is what was brewing in Gmünd.
One among a thousand possible scenes: Kafka fears this meeting so much that he hasn’t slept for several days. When he gets off the train, his legs wobble with anxiety. Milena walks toward him, she is wearing his favorite dress, the good-bye dress. At the sight of this man with graying hair and a slow walk, who looks at her with staring eyes (he wants to say: “Milena, by walking toward me you are plunging into the abyss”), this young woman, twenty-four years old, draws back in spite of herself. The man in Gmünd is not the man in Vienna, the tender, gay, alert lover whom she had adored. The man extending his arms to her is gravely ill. The enormous, the irresistible disappointment she feels is immediately reflected in the face of the stranger confronting her.
Six hours together, first stretched out on a patch of grass, then, when it starts to rain, lying like statues on a bed with suspect sheets in a shabby hotel by the station, a hotel for traveling salesmen.
Franz, his eyes shut, holds tightly to Milena’s hand as though afraid of drowning. She does not bare her shoulder, he does not touch his lips to her naked breast. She caresses his face as though caressing a child with fever. Between the silences, he returns to the same subject.
“If you were unable, or unwilling, to leave your husband although your marriage was going badly, it isn’t because Ernst is sick or because you’re dependent on him. It’s to avoid living with me. I am your scourge, and instead of separating you from your husband, I have brought you closer together, a truth that obsesses me. The rest is just lies. Let’s stop talking about the future, we’ll never live together, never even live in the same city. Let’s think only about the present.”
“Stop torturing me!” she says.
“I’ve told you many times, Milena, I do nothing but suffer torture and inflict it.”
“What is the reason for this?”
“To wrest truth from myself, extort confession.”
Before leaving the room, the young woman may have lingered in the bathroom. Wracked by remorse, by guilt, she remembers Max’s letter asking her to treat Franz gently. She hasn’t heeded this warning, she has constantly heaped reproaches on him, she tells herself he is going to die soon, he doesn’t have the capacity to live. Franz is the only man in the world who never accepts a compromise. No one has the enormous strength he has, his undeviating need for truth. His purity.
On their return to the station, Franz decides to send a postcard to Ottla, his sister, friend, and confidante. Why the card, when it will arrive after him? To leave some proof of his meeting with Milena? He is so tired that he declares the task beyond him. Making his proof even stronger, he asks Milena to write out a line or two of dictation. Below, she writes: “He was unable to finish. Yours, cordially.” Ottla kept this card, on which Milena’s handwriting appears, but not her signature—a married woman’s caution.
After Gmünd, she goes to Saint-Gilgen for a rest. During the two weeks of her stay and through the long month of November, Franz and Milena ask themselves the same question: Why is our relationship coming to an end?
Kafka attributes the problem to himself.
“But the real reason,” he tells her, “is the inability to get beyond these letters. A thousand letters from you, a thousand wishes from me, won’t change a thing.”
Once again he speaks to her of his fear, a fear that extends to everything: fear of what’s big, fear of what’s small, fear of night, fear of not-night, a convulsive fear of uttering a single word, fear of venturing into a world bristling with traps, fear of the future, fear of everything that lives without modesty, fear of being abandoned, an awful fear of suffering. And above all, fear of never being equal to what is expected of him, an insurmountable fear of disappointing the women he loves, a nagging worry of impotence. When they made love on the grass in Vienna, he had felt his throat constrict several times. When fear overcame him, Milena would look him in the eyes, together they would wait a moment, he would recover his breath, and everything would once more become simple and clear.
To Milena, and only to Milena, he gives an account of his first sexual experience, which, he claims, is at the root of his sexual fears. He is twenty years old and a law student. On a hot summer day, as he is beating his brains out to learn a chapter on Roman law by heart, he looks out the window and sees the salesgirl from the candy store across the street. She is getting a breath of air on the sidewalk. The girl looks at him, he looks at her. They smile at each other. Using hand signals they agree to meet. At eight o’clock when he arrives she is talking to a man with whom she walks off, signaling Franz to follow. The two sit in a cafe, where they order a beer. Franz takes a nearby table and does the same. The couple then sets off toward the girl’s house with Franz following.
For him it is irritating, exciting, horrible. The man leaves. Shortly after, Franz and the salesgirl go to a hotel. They emerge only at dawn. He sees her again two days later. His body, which has been in agonies for months, is contented, happy. Franz leaves on vacation not long afterward. On his return, he cannot bear to see the girl, pleasant though she is, he cannot say a word to her or offer her an excuse, nothing.
Why? At the hotel, the girl, all unconsciously, had made a nasty gesture—a gesture, he tells Milena, there is no call to specify. And she had said something dirty to him, also not worth mentioning. Yet both excited him frantically.
Afterward, his body—he talks about it as though it were an object in his keeping—was overtaken at irregular intervals by a keen desire, the desire for this dirty, repulsive something. The memory of these two bits of filth, the little gesture and the little phrase, was never erased, and for a long time he thought that this sordidness and horror were an integral part of the whole. The memory of it stayed with him forever after, a bad smell, a whiff of sulfur, a bit of hell lingering in the heart of pleasure.
“It is a little thing that determined my sexual life, just as in the great battles of history,” he jokes, “where the fate of little things has been decided by little things.”
Only in his journals does he confess his taste for brothels: “I walked by the brothel as though it were the house of a beloved,” he writes. On his daily walks through Prague, he chooses streets with prostitutes. It excites him to walk past them.
Sometimes he accosts one. In June there were six in all. He knows nothing more agreeable or more innocent than the fulfillment of this desire, he feels no remorse about it. He is drawn to large and slightly older girls, wearing unfashionable clothes whose flounces and furbelows give them something of an air of luxury. Or girls with hefty behinds. There is one that nobody apart from himself would find at all attractive. She stands on the street corner in a tight-fitting yellow coat. When he encounters her, he turns around several times to look back at her. Yesterday he saw a girl who was truly ugly. He was quite drawn to her all the same.
With Max Brod in Paris he visited brothels. He describes their organization, the electric bell at the front door. He finds the drawing rooms too crowded with girls, who hem you in too closely and make it hard to choose.
“I can’t understand how I found myself back on the street, can’t understand how it all happened so quickly.”
Did pleasure come too quickly?
Since coming to know Milena, he is no longer drawn absurdly into a world of squalor. His longing for sordidness has gone. He is no longer afraid.
Actually, in Gmünd, his fear returned at the very thought that Milena might never be his. He lost her.
On November 20, 1920, he ends their exchange of love letters. Milena accedes. Her hope, she says, is simply to separate from him completely.
In mid-December he flees. On his doctor’s advice, he checks in to a sanatorium in Matliary, a resort in the Tatra Mountains at three thousand feet. Its clientele includes the ailing, but also tourists, who come to hunt. Extending his leave of absence again and again, Franz stays there for ten months, until August 26, 1921.
To Max Brod, to Ottla, to his friends, he sends lively descriptions—written with such gaiety!—of the rooms he lives in before finally finding one that suits him. He offers portraits of the other guests, some thirty in number, and relates their conversation. He is an adept and genuine listener, and his tablemates speak freely before him. Mealtime discussions are often fueled by anti-Semitism. The legendary pusillanimity of the Jews is a frequent target, the cowardly subterfuges they used to avoid conscription during the war. “As to Jews who are also Communists,” he writes Max, “they are drowned in the soup and carved up with the roast. Everyone laughs appreciatively, then apologizes to me once more.”
He describes his diet in detail (liters of milk and cream but no meat, which inflames his hemorrhoids). He complains (again, as always) of the noise coming from the kitchen, the restaurant, the other rooms, the next-door balcony “where a young man (what a race!) hums Hebraic melodies, his hand thrust into his fly.”
To escape this cacophony that is driving him mad—his hearing, made keen by anxiety, picks up everything—he takes refuge, as he had at Zürau earlier, with Ottla, in a lovely prairie surrounded by woods, an island between two streams. There, steeped in silence like a fish in an aquarium, he wonders if the noises made by his neighbors irritate him because they point to the emptiness of his own existence and the solitude he revels in.
To Max alone, he mentions his state of health, the boils on his buttocks that are so deeply embedded they won’t heal, his flirtations, two walks with a young lady in the forest, nothing happened, he says, just a few long looks; the violent snowstorm that has been raging for two weeks and has pinned him deep in his bed. His fever is rising, he can no longer read, nor write, nor sleep, nor stay awake, he is too worn out, he coughs constantly. As he is recovering from this bout of influenza, he is pole-axed by intestinal fever.
The letters from Matliary resemble the stylistic exercises from Zürau, in which he described his epic struggle against the mouse people. One of them tells of visiting a neighboring patient, a Czech with tuberculosis of the larynx. The man invites him into his room one day and explains in a cavernous voice how, using mirrors, he captures the rays of the sun to irradiate the ulcers in the back of his throat, at the risk of burning himself severely. He then opens his mouth wide to display his sores to his visitor. Kafka feels himself sinking into a faint, as though a wave were breaking over him. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, using the walls of the room to guide himself, he flees onto the balcony, where he recovers somewhat in the cold air. He then exits the patient’s room without really taking his leave. Just a few words, “What a lovely evening!” to explain his outing onto the balcony, and “I feel quite tired” to justify his exit.
What he saw in that bed, he says, is “far more terrible than an execution, worse even than torture. All the misery of that life—the fever, the suffocation, the mirrors, the drug taking—has no other goal than to prolong the torture, which the patient freely inflicts on himself. And to this slow-burning pyre come parents, doctors, and visitors who cool and refresh the torture victim, console him, encourage him to endure further suffering. Then once back in their rooms, terrified, they wash their hands—as I have just done.”
There are others in Matliary besides patients at death’s door. Franz encounters young ladies, healthy young men, pretty serving girls, and numerous tourists. In February he develops a genuine friendship with one of the other guests, Robert Klopstock, a young man of twenty-one who has interrupted his medical studies to care for his lungs, which are lightly affected by tuberculosis. A native of Budapest, he is ambitious, intelligent, and literary, a tall man, wide of girth, blond, with pink cheeks. He is almost too corpulent (especially compared to Franz, who is having trouble regaining the pounds he lost earlier). Robert comes to Franz’s room every night to wrap him with the utmost care in cold-water compresses. They talk for hours. Franz grows more and more interested in the young man. He asks Ottla to send him books, drawn, as he specifies, from his own library.
He writes to Max: “Can you help him with his career? He is Jewish but no, he is not a Zionist. Dostoyevsky and Jesus are his masters.”
Since the letter of November 20, Milena has heard nothing further from him. Breaking her promise to Max, she writes Franz. He answers with just a few lines: “Don’t write to me and avoid any chance that we might meet. Do this, I beg you, without saying another word. Only this will let me go on living a little, the rest can only destroy me.”
Milena obeys but, toward mid-April, on a difficult night, she writes him again. She implores him to give her news of himself one last time. He learns from Max that, seriously ill, she has reconciled herself with her father and gone to live with him. He immediately writes Max: “Let me know when she will be in Prague and for how long, I do not want to run into her.”
Despite his resolve, he sees Milena again in late August. And in early October, he entrusts her with his thirteen large notebooks (she is the only other person to have read his Diaries, perhaps the only other person to have held them in her hands, during his lifetime). In late November, she comes to visit him four times at home. At this point, he hardly ever rises from bed. The visits are affectionate and dignified, but a bit weary, a bit stilted, as sickbed visits are.
In the lobby she encounters his parents. They greet her icily, Hermann Kafka in particular, who mutters under his breath as she goes by.
When Franz looks at the young woman sitting across from him, he remembers their first meeting at the Café Arco.
He thinks: I am a live memory, that is one cause of my insomnia, always Milena, or perhaps not Milena, but a light in the shadows.
Did the shadows hold the memory of a humiliation that he never explicitly admitted?
Does it not seem strange that in all the letters Kafka writes to Milena (some 150) there is no echo of any admiration on her part for his work? Whereas he heaps praise on the most trivial of her newspaper articles.
It was after reading The Stoker, The Metamorphosis, and A Country Doctor that Milena decided to translate them. And it was these texts that, like Ariadne’s thread, led her to Kafka and bound her to him.
During the months she worked on them, she sought the most faithful Czech equivalent for each of the words he had written, attentive to the rhythms of the sentences and the author’s hidden intentions. No one, consequently, had read the texts more attentively than she.
She submits each of her translations to him. He immediately congratulates her, praises her, calls her “Professor Milena.” He dreams of being her student, assures her that she has transformed his “bad, his extraordinarily bad stories” and made them readable. He hardly dares to bring up a few egregious mistranslations.
At the beginning of their correspondence in May, he tells “Dear Frau Milena” the story of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s first success. The Russian writer has just finished his first novel, Poor Folk. His roommate, Grigorowitsch, also a writer, reads it at once and is entranced by it. He steals the manuscript and runs off to show it to the most celebrated critic in Russia. At four in the morning Dostoyevsky’s doorbell rings. It is his friend with the great critic, Nekrasov, who, meeting Dostoyevsky for the first time, embraces him, kisses him on the cheek, and calls him “Russia’s hope.” They spend two hours together, talking mostly about the novel.
Kafka adds that Dostoyevsky, who would later remember this as one of the great nights of his life, leans out the window and watches the two men as they walk away at dawn. Choked with emotion, he starts to cry, repeating over and over: “What splendid men! How good they are, how noble, to have come during the night without waiting. Oh, how wonderful that is, how noble!”
That is not all.
On August 1, Franz dreams of Milena, a sad dream, which he tells her about in great detail. They are walking together on a street in Prague. Milena, her face heavily powdered, and the powder clumsily applied, is acting coldly toward him. The cause of her coolness he does not know. They meet a man at the cafe who looks like Dostoyevsky and who responds openly, cordially, amply, whenever Franz asks him a question. And who ignores him each time he stops questioning him.
These two stories have no effect. Milena refuses to play the part of Nekrasov. Tired of waiting for a compliment, or even a word of encouragement, he settles for a reproof: “Scold me thoroughly,” he writes, “for you know how to do everything, but scold me better than the rest.”
Whereas he upbraided Felice for offering no reaction to his first collection, Franz doesn’t dare question Milena directly. They discuss literature. Robert Louis Stevenson, about whom Kafka knows nothing, is Milena’s favorite author, along with Chekhov. Franz also admires Chekhov, at times passionately. On the other hand, he disparages a novel that Milena has several times urged him to read and praised to the skies: Marie Donadieu.16
He continues nonetheless to extend opportunities to her. He tells her with what haste, what emotion, he has read each of her articles, he can’t stand to miss a single one. He offers comments on them, keeps them like precious relics. He buys a dozen copies of each, as he does with her translations of his stories.
He sends her his “Letter to His Father.” In early October 1921 he gives her the bulky blue notebooks of his Diaries, of which even Max has read only rare passages.
Franz is waiting, one would swear, for Milena to swoon and send flowers. Yet once again she says nothing. The proof? On January 20, 1922, four months later, he asks her this question: “Did you find something decisive against me in the Diaries?”
He perhaps wonders if Milena even took the trouble to open his notebooks. Might she have stuffed them into some corner of her vast armoire and forgotten them?
Does he decide to fish for a criticism, if only to make her read his heart laid bare?
On January 18, 1923, although he is gravely ill, he writes her an interminable letter of congratulations, verging on flattery. He has just read Milena’s “The Devil at the Hearth.” He cannot find the words to express his admiration: “A marvelous and moving article, in which the dazzling character of your thoughts is striking, touching.”
In opposition to Max, Oskar, Felix, and Ernst, who howled with appreciative laughter at Franz’s reading of “The Metamorphosis” and the first chapters of The Trial, women, at least those who fall in love with him, find that his works depict a world where man is only a pitiful shadow under the sun, a world of absurdity where every undertaking is destined to failure, where the innocent accept their guilt, where even the emperor’s messenger cannot deliver his message because “if he were ever to reach the bottom of the stairs, he would be no farther along, as he would still have to cross the courtyards. And after the courtyards, the second palace surrounding them, and then more stairs and courtyards, and after them a further palace. And so on for centuries and centuries.” Chilled to the bone, Franz’s women no longer know the man they love, can no longer separate fiction from fact.
And yet … immediately following Kafka’s death, Milena published an obituary that one cannot read, and reread, without being deeply moved. An admirable analysis of the man and his work, one of the most sensitive ever written.17
On May 8, 1922, he sees Milena for the last time. Their encounter stays with him like a sore that won’t heal. “Don’t be unhappy,” he tells himself in the Diaries. “Don’t put any pressure on yourself, but don’t be unhappy that you are putting no pressure on yourself, stop sniffing voluptuously at the opportunity for pressure.”
Despite his sermons, he is clearly in distress.
The question that haunts him is whether, since he was happy with Felice in Marienbad, he might not now find happiness with Milena in Prague. After their painful breakup in Gmünd.
He doubts it. Between himself and Milena is not a wall but a grave. Yet sexual desire inflames him, tortures him day and night. “To satisfy it,” he writes, “I would have to overcome my fear, my sense of modesty, and also my sadness.”
Rejected by Milena, banished, expelled from the world and the company of the living, incapable—as he believes—of forming bonds with anyone, he buries himself. He disappears into silence, the darkness of his burrow, the only place where he feels safe. In nine months, with the tracery of his pen, he builds The Castle,18 his third and final novel, the most personal, the most allegorical, the novel that makes one wonder: Is it the memory of a disillusion that hovers on the heights?
15 After Kafka’s death, she asked Max Brod to burn them.
16 By the French social realist Charles-Louis Philippe (1874–1909).
17 An extract can be found on pages 257–58.
18 The Castle, unfinished at Kafka’s death, was published by Kurt Wolff in Munich in 1926. Of the print run of 1,500 copies, few were sold.