Dear Franz,
Having outlived you by so many years, I often feel a bit uncertain about what you will and won’t understand. For example, what would you make of the phrase, zero to sixty in sixty seconds? That was how it was for us, my dear. One minute we were at Max’s apartment, perusing your vacation snapshots, which you handed me, sacramentally, one by one, over the table. A minute later, you were writing me letters, and then not writing, and I would write, or not write, a letter wouldn’t arrive, you’d write me an entire letter about the first letter not arriving, and so it was on, our great love affair, zero to sixty in sixty seconds.
It was all about the letters. The letters were our subject. Other couples had children, gardening, kisses, the theater. We had four hands, two typewriters, paper, two desks in distant cities.
But first, we had those snapshots: a mountain, trees, a stream, rocks, you and Max posed in some village square. I was glad to have them to look at. No one wanted me at that dinner. I was Max’s brother-in-law’s cousin, a family obligation passing through Prague en route to her Budapest sister. Not powerful, not beautiful, a secretary from Berlin. The pictures gave me some privacy, and besides, it was interesting to secretly watch you secretly watching me. Who were you? I’d forgotten your name. It wasn’t a name I’d heard. You were young, unmarried, nice looking, though other girls might not have thought so.
So many of your letters, dear, were childlike demands for truth – where did I go, what color hat did I wear, how well did I chew my food – that it seems a little strange that so much lying should have gone on. Right off, I only pretended to be interested in those (to be honest) rather boring vacation snapshots. I didn’t want to be at that dinner, but I knew no one else in Prague, and the meal was free. I knew how they felt about me, too, so that when Max pointed out that my food was getting cold while I lingered over the photos, it gave me pleasure to say I found it disgusting when people were no better than pigs, obsessed with stuffing their faces.
It wasn’t exactly a sacrifice. The food at Max’s was awful, those quivering lumps of animal fat my Prague relations ate. But when I said that about eating, you nodded wildly, and then seemed surprised to feel your own head bobbing up and down.
The conversation kept drifting to some dreary literary business you and Max had to settle. There wasn’t much I could add until someone mentioned needing a manuscript typed. It was as if I had left my body, and was watching myself hold forth on the fascinating subject of my life as a typist! I said I no longer typed any more, the firm hired girls to do that, but I saw nothing demeaning about the job, in fact I liked to type. How innocent you and Max were, dear, assuming that a woman stupid enough to like typing would be too stupid to know what effect it might have on a writer to hear that a woman liked to type.
You smacked the table and stared at me. I’ll admit, I liked the attention. So when the conversation drifted back to this or that magazine or publisher, I took advantage of a pause to remark how hard I was working, studying Hebrew in my spare time. You had mentioned Palestine, earlier in the evening.
Hebrew! How impressed you were! A braver, bolder spirit possessed you and made you declare that you not only wanted to go to Palestine, but you were planning to go this year! And then that bold angel or devil leapt from your head into mine, and made me say I would go with you. You asked if I meant it. I nodded. We shook hands on it, then and there, comradely and businesslike, with Max’s family watching. An agreement had been reached, a deal had been transacted.
You were never going to Palestine. I understood that, soon enough. And though at the moment I meant it, I wasn’t going, either. So let me return, for a moment, to the subject of lying.
I wasn’t studying Hebrew. I’d been thinking I might want to.
Dear, every couple tells little white lies that don’t seem false at the time. They say they love something they don’t really love, only because the beloved loves it, and for a moment they do love it, because the beloved does. That’s what is known as falling in love, though how could you have known that?
And now, my dear, a question that I can only ask you: What, do you think, would be the point of a man lying to his diary?
When your diaries were finally published, you had been gone for decades, but even so I felt a chill – a chill of conscience, you might say – at reading the intimate journals of a man to whom I’d once been engaged. Not once, as you well know, but twice. I am only human, as you were always so eager to point out, so perhaps I can be forgiven for admitting that I opened the volume directly to the date of our first meeting. As intimate as our courtship had been, I still feared that I was prying. And my punishment for this tiny sin? It was instant, dear, and cruel.
How shocking to learn that what you saw in me – that what attracted you – was what you called my emptiness. A bony empty face, displaying its emptiness openly was the exact expression that, I believe, you used. Bristly, unappealing hair, a big chin, a broken nose. I know I was never a beauty, I had trouble with my teeth. But I wouldn’t have called myself empty. Far from it. I was full of many things, energy, for one. I had supported my family since Father left us for his younger, more cheerful family on the other side of town. I traveled, I had an excellent job, friends, money, professional respect. I was a woman who had done well for herself even if I didn’t write books, like you and Max and your friends.
And if I’d written that to you, my dear? No one could ever correct you, because you always agreed with them and went further. You were a worm, a dog, a feral creature fit only to haunt the woods and crawl on the floor and beg for table scraps. Besides, those few times when we saw one another, I did feel myself empty out, like a spilt cup waiting to be filled by one precious drop from you.
No one else has ever made me feel that way in my entire life – the life that you despised me for wanting, and warned I would never find with you. No one else had the power to turn me into a melancholy ghost of myself, sighing and wringing her hands, too weak and indecisive to move from the sofa to the chair. There would be no point in saying that it wasn’t fair. You would only go on for pages of self-laceration, like the pages in the letter that included your marriage proposal. A girl wants to show such a letter to her family, her friends, her co-workers. But I couldn’t. You had made sure of that.
How much have you kept up, my dear? That is so hard to know. These days, women do what they please, they are just like men. But in our time, our circle, it was considered awfully modern to agree to go to Palestine with a stranger one had just met. It wasn’t something a girl would forget, but I tried. I told myself it was a joke. And then I received your first letter. The trip to Palestine was on. We needed to discuss it. Meanwhile, you felt you should warn me that you were careless, casual, lazy about correspondence. All lies, I need hardly say.
And then the second letter, the one I pretended to lose. I didn’t know how to answer it. I don’t know what I expected. Polite chat about your family, a remark about the office, the weather in Prague, but not those pages of complaint about the torture it had been for you to write every word you sent me. Was I supposed to be flattered, dear? I put it out of my mind, until a friend mentioned she’d heard that I was engaged in a very lively correspondence with a certain Doctor Kafka, and I said yes, a lively correspondence indeed, and so it was decided.
It wasn’t just the speed of it, the zero to sixty in sixty seconds, but the fact that you and yourself and our love affair took off and left me behind. I was good with numbers. If I’d had the time or the interest, I would have computed the ratio: the small number of our meetings compared to the large number of letters before and after, the notes arranging every detail and then reporting that you had changed your mind and then changed it again about whether the meeting would even take place.
Certain things did interest me: that note you enclosed with the flowers you sent me. ‘The outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful to contain everything that a person has inside.’ I recognised your handwriting, but you didn’t sign it. And what on earth did it mean? A more conventional woman might have been scared away for ever. And you, with your famous imagination, why could you not imagine the scene in which my family and friends gathered round and said, Flowers! Show us, dear Felice! What does your young man write?
There was so much you never forgave me for even as you claimed to take all the blame on yourself. For example, my so-called failure to understand your work. Oh, I understood it, all right. But how could I not have been jealous of the rival that, as you seized every chance to say, you loved so much more than me. How could I not have resented the hungry beast that had to be fed, and whose need for care and feeding meant you could never have a life. A normal life was all I wanted, dear, and what you claimed to want – at the beginning. A house, the voices of children, country vacations, Sunday lunch. You had your fantasies, and that was mine. Both were equally unlikely. Those Sunday lunches were as improbable as a machine that painfully tattooed the names of one’s crimes into one’s flesh, though maybe those things were the same for you. How would I ever know? By the way, dear, I’ve spent much of my life – my normal life – in America, which, I feel I must tell you, might be hard to recognise as the country you described in your book.
Since we are, as we frequently were, speaking of forgiveness, perhaps this is the moment to tell you about something for which I feel I might need to be forgiven. And that is the sale of the letters, dear, by which I mean your love letters to me. I don’t know if you know about this yet, it has only just happened. I have no idea how you get your information, or if you get any at all. Though matters of finance were always far below the lofty plane on which our love transpired, I must confess that I received, for them, the not inconsiderable sum of eight thousand dollars.
I agonised for a long time, as I’m sure you can believe. My deliberations are worth noting, if only because you were always the one who got to play and replay every theme and variation, to trace and retrace every baby step forward and backward in your thinking about this or that.
I thought about your reading Grillparzer’s letters, and Kleist’s, and I wondered if you could imagine some as yet unborn disciple of yours poring over your letters that way. I thought of how lightly you took it when my mother and sister found them, and how your only concern was that they should realise that, despite the passion and intimacy of our correspondence, we had spent only a few heavily chaperoned hours in each other’s presence. If they’d known you, they might have realised that, but that is not my point. I am merely consoling – or justifying – myself by recalling your lack of outrage at having something so tender exposed to unsympathetic eyes.
I am not the sort of person who adds things up, who divides life into debit and credit columns marking who did what, and who owes what. I have always thought that my not being that sort of person was among the many reasons that my marriage was so happy and lasted so long – until my late husband’s recent death. And yet I think that, in our case, some accounting is required. While I was pretending to have lost that second letter, you wrote ‘The Judgment’ in one night. While you were worrying about the flowers and the card you sent, you found relief by writing that terrifying description of that poor young man waking up as a bug. And then there was that meeting in the Berlin hotel room, a conversation that now, my dear, would be called an intervention. My friend and my sister helped me demand that you be honest and stop lying. Forever, you would refer to that afternoon as ‘the tribunal’. Who was being judged, dear? Who was being punished? You went off with Ernst and his sexy girl, you had a good time, you had fun. And I stayed in Berlin, feeling as hopeless, as cursed as you claimed to feel every day of your life. Later, you would write The Trial. Don’t I get any credit for that?
Which isn’t to say I don’t owe you some things: a tendency towards paranoia, a compulsion to analyse every word in an attempt to fathom its hidden meanings. That is how I first heard, in my grown children’s voices, the unspoken mathematics of how much my care might eventually cost, and which of them would assume it. It is they who urged me to sell the letters, so maybe you were right about the danger that children posed to your life as a writer. Or maybe you would have wanted them sold. Those letters were never written to me. They were messages from you to yourself, from you to yourself and the world. But even so, as my family has so often, and so unsubtly pointed out, I am old, my love, and your letters were all that I had.