great injustice. What remains an enigma to me is Marienbad. Why …”
He doesn’t finish his sentence.
T hat afternoon and the following day are terrible. He has to convince Felice that she cannot become attached to a man like him. He accuses himself of ruining her life, he has made her fall out with Grete Bloch, he has made her fall out with her sister Erna, he has contributed to the death of her father, he has tortured her in everyway conceivable, he has tyrannized her, he has insisted that she learn to swim, that she perform gymnastics, that she stop eating sugar cubes, that she volunteer ever longer hours at the Jewish People’s Home …
Felice puts her hand over his mouth: “Stop, Franz, please, you are talking nonsense, absolute nonsense.”
“Then stop asking me why I am putting an end to it, don’t prolong my humiliation.”
More gently, he continues: “I’ll tell you a secret, I am not going to recover my health. My tuberculosis is not an illness that you put to rest on a deck chair, it is a weapon that I need, one that will stay with me as long as I live. And we cannot both remain alive, my illness and I.”
On the morning of December 27, he accompanies Felice to the train station. He knows that he will never see her, never hear from her again. He watches her climb into a carriage, watches the train pull away, he cannot contain the emotions working in him. Pale, his face hard and cold, he seeks out Max. His friend is at the office, and he is not alone. One of his colleagues sits at an adjoining desk. Paying no attention to this man, whom he seems not to see, paying no attention to the bustle going on around them, Franz sits down next to his friend. He bursts into tears.
Max is worried, it is the first time since he has known Franz that he has ever seen him cry, cry openly, the tears rolling down his cheeks. Between sobs, he hears him say: “Isn’t it terrible that it should come to this, isn’t it terrible?”
13 The consolation that Julia Kafka offered her son, on learning that his second engagement had been called off.
“One has simply been sent out as a biblical dove, and having found nothing green, now slips back into the darkness of the ark.”
— LETTER TO MILENA
Julie, the Forgetting
S panish influenza, rampant across Europe, strikes him in early October. His temperature soars to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and remains there. His mother tends to him day and night, thinks he will die, cries at his bedside. She remembers her two sons Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of six and eighteen months.
Franz recovers, then relapses. His lungs deteriorate. When he gets over the flu, he is so weakened that his doctor prescribes a long rest cure in the countryside.
On November 30, 1918, his mother drops him off in Schelesen, a village north of Prague that Franz knows. Atthis time of year, he is the only guest at the small hotel kept by Fräulein Olga Studl. He stays there four months, at sixty krone a day.
He spends the days lying in a deck chair on his balcony, breathing the fresh air, swathed in blankets, looking out at the wooded hills. The quiet is broken only at lunchtime by the snarling of the hotel’s dogs, Meta and Rolf, fighting over the remains of Franz’s meal, which he tosses out the window to them.
One day in January, a second guest arrives. It is a young woman of twenty-eight, Julie Wohryzek. Winter is at its height, and the hotel, the hills, the forests are buried in crystalline snow, which sparkles as far as the eye can see. It could be Lapland, and there is no traveling except by horse-drawn troika. But the intense cold outdoors keeps the two convalescents prisoners inside “this truly enchanted habitation.”
The early moments of their relationship belong in a film comedy. Franz and Julie keep walking into each other, as they traverse the hotel’s deserted hallways, or enter the empty dining room, or rise from their respective tables, which are yards apart, or
He doesn’t finish his sentence.
T hat afternoon and the following day are terrible. He has to convince Felice that she cannot become attached to a man like him. He accuses himself of ruining her life, he has made her fall out with Grete Bloch, he has made her fall out with her sister Erna, he has contributed to the death of her father, he has tortured her in everyway conceivable, he has tyrannized her, he has insisted that she learn to swim, that she perform gymnastics, that she stop eating sugar cubes, that she volunteer ever longer hours at the Jewish People’s Home …
Felice puts her hand over his mouth: “Stop, Franz, please, you are talking nonsense, absolute nonsense.”
“Then stop asking me why I am putting an end to it, don’t prolong my humiliation.”
More gently, he continues: “I’ll tell you a secret, I am not going to recover my health. My tuberculosis is not an illness that you put to rest on a deck chair, it is a weapon that I need, one that will stay with me as long as I live. And we cannot both remain alive, my illness and I.”
On the morning of December 27, he accompanies Felice to the train station. He knows that he will never see her, never hear from her again. He watches her climb into a carriage, watches the train pull away, he cannot contain the emotions working in him. Pale, his face hard and cold, he seeks out Max. His friend is at the office, and he is not alone. One of his colleagues sits at an adjoining desk. Paying no attention to this man, whom he seems not to see, paying no attention to the bustle going on around them, Franz sits down next to his friend. He bursts into tears.
Max is worried, it is the first time since he has known Franz that he has ever seen him cry, cry openly, the tears rolling down his cheeks. Between sobs, he hears him say: “Isn’t it terrible that it should come to this, isn’t it terrible?”
13 The consolation that Julia Kafka offered her son, on learning that his second engagement had been called off.
“One has simply been sent out as a biblical dove, and having found nothing green, now slips back into the darkness of the ark.”
— LETTER TO MILENA
Julie, the Forgetting
S panish influenza, rampant across Europe, strikes him in early October. His temperature soars to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and remains there. His mother tends to him day and night, thinks he will die, cries at his bedside. She remembers her two sons Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of six and eighteen months.
Franz recovers, then relapses. His lungs deteriorate. When he gets over the flu, he is so weakened that his doctor prescribes a long rest cure in the countryside.
On November 30, 1918, his mother drops him off in Schelesen, a village north of Prague that Franz knows. Atthis time of year, he is the only guest at the small hotel kept by Fräulein Olga Studl. He stays there four months, at sixty krone a day.
He spends the days lying in a deck chair on his balcony, breathing the fresh air, swathed in blankets, looking out at the wooded hills. The quiet is broken only at lunchtime by the snarling of the hotel’s dogs, Meta and Rolf, fighting over the remains of Franz’s meal, which he tosses out the window to them.
One day in January, a second guest arrives. It is a young woman of twenty-eight, Julie Wohryzek. Winter is at its height, and the hotel, the hills, the forests are buried in crystalline snow, which sparkles as far as the eye can see. It could be Lapland, and there is no traveling except by horse-drawn troika. But the intense cold outdoors keeps the two convalescents prisoners inside “this truly enchanted habitation.”
The early moments of their relationship belong in a film comedy. Franz and Julie keep walking into each other, as they traverse the hotel’s deserted hallways, or enter the empty dining room, or rise from their respective tables, which are yards apart, or
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