Kafka in Love by Jacqueline Raoul-Duval Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    5 Title of an oratorio by Handel.

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 theirappointments, 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,