Free Kafka in Love by Jacqueline Raoul-Duval Page A

consolation,” she says.
    “I am not unhappy, or rather, I am unhappy to be as I am, about which I am inconsolable.”
    “Why did you not defend yourself in front of the others?”
    “I had nothing decisive to say.”
    He hums a tune from
Carmen
, “a closed mouth, no fly can enter.”
    “And it’s possible,” he continues, “that if I had had anything decisive to say, I’d have kept my silence. As an act of defiance.”
    “Why?”
    “All was lost. I could see Felice’s unhappiness. She isn’t to blame. For two years, she has suffered on my account as no criminal should ever have to suffer. She couldn’t understand that for me, the only escape from hell is through literature. But let’s leave all that.”
    He orders wine and, for himself, a slice of roast beef, thick and cooked rare. Erna voices her surprise: “I thought you were a vegetarian. Felice has so often complained of it!”
    “She insisted that I eat meat. Despite all the pressure that she brought to bear, I never did give in. I’ve always made a point of evading power, all forms of power. At my parents’ table, I don’t eat as they do, I eat in rebellion against them! And yet tonight, with you, I am becoming a carnivore again. And I am drinking wine. Strange as it seems, setbacks actually make me stronger.”
    “What did you do this afternoon, after …?”
    “After the trial at the hotel? I went to the Stralauer Ufer swimming pool. I saw men there with powerful bodies, running madly. I swam for a long time. I lay on the deck in the sun and felt the ebb and flow of tiredness in my joints.”
    Touched, Erna smiles. “Are you leaving tomorrow night?”
    “Yes. Would you like me to pass through Berlin again on my way back from Lübeck? I’d so like to see you again! We could go to Potsdam together. In the meantime, would you give me permission to write you?”
    The next morning he sends a letter of farewell by messenger to Carl and Anna Bauer, Felice’s parents. Thatevening, Erna accompanies Franz to the train station. With a troubling expression, she offers him her hand, says she believes in him and still has confidence in him. He is gladdened by her words.
    “I’ll write you from Lübeck,” he promises.
    He would wait two weeks before making a brief, elliptical allusion in his
Diaries
to what he always referred to afterward as the “Askanischer Hof Trial.”
    Two weeks during which he would ruminate the humiliation he suffered on that day. It was as if the shame of it would outlive him.
    Humiliation. The theme of the novel that he starts to write.

That Night, or the Marienbad Enigma

 
    H e spends two weeks on the beach in Marielyst, Denmark, barefoot, in the company of Ernst Weiss and his mistress Rahel Sansara, after meeting the couple by chance in Lübeck. The bickering of the two lovers sometimes annoys him. The hotel is only adequate. Meals don’t extend to fruits or vegetables, so he eats only meat, it’s horrible, he feels sick. But the beach is almost deserted, the days are sun-filled, the three of them go swimming every day.
    There is a photograph of Franz sitting cross-legged on the sand. Next to the bearlike Ernst Weiss, he appears anadolescent—sullen, distracted, aimless. From morning to night he mulls over the reproaches flung at him by Felice. The humiliation she inflicted on him in public still burns, as though he had rolled in nettles. He is at times relieved to have escaped marriage, at times dispirited at having lost his fiancée. He feels as hollow, he says, as a seashell about to be crushed under his big toe.
    On his return trip he stops in Berlin. According to plan, he sees Erna, who proves as amiable as ever. 7 They visit Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, linger in Voltaire’s bedroom, and generally get along so well that they decide to travel together at Christmas.
    On Sunday, July 26, 1914, Franz arrives back in Prague, where the mobilization of the military is under way. Disappointed at being turned down for