Free Kafka in Love by Jacqueline Raoul-Duval Page B

military service—a stint in the army would have freed him from the office, from Prague, from his listlessness—Franz pays little attention to the declarations of war, the troop movements, and the mad bloodthirst intensifying in Europe, as the floodgates of evil prepare to open.
    On August 2, learning of Austria’s entry into the war, he spends the afternoon at the swimming pool.
    He looks on disparagingly at military parades, “among the most repulsive accompaniments to the hostilities.” A cold, often cynical observer, he lambasts “the stupidity of the soldiers, the criminal blindness of the crowd.”
    His brother-in-law, by contrast, is called up to serve his country. Franz’s sister Elli decides to move back in with her parents, along with her two children, Felix and Gerti. Franz turns over his room in his parents’ house to his sister and moves into her old apartment.
    For the first time in his life, he has a place to himself, a quiet three-bedroom. His routine is as inflexible as ever: at the office until 2:30 p.m., lunch at his parents’ house, then home to read the newspaper and the day’s mail, followed by a long siesta until 9:00 p.m. He then walks to his parents’ for a family dinner and at 10 p.m. rides the tram home. Chained to his desk, he then works on his new novel until he drops from exhaustion. He glimpses Max for a few minutes on his way home from work but no one else. His novel progresses so well that he asks for a week’s vacation in October, followed by a second week. He works until five in the morning, sometimes even until 7:30. It is his way of fighting. Absorbed in the pleasure of writing, he is metamorphosed. In the afternoon he indulges in long solitary walks along the paths of ChotekPark, the most lovely spot in Prague, with its birds, its palace and arcades, its old trees that cling to their last year’s leaves, its half-light. He wolfs down a story by Strindberg,
Entzweit
, a gem. 8
    Before long, he is reading Max the first chapter of
The Trial
, and he sends an inventory of the texts he has been working on: “Memories of the Kalda Railway,” “The Village Schoolmaster,” “The Substitute.” “Here I am,” he says, “with five or six stories lined up before me like horses in front of a circus ringmaster.” He finishes only “In the Penal Colony” and the last chapter of
Amerika
: “The Oklahoma Theater.”
    N o news of Felice since the “Askanischer Hof Trial.”
    He doesn’t seek her out. In late October, he receives a letter from her, another letter of regret: regret at having been hostile, nervous, and at the end of her strength.
    “Can you explain to me,” she writes, “what your position was? What it is today?”
    The balance of power has shifted. Now, it is Felice who is begging Franz to write.
    He spends several evenings answering her. Reading the many pages he produced, one senses a change, hears a certain weariness, as though Franz were a teacher patiently addressing a student whom a fly has distracted.
    “For me, nothing has changed in the last three months, absolutely nothing, either for good or ill, you are still the greatest friend to my work and its greatest enemy.”
    He explains that there are two beings at war within him: one is more or less congruent with the man that Felice would like to marry, and this man loves her beyond all measure; the other fights against her tooth and nail because of the hatred and fear she feels toward his work and his way of life. And nothing about either one of these men can be changed without destroying both.
    He adds: “If I said nothing at the Askanischer Hof, it’s because I couldn’t shake from my mind your aversion to the way I organize my life.”
    And he has a duty to protect his work, which alone gives him the moral right to live.
    “Our letters never benefited us much,” he writes. “Even the most beautiful contained a hidden worm; I’llwrite you infrequently, we must not start torturing each other