Authors: Jacqueline Raoul-Duval
They spend four days together, from June 30 to July 4.
Four radiant days, to hear Milena tell it.
“If I close my eyes, I see you again in Vienna, near me, I see your white shirt and your suntanned neck, you were climbing the hill, your steps rang out behind me. You walked all day, you went up, you went down, you stayed in the sun, your head on my bare breast, you didn’t cough once, you ate poorly, you were alert, gay, you slept all night.” (How would she know? They never spent a night together.)
Franz is more reserved. True, he hasn’t forgotten the forest where they took a long walk, the clearing where
they lay on the warm grass, Milena’s face above and then below his own, the sweetness of their physical contact, all too brief, and the fixing of their bodies’ boundaries. He hasn’t forgotten the wind that, on the way home, puffed out the sleeves of Milena’s dress, Vienna on the horizon, the carriage ride through the popular quarters, the climb up the little paved street, the alleys in the evening light, and the happiness of lying on Milena’s bare shoulder.
“How nice it is to be with you,” he kept saying.
He often thinks of the wonderful stationery store they visited, where they stood pressed against one another. He is sorry he didn’t stay there longer. He can still see the massive armoire in Milena’s bedroom, he doesn’t like that armoire, it reminds him of the one Felice bought, a funerary monument. All these young women, why do they need these gigantic pieces of furniture? What is to be buried there, once they are married?
Milena has mentioned Franz to her husband, and Ernst has sworn, in the style of a music-hall skit, that he will sock, no, strangle the hapless lover. Franz is still laughing about it. “If only he would do it!” he says to Milena.
He knows, even before leaving Vienna, that he is losing the battle. Each night he makes his way back to the Hotel Riva alone, and he spends his mornings
alone. A bell rings in his ear: Milena isn’t with you. She won’t leave her husband for you. Your prayers will have no effect.
He thinks back to his meetings in Berlin with Felice. Every one of them was a disaster. Although his letters strengthened, tightened their relationship, his presence, like an acid, dissolved it. Was the same process happening here? he asks himself. On July 4, Milena rises at dawn and accompanies him to the station dressed in her prettiest dress, her good-bye dress. But when he kisses her on the platform (was it too public, too insistent?) the young woman recoils ever so slightly, and he knows that he has lost Milena. The novel they constructed together with so much passion, so many letters and letters and more letters, so many declarations and confessions, each offering his self, and her self, voluptuously to the other, is only a novel, a shimmering mirage on the horizon.
“I can’t leave my husband for the moment.”
It is the truth. The excuses Milena offers are weak: “Ernst is sick, he has no money, he can’t live alone. And who will shine his boots?”
W
hen he arrives back in Prague, Franz finds a letter on his desk from Julie, she asks to see him at
three o’clock in front of her building. He decides to tell her everything. Arriving at six o’clock (he has sent word that he will be late), he notices that she looks quite unhealthy but is unmoved by it. Accustomed to speaking the truth, even to the smallest detail and whatever the consequences, he says, “I am with Milena, I am dissolved in Milena, I am only with Milena.”
Done like an executioner.
Julie’s face breaks apart, she trembles all over, she grows angry: “That woman already has a husband, and what’s more a husband she loves. She goes behind his back to see you. You live in Prague, she lives in Vienna, and she needs you on top of everything? Let me write to her, she’ll understand that I have only you. If I lose you, I have nothing, no reason to live.”
“You’ll still have my friendship and my affection, you know that perfectly well.”
“I want to see what she’s been writing you. Show me her letters.”
“Out of the question.”
“Give me her husband’s address.”
She begs him, driven by a bottomless despair. To appease her, and to bring the interview to a close, he gives her permission to write Milena.
It is after nightfall when they part. The next morning, Franz sends Julie an urgent message: “Don’t send the letter to Vienna before we’ve talked about it.”
Julie wrote the letter at dawn. She has just posted it when the telegram from Franz arrives. Panicked, she runs to the main post office. She is so relieved to intercept her letter that she gives all her money to the teller. That night, she turns the letter over to Franz.
Their meeting on that night is their last, they will never see each other again. Two rounds of letters follow in the days to come, then all between them is finished.
What does he do with Julie’s pleading letter? He sends it, without breaking the seal, to Milena. And Milena answers the tearful girl.
What does Julie do with her rival’s curt reply? She sends it to Franz without comment, only marking it up in pencil. She has double-underlined the sentence: “Forget all about him! He has never spoken a word to me about you, or so much as hinted at your existence in his letters.”
A cruel lie! In his first letters to Milena, Franz mentioned Julie, whom he calls “the girl.” He gave a faithful report of their engagement, their meetings, their talks, he even asked Milena to help him break off the relationship! He realizes how foolishly he has behaved only as his affair
with Julie is coming to an end. He asks for forgiveness, but only from Milena.
We lose direct track of Julie after July 15, 1920, the day when, showing much good sense, she shows Franz the door. We know that she opened a millinery shop. Franz urges Ottla to visit it and buy a hat there.
A few years later, plagued by hallucinations, Julie is committed to the Weleslawin psychiatric asylum, the very institution Milena had been sent to by her father. There Julie dies. But in what year? 1930, 1931, 1932? Did she burn her fiancé’s few letters to expel him from her life, as she had been expelled from his? None survives.
What we know about his relation with the pretty milliner, whom he describes as “almost an enchantress by nature,” comes from the letter he wrote to her sister. This is the woman he glimpsed at Schelesen when she came to accompany Julie back to Prague. Why such a long account, some twenty pages, to a woman he didn’t know and who wanted nothing from him? Someone, furthermore, who never spoke a word to him though she most certainly knew about her sister’s romance and its termination. Was he trying to justify himself? Or leave a trace of the bond they shared, the events that drove them apart? Was it the impulse of a memoirist, intent on capturing the people he meets, the accidents of history, the bits of life?
Grete freed Franz from Felice, Milena got rid of “the girl” for him. Both did it in the same way, using weapons he had put in their hands: his letters.
A
fter Vienna and the first crack in their relationship, Franz and Milena continue to write each other just as often as before, and just as lengthily. But Franz’s tone is no longer the same. His love, obsessive as ever, brings him only suffering: “You, Milena, are what I love most, you are a part of me (even if I am never to see you again), but you are the knife with which I probe my wound.”
His tone is sad, almost bitter, when he says: “Milena, don’t let the memory of our four radiant days lead you into making a mistake. We owed many of our beautiful moments to your certainty of returning to your husband each night. I am no longer contesting him for possession of you. The battle is all happening inside you. Rather than freeing you from Ernst, I have strengthened your mutual ties.”
And this: “If, during those four days, I had convinced you, you would no longer be in Vienna but in Prague.”
“It’s true, you asked me to leave Ernst and come with you. I didn’t do it, I couldn’t! I am too weak, too much a woman, to live the monastic life you lead, to take part in
your strict asceticism. I have both feet on the ground, and a wretched love of life.”
“The only way to save another person is through one’s presence. There is no other way, Milena, and you know it.”
“You’re right. If I had gone with you when you were begging me not to abandon you, I would have given you proof of my love. This proof is something that you will always miss, and your fear will feed on it.”
“My fear is the best thing about me, it makes up my substance, and perhaps it is also what you love in me.”
I
n late July, Milena expresses a desire to meet without delay. There follows a tedious discussion about the date of the journey and its duration, one day or two? About the train schedules, “My head has turned into a railway station,” he says. They choose to meet at the halfway point, on the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia. A few days before the departure, Milena falls sick. She cancels the trip. She admits to Franz that she hasn’t found a plausible lie to tell her husband, whose violence she fears.
Then she decides that they will see each other on Sunday, August 14, for six hours, between two trains. By leaving Vienna at seven o’clock in the morning, she
can reach Gmünd at eleven. She will return by a late-afternoon train and be back in Vienna that night. Her husband will never know of her escapade.
Gmünd is a disaster. Why? Neither of the lovers gives even the briefest account of it. Five or six times, Franz says to Milena: “The subject of Gmünd will have to be broached in our letters, or discussed between us.”
But he never addresses it. Nor is Milena anxious to revisit what happened, or failed to happen, in Gmünd. A memory that neither party is interested in discussing, what is the point?
Other than the fact that they saw each other for six hours, what remains of this day? This brief and surprising exchange:
“Have you been unfaithful to me in Prague?”
“Milena, I don’t even understand what the question could mean.”
And this command from Franz: “Stop writing letters to Max. I don’t want anyone to slip between us, or to influence us. If my state of health concerns you, I am the one who is sick. I alone can give you news of my health.”
Indications suggest that in the border town of Gmünd, the two lovers (who are no longer lovers) talked at length, but as though they were strangers.
“Mostly,” he writes Milena, “there were misunderstandings [about what?] and shame, a practically ineradicable shame [shame of what? Of his extreme tiredness, his impotence? Only desire is real, he had said], and lies [‘if I had come to fetch you in Vienna, you would be by my side, the rest is lies’].” Everything is his fault, he is so far below her: “Next to you, I feel dirty.”
T
o take a step backward: What happened in the six weeks separating Vienna and Gmünd? In the multitude of details about this period there are perhaps elements of an answer.
The moment Franz leaves Vienna, his head empty, tired (another defeat!), the imperious and demanding Milena sends him a long list of errands. He runs from shop to shop in search of the knit jersey or the ten books that she has asked for. He stands in line for the export permit he must obtain for each of the packages, into which he slips a little money.
For two long days in a heat wave with the temperature at one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and the trams on strike, he wanders among the graves in the cemetery looking for the resting place of Jeniček, Milena’s brother, who died as an infant. Franz’s head spins from peering at headstone
inscriptions whose gold has faded away. After a long and tedious search, he discovers that the baby was buried not under his father’s name, Jesensky, but under his mother’s. Milena had not mentioned this detail.
Does he ask himself as he lays a bunch of carnations on the edge of the stone why Milena sent him to the grave of this infant, dead more than twenty years? To punish him? For what? To mourn their love and the child he has not given her, will never give her?
She directs him to arrange a meeting with Laurin, the garrulous editor of the
Tribuna
, for which she writes. He must also make repeated visits to two of her childhood friends. The first of them he finds horrid: “Whenever I want to imagine hell,” he says to Milena, “I think of Staša.”
The other, Jarmila, looks like a specter, an angel of death. She is in the midst of a tragic story: her husband, Joseph Reiner, discovers that she has had a love affair (perhaps platonic) with one of his friends. He kills himself. The news of his suicide casts a shadow over Franz and Milena: What if Ernst should do the same?
A further, more difficult mission is to obtain a reconciliation with Milena’s father. Milena is ill and short of funds, she would like her father to send her a regular allowance. Franz doesn’t feel strong enough to confront haughty Professor Jesensky. Instead, he negotiates with the professor’s
assistant and mistress, Vlasta. After several rounds of back-and-forth, he obtains the desired result: Milena can take a rest cure by the lake at Saint-Gilgen as she had wanted.
When he gives her the news, she is indignant: “You’ve gone about it with such stupidity, such carelessness, such rotten clumsiness!”
He has spent six weeks running all over town in a heat wave, climbing endless spiral staircases, putting up with the babbling, the visits, and the thoughtless remarks of Staša and Jarmila, he has met for whole afternoons with people who revolted him and made him nervous. Drained of energy, he then spent his evenings in an armchair unable to move a muscle, his chest on fire, his body glazed with sweat, a sweat that gushed, it seemed to him, from his forehead, his cheeks, his temples, his scalp, his whole skull. He stared through the window, inert, at the building across the way, a one-story house that he couldn’t take his eyes off.
Max comes calling one night. He is so alarmed by his friend’s state of exhaustion that, without telling Franz, he writes a letter to Milena with strict instructions to be gentle with their friend: “His illness is much worse, did you not know?”
After nightfall, when the summer air has cooled and when he has stopped coughing, Franz sits down at his
desk. His migraines notwithstanding, he composes a detailed account of his various errands, interjecting little jokes, punchy remarks about this person and that, in the hopes of eliciting some signs of gratitude, a smile, a compliment, from Professor Milena.