Life Sentences (13 page)

A bug’s biographer. You might imagine it the other way: a flea that observes the amorous frolics of its host. They do follow one another
rather continuously—come in crowds—these dutiful recorders. This particular life of me has scarcely reached the shores of Amerika when another vast bio appears in Germany. The present one is by Reiner Stach, who subtitled it “The Decisive Years.” It is mostly about Franz’s seesaw affair with his mail-order fiancé, Felice Bauer. I understand that it has been given a wonderfully supple translation by Shelley Frisch. The latest one, not yet at your shores, is by Peter-André Alt and subtitled
Der ewige Sohn
(“The Eternal Son”). Stach’s is a splendid effort, and will be hard to surpass. I shall have had one short life, but many and long are the works that try to transcribe me. Consider your own life and imagine how you would feel if the way you ate were an issue, if every weakened purpose you took to work were written up, every deception documented, the interrogations you mimicked and mocked carried on into your afterlife (“Was Franz Kafka a real man?”), and every letter you ever wrote, even those you never sent, were to be prominently printed in a learned book. Unless, of course, you had already cut yourself like a coroner into three enigmatic egos—the overburdened and suffering son, called Dr. Kafka at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute on account of his law degree; the episoler and unhappy lover who signs himself “Franz” and begs for an immediate reply; the sensitive artist, diarist, and tormented perfectionist who stays awake to fashion nightmares for a sleeping world—while planning very carefully (though not all that consciously) for the immortality of each of them.

(If we were three, Felice was four. Franz almost immediately parceled her out. The first was the girl he met at Max Brod’s place in Prague, the second the one who wrote him letters from Berlin where she lived and worked, the third the woman with whom he strolled when he visited her apartment in Charlottenburg, and the fourth is the person who leads her own Berlin life, has friends he does not know, and visits places he has not been. What a surprising lot of folks for one romance.)

In my writerly guise my pages will be as shocking as my present prehistoric carapace. I want to publish principally to prove to my
father I can be a success at something. But not in my role as a writer, rather in my role as a son. Perhaps I would prefer my scribblings to stay unseen and my bound and printed sheets to remain unread, even though I have carefully placed a copy of my first book on the nightstand next to my father’s bed. I want his approval so I can scorn it. I want his approval though my need makes me ashamed. I depend upon his animosity, for it defines me, gives me edges just as the man who cuts out your silhouette from a sheet of black paper does; and, for the sum of loose change, gives you the profile of a piece of land. My movements are awkward, my body cumbersome, my desires mixed. I can debate the situation with my head but however it goes—approval or blame—I remain a failure.

Yes, I remember writing a fragment of fiction about just such a situation. I am safely … my character is safely in his own bed, but it threatens to become his bride’s bed too, so my reluctant bridegroom imagines sending his properly decked-out body to the wedding while he remains at home, unable to venture beyond his blankets because—well—because he is a “large beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.… I would then act as though it was a matter of hibernation.…” My metaphor would marry and make love. I would not be required to attend.

Yes, I must be a different species. I dislike everything my family does. I cannot eat what they eat; I cannot abide their games; the noises of their life are like the scratch of chalk; and they move through my room to other rooms like trains through a station. I only come out at night, when the card game is conceded, the last door closed, my father’s lungs cough, and the parental bedsprings sigh. I come out into the comforting emptiness of silence, where I may lead my counterclockwise life.

That is why, as a fiction, I define my room by doors: because I have so little privacy in daily life. Doors will dominate my correspondence too. “Dear Fräulein,” Franz shall write to Felice Bauer, “My wretched letter had to suffer through so much before it was written. Now that the door between us appears to be beginning to budge, or
at least we have taken hold of the handle, I surely can, or even must, say it. The moods I get into, Fräulein! A torrent of nervousness is constantly raining down on me. What I want one minute, I don’t want the next.” How cautious Franz is too. He says he must say … what? but he does not say … anything. The door appears … to be beginning … to op—… Well, perhaps we have only touched the handle … His caution is that of a cat who may be kicked … at any moment.

My problem, if I were to put it simply, is the family, the dynamics of the family, the reach of relations, the forced feeding of custom and belief, the close embrace of the tribe, the shrinking circle that begins the words
obey
and
obligation
and concludes every
no
that issues from my father’s mouth to sum me up as a zero. The family is formed by a system of functions: the father’s to rule and provide, direct and protect, beget and mold; the mother’s to cherish and succor, to bear and care; the child’s to obey and prepare, to mate and become mother or father in another such system, perpetuating the name, supplying the tribe with more tribesmen, adding to its coffers, filling with good repute each grave.

To love as one might like to love is impossible. Marriages are arranged. Sex is overseen by a rabbi (in my case) and directed by religious rules and with economic expectations. In fact, the law is what is loved. It is worshiped because it preserves the position of the father. Obey the powers that be and one day you shall be obeyed. What you suffer now, you shall cause others to suffer, so your early suffering shall not be in vain. I cannot swallow this. I cannot get it down. I cannot incorporate. When I was a man I could not eat the good red meat from the family table; now that I am a bug I cannot eat it either. I am thin because I manage only lettuce and old air. My eyes grow as large as a starveling’s, and my voice lacks the loud assurance of my father’s, although its softness is often admired as one might admire soft cloth. I dress expensively, however, projecting a dark ethereality that has its own charm. I am too tall. My doctor finds me not quite well—bad digestion, underweight, and nervous as a gnat. He sends me off to a nudist camp. Well, not quite—to
a sanitarium where sexually separated guests sometimes forgo all clothes on behalf of nature’s benevolent breezes, and enjoy a roll on the morning’s damp, democratically naked grass. Sickness has its own attractions. I can be too weak to work, and take to my sofa, behind closed doors, where I pillow my head in a dream. Or I reread my diaries. They make me despair. Then with great energy I can pursue a wild idea, a nutty project, while allowing my assigned duties to lapse, like a sentry who leaves the main gate to guard the latrine. The guilt I feel may be worth it, because this behavior drives my father beyond the edge of dither. Dr. Kafka brings undesirables home to dinner, but even that does little to improve my appetite. In addition, I Fletcherize my food: I cut my vegetables into small squares. Then I chew each bit slowly and with great deliberation. With distaste. My father hides behind his paper, through which, I know, he stares.

I hesitate to approach them. Girls, I mean, not the ladies whom one can hire like a hansom. Horses, apes, insects—any species other than the human—are my imaginary companions. Well, they all eat; they all mate. And there are always repercussions. As a son I am asked to breathe fumes at an asbestos factory, sit all day in the din of hammered tacks as secretaries type and the family yaps. No silence. No privacy. Not a hint of anything higher than a rabbi’s reach to obtain a scoop of sour cream to dab on his latkes. Now my supervisor is hammering on my door. I try to make excuses but they don’t come out right. Sometimes I am nothing but feelers.

I hesitate to approach the opposite sex—opposite, don’t you say?—because sometimes I am smitten with a suddenness that leaves me dazed. A young woman like Felice Bauer, for instance, who shows up at Max Brod’s house with her face empty as a plate, nevertheless entices me; she makes the right responses—she loves Goethe—she says satisfactory things—she says she finds nothing more repulsive than people who are constantly eating—and in minutes we are planning a trip to Palestine together as if we were geographical Zionists, as full of zeal as a jar of jelly. I like her to the point of sighing.

My biographer will prepare you for the abrupt obsessive nature of my attractions. Let us stop a moment to watch how Reiner Stach
goes so skillfully about his business. It offers the reader a pleasure all its own. My friend Max Brod and I are visiting Weimar in order to pay our respects to the great God Goethe, and to visit his home where “the beech tree that darkened his study” had once been seen by a genius and was to be seen again as if we had traded eyes. My diary surprises me with what I’ve written: “While we were still sitting down below on the stairs, she ran past us with her little sister.” Goethe. A garden. A girl. They will coalesce and later enliven the images of Felice Bauer with precisely the awkwardness that shows up in a tampered photograph.

But this figure was Margarethe Kirchner, the daughter of the caretaker, a carefree sixteen in an era when innocence and naiveté were expected of girls. Perhaps it was the bloom of her being in this garden given over to the dead that ensnared me. Encouraged by Brod, who was in a jovial mood, I advanced on this lovely with my smitten eyes, surprised by the absence of my customary shyness. She was called Grete. Despite this fortuitous link with the sister at whose hand I would be fed a few scraps of garbage when I became a bug, or the Grete Bloch who would become a go-between for Felice and me, biographers have largely ignored this passing item in my life, though some have allowed her a few lines, as Peter-André Alt does in his 2005 history. But Reiner Stach stages the encounter like a dramatist, allowing the little details to loom large, but on their own account, by releasing them without fanfare at just the right time. I remember she was standing by a bush of roses.

I pursued her during the several days of our visit, and managed, with Brod’s connivance, to get her alone long enough to arrange an assignation, but this was not easy, Brod was busy networking (as you say now); we had our tourist duties to attend to (Schiller, Liszt, Goethe’s garden house); and Grete was elusive, though I lay in wait as ardently as any Casanova near her sewing school, “holding a box of chocolates with a chain and a little heart.” There is a snapshot of the two of us taken on my twenty-ninth birthday.

Finally, just as we were about to leave, she consented to see me for an hour. Later, when we met, she wore that “Pink dress, my little
heart.” We drove through the park together and I stubbornly hung around into the evening, even though I knew we had nothing in common, that there was no real connection possible between us. Perhaps that was itself the attraction. When I said good-bye her eyes were swollen with tears, but it was because her partner for the ball that night had disappointed her. “A woman bringing roses disturbed even this little farewell.” Yet those roses concluded the episode as if I had written it. As, in fact, I had. Moreover, I would employ her name, as I would use other “Gretes,” for that of my poor bug’s sister; and even though she would order my brittle carcass to be tossed into the trash, I’d allow her to complete the metamorphosis that I began, triumphantly fluttering away at the end, you may remember, a fully realized woman.

The biographer must interpret such facts as he has on hand only so far as they fit into the life that is being lived, and while he can speculate as often as his readers may also be invited to do, his history should be as clean of simple conjecture as wounds of infection. My story of anxiety and anguish I have strewn with helpful clues, and it unashamedly displays aesthetic elements of organization. I never felt that Reiner Stach was building imaginary bridges between gaps in the debris I left behind, but was reconstructing events from otherwise scattered facts the way the broken lines of a sketch invite the eye to complete their intended course and see a complete form or finished pattern where there is mostly implication.

From the same materials as Reiner Stach has, I must construct myself as I step back and forth from fact to fiction—half a man and half a metaphor. Let me give you another instance: my suicide threat. Think back: I am sore beset (for sins of absence and inattention) by problems at the asbestos plant, and my parents’ subsequent nagging has rubbed me raw. I complain to my diary: “The day before yesterday was blamed because of the factory. Then one hour on the sofa thinking about jumping out the window.” When I receive my censure I am Dr. Kafka. While I lie on the sofa I begin to see myself opening the window, leaning out.… I envision—don’t I?—the family’s consternation—don’t I?—with some pleasure. This
visit to a daydream passes, as the months do. The family pressure concerning the factory becomes intolerable. In a burst of fear, guile, hate, and guilt, in one night I write “The Judgment,” a story in which a father accuses his son: you have betrayed your friend, your mother, and myself; consequently “I sentence you now to death by drowning.” Thereupon the son, obedient as a dog, leaps over a rail of the Charles River bridge. He waits, hanging by his hands, for the passage of a bus to cover the sound of his splash. In that same way I also fall, a fiction, into tear-wet water. And what is my concluding line? “At that moment, over the bridge, there came and went a ceaseless stream of traffic”—“unendicher Verkehr.” Another meaning would be: “unending intercourse.” Shortly I am writing the following to Max Brod: “I realized clearly that there were only two options for me, either to jump out of the window after everybody had gone to bed or to go to the factory and my brother-in-law’s office on a daily basis for the next fourteen days.” Because I am now both a figure of speech and a notorious fact—“a dried-up well, water in unreachable depths and uncertain even there”—in the end I do not die of a killing routine nor of defenestration. Max Brod gets my mother to cover me and my absences with lies. In fact, everybody lies, and Father doesn’t notice. Not noticing what has been noticed is a talent we Kafkas treasure.