Read Online Kafka in Love by Jacqueline Raoul-Duval - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jacqueline Raoul-Duval
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the bit of paper in her hand.
“Dr. Kafka, since our meeting in Prague on November 1, you have written me sixty-seven letters. In your most recent letters, you have gone to great lengths to convince me that you cannot possibly marry. Everything in you rebels against such a union. I deeply regret that I insisted on seeing your engagement as a benefit to you both, and deeply regret encouraging you to proceed down that path. In doing so, I assumed an enormous responsibility, which I never should have taken on. And that is why I sent Felice some of your letters. I underlined in red the passages that alarmed me. I couldn’t stay silent any longer. I no longer dared look Felice in the eye. My complicity in—”
“Fräulein Bloch,” says Ernst Weiss, interrupting, “these letters were addressed to you personally, were they not? Did you ask Dr. Kafka for permission to pass them on to Fräulein Felice Bauer? Did you even warn him that you intended to do it?”
“I warned him. After I sent them.”
“You’d known Fräulein Bauer for a long time when she asked you to plead her case?”
“Five months.”
“Five months? You live in Vienna and Fräulein Bauer in Berlin, so you can hardly know each other very well.Yet in spite of that, you agreed to undertake a delicate mission for her?”
Grete makes no answer. Dr. Weiss resumes: “Why did you continue to correspond with Dr. Kafka? You spoke of sixty-seven letters, I believe? And you replied to them? Why did you not end your role as mediator earlier?”
“I didn’t, I hoped, Dr. Kafka …”
She doesn’t complete the sentence. She guiltily remembers sending Dr. Kafka two of Felice’s letters to her and trembles at the prospect of exposure. What would her friend do if she found out? It had been easy enough to predict the effect of those two letters on Dr. Kafka. In them, Felice confessed that secretly—but the secret had now been betrayed—she harbored grave doubts about her feelings toward Franz.
Grete says nothing. All eyes turn toward Dr. Kafka. What will he say in response? He mumbles a few barely comprehensible words: “Nothing. True.”
Felice upbraids her fiancé: “Oh no, you’re not going to sit there and say nothing. That would be too easy!”
She pulls from her purse the incriminating evidence: a wad of letters with passage after passage underlined in red.
“You completely stopped writing me, your fiancée. I became just a pretext for writing to another woman, awoman you seduced shamefully, in every way possible, asking ten thousand questions, about her, her brother, her cat, her mother, her office, her girlfriends, offering ten thousand compliments and pieces of advice. Was it to ask her about me that you wrote in this letter [she reads in a heavily ironic tone]: ‘Dear Fräulein Grete, how do you look after your teeth? Do you brush them after each meal?’ In this one you call her ‘Child of Spring,’ you tell her your dreams, you imagine her reclining on a checked bedspread.”
She rummages among the papers in front of her. She exclaims, “You were curious about the dress Grete planned to wear at my engagement but showed no interest at all in mine. ‘Your dress, dear Fräulein Grete, will be viewed with the most, well, the most affectionate eyes.’ You had the nerve to write her that. And this, which is even worse: ‘You cannot be fully aware of what you mean to me. I have been actually, visibly languishing for you. Once we are married, you will come and live with us from the very beginning. You shall hold my hand, and I, in order to thank you, must be allowed to hold yours.’ And what am I to do while you hold her hand so that you can endure my presence? Am I to watch you lust after another woman? Or am I just to go to the devil?”
How to get out of this room? Franz asks himself, his face ashen. How to get away from this noise, this face distorted by hatred?
He remembers the prostitute he often visits, a big girl in outmoded
“Dr. Kafka, since our meeting in Prague on November 1, you have written me sixty-seven letters. In your most recent letters, you have gone to great lengths to convince me that you cannot possibly marry. Everything in you rebels against such a union. I deeply regret that I insisted on seeing your engagement as a benefit to you both, and deeply regret encouraging you to proceed down that path. In doing so, I assumed an enormous responsibility, which I never should have taken on. And that is why I sent Felice some of your letters. I underlined in red the passages that alarmed me. I couldn’t stay silent any longer. I no longer dared look Felice in the eye. My complicity in—”
“Fräulein Bloch,” says Ernst Weiss, interrupting, “these letters were addressed to you personally, were they not? Did you ask Dr. Kafka for permission to pass them on to Fräulein Felice Bauer? Did you even warn him that you intended to do it?”
“I warned him. After I sent them.”
“You’d known Fräulein Bauer for a long time when she asked you to plead her case?”
“Five months.”
“Five months? You live in Vienna and Fräulein Bauer in Berlin, so you can hardly know each other very well.Yet in spite of that, you agreed to undertake a delicate mission for her?”
Grete makes no answer. Dr. Weiss resumes: “Why did you continue to correspond with Dr. Kafka? You spoke of sixty-seven letters, I believe? And you replied to them? Why did you not end your role as mediator earlier?”
“I didn’t, I hoped, Dr. Kafka …”
She doesn’t complete the sentence. She guiltily remembers sending Dr. Kafka two of Felice’s letters to her and trembles at the prospect of exposure. What would her friend do if she found out? It had been easy enough to predict the effect of those two letters on Dr. Kafka. In them, Felice confessed that secretly—but the secret had now been betrayed—she harbored grave doubts about her feelings toward Franz.
Grete says nothing. All eyes turn toward Dr. Kafka. What will he say in response? He mumbles a few barely comprehensible words: “Nothing. True.”
Felice upbraids her fiancé: “Oh no, you’re not going to sit there and say nothing. That would be too easy!”
She pulls from her purse the incriminating evidence: a wad of letters with passage after passage underlined in red.
“You completely stopped writing me, your fiancée. I became just a pretext for writing to another woman, awoman you seduced shamefully, in every way possible, asking ten thousand questions, about her, her brother, her cat, her mother, her office, her girlfriends, offering ten thousand compliments and pieces of advice. Was it to ask her about me that you wrote in this letter [she reads in a heavily ironic tone]: ‘Dear Fräulein Grete, how do you look after your teeth? Do you brush them after each meal?’ In this one you call her ‘Child of Spring,’ you tell her your dreams, you imagine her reclining on a checked bedspread.”
She rummages among the papers in front of her. She exclaims, “You were curious about the dress Grete planned to wear at my engagement but showed no interest at all in mine. ‘Your dress, dear Fräulein Grete, will be viewed with the most, well, the most affectionate eyes.’ You had the nerve to write her that. And this, which is even worse: ‘You cannot be fully aware of what you mean to me. I have been actually, visibly languishing for you. Once we are married, you will come and live with us from the very beginning. You shall hold my hand, and I, in order to thank you, must be allowed to hold yours.’ And what am I to do while you hold her hand so that you can endure my presence? Am I to watch you lust after another woman? Or am I just to go to the devil?”
How to get out of this room? Franz asks himself, his face ashen. How to get away from this noise, this face distorted by hatred?
He remembers the prostitute he often visits, a big girl in outmoded
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