The Glory of Life

by Michael Kumpfmüller

  12

  He has seemed to be better again for the last few days. She doesn’t really know why: is it his work on the proofs, is it the whispering at night when she tells him silly things, what she was like as a little girl, her refusal to have her hair cut after her mother’s death? Instead she wore it in two long braids. She tells him about her school, how she wished she had siblings, sisters like Ottla and Elli. She is still talking to the two of them on the telephone every day, discussing every change in his state of health, however small. As far as possible she avoids the Hofmanns. They seem to have resigned themselves to the situation, but all the same it is awkward meeting them, especially Frau Hofmann, who looks at her pityingly, a little like the owl she has been dreaming of recently. It is always the same dream, and nothing much happens in it. The creature just sits there, looking at her. She is not afraid of it, at least not in the dream, where it is only a stupid bird, a guest here, she thinks, a messenger, as she knows when she wakes, and she has known its message for weeks.

  Judith has written. In her last letter she sounded very busy, but now her world has suddenly gone awry. She is pregnant by her Fritz, and Fritz has gone back to his wife, so she can’t go to Palestine. She sounds very upset, disappointed, strange in some kind of way, as if she were living an incomprehensible life there in Berlin. Franz is dying, and Judith is expecting a child that she certainly doesn’t want, although in the circumstances she does want it after all. Her life has been turned upside down, she paces up and down her room day and night, up and down like a caged lion, sometimes making her decision one way, sometimes another. Dora doesn’t really know how to reply to her. She writes that she wishes Judith courage, there is nothing she herself can do at the moment, her days are terrible, she just hopes to find him still breathing every morning, and as long as he is breathing she will gladly bear everything. Franz doesn’t think Judith’s plight so bad; he is glad she can’t go to Palestine, but then again why not? Maybe she should go to Palestine with her child instead of Dora and himself.

  At night in bed, when she sees the bird of death, she tries in vain to pray. She doesn’t know what she is praying for – a last-minute miracle, or that she will survive it when he is not here any more, because she guesses that he will soon be gone and then she will have lost him, however much she prays and laments. Towards morning there is a knock on the door, and she thinks at once: It’s now! But it is only Robert to tell her about a broken night. Franz woke up several times and has asked her to come. He pats the quilt beside him, visibly glad to see her, and that is all, the usual conversation with the help of the notes, but no confessions, no last trial to withstand, he only lies there looking at her and points to the open window through which the first birdsong can be heard. He either cannot sleep or does not want to. Once Robert appears, but he goes away again at once so as not to disturb them. When he comes back again it is to bring breakfast, with a coffee for Dora that she hardly touches. Towards midday Franz goes to sleep. She watches him breathing, marvels at her own calm and the fact that there is nothing special to say when the end is approaching, for he lies awake for hours, begins whispering once more, lovely little things – it takes him an eternity to bring them out – about seeing her as an actress he once saw on stage, and in his dream she takes a role unknown to him.

  She stays with him again. She has kissed him, and then didn’t know for some time whether to find a chair or stay sitting on the bed, where she can see him better, because she wants to watch him in peace once more, his hand lying on the quilt, every single finger, the tips, the nails, the knuckles, and then his face, his eyelashes, his mouth, the slight movement of his nostrils that always sends her to sleep. She feels the stiffness in her back from sitting and lying at an awkward angle, but never mind that, for Franz does her the favour of waking her. She was dreaming, but now he wakes her, runs his fingers through her hair, it is taking some time, as he says almost without any voice. In her dream they were drinking beer, and his parents were there, too, drinking their health from the table next to theirs. Franz does not want them to visit him again; they have openly threatened to do recently, so they must be dissuaded in a long letter, in which he piles difficulty upon difficulty. Meanwhile Robert brings them two dishes of strawberries and cherries, so the letter is put aside for the time being. As evening approaches he sets to work on the proofs again. He will not get them finished, but he seems content, and as he drops off to sleep he holds her hand for a long time, not very firmly, so that she sometimes forgets there is anything there. His hand is almost weightless, as if it would fly away any moment now.

  Yesterday he moved his lips several times in his sleep. She couldn’t make out a word of it, but there was no doubt that he was trying to say something, the same words again and again, she had the impression that it was a kind of formula, not a prayer, although that was what it reminded her of, words spoken by a devout Jew in the synagogue. Is his breath coming with more difficulty today? The day before he was coughing often, but she is not especially concerned, or no more than usual, she looks at him for a long time, she is infinitely more weary than yesterday, she can hardly think for weariness. She wakes at four in the morning, lies on the bed over his legs, and suddenly hears funny sounds. They are coming from Franz, she realises at once, he is gasping for air, waving his arms in a very strange way without seeing her, so she jumps up and fetches Robert. Now, she thinks. Like a fish, she thinks. But do fish gasp for air? My God, dearest, she says. She stands by his bed, not sure what to do; she tries to calm him while Robert goes to get the assistant doctor. They send her out of the room. Franz is to have a camphor injection, perhaps morphine, at least they are discussing that possibility, they have brought some ice to cool him, and it seems to help. Franz is looking terrible. The attack has cost him much of his strength, but she can sit beside him, she holds his hand, strokes his cheek, while he sleeps most of the time. She sits there hour after hour, as if frozen, as if she were far inside time, in a pure and empty space. Please don’t, she says. Don’t be afraid. I’m here. Can he still hear her? A time comes when Robert can’t watch it anymore, and sends her to the post, although she doesn’t want to go at first. Reluctantly, she walks out into the morning sunlight, step by step like an automaton. She hands in the last letters. The break does her good, and she could walk a little more, but the assistant doctor comes running to meet her. He seems to be waving and making signs, and then she hears him calling: Come quickly, the doctor. Although she has been gone for half an hour at the most, Franz has changed greatly in her absence, he looks shrunken, so to speak, as if only half of him were there. But he is awake, he smiles, he nods before he closes his eyes in exhaustion. He dies in her arms at about midday. It is strange that she knows at once; perhaps his breathing was particularly shallow, but she knows all the same. Robert has come in, and so has the assistant doctor. She lies there for a while with her arm round him as if he were a child, she could almost think that although he is her man. At last she gets to her feet and covers him up, with a vague feeling of farewell, like the time on the station platform with Max when he didn’t want to get onto the train. Later she begins washing him. Robert has taken her out of the room and brought her coffee, but now she wants to go back, and she washes him with new attention, his body and his face, all the beloved parts of him. The afternoon passes like that. Robert has telephoned them in Prague, he asks if he can help her in any way, and he can. She says to Franz: Do you mind? She puts fresh underclothes on him and the dark suit that he has not worn for a long time, and only then is she anything like content. She does not want anything to eat. Robert has given her something to take, and they sit together for a while discussing the next steps. There is no question about it, says Robert, they will take him to Prague. My God, yes, she says, for now she will go to Prague; Franz is dead, and she is going with him to the city of Prague that he disliked so much.

  That first night, when they hardly sleep at all, they tell each other over and over again that they knew it. T
hey have said goodbye, but is the terror any less for that? They are not what they were before, they say, like children turned out of doors, it is cold outside and inside although it is summer, and one bright, shining day follows another. Robert wants her to get some sleep at last, and she lets him persuade her only because he promises to go to see Franz with her afterwards. When she wakes up she does not know where she is for a long time; at first she thinks she is in Berlin before it all comes back. She was dreaming of Berlin and how she waited for Franz in the Heidestrasse apartment. It takes her an age to be properly awake, and they have a coffee before they go into the room to see Franz again. But is that still Franz? If you touch him you feel you are shivering, his face looks very stern and unapproachable, it is a long time before she dares to kiss him. She would like a few things as mementoes, and takes his dressing-gown, his notebooks and his hairbrush. Frau Hofmann has said that they will come for him later and take him to a hall at the cemetery, so she tries to tell him, once again, what it all meant for her from the first. But it is difficult to talk to a dead man, he doesn’t listen properly, and she gives it up. Unfortunately they, too, have visitors. Karl and Franz’s uncle have arrived, and there are unedifying scenes in the middle of their unhappiness, because his uncle wants Franz to be buried in Kierling, while Dora insists on Prague, so that in the end the question has to be decided by a telegram from his father; only Dora’s wishes, he says, carry any weight.

  The next few days pass like that. He quickly becomes more and more of a stranger to them where he lies in the hall. She cries because she doesn’t recognise him any more, and then again when they close the coffin and take him away from her for ever. There are thousands of formalities to be gone through for the transfer of the coffin to Prague; Robert has to go to the register office several times because of the papers, but in the end he has them all, and the day comes when they say goodbye and board the train. Franz is somewhere on it too. They arrive in Prague over a week after his death. She meets his parents. His three sisters are there, and the governess, all as if turned to stone. She merely acknowledges most of it: his old room, where she is going to stay, his bed, his desk, that, for her, is like any other desk. When she is not crying she sits at the large table and tries to remember. In his letters to the family Franz has glossed over much of her life; now she can correct some of their impressions and tell them what it was really like, how happy they were together from the very first day. As long as she is talking about it, everything seems bearable. The open grave is bad, the mountains of flowers, the absence of a gravestone, but there will be one after a time, so she will have a destination again, something like a meeting-place where she can talk to him every day. Friends of Franz have organised a little reading to include several of his works, but most of it is still strange to her, as if it were by a Franz she doesn’t know. Are you always another person to different people? Franz was afraid of his parents to the end, but all she sees is that they are old, and that they are mourning with her and do not send her away. June passes, and half of July, and she is still in his city. Once there was a difficult meeting with Max, who has discovered various manuscripts left by Franz, novels, he says, stories, fragments that he intends to publish gradually, and so he is asking all kinds of people if they have any of his work and can let him have it. When she says no, he accepts it, but at a second meeting he is more pressing: you wrote to each other, didn’t you? And where are his last notebooks? But by now she has thought about it, and has come to the conclusion that he has no right to them. At the end of July she seems to notice something in her becoming clearer. On his birthday at the beginning of the month, she still felt that she would break apart with pain, but now she notices her strength returning. Ottla and his mother have told her a great deal about Franz as a child and a student, they have shown her Prague, the river and the bridges, the streets where he used to walk, the old alleyways, his father’s business. Franz’s father also misses him, in a quiet sort of way, with a shake of the head that also includes Dora, as if he wouldn’t have expected Franz to find a girl like Dora. Should she go back to Berlin? She doesn’t know where else to go, even if everything there reminds her of Franz. But can there be any place where she will be without him? Judith has written, too, saying that she is going to keep the baby, and is waiting impatiently for Dora’s return. She still hesitates. It is the beginning of August, she has bought a ticket, her cases are packed, she could simply go without making a big farewell scene of it, and that is exactly what she does. I will write to them, she tells herself, but first she goes back to Berlin, where a hot summer and Franz’s books are waiting for her. She has them all, including the new one for which it is still too soon, so she leafs through the old ones, reading a beginning here and there; she immediately likes the title Eleven Sons, it sounds very much like Franz.

  Afterword and acknowledgements

  The correspondence between Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant has not been preserved. In the summer of 1924, Dora Diamant took 20 of Kafka’s notebooks and 35 letters from him to Berlin with her. They were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 when the building where she lived was searched, and are now regarded as lost. Dora Diamant lived in Germany until 1936, and after that in the Soviet Union for three years. Soon after the beginning of the Second World War, she emigrated to England, where she died in August 1952 at the age of 54. Kafka’s father lived until 1931 and his mother until 1934. His sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla, as well as his niece Hanna, were murdered in 1942/43 in the death camps of Chelmno and Auschwitz.

  I would like to thank the following for their critical reading of this book and their support during my research for it: Prof. Dr. Peter-André Alt (Freie Universität Berlin), Kathi Diamant (San Diego State University), Dr. Hans-Gerd Koch (Bergische Universität Wuppertal), Hermann Kumpfmüller, Stefan Kumpfmüller, Matthias Landwehr, Helge Malchow, Olaf Petersenn, Dr. Annelie Ramsbrock (Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam), Prof. Dr. Klaus Wagenbach.

  First published in the German language as Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens by Michael Kumpfmüller

  Copyright © Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne, Germany, 2011

  Copyright © Michael Kumpfmüller, 2011

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Haus Publishing Ltd

  70 Cadogan Place, London SW1X 9AH

  www.hauspublishing.com

  English language translation copyright © Anthea Bell, 2014

  The rights of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-908323-55-2

  All rights reserved.

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.