Meran (April–June 1920)

In the spring of 1920 Franz Kafka was thirty-six, a lawyer at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, the author of a handful of short books that few people had read, and ill. Tuberculosis had been diagnosed in 1917; he was on sick leave in Meran, a spa town in the mountains of South Tyrol, newly Italian after the war, living in a boarding house, lying on the balcony in the sun, eating, gaining weight on doctor's orders, and writing letters. He was engaged — for the third time in his life — to a young woman in Prague, Julie Wohryzek, the daughter of a shoemaker; and he was afraid of the marriage, as he had been afraid of every marriage.

Milena Jesenská was twenty-three: a Czech, from an old Prague family, the daughter of a professor of dentistry, a fierce nationalist who had once had her shut up in a mental hospital to stop her marrying a Jew. She had married him anyway: Ernst Pollak, a clever, charming, unfaithful bank clerk and man of letters, who frequented the literary cafés of Vienna. They lived in Vienna, poor; Milena gave language lessons, carried luggage at the station for money, wrote articles for Prague newspapers about Viennese life and fashion. She was brilliant, generous, impulsive, reckless, and very unhappy. She had met Kafka once, briefly, in a café in Prague. She had read his story "The Stoker," and had translated it into Czech; and she wrote to ask his permission to publish it.

So it began: with business. Kafka answered politely, in German, from Meran, and asked her to write to him in Czech, which he read well, because he wanted to hear her own language. He told her of his illness, of his boarding house, of his fellow guests — a general, an old lady; of the heat; of the Italian spring. Within a few weeks the letters had changed. They came every day, then twice a day. He waited for them. He reread them. He described himself to her, again and again, as unworthy, weak, dirty, afraid; and she would not believe it.

He told her his past: his engagements, twice to the same woman, Felice Bauer in Berlin, both broken off; the long letter he had written to his father the year before, which his mother had never given to his father, and which he would later give to Milena to read, a hundred pages of accusation and self-accusation. He told her that he was a Jew, and asked her, in effect, whether she understood what that meant to him. He told her about his fear — his fear of everything, of marriage, of the body, of happiness itself. He told her that he was a creature of the forest, who had crept out of its hole and seen her standing in the open, in the light; and that he had forgotten for a moment what he was, and had come out to her; and that sooner or later he would have to go back into the dark.

She asked him to come to Vienna. He found every reason not to: his health, his office, the journey, his fear. Then, at the end of June, on his way home to Prague, he went.