days. Then they will go their separate ways, and it will all be over. A love without future, without anxiety, without physical embrace, a chaste love, with glances that penetrate and make them almosttremble. Franz has known a similar enchantment only once before, one long-ago summer: her name was Selma, she was fifteen, he seventeen.
Gerti knows that Franz is a writer. One day he asks if she likes fairy tales, he would like to write some for her. He doesn’t tell her that at that moment he is imagining her sitting in the dining room, hiding his tales in her lap under the table. He sees her reading between courses and blushing horribly. Horribly? Why? Is he thinking of ribald tales?
Gerti refuses his offer outright. She makes him promise three things: “We will never see each other again. We will never write each other, not even a single line. And you will neither write nor say anything about me.”
Franz kept his word. He always refused to answer any of Max’s questions about her. In his
Diaries
, he wrote only the girl’s initials, GW (from which her identity was only discovered decades later).
The little that we know of this brief encounter comes from his
Diaries
, where the events of these two weeks take up barely ten lines, and from the letter he writes to Felice three months later, on December 29, when he confesses to his fiancée, with his usual abrupt frankness, that he fell in love with a young Swiss woman, almost a child, eighteen years old, that he was very attached to her, butthat they had not been right for each other. On the day of his departure, he says, the young woman almost burst into tears, and he was just as bad.
Yet this episode convinced him that deep inside, what he truly aspired to was … to marry Felice.
He carried away from his stay in Riva one regret. The ribbon games that he played with Gerti prevented him from taking his pleasure with the young Russian woman in the room directly across the hall from his. Each of her smiles, each of her innuendos, had been an invitation.
Franz leaves Riva a little surer of himself. His hair is starting to turn gray, his eyes are gentler.
6 Several texts written by Kafka on insurance coverage in the building industry and accident prevention in the workplace have survived.
Grete Bloch, or the First Trio
F elice is the one who, after two months, decides to break the silence, a silence that is starting to feel like a final separation. In her letter dated October 23, 1913, she informs Franz that a friend of hers is coming to Prague, a young woman, whom she has charged with effecting their reconciliation. Furthermore, she asks Franz to come to Berlin in the days after the meeting.
Franz has received three letters from Felice’s unknown friend, three letters that he has left unanswered. How could Felice ever imagine that an emissary coming out of the blue, totally ignorant of their complicated history,could magically sort out their differences? How could she ever have hoped such a thing?
The idea of explaining himself to this unknown lady, who was most likely of a certain age, tall, strong, and maternal, does not appeal to him.
Even as he tells himself he won’t go, a temptation arises: to introduce a new element or character, however secondary, into a plot that has stalled, and onto a stage that is emptying. He wants to break the monotony of the passing days. His life was starting to feel like one of those schoolboy punishments where you are made to write the same absurd sentence a hundred times.
Who is this woman friend that Felice is sending me, though she has never spoken of her before? After a few days of hesitation, he answers Fräulein Grete Bloch: “Certainly I shall come to your hotel, please name a convenient time.”
And to Felice: “Since you have requested it, I shall arrive in Berlin on Saturday, November 8, and leave the next day between 4 and 5 o’clock.”
A useless trip, he knows, another trip that will bring no added light,
Gerti knows that Franz is a writer. One day he asks if she likes fairy tales, he would like to write some for her. He doesn’t tell her that at that moment he is imagining her sitting in the dining room, hiding his tales in her lap under the table. He sees her reading between courses and blushing horribly. Horribly? Why? Is he thinking of ribald tales?
Gerti refuses his offer outright. She makes him promise three things: “We will never see each other again. We will never write each other, not even a single line. And you will neither write nor say anything about me.”
Franz kept his word. He always refused to answer any of Max’s questions about her. In his
Diaries
, he wrote only the girl’s initials, GW (from which her identity was only discovered decades later).
The little that we know of this brief encounter comes from his
Diaries
, where the events of these two weeks take up barely ten lines, and from the letter he writes to Felice three months later, on December 29, when he confesses to his fiancée, with his usual abrupt frankness, that he fell in love with a young Swiss woman, almost a child, eighteen years old, that he was very attached to her, butthat they had not been right for each other. On the day of his departure, he says, the young woman almost burst into tears, and he was just as bad.
Yet this episode convinced him that deep inside, what he truly aspired to was … to marry Felice.
He carried away from his stay in Riva one regret. The ribbon games that he played with Gerti prevented him from taking his pleasure with the young Russian woman in the room directly across the hall from his. Each of her smiles, each of her innuendos, had been an invitation.
Franz leaves Riva a little surer of himself. His hair is starting to turn gray, his eyes are gentler.
6 Several texts written by Kafka on insurance coverage in the building industry and accident prevention in the workplace have survived.
Grete Bloch, or the First Trio
F elice is the one who, after two months, decides to break the silence, a silence that is starting to feel like a final separation. In her letter dated October 23, 1913, she informs Franz that a friend of hers is coming to Prague, a young woman, whom she has charged with effecting their reconciliation. Furthermore, she asks Franz to come to Berlin in the days after the meeting.
Franz has received three letters from Felice’s unknown friend, three letters that he has left unanswered. How could Felice ever imagine that an emissary coming out of the blue, totally ignorant of their complicated history,could magically sort out their differences? How could she ever have hoped such a thing?
The idea of explaining himself to this unknown lady, who was most likely of a certain age, tall, strong, and maternal, does not appeal to him.
Even as he tells himself he won’t go, a temptation arises: to introduce a new element or character, however secondary, into a plot that has stalled, and onto a stage that is emptying. He wants to break the monotony of the passing days. His life was starting to feel like one of those schoolboy punishments where you are made to write the same absurd sentence a hundred times.
Who is this woman friend that Felice is sending me, though she has never spoken of her before? After a few days of hesitation, he answers Fräulein Grete Bloch: “Certainly I shall come to your hotel, please name a convenient time.”
And to Felice: “Since you have requested it, I shall arrive in Berlin on Saturday, November 8, and leave the next day between 4 and 5 o’clock.”
A useless trip, he knows, another trip that will bring no added light,
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