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writer.
    The next day, proud of his courage, he writes to Max: “Yesterday, I sent my great confession to Berlin. She is truly a martyr!”
    And Felice’s reaction? “You are drifting away from me, at a time when you are critically necessary to me.”
    “I am critically necessary to you?”
    Franz is elated, he has no cause for fear, he did not receive the answer that his letter deserved. He sighs with relief: “I, dearest, drift away? I, who breathe only through you? I look for you everywhere. In the street, the gestures of all sorts of people remind me of you. I, drift away, I who die of longing for you?”
    He confesses that when he was washing his hands in the dark passage that very morning, he felt such a strong desire from thinking about her that he had to step across to the window … to seek comfort from the gray sky.
    Felice must have been shocked by this image: Franz masturbating as he looked out at the clouds. Next she must have wondered, if he gets an erection thinkingabout me, why does he keep repeating with such humiliating obstinacy that he will never be able to possess me?
    She doesn’t quite dare ask him the question. She is unable to speak about sexuality, or to hear it mentioned. Her upbringing, her social class, forbid it. When Franz had spoken, that night at the Brods’, about his vacation at Jungborn with the nudists, she had felt gooseflesh: completely naked people, he had said, strolled through the trees, stretched, ran, scratched themselves, stroked their naked bodies. The picture still made her sick, even these many months later. Franz, to his eternal credit, made a point of saying that he always wore his bathing suit.
    In the next weeks, the more Franz castigates himself, the more Felice refuses to understand what he is talking about. He begs her: “Don’t shut your eyes, don’t give in to illusions, I will never change. My need to keep up an uninterrupted exchange of letters with you comes not from love but from my unhappy disposition.”
    She swears that if she continues to write him, it is not—as he thinks—out of pity. She is bound to him.
    Tired of wrangling, they pass on to other subjects. The talk is of the incidents of daily life, of friends, books, the weather. Felice has promised to take swimming lessons, Franz is unhappy that she is making no progress. He asksher: “Are you learning with the help of a pole or do they have you on an apparatus?”
    He describes his new neighbor to her, a Czech who writes erotic novels, a splendid and enviable man with a natty little French goatee, a slouch hat straight from Montmartre, and a cape draped over his arm. On another day, he mentions that he broke his fine shaving mirror. It made him shake with annoyance.
    Felice has toothaches, Franz is worried. On the day of the extraction, he is anxious and cannot sleep. One’s head spins.
    3 Kafka never went on a trip without slipping this book into his luggage.
    4 Kafka drew details of daily life in America from Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
, which he read with great enjoyment and recommended to his father.

The Triumph of Time and Disillusion
5
    T ruly, everything is as it was. Please don’t worry unnecessarily,” Felice writes, exasperated by Franz’s insistence. “Everything is as it was” has a wonderful ring to it, but Franz is convinced of the contrary, even when Felice manages to shake his firmest convictions. He has tried to push her away in the hopes of sparing her greater suffering. He has failed. He is thoroughly relieved—he would have been destroyed if she had expelled him (“expelled” is the term he uses), and he is distraught thatshe has not done so. He struggles with his anxiety attacks and his fits of despair. He could have built the pyramids, he jokes, with the effort it takes him “to cling to life and reason.”
    To settle his nerves, he decides to take a practical course in gardening. Manual labor calms him, as he knows. A year or two earlier, he had