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lover lived in Prague, and they would meet halfway in the border town of Gmünd, or the first time they met, after several months of exchanging letters, at the station in Vienna. Before they started writing, they saw each other only once, in a café, scarcely noticing each other, and now suddenly he wanted to reclaim from the fuzzy fringes of memory the face of this woman.
I warn you that I cannot remember your face in detail. I remember only your moving away between the small tables in the café: your figure, your dress . . . I still see them.
He has taken the train in Prague, knowing that at the same time she has taken another in Vienna, and his impatience and desire are no stronger than his fear, because he knows that within a few hours he will hold in his arms a physical woman who is scarcely more than a ghost of his imagination and their letters.
Fear is unhappiness,
he wrote to her. He fears that the train will arrive and he will find Milena standing there, her light-colored eyes searching for him, and also fears that she had second thoughts at the last moment and stayed in Vienna with her husband, who does not make her happy, who deceives her with other women, but whom she doesn’t want or is unable to leave. He consults his watch, looks at the names of the stations at which the train is stopping, and is tormented by an urgent wish for the hours to race by, to already be there, but also by the fear
of arriving and finding himself alone on the platform of the station in Gmünd. And he fears the impetuous physical presence of Milena, who is much younger and healthier than he, more skillful and more daring in sex.
    Unconscious memory is the yeast of imagination. I did not know until this very moment, while I was trying to imagine Franz Kafka’s journey on a night express, that I was in fact remembering a journey I myself made when I was twenty-two, one sleepless night on a train to Madrid, on my way to a rendezvous with a woman with light eyes and chestnut hair. I had sent her a telegram minutes before buying my second-class ticket with borrowed money and foolishly leaving everything behind. When I reached the station at dawn, there was no one there to meet me.
    What would it be like to approach a border checkpoint and not know if you would be turned back, if the uniformed guards who examined your papers with cruel deliberation, looking up arrogantly to compare the face in the passport photograph with the fear-filled face struggling to seem normal and innocent, would prevent you from crossing to the other side, to the salvation only a few feet away? After meeting Milena for the first time and spending four days with her, Kafka took the express from Vienna to Prague, nervous about getting to his job the next morning, feeling a mixture of happiness and guilt, of sweet intoxication and intolerable amputation, for now he couldn’t bear to be alone and who knows how long it would be before he could meet his lover again? When the train stopped at the station in Gmünd, the border police told him that he could not continue on to Prague; one paper was lacking among his numerous documents, an exit visa that could be issued only in Vienna. On the night of March 15, 1938, when Kafka had been dead for almost fourteen years, safe from all worry and guilt, that same express, which left Vienna for Prague at 11:15, was filled with refugees—Jews and leftists, especially—because Hitler had just entered the
city, welcomed by crowds howling like packs of wild beasts, their arms uplifted, shouting his name with the hoarse, collective roar of a raging ocean, yelling
Heil
to the Führer and to the Reich, clamoring for the annihilation of the Jews. Uniformed Austrian Nazis boarded the Prague express at intermediate stations and looted the baggage of the refugees, whom they beat and subjected to insults and curses. Many passengers had no papers, and at the border station the Czech guards prevented