Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka

Author:Franz Kafka
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House

[Prague, August 1, 1920]

Sunday

I still don’t know what you’re going to say to the letter of Saturday evening and I won’t know for a long time; in any event I am now sitting in the office on Sunday duty (another strange institution: it’s enough just to sit here, so other people on Sunday duty do less work than usual—I do exactly as much). It’s dreary outside; one minute it’s about to rain, the next there’s light coming through the clouds, disturbing my writing; that’s exactly the way things are, too—sad and heavy. And though you write that I have a true desire for life, it’s hardly true today; what does today matter to me, or tonight? Nevertheless (please keep coming back every now and then, good word), I essentially have this desire, but little of it is on the surface. Moreover I like myself so little: I’m sitting here in front of the director’s door, the director isn’t in, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he came out and said: ‘I don’t like you either, and that’s why I’m firing you.’ ‘Thank you,’ I would say, ‘I really need that so I can go to Vienna.’ ‘In that case,’ he would say, ‘now I like you once again and am retracting your dismissal.’ ‘Oh,’ I would say, ‘so now once again I can’t go.’ ‘Oh yes you can,’ he would say, ‘because once again I don’t like you and you’re fired.’ And so it would go, a story without end.

Today I dreamt about you for the first time since returning to Prague, I think. A dream toward morning, short and heavy, something like sleep caught after a bad night. I don’t remember much of it. You were in Prague, we were walking down the Ferdinandstrasse, somewhere across from Vilimek, heading toward the docks. Some acquaintances of yours passed us on the other side, we turned around to face them, you spoke with them, you may have also discussed Krasa124 (I know he’s not in Prague; I’ll find out his address). You spoke the way you usually do, but there was something you were concealing, something that was impossible to grasp, some element of rejection. I didn’t mention it at all but I did curse myself, although in so doing I was merely repeating the curse already on me. Next we were in a café, probably in the Café Union (it was on our way; moreover it was Reiner’s last café that evening). A man and a girl were sitting at our table, but I can’t remember them at all, then there was a man who looked very much like Dostoyevsky—but young—with his deep black beard and hair, and everything incredibly pronounced, for example the eyebrows, the bulges above the eyes. Then you were there and so was I. Again nothing betrayed your inner attitude, but the rejection was there. Your face was—I couldn’t take my eyes off this agonizing peculiarity—powdered, and what’s more, too much so, clumsily, badly; it was probably also hot and whole designs of powder had formed on your cheeks; I can still see them.

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