From Kafka’s Lung

It starts inside her, the woman named Milena Jesenská. Inside the enveloping night. In the ennui, the Viennese ennui. In this language that is not hers, that she never chose. The loneliness, the vulnerability. Not being able to come into her own.

I want to emphasize this: it isn’t about me and the sources of my pain. You can never compare anything. But to write about others is to graze against yourself. You meet within the loneliness that always encloses you, no matter what you do.

Milena Jesenská had moved to Vienna in March 1918 with her husband. The reason was that her father had forced them out of Prague, although World War I was still raging. Milena had always been a strong-willed child, and she would become worse as the years went by. Her studies in medicine were interrupted before they really took off. Instead she worked at a school, socialized in German-Jewish circles in Prague, dashed in and out of Café Arco.

When she fell in love with Ernst Pollak, ten years her senior, her father had her admitted to a psychiatric hospital to cut off the relationship. She was raised in a bourgeois milieu and there was room for a few follies, but others simply had to be snuffed out.

Milena was thirteen when her mother died, and then she and her father were the only ones left. When she was allowed to leave, as an adult – which you became at the age of twenty-one – she got married. In Vienna, she worked various temporary jobs. She translated between Czech and German, and gave Czech lessons as well. She carried suitcases at the train station. She wrote journalistic texts and pamphlets. She researched in-depth articles on post-war poverty. Sometimes she coughed up blood.

Her husband lived a bohemian life and had to be brought home from the cafés. There was a mistress, too, or several. All of this was beneath Milena Jesenská’s dignity and very different from what she’d been used to in Prague, where life had been open-and-shut for her.

In 1920 she translated Kafka’s story ‘The Stoker’, which would become the introduction to his novel Amerika – or The Missing Person as Kafka himself called it – and several other prose texts. This quickened the pace of their correspondence. ‘Desperation’ seems to have been a key word between them – except when it came to the translations, where everything worked like a charm.

Milena was the one who wrote to Franz first, with a question about translation. They’d caught glimpses of each other at cafés in Prague, amongst other authors and intellectuals, and now she wanted to take on his texts. Bring them home! They said that Milena wasn’t someone you forgot. The correspondence between Merano and Vienna bespeaks Milena’s nagging that he come visit. But Franz, he simply couldn’t. He wrote: ‘I am certain I won’t come, but if despite everything – it’s not going to happen – I, to my incredible surprise, should find myself in Vienna, I will need no breakfast or supper, but rather a stretcher where I can lie down for a little while.’ It wasn’t for lack of desire – it was his lungs, a penetrating exhaustion. And a lack of ability when it came to relationships with women, an idealizing, a fear of getting too close. But eventually he came, after all. It was a meeting he wrote about later, about Milena’s beautiful dresses and about holding her hand as long as he dared. And which Milena, in turn, described in letters to Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s closest friend. To him she wrote that for Kafka, life was something quite different than it was for everyone else. For him, this world was and will continue to be a mystical secret. His books were remarkable, but he himself was even more so. What did she know about long-term lung disease and its effect on the body? It’s a situation where a hand at just the right temperature can mean everything you’ve ever wanted.

When I awaken, I’m tangled in the bedclothes; everything around me smells sweet. Yesterday’s pizza box is swelling in the heat. When I look in the bathroom mirror, I ask: Is this me? Who on earth have I become? Forty-seven years old but with the same angry bob and impertinent, puffy appearance as always. I’m like an overgrown teenager who never felt comfortable in her own skin. I yank the brush through my hair and splash my face with cold water. It doesn’t get any better than this. I take the stairs down to the hotel breakfast. Italian and Danish tourists crowd around the buffet. The eggs are cold, the juice squeezer has gone on strike, the tables need clearing and the marmalade is all gone.

In the courtyard, the May morning is chilly. Coffee lends a sense of peace to my body. I look up at the sky. The city: it’s open to me now. How I’ll get around, entering shops and contexts. I’ll go straight to Julius Meinl’s flagship store at Graben. Is this where I’ve wanted to go? Into a kind of bourgeois self-evidence, as when I have my daughter by my side, showing that I’m a mother now.

Not like when she was small and I took a look at myself in the mirror. With a diaper bag, pram and all of the correct attributes, while feeling alienated inside. Not from her, my child, or our little life. But from the image of what a mother is supposed to be. Neat, no stains, and making sure the little one is wearing a sweater at the child welfare clinic. Although maybe that’s what I was like after all. It doesn’t matter, because soon I’ll be the mother of a teenager, and how will I ever be enough? You can’t simply set up a Snapchat account – there’s so much else to embrace. Like the vaping, the messaging and the cash-tapping. Outfits and skin-care routines – the kinds of things I’ll never be able to understand.

Back upstairs in my room, I wash my hair although I don’t really have the energy. I put on a white blouse and suit pants. Adult, fresh and clean and irreproachable. I lie down on the bed again, open up a jar of apricot marmalade. I eat a few spoonfuls straight out of the jar and fall asleep.

I doze my way to the town where I grew up. I’m no longer an adult with my own family, but nineteen and lost. My rosy-warm skin, the worry surrounding me. You couldn’t let on that anything was wrong. I’ve just come back from Vienna. I’ve failed as an au pair and as a human, didn’t check off a single one of the things on the list I’d made before I left. I’ve neither created a European life for myself nor written a book of poetry. On the other hand, I’ve managed to acquire sores that leak all over the sheets. Dragging myself into the bathroom is a great feat, and once I’m there taking a shower makes me sweaty.

My friends from high school – I talk to them on the phone. They’ve been to Paris, Bretagne and Kaliningrad. They’ve learned French, English and Russian. They’ve had boyfriends, smoked hashish and gone through glass tables at cafés. They’ve taken the train between Paris and Lille and collapsed in bushes on the Riviera. They’ve gotten pregnant on an island in the West Indies and gone home when it was time to give birth. They’ve learned about life, and while they’ve been doing it, I’ve found myself in an uncontrolled state in Vienna – the city of broken dreams and landscapes, the resting place for my brilliant ideas.

Now I’m something awkward that they can’t get rid of, like an insect that’s got inside. I’ve been banished to my brother’s old room, while he’s taken possession of my much bigger one. He plays football, travels all around the county of Norrbotten refereeing games, works an extra job at Statoil and takes yet another sabbatical. My parents’ concern about him is a mumbling in the evenings – he’s the one who could really become something. I, on the other hand, have always been someone who was going to go to pieces sooner or later, a loose cannon on a field blanketed in snow.

The green wallpaper in the shower room makes me nauseous. The smell of childhood and failure regurgitates from the drain. My bathtub toys, the memory of when everything was simple. Because my childhood really was simple, wasn’t it?

One day, a few relatives come to visit. I can hear them bustling about down there in the kitchen with the coffee cups and spoons. Slowly I shuffle my way downstairs and say hello. Everyone stares at me. It’s as if I were someone else, something foreign.

‘What would you do if you were financially independent?’ my brother asks one day after I’ve managed to crawl out of bed. He’s baked an apple pie and is whipping up a package of vanilla sauce. ‘Buy a flat in Vienna and one in Berlin, maybe one in Prague, too. Register at all the universities and then just travel between them and study.’

My brother puts down the electric mixer, and the words grow in his mouth like an apple you thought was good but turned out to be rotten inside. ‘You’ll be wrapping your children’s Christmas presents in newspaper,’ he says, and we both know that it’s probably true. For even though my brother does bop around and make trouble, one day he’s going to start studying at the Stockholm School of Economics, get married and buy a flat, while I’m still whirling around looking for direction.

I still haven’t read Franz Kafka properly, just a few short stories that have pulled me into a feeling of vibrating, mysterious darkness. When I do it a few weeks later, when I’m miraculously back on my feet and starting to study German at the university in my hometown, I understand that it’s Gregor Samsa who’s taken possession of me. The anti-hero in Franz Kafka’s short novel The Metamorphosis, the travelling salesman who wakes up one morning to discover he’s now a cockroach. It helps me understand everything about myself, my family and the world around me. That the shame and the incapacity are one and the same. Even the apples in the novel that Gregor’s father throws at him and which then get stuck in his shell, causing the infections that bring on his demise. All of this recurs in my life and is bound together with my own whispering will. With apricots and hinterland heat, the peaks of the Alps and free-falling, forward-falling.

My hotel is only a few blocks from Lerchenfelder Strasse. I head westward, towards the Gürtel, the motorway that surrounds the city like an outer ring. Although I know the area well, I can’t find my way. Until I focus, tune in to the correct frequency of my sense of direction. Number 113 turns out to be a fin-de-siècle building. But nobody would make a detour to this part of town, lined with garages, discount shops and supply lines – small joints and people who mostly seem to be drifting around.

Milena’s house stands as if it were torn away from the rest. As if it were the only one that hadn’t been renovated in this neighbourhood, or the only one that’s remained intact. There’s no commemorative plaque on the front door, no ‘Behind these walls once lived the brilliant journalist and translator Milena Pollak, née Jesenská, and her unfaithful husband, Ernst’.

‘Lerche’ means lark, but the name of the street has nothing to do with birdsong.

I press all the buttons on the intercom, and finally someone lets me in. The scent of the stairway is familiar – maybe all buildings in Vienna smell like this? It’s a mixture of fresh morning and scouring detergent. I walk up the stairs, but I don’t find a single trace. As it turns out, the building has been renovated inside, but the dimensions and the stucco have been preserved. Yet there’s something missing.

So this is where Milena lived with domestic and spouse. Her bourgeois background shone through: even though she toiled at different kinds of work, she would have never touched any household tasks. You simply did not do such things. But work hard – that she did. ‘It’s just different kinds of work – what women do has always been the same,’ I hear a voice inside me say. As if my grandmother suddenly appeared on the stairs. Taking care of someone’s texts or your own cows are just two sides of the same coin.

I close my eyes for a moment and visualize a skylark singing intensely. Milena’s bedroom window faced the greenery outside, the small park where families with children and people with unclear business now share a space. ‘She must have been close to the birds and their songs, to the living,’ I think.

Otherwise I find nothing here. The signs on the doors don’t reveal a single clue. Yet it’s as if something is filtering through me, like a kind of light with a lilac’s simplicity within.