But since I have not forgotten my former inability to swim, my
ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all.
- Franz Kafka
As if from within a camera obscura
as if through a damp lens
the image sliding down
threatening to disappear
to become something else
something unrecognizable
Kafka looks across an intersection
from a basement apartment.
A woman is leaving an emergency room.
She carries a basket.
The basket is filled with linens.
No, not linens, letters.
Yes, letters.
The basket is filled with letters.
She crosses the intersection
and gets into a car.
Franz Kafka has been engaged to Felice Bauer for five years.
Their relationship is carried out almost entirely by letters.
In the autumn of 1912, Kafka writes to Felice: "Lately I have
found to my amazement how intimately you have now become
associated with my writing, although until recently I believe
that the only time I did not think about you at all was while I
was writing.”
The woman drives to a lakeside cottage.
She enters the cottage.
A dock stretches out into the water.
The woman appears wearing a black
one-piece bathing suit.
A dog (hers?) runs onto the dock
and jumps into the water.
The dog paddles to a raft.
The woman jumps in
and joins the dog on the raft.
She dangles her feet.
“Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on
Sunday - for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable
of enduring them.”
Kafka forgets, for the moment,
his fear of water.
The dog’s ears perk
at the sound of a loon.
The woman looks in the direction
of the loon.
Kafka gathers up the woman’s clothes
and places them in a basket.
“What have I done that makes you torment me so? No letter
again today, neither by the first mail nor the second. You
do make me suffer! While one written word from you could
make me happy! . . .”
There is food and drink on a picnic table.
And several copies of a script.
One has Kafka’s name on it.
It contains only his lines, these lines:
It is not able.
The trees are some of them.
The white ones.
No, I don’t remember.
It wasn’t that.
I do know someone with that name.
It will rain.
Of course not.
Nothing like that.
I am talking.
No, I disagree.
What I said was this.
No, I will not agree to that.
I’ve told you already.
Please, let me explain.
Differences? Of course.
Yes, but doesn’t everyone?
This is ridiculous.
Of course not.
No, I will not agree.
But I will not wait indefinitely.
Somehow?
What is somehow?
“If I am to go on living at all, I cannot go on vainly waiting for
news of you, as I have done these last few interminable days. . . .”
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| Felice Bauer and Franz Kafka |