Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

My health would be good, if I could sleep. It’s true I’ve gained some weight, but recently my insomnia has been almost unbearable.

I hardly slept myself, but two things consoled me. First there were heavy pains in my heart…and then, after a series of dreams, I had this one: A child wearing a little shirt was sitting to my left (I couldn’t remember whether it was my own child or not, but this didn’t bother me), Milena was on my right, both were cuddling up against me, and I was telling them a story about my pocketbook* which I had lost but then recovered, although I hadn’t yet looked inside, and didn’t know whether the money was still there. But even if it had been lost it didn’t matter, so long as the two were by my side…

I’m living quite well here, the mortal body could hardly stand more care, the balcony outside my room is sunk into a garden, overgrown and covered with blooming bushes (the vegetation here is strange; in weather cold enough to make the puddles freeze in Prague, blossoms are slowly unfolding before my balcony), moreover this garden receives full sun (or full cloud, as it has for almost a week)—lizards and birds, unlikely couples, come visit me: I would very much like to share Meran with you, recently you wrote about not being able to breathe, that image and its meaning are very close to one another and here both would find a little relief.

It occurs to me that I really can’t remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see.

But that is past and should remain deep in the past. Is it nice at home?

And what are you going to do now? The fact that you’re being looked after is probably insignificant. Anyone who cares about you has to realize that you need a little looking after, nothing else really matters. So is there salvation here as well? I said already—no, I’m not in the mood for making jokes, I am not being funny in the least and will not be funny again until you have written how you are planning a new and healthier way of life.

Today I’m not going to write about anything else, I don’t have anything more important to bring up. I’m saving everything else for tomorrow, including my thanks for the issue of Kmen which makes me moved and ashamed, happy and sad. No, there is one other thing: If you waste as much as one minute of your sleep on the translation, it will be as if you were cursing me. For if it ever comes to a trial there will be no further investigations; they will simply establish the fact: he robbed her of her sleep. With that I shall be condemned, and justly so. Thus I’m fighting for myself when I ask you to stop.

But I wanted to read you in Czech because, after all, you do belong to that language, because only there can Milena be found in her entirety

It’s like trying to smash a single cauldron in hell; first, the enterprise won’t succeed, and second, if it does succeed, one will be consumed by the glowing effluent, while hell remains intact in all its glory. The problem must be approached differently.

[Meran, April–May 1920]

I don’t find the doctor’s diagnosis especially favorable, it’s really neither favorable nor unfavorable, your attitude alone can decide how it should be interpreted. Of course doctors are stupid or rather no more stupid than other people but their pretensions are ridiculous—still you have to count on their becoming more and more stupid from the moment you start dealing with them, and what the doctor is now demanding is neither very stupid nor impossible.