Only after investigating the house inside and out did I approach the worktable. Approached it casually, I should say, with no plans whatsoever of doing anything there, least of all writing. And it was only then, as I sat down in the chair and mindlessly lay my fingers on the typewriter’s letters, that it dawned on me that this was Kafka’s house that I’d been brought to. The house where he’d lived alone at the end of his life—lived and died for the second time, under the minimal conditions he yearned for, confined at last to only that which was unquestionably within himself. That this was where Friedman had intended to bring me all along.
Very soon after that, maybe even the following day, I fell ill. It came as a wave of weakness and heaviness in the limbs, and at first I thought it was just exhaustion from lack of sleep. All afternoon I lay on the bed looking listlessly out the window at the desert ever changing in the light. Lay unmoving, as if already exhausted by whatever it was that I was going toward. When I began to shiver, and a low ache spread down from my skull and through my limbs, I thought it must be psychosomatic, a way to avoid having to try to write, or to confront what I was really doing there, or to fully consider what in my heart I already knew was to come. I no longer feared physical pain, but I did fear emotional pain—my own, but far more so the pain I might inflict on my children, which everything in me leaped to shield them from for as long as possible. Forever, if I could. But by then I had begun to sense that I could only delay their pain, and that the more I delayed it, the more their father and I continued to uphold a form we no longer believed in, the more hurt they would ultimately be. I know I should add that I feared the pain my husband would feel, too, and as much as I did, I find it difficult to write that sentence now. In the years that followed, he behaved in ways that continually shocked me despite their near constancy. We walked away from our marriage side by side, and though afterward both of our sufferings were great, I do believe I could have gone on feeling very much for him all my life, this man with whom I’d borne our children, who had poured his love into them, had he not become someone I could no longer recognize. Not just his face, which I continued to study with perplexity for a long time afterward, but his whole being. I think it must often be the case that after one parts from someone one has been with a long time, many things spring out that were suppressed or constrained by the presence of the other. In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light. But there had been so much restraint and silence between my husband and me that when we parted and broke into our separate light and volume at last, the person that came into view was impossible to hold close. Perhaps he didn’t wish to be held close, or couldn’t, for which I don’t blame him. And now, far enough on the other side of grief, I find I feel only surprise when I think of him. Surprise that for a time we ever believed we were walking in the same direction at all.
At what moment does one fall out of a marriage? Unlike love and care, the promise of time can be measured, and so to marry another is to bind oneself to him for a lifetime. And now I think that I left mine by falling out of time, which was the only way for me, just as packing my suitcase in the haze of insomnia was the only way. Awake in Kafka’s bed, I fell out of time’s old order and into another. Outside the window there was only time, and inside, too: the light that crossed the floor was time, as was the hum of electricity from the generator, the tick of the bulb that brought a dim illumination to the room, the wind whistling around the corner of the house, all of it only time swept up from somewhere and deposited here, having given up any attachment to sequence.