As the story goes, Kafka was walking through Steglitz Park in Berlin where he meets a little girl who was crying because she had lost her doll. To calm her down, Kafka tells the girl that the doll was probably away on a trip, but not to worry as he was a postman and the doll will surely send her a letter. He arranges to meet the girl the next day to deliver the letter.
That night, with the intensity that he applied to all his writings, Kafka composes a letter from the doll to replace the girl’s loss with a different reality. The next day, in the park, he reads the letter to the little girl: “Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.”
For three weeks Kafka continues to write letters from the doll recounting her adventures and reads them to the little girl. The doll grows up, goes to school, meets other people, but always reassures the little girl of her love while complaining of the obligations of her doll-life that prevent her from returning to live with the little girl at this time. By the end of the three weeks, the little girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her a new reality curing her of her unhappiness.
As a last gift for the little girl, Kafka gives her a new doll that obviously looked different from the original doll, but an attached letter explains: “My travels have changed me...”
Many years later, the now grown girl finds a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll: In part it reads: “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”
For some reason, as a Cuban exile who lost his country as thirteen-year-old boy six decades ago, I relate intensely to this story. The loss of country was certainly agonizing for me, as it was for my fellow exiles. Like many of my exile generation, I have never returned, and I have never been able to visit my parents’ grave in Havana’s Colon Cemetery. For years, Kafka’s themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity were very real to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment