Dead Letters: "The Doll"

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent
 

I should tell you before I begin that I cannot prove any of this happened. The only other witness was a woman named Dora Diamant, who told the story to others after the man in question was dead, and whose account has never been independently confirmed. The letters — if they existed — have never been found. The girl has never been identified. I am aware of how this sounds coming from a correspondent whose credibility is, at this point in his career, not what it once was. But I was there, and I will tell you what I saw.

I was in Berlin in the autumn of 1923, failing to secure an interview with Thomas Mann. This was not unusual. What was unusual was Berlin itself, which was at that time tearing itself apart — the currency collapsing, the bread lines growing, the mark worth less by the hour. I was staying in Steglitz, on the southern edge of the city, because the hotels in the centre were either too expensive or too depressing, and Steglitz was both cheaper and possessed of a park.

It was in this park, on an afternoon in late October, that I saw a man and a woman walking together. He was thin — extraordinarily thin, the kind of thin that suggests illness rather than constitution. Dark eyes. Large ears. A face that looked as though it had been designed to absorb worry. The woman beside him was younger, dark-haired, watchful. They were speaking quietly in German, which I understood well enough to follow if I was close, and I was close, because the park was small and we were all walking in the same direction.

They came upon a girl — perhaps six or seven years old — sitting on a bench and crying. The woman stopped. The man stopped. He looked at the girl for a moment. Then he knelt down and spoke to her.

She had lost her doll. She could not find it anywhere. She had looked in all the places she usually took it and it was gone.

The man did not tell her not to cry. He did not tell her the doll would turn up. He told her, with complete seriousness, that the doll had not been lost. The doll had gone on a trip. And he knew this because the doll had written him a letter.

The girl looked at him with the suspicion that children reserve for adults who are obviously lying but who are lying with such commitment that the lie deserves investigation.

"Do you have it?" she asked.

"Not with me," he said. "I left it at home by mistake. But if you come back tomorrow, I'll bring it."

I sat on a bench nearby and watched this exchange with the mild interest of a man who has nothing better to do, which was accurate — Thomas Mann had not responded to my third letter, and I was running out of ways to justify my expenses. I assumed I was watching a kind man tell a kind lie to a sad child, and that the next day the girl would return and the man would not, and the loss would double.

I was wrong.

The next afternoon, I was in the park again — I had genuinely nothing else to do — and the man was there, and the girl was there, and he was reading her a letter. I was too far away to hear the words, but I could see the girl's face. She was not crying. She was listening with the rapt intensity of a child hearing a story she has decided to believe.

He came back the next day. And the next. I watched this happen for over a week before I understood that this was not an idle kindness. This was a project. The man was writing a new letter every night — the woman told me this, on one of the afternoons when I was sitting close enough to be noticed and she approached me to ask, politely, why I kept coming to the park. I told her I was a correspondent. She told me her companion was a writer. I asked his name. She said Franz.

I asked if Franz might be willing to speak with me.

She smiled — not unkindly — and said he was very busy. He had letters to write.

One evening that week, walking back to my lodgings, I passed the building where I had seen the couple enter earlier that day. There was a light in an upper window. Through it I could see the thin silhouette of a man bent over a desk, writing. I stood on the street for a moment and watched him work. I did not know what he was writing. I know now.

I did not learn his full name until weeks later. His books took me longer. When I did read them, I could not reconcile the man who wrote The Trial and The Metamorphosis — those monuments of dread and absurdity — with the man I had watched kneeling in a park, reading a letter from a doll to a girl who had decided to trust him. The gentleness did not match the work. Or perhaps it did, in a way I was not equipped to understand. Perhaps only a man who had mapped the full territory of human cruelty could be that careful with a child's grief.

Dora Diamant — that was the woman's name, I learned afterward — said he wrote each letter with the same care he gave his other work. Precise. Funny. Absorbing. The doll had adventures. It made friends. It traveled to new cities. It changed its name. It wrote home. It was, for three weeks, the most corresponded-with doll in the history of literature, and the correspondent was a man who would be dead within eight months.

He died on June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium outside Vienna. Tuberculosis of the larynx. He was forty years old.

The letters have never been found. Dora said the Gestapo confiscated Kafka's papers from her apartment in 1933. They may have been among them. They may have been burned. They may be in an archive somewhere in eastern Europe, sitting in a box that no one has opened, which is — if you think about it — exactly the kind of fate Kafka would have written for them.

The girl was never identified. She would be over a hundred years old now, if she's alive, which she almost certainly is not. But for three weeks, in a park in Steglitz, she received mail from a doll who loved her, delivered by a dying man who had no reason to do this except that a child was crying and he knew how to write. A letter from a doll, read aloud in a park, to a child who has decided to believe.

— F.M.
 

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.