There’s this story about Kafka I just love—in part, because it cuts across that dour, depressive image of him as a writer. The story goes something like this.
One day, at the age of 40, Franz Kafka was strolling through Steligtz Park in Berlin as he often did in the afternoons, when he happened upon a young girl crying on a bench. When he inquired why the girl was crying, she replied that she had lost her doll. Together with the girl Kafka scoured the park in search of the doll, but to no avail.
Kafka, who never married or had any kids, told the young girl to meet him at the same bench tomorrow and they would look again.
When they walked all through park and still couldn’t locate the doll, Kafka handed the young girl a letter. It was from her doll, he told her. “Please do not cry,” the doll’s letter read. “I have gone on a trip to see the world. I’m going to write to you about my adventures.”
For several weeks, Kafka and the girl met and he would read her ‘letters’ from the doll, full of incredible adventures and exciting characters. The girl loved it, of course, her imagination running wild with where in the world her doll would travel next.
Until finally, one day Kafka arrived to their scheduled meeting with a new doll. Her friend had finally returned home, Kafka told the girl. But that doesn’t look like my doll, the girl said. Kafka handed her another letter written by the doll. “My trips,” it read, “they have changed me.” And so the young girl hugged the doll and took her home.
A year later, Kafka retreated to Prague and then finally Vienna, where he died from tuberculosis.
Much time passed and the girl, now grown-up, discovered yet another letter hidden inside a crevice of the doll. The letter was tiny and signed not by the doll, but from Kafka himself. “Everything you love is very likely to be lost,” he wrote, “but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
The story, by the way, has no written records to prove its validity. There is no museum or library where you can find this doll or the letters. The lone source of the story is Dora Diamant, a Polish woman who was dating Kafka at the time. She was the one who first shared this vignette with Kafka’s lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod—the very man who ignored Kafka’s instructions to burn all his work upon his death and who instead published it, giving us the opportunity to read it today.
Now, you don’t have to dig very far to find those calling the story implausible, or that it’s fake (because you can always find someone online calling something fake). But I don’t really care if it’s 100% historically accurate, if this ever happened to Kafka, or if it’s fiction from Diamant. Because first, once a story is told it doesn’t belong to the author but to the audience, and two, because all of that misses the point of the story.
Yes, the sentiment that lost love comes back around is nice. But the more subtle idea hidden below the surface is what affects me most—that all of us get to choose what we believe about the events of our life. We can choose to believe we’re dumb idiots who lost our favorite doll OR we can choose to believe our doll is going on a world adventure. We can choose to believe a random girl crying on the bench isn’t our problem OR we can choose to believe that it is and help her and share a special moment with someone you might never see again. And you can choose to believe this little tale about Kafka if you want.
Or you can also not, won’t bother me none. It’s your choice, after all.