A little ‘healing story.’ I’ll summarize.
A year or so before he died, the story goes, writer Franz Kafka encountered a little girl in one of the Berlin parks where he walked daily. She was crying and distraught because she had lost her doll. He helped her to look for it, but to no avail. Unable to find the doll, the writer came up with a solution designed to stem the girl’s tears. The doll had left for a long journey, he told the girl, but had not forgotten her. “How do you know that?" she asked. "Because she's written me a letter," Kafka replied. “I'll bring it with me tomorrow.” Kafka went home and wrote the letter, and read it to the girl when they met the next day.
“Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a long journey to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.”
Here is an opening passage of one of the letters:
“Dear Elsi, first of all, I’m sorry to have left so suddenly without saying goodbye. I’m sorry, and I hope you’re not angry. Sometimes we do things without realizing it, or we react to what our instinct does not say, and we hurt who we do not want.
It’s that the farewells are sad, and I did not want you to cry or try to convince me to stay any longer. Now I know that you will be more at peace knowing that I am well, will rejoice for both of us.
You must know that to live is to keep going forward, to enjoy every moment, every opportunity and necessity […] You taught me many things, made me a good doll. Thanks to you I am free to do this … ”
The doll explains that she has gone away to see the world and make new friends. She loves the little girl, but longs for a new life. She promises to write every day to tell the little girl about her adventures, a promise which Kafka kept.
Kafka, the story goes, returned to the park each day, to read a new letter from the doll, easing the girl’s pain. For several weeks, Kafka continued to write these letters of wonders, telling of the adventures of the beloved doll on her travels, which he would read to the little girl when they would meet. The little girl was comforted by the tales, the pain of loss disappearing in the dreamy folds of the different reality evoked by the writer.
But Franz Kafka was suffering from terminal illness and was in the last year of his life. As his tuberculosis worsened, he decided to return to a sanatorium in Prague, dying shortly after at the age of 41. The journey was over and the meetings came to an end. Before he left Berlin, however, Kafka presented the girl with a doll, which he insisted was the doll that belonged to the girl.
Of course, the doll looked very different from the original doll. The letter attached clarified the obvious: ‘My travels have changed me.’
On her long journey, the doll had seen many amazing sights and gone through many intense experiences. Life had changed her appearance.
Years later, so the story goes, the now grown up girl was exploring the cherished doll, and found a letter that was stuffed into an unexplored crevice. It read:
“Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”
Whilst I wondered whether Kafka actually did write the tale about the journey of the lost doll, there’s no doubting the healing quality of the tale. As far as I can tell, the general consensus of experts is that Kafka did write these missing letters, but that the letters were most likely destroyed along with other of Kafka’s papers.
Kafka gave this little girl something much more valuable to replace her lost doll, he gave her a story. Inside that parable’s imaginary world, the pain of the real world faded. As a terminally Ill person, Kafka also gave her something of the precious little time he had left, dedicating to her many hours of his fading days.
“Solidarity is the feeling that best expresses the respect for human dignity.”
The highlight of the story is the solidarity that Kafka had with a sad little girl mourning her loss, ‘inventing’ the parable of the traveling doll and giving her another reality.