Yet Kafka’s stay in the city was not utterly bleak; hence the first of my two little riddles-a story about Kafka and a little girl in Steglitz. Dora Diamant told it to the French critic and translator Marthe Robert, and, in a slightly different version, to Max Brod. While out on a walk one day in Steglitz, Kafka and Dora met a little girl in a park who was crying because she had lost her doll. Kafka told her not to worry since the doll was away on a trip and had sent him a letter. When the little girl asked suspiciously for the letter, he told her he didn’t have it with him, but that if she returned the following day he would bring it.

True to his word, every day for three weeks thereafter he went to the park with a new letter from the doll. Dora Diamant emphasizes the care he devoted to this self-imposed task, which was of the same degree as that which he lavished on his other literary work. She also dwells on his difficulty coming up with an ending that would let him off the hook while also reaching a reasonably satisfactory conclusion, for the little girl. In the version that Dora told to Marthe Robert, Kafka did so by having the doll become engaged: “He (Kafka) searched about for a long time and finally decided to have the doll marry. he first described the young man, the engagement… , the preparations for the wedding, then in great detail the newlyweds’ house.” Because of those ongoing “wedding preparations”-a word that recalls the title of one of his earliest stories and suggests the degree of fictive autobiography that went into his spinning of this engaging tale-the doll could understandably no longer visit her former mistress.