by Franz Kafka
And I really was beside myself then. Under normal circumstances, I would have been seriously ill and unable to move, but I couldn’t withstand the melody the dog would soon take up as his. It grew ever stronger; its welling seemed to know no bounds, already it was almost shattering my hearing. But the worst thing was that it seemed to exist only on my account, the voice before whose loftiness the forest hushed, was just for me; and who was I to dare to stay here sprawled out in front of it in blood and filth. Shaking, I got to my feet and looked down the length of my body; ‘that body can’t walk’, I managed to think to myself, but already chased by the melody, I was flying along in exquisite bounds. I said nothing of this to my friends; right after my arrival I would probably have blabbed, but I was too weak, and later on it simply struck me that such things could not be communicated. Hints that I couldn’t force myself to suppress were lost without trace in our conversations. Physically, I was restored in a matter of hours, though my spirit still bears the scars today.
I expanded the scope of my investigations to include canine music. Science had not been idle in this field either; the study of music, if I am correctly informed, is perhaps even more extensive than that of food and certainly more solidly based. This can be accounted for because the terrain can be worked over more dispassionately; it tends to be a matter of observation and systematization, whereas in that other field there are practical consequences to be weighed up as well. Connected to this is the fact that respect for musical science is greater than that for nutritional science, though the first can never be as deeply rooted in our people. Also my attitude towards musical science was more agnostic than any other – until I heard the voice in the forest. My experience with the canine musicians had already pointed me the way, but I was still too young at the time, nor is it easy to get to grips with that science; it is reckoned to be particularly arcane, and inaccessible. Also, while the music had been the most arresting aspect of those dogs, what seemed more important to me then was the discretion of their being, their terrible music was like nothing I had ever known, making it easier for me to set it aside, whereas their nature was what I encountered in dogs everywhere. To penetrate the true nature of dogs, the study of nutrition seemed to promise the most direct route. Perhaps I was wrong to think so. The contiguity of the two sciences had already caught my attention. It’s the lesson of the song that brings down nourishment. Again, it is much to my regret that I never made a serious study of musical science; I can’t even count myself among those semi-educated individuals who attract the most contempt from experts. I need to keep this in mind always. Given an elementary test by an expert, I would fare badly indeed – and unfortunately I have proof of this. This has its roots, in addition to my biographical circumstances mentioned already, in my lack of scientific ability, poor capacity for abstract thought, worse memory, and above all my inability to keep a scientific goal always before me. I admit all this to myself quite openly, even with a certain relish. Because the deeper ground for my scientific inability seems to me to be an instinct, and not a bad instinct at that. Were I to brag, I could say that it was this instinct that has destroyed my abilities as a scientist, because wouldn’t it be odd after all, if I – who in the ordinary things of daily living, which are certainly not the simplest, demonstrate a tolerable comprehension, if not of science, then at least of scientists, as witness my results – if I should have been unable from the very beginning to raise my paw to the lowest rung of science. This was the instinct that – perhaps out of regard for science, but a different sort of science from that practised today, an ultimate science – has led me to esteem freedom more highly than anything else. Freedom! Freedom as it is on offer to us today is a wretched weed. But it’s freedom of a kind, something to possess.
The Married Couple
The overall state of the business is so poor that when my timetable permits, I sometimes pick up my old sample case and call on clients in person. Among others, I had long meant to visit K., with whom I used to be in regular contact, though this had practically come to an end over the course of the past year, for reasons unknown to me. Disruptions like this actually require no particular cause; in today’s difficult circumstances, a trifle, a mood is enough, and another trifle, a mere word, is enough to restore things to what they had been. Going to K.’s is a little awkward; he is an old man, rather frail of late, and even if he still has a firm grip on the business, he rarely goes into the office anymore; if you want to talk to him, you have to visit him at home, and that sort of contact is most apt to be postponed.
But last night, a little after six, I did finally go; it wasn’t exactly a conventional visiting time, but then it wasn’t a social call so much as a business matter. I was in luck: K. was at home; he had just, as I was told in the hall, returned from a stroll with his wife, and was now in the room of his son, who was unwell and bedridden. I was invited to go up; at first I hesitated, but then my desire to get the thing over with prevailed, and I allowed myself, in hat and coat and sample case, to be conducted through an unlit room into another, dimly lit, where a small group of people were huddled together.
It was probably instinct that caused my first look to fall on the – to me – very familiar figure of a certain business agent, an occasional rival of mine. So he had managed to get the advantage over me, and sneak up ahead. He was sitting comfortably close to the sickbed, almost as if he had been the doctor; he cut a rather powerful figure in his fine, unbuttoned, puffed-up coat. His impertinence is unrivalled; the invalid may well have entertained similar thoughts as he lay there with fever-flushed cheeks, looking up at him from time to time. This son is, by the way, no longer young, he’s a man of my own age, with a short beard, a little unkempt from his illness. Old K., a large, broad-shouldered man, though bowed and uncertain and to my astonishment drastically slimmed down on account of his creeping malady, was still standing there in his fur, as though he’d just walked in, murmuring something in the direction of his son. His wife, who was small and fragile-looking, but very animated, at least where he was concerned – she barely noticed the rest of us – was busy trying to take his coat off, which, in view of the difference in height between them, was a difficult undertaking, but finally she succeeded. Perhaps the real difficulty lay in the fact that K. was very impatient, and with fumbling hands kept feeling for the armchair, which, once she had taken off his coat, his wife quickly pushed under him. She herself took the fur, under which she almost disappeared, and carried it away.
Now at last the moment seemed to me to have come – or rather it hadn’t come and would probably not come here at all – but if I was going to attempt anything, it would have to be right away because to go by my feeling, the conditions for a clear-the-air business conversation would only get worse; to put down roots, as the other agent apparently intended doing, wasn’t my style; and I was determined not to pay any attention to him anyway. So I launched straight into my topic, even though I could see that K. evidently wanted to talk to his son a little. Unfortunately it’s my habit, if I have talked myself into a bit of a lather – and that tends to happen quickly, and occurred in this sickroom a little more quickly than usual – to get up and pace about while talking. In one’s own office, it’s a perfectly viable habit; in someone else’s flat it may appear a little uncouth. But I was unable to master myself, especially as I didn’t have the customary cigarette. Well, everyone has their habits, and I must say I still prefer mine to those of the agent. What words are there for someone sitting there with his hat on his knee, pushing it slowly to and fro; sometimes suddenly, perfectly unexpectedly, jamming it on his head, then taking it off again right away, as though it had been an accident; but it remains the case that it was on his head for a moment or two; and then he did it again, and again. A performance like that is really beyond the pale. It doesn’t bother me, of course; I walk up and down, I’m completely taken up with my own stuff, and I ignore it, but there may be people who find this hat trick utterly discombobulating. When I get th
e bit between my teeth, not only do I not have eyes for such a disturbance, but I can’t see anyone at all; I have a vague sense of what’s going on, but until I’ve finished, or unless I’m actually interrupted, I don’t attend to it. So, for example, I noticed that K. had very little attention to give; he was twisting his hands up and down on the armrests of his chair, he didn’t look over to me, but peered emptily into the void, and with such an apathetic expression it was as though not a syllable of my speech, not even any sense of my physical presence reached him. His whole (to me) discouraging, possibly morbid behaviour I could see perfectly well, but I went on talking, as though I had some prospect through my words, through my advantageous offers – I was alarmed myself about the sweeteners I had offered, sweeteners that no one had asked for – to get back to some kind of equilibrium. It did give me some slight satisfaction when I happened to notice that the agent had stopped playing with his hat and had crossed his arms over his chest; my exposition, which was indeed partly for his benefit, seemed to have put a dampener on his efforts. And in the resulting sense of well-being, I might have gone on speaking for a long time, had not the son, whom I had thus far taken for a minor player here, suddenly half-sat up in bed and, brandishing his fist, brought me to a halt. He clearly wanted to say something himself – to show something – but he lacked the strength. At first I thought it was on account of his fever, but when I involuntarily happened to look at old K. shortly afterwards, I understood better.
K. was sitting there with open, glassy, puffy, almost sightless eyes, trembling as he leaned over, as though some adversary had gripped him by the neck or was beating him – his lower lip, yes, his entire jaw with gums exposed hung down helplessly, his entire face was out of kilter; he was still managing to breathe, rather heavily, but then, as though freed, he slumped back against the chair-rest, shut his eyes, the expression of some great exertion crossing his face, and then it was over. Straightaway I leaped to him, touched the cold, lifeless, shudder-inducing hand that dangled there; there was no pulse. So it was all over. Admittedly, he was an old man. May our deaths be no harder than his. But how many things there were to do now! And which one first, in the rush? I looked about me for help; but the son had pulled the blanket over his head and I could hear his constant sobbing; the agent, as cold as a frog, sat tight in his chair, just two steps from K., visibly resolved not to do anything but await developments; so I, I was the only one left to do something, and the hardest thing of all, namely to break it to his wife somehow, in some bearable way – an option that just wasn’t available in the world at the moment. Already I could hear the brisk shuffling of her feet from the next room.
She – still in her street clothes, she hadn’t had a moment to get changed yet – was bringing a nightshirt that had been warmed through on the stove that she wanted to put on her husband. ‘He’s fallen asleep,’ she said with a smile and a shake of the head, finding us all so still. And with the unending trustfulness of the innocent, she took the same hand I had just – with some disgust and aversion – held in mine, kissed it in some little marital game, and – the expressions on our three faces, looking on! – K. stirred, yawned loudly, allowed himself to be dressed in the nightshirt, bore with a long-suffering expression the tender reproaches of his wife for having overtired himself in the course of their walk, and countered, to come up with a different explanation for having dropped off, a little remarkably, with something about boredom. Then, to avoid catching a chill on the way to another room, he provisionally slipped into bed with his son; beside the feet of the son, his head was settled on a couple of bolsters hurriedly produced by his wife. After all that had taken place so far, I found nothing unusual in these proceedings. Now he called for the evening paper, took it without regard to his visitors, didn’t read it but glanced at a page or column here or there, telling us with astonishing acuity some rather unflattering things about our offers, while continually making dismissive motions with his free hand, and by clacking his tongue suggesting a bad taste in his mouth that our business practices had given him. The agent was unable to bite back a few inappropriate remarks himself, clearly some sort of equilibrium needed to be achieved, but his really wasn’t the way to do it. I quickly took my leave, feeling almost grateful to the agent; without his presence I would have lacked the resolve to leave so soon.
In the anteroom I ran into Frau K. At the sight of her wretched form, I told her the first thing that came into my head, namely that she reminded me a little of my mother. And since she stopped still, I added: ‘Whatever you may say, she was a woman who could perform miracles. All the things we broke that she was able to repair. I lost her when I was still a boy.’ I had quite deliberately spoken exaggeratedly slowly and distinctly as I assumed the old woman was hard of hearing. But she was probably stone-deaf, since she asked without any pause: ‘And what about my husband’s appearance?’ From a few words of goodbye, I could tell she was mistaking me for the agent; I like to think she would have been more cordial otherwise.
Then I went down the steps. Going down was harder than climbing up, which itself hadn’t been easy. Oh, the things you do for business, and you still have to go on carrying the load when they fail.
A Commentary
It was very early in the morning, the streets were clean and empty, I was on my way to the station. When I compared my watch with the clock on the bell-tower, I saw that it was much later than I had supposed, and I had to hurry; my panic at this discovery made me uncertain of my route, I didn’t know this town at all well. Luckily there was a policeman standing there; I ran up to him and, a little out of breath, asked him the way. He smiled and said: ‘You want me to tell you the way?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I can find it for myself.’ ‘Then give it up,’ he said, ‘give it up,’ and turned away from me with a great flourish, in the manner of someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.
On Parables
Many people complained that the words of the wise were always couched in the form of parables, but were useless in daily life, which is the only sort of life we have. When the wise man says ‘Cross over,’ he doesn’t mean we should cross over to the other side of the street, which is something one might at least be able to do, if it were worth our while; no, he means some fabulous yonder, some place we don’t know, some place that doesn’t get any closer description from him either and that therefore can’t help us. All these parables are trying to tell us is that the intangible is impossible to grasp, and we knew that anyway. But the things we struggle with every day, those are different.
Thereupon someone said: ‘Why struggle? If you followed the parables, then you would have become parables yourselves, and thereby free of your daily cares.’
Someone else said: ‘I bet that’s a parable as well.’
The first person said: ‘You’ve won.’
The second said: ‘Yes, but unfortunately only in a parable.’
The first man said: ‘No, in reality; in the parable you’ve lost.’
Homecoming
I have come home; I stride down the passageway and am looking about me. It is my father’s old farm. The puddle in the middle of the farmyard. A tangle of useless old gear blocking the steps up to the loft. The cat lurking by the balustrade. A ripped cloth – a plaything – draped once around a pole is flapping in the wind. I have arrived. Who will welcome me? Who is hiding behind the kitchen door? Smoke is coming out of the chimney; the water for tea is on the hob. Do you feel in your element, do you feel at home? I don’t know, I feel very uncertain. It is my father’s house, but the things stand there next to one another coldly, as though each one were busy with its own concerns, which I have partly forgotten, partly never knew. What good can I be to them, what do they care for me, even if I am the son of my father, the old farmer. And I don’t dare knock at the kitchen door; I listen out from a distance, standing there, so that I don’t get caught listening at the door. And because I am listening from a distance, I manage to hear nothing, only perhaps the s
ound of a clock striking or perhaps I just think I am hearing it from my childhood. Whatever else is happening in the kitchen is the secret of the people sitting there, which they are keeping from me. What would happen if someone were to open the door now, and ask me a question? Would I not then be like someone wanting to keep his secret to himself?