The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction

by Franz Kafka

  Since I have extensive practice with such investigations, it probably won’t take me very long, and I can begin right away – yes, I have other work waiting for me, but this is the most urgent task – I require silence in my passageways. This particular sound is relatively innocent; I didn’t even hear it at first, even though it will have been present already; I had to be fully re-acclimatized to hear it, if you like, it’s a sound that requires the hearing of the owner-occupier doing his proper job. And it’s not even constant, as such sounds tend to be, there are long breaks in it, evidently a function of occasional blockages in the air-flow. So I commence my investigations, but I am not able to find the right spot to intervene; I start a few random excavations, of course nothing turns up, and the great labour of digging and the still greater labour of filling in and making good is all in vain. I don’t even succeed in coming any closer to the source of the sound: it continues reedily at regular intervals, sometimes like hissing, sometimes more like whistling. I could ignore it for the time being; I do find it terribly disruptive, but there is little doubt as to its presumed source, so it will hardly grow any louder; on the contrary, it’s been known – admittedly, I’ve hardly ever cared to wait that long – for such sounds to disappear by themselves over time owing to the further efforts of the little burrowers; and that aside, some chance event often leads one along the trail of the disturbance, while more systematic investigation can turn up nothing for long periods. So I comfort myself, and would rather wander through the passageways and visit the plazas, many of which I have not yet revisited, and in between times treat myself to periodic visits to the citadel; but it won’t let go of me, I am compelled to go on looking. A lot of time, a lot of time, time for which I have better uses, is taken up by the little folk. On these occasions, it is usually the technical difficulty that attracts me. I imagine, for instance, based on the sound that my ear from long experience is able to analyse minutely, in scrupulous detail, the exact cause and then I am compelled to check whether the reality bears any relation to it. With good reason, because without a positive identification I am unable to feel safe, even if it’s just a matter of knowing which way a grain of sand will go as it rolls down a surface. A noise like that is by no means unimportant in such a context. But important or not, and try as I may, I find nothing, or rather, I find too much. It had to happen in my favourite plaza, I think to myself, and I go far away from it, almost halfway to the next plaza; the whole thing is a joke really, as though I wanted to prove that it wasn’t my favourite plaza that has disappointed me, but that the disturbances are elsewhere, and smiling, I set myself to listen; then, I kid you not, I hear the same hissing sound here as well. It’s nothing; sometimes I think no one but me would be capable of hearing it; admittedly, with my practised ear, I am hearing it ever more distinctly, even though in reality it’s exactly the same sound, as I can tell by making the comparison. Nor does it get any louder, as I can tell by leaving the wall and standing in the middle of the passage and listening. It takes considerable concentration, even immersion, to pick up the ghost of a sound, which is more guessed at than actually heard. But it’s this constant volume all around that I find most disturbing because it won’t permit itself to be reconciled with my original assumption. If I had correctly guessed the source of the noise, then it should have been loudest from a specific place that I would have had to discover, and then be diminishing from there. But if my explanation wasn’t correct, what else could it be? There remained the possibility that there were two centres of the sound, that I had thus far picked up equally distant from both of them, and that as I approached one, the volume from it would increase, but by simultaneously decreasing as I left the other one, the overall volume remained more or less constant. I almost thought that, when I listened intently, I could hear differences in quality that bore out the new hypothesis, though these were extremely hard to make out. At any rate, I would have to greatly extend the area of my operations. So I follow the passage down to the citadel and start to listen there. Curious, it was the same sound here as well. Now it’s a sound produced by the digging of some inconsequential animals that have made use of my absence to get up to no good; at any rate there is no question of any threat to myself, they are purely concerned with their work, and so long as they encounter no obstruction, they will carry on in the same direction; I know all that, but even so it baffles me and excites me and confuses the faculties I need for my work that they have dared to penetrate as far as the citadel. In that respect I’m not interested in any distinctions: was it the considerable depth at which the citadel is located, was it its great extension and the corresponding strong movement of air, which frightened the diggers, or was it simply the fact that it was the citadel – the absolute grandeur of the place – that had got through to their dull wits by some agency or other? Thus far at least I had not observed any excavations touching the walls of the citadel. Animals sometimes came here, in numbers, drawn by the powerful exudations; this actually is where I had some of my best hunting, but they usually dug their way in somewhere up above, struck a passageway, and came down it – sheepishly maybe, but powerfully attracted nonetheless. Whereas now they were apparently coming through the walls. If only I had managed to follow through on the grand plans of my youth and early manhood, or if only I had had the strength to carry them out, because it wasn’t that I lacked the willpower. It was one of my most cherished plans to seal off the citadel from the soil around, walling it in but only to a thickness roughly corresponding to my own height, and above that to create a hollow space – on a narrow foundation unfortunately not entirely separable from the soil – going all around the citadel. This hollow space I had imagined – and surely rightly – would have provided the most beautiful accommodation I could ever have had. To dangle on the curve, to pull myself up, to slither down, to turn somersaults and once again feel the ground under my feet, and all these games literally on the body of the citadel, though not in its actual confines; to be able to avoid the citadel, to allow my eyes to relax from it, to put off the joy of seeing it again to some future time, and yet not to be away from it, but to have it literally in my grasp, something that is impossible if one has nothing but the humdrum open approach to it; and above all to be able to guard it, to be so amply compensated for the inability to see it that certainly, had there been a choice between remaining in the citadel or the hollow, then certainly you would have chosen the hollow space for the rest of your days, always promenading up and down there, protecting the citadel. Then there would be no noises in the walls, no impertinent digging up to its purlieus, then peace would be guaranteed, and I would be its guarantor, I wouldn’t be listening, nauseated, to the scrabbling of small fry, but with rapture to something I totally miss: the sound of silence over the citadel.

  But none of this beauty exists, and I need to go about my work; I should be almost glad that the citadel is involved, because that will lend me wings. It increasingly appears that I will need all my strength for what at first seemed a rather modest task. I listen attentively now to the walls of the citadel and wherever I press my ear, high and low, to the walls or to the ground, at the entrances or deep within, everywhere I hear the same sound. And how much time, how much concentration goes on picking up this sporadic sound. If you want, you can take some little comfort from the fact that here in the citadel, as opposed to the passageways, if you take your ear off the ground, you hear nothing – that’s a function of the dimensions of the citadel. It’s only to rest, to bring myself back to reality that I periodically undertake these trials, and then I’m happy when I hear nothing. What’s happened, after all? My first attempts at an explanation totally failed in the face of this phenomenon. But then I must quickly reject other accounts that present themselves. You might suppose that what I am hearing is the small fry at work. But that would fly in the face of all experience; something I have never heard before, that was always present – I can’t suddenly overnight have begun to hear it. My sensitivity to disturbances in th
e burrow has perhaps become more acute over the years, but my actual hearing can’t have become keener. It’s in the nature of the little creatures that one doesn’t hear them, or else I would never have tolerated them; at the risk of starving, I would have exterminated them. But maybe – I have a sneaking suspicion – this is some animal I am unacquainted with. It’s a possibility; of course I’ve observed the forms of life here below minutely and for a long time, but the world is varied, and one is never short of nasty surprises. It couldn’t be a single specimen, there would have to be a major herd of them that had suddenly moved into my territory, a major herd of small animals, that, since they are at least audible, must be larger than the small fry, if not by much, since the noise of their labour is still quite faint. So they could be animals unknown, a migratory herd moving through, disturbing me, yes, but not here for very long. I could wait it out, and avoid doing unnecessary work. But if they are new animals, why is it I have yet to see them? I have undertaken much digging to try and nab one of them, but I haven’t succeeded. It occurs to me that they might be really tiny creatures, much smaller than the varieties known to me, and that the only considerable aspect of them is the noise they make. I go back through my spoils, toss the lumps of soil up in the air to break them up into tiny bits, but I find no trace of the noise-makers. It dawns on me gradually that these random excavations are not the way to go; I will end up tunnelling through the walls of my burrow, scraping up something here and there, but not taking the time to repair the cavities; already, many places have heaps of earth blocking the path and the view. I may find it only marginally upsetting that I can neither walk around nor look nor rest, and often I find I’ve nodded off over my work in some hole or other, one paw clawed into the soil I wanted to pull a piece out of with the last of my energy. I will change my methods. I will construct a wide trench in the direction of the noise, and not stop digging until, regardless of my theorizing, I have succeeded in finding the true source of the noise. Then if it is in my power, I will deal with it, and if not, I shall at least have some certainty. This certainty will bring me either calm or turmoil, but whichever it is, there will be no doubt about it and it will be justified. This resolution does me good: everything I’ve done so far strikes me as having been over-hasty, attributable to the excitement of returning home, not yet free of the alarms of the upper world, and not yet fully reabsorbed into the tranquillity of the burrow; still over-sensitized by having gone without it for so long, I have allowed myself to be utterly distracted by a new and admittedly remarkable phenomenon. So what is it? A gentle hiss, only audible at long intervals, nothing at all really, you might get used to it, well, maybe not that, but you could be content merely to observe it for a while, give it a watching brief, i.e. listen in every few hours or so and patiently note the results, but not do as I did and rub your ear along the walls, and scratch open the ground almost every time you pick up the sound, to no end, other than to express your inner disquiet. That’s all about to change now, I hope. And then again, I don’t hope – as I admit to myself with eyes closed, furious with myself – because I am trembling with this agitation every bit as much as I was hours ago, and if common sense didn’t hold me back, I would probably just start digging somewhere else, regardless of whether I heard anything there or not – dully, stubbornly, just for the sake of digging, not so very different from the small fry that digs for no reason, or only because they eat the soil. My sensible new plan both tempts me and doesn’t. There are no objections to it, at least I know of none; it is bound, as I see it, to lead to a result. And all the same, at some level I don’t trust it, I have so little faith in it that I am not even alarmed by the possible terrors of what it may ultimately turn up, I don’t even believe in the terror; yes, it seems to me that from the very first appearance of the noise, I had thought of such a purposeful excavation, and the only reason I didn’t embark on it was because I had no confidence in it.

  Of course I will begin to dig such a trench: I have no other choice; but not right away, I will put off the work a little, until common sense has returned to me, I won’t plunge into it. First I’ll make good the damage I’ve done to the burrow with my scrabbling around; that will take some time, but it’s important; the new trench will in all probability be long if it does actually get anywhere, and if it leads nowhere, it will be positively unending; at any rate that work will require a longer period of absence from the burrow, not so much maybe as lately in the upper world, and I can break off the work when I feel like it and go on visits home; and even if I don’t, the air from the citadel will still waft across to me, and accompany me while on the job, but it still entails a period of absence from the burrow proper and the surrender to an uncertain destiny, so let me at least ensure that I leave the burrow in good order; I don’t want it to appear that in fighting for my peace and quiet, I ended up destroying it and leaving it derelict. So I begin scraping the soil back into the holes, work I know intimately, I’ve done it thousands of times almost without feeling that it was a job at all, and that, especially as regards the final pressing down and smoothing out – this is not patting myself on the back, it’s the simple truth – I am a past master at. This time, though, it feels hard, I’m absent-minded, I keep stopping to press my ear to the wall to listen, indifferently letting pawfuls of earth I’ve just hoisted up trickle back down the slope. The final cosmetic improvements, which call for heightened concentration, are almost beyond me. Ugly bulges are left, unsightly cracks, not to mention the fact that overall it’s impossible to give a patched piece of wall any of the old elan. I try to console myself by saying it’s just a provisional job. When I’m back, once peace has been restored, I can give it a proper professional going-over, and it will all be done in the twinkling of an eye. In fairy tales, things are forever being done in the twinkling of an eye, and this bit of consolation is no more than a fairy tale. It would be so much better to do the job properly now, much more practical than forever interrupting it, traipsing through the passages and identifying fresh places where I can hear the noise; which is actually terribly easy, because it involves nothing more than stopping pretty much anywhere at random and listening. And then I make further unhelpful discoveries. Sometimes it feels as though the noise has stopped – you remember there are long pauses – sometimes you can ignore a little hiss, because of the way the blood is throbbing in your ear, then two pauses merge into one, and for a while you imagine the hissing has stopped for good.

  You stop listening, you leap up, life is turned upside down, it’s as though a source has opened from where the silence of the burrow streams forth. You do anything rather than check your new discovery, you go looking for someone you confided it to unquestioned before, you race off to the citadel, you remember that with everything you are, you have awakened to a new life, that it’s ages since you had anything to eat, you grab a handful of something from the now somewhat soiled provisions, and are still gulping it down as you run back to the place where you made your incredible discovery; at first you want nothing more than casually, fleetingly, while snacking, to hear it again, you cock an ear, but the merest half-attention is enough to tell you that you’ve made a howling blunder, because there’s the hissing again merrily in the distance. You spit out what’s in your mouth and feel like treading it into the ground, and you go straight back to work, though you’re not sure where to start, some place where something needs doing, and there’s no shortage of those, so you mechanically get busy doing something, as if a foreman has arrived on site and you had to put on a bit of a show for him. But after you’ve been working in that style for some little time, you make your next discovery. The noise seems to have got louder, not much louder, of course, but distinctly louder, you can clearly hear it. And this sounding louder seems to suggest a coming closer, and much more clearly than you hear the louder sound, you seem to see the pace at which it is getting nearer. You recoil from the wall; you try to take in all the possible implications of this latest discovery. You have the feeling you
never really put the burrow on any sort of proper defence footing; you meant to, of course, but contrary to all the lessons of life you thought the danger of an attack and hence the putting on a defence footing was remote, or if not remote (how could that be possible!), then at least less important than designing it for a peaceful life, which was what became your priority throughout the burrow. A lot of things could have been done in that other direction, without even changing the basic design, but over the years quite unaccountably it hasn’t been done. I’ve been lucky over all these years; luck made me its darling. I was uneasy, but unease within an overall context of luck doesn’t matter.