The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction

by Franz Kafka

  The thing to do now, and urgently, would be to revisit the burrow with a view to its defence, imagine every conceivable defensive modality, then come up with a strategy and a concomitant schedule of work, and then straightaway embark on it, as fresh as a youngster. That would have been the thing, for which, as I say, it is too late, but that would have been what was needed, not all the digging of some kind of massive experimental trench that actually serves no purpose, which leaves me defenceless even as I put all my strength into seeking out the danger, as if it couldn’t come along soon enough at its own speed. All of a sudden I no longer understand my own earlier plan, the once rational scheme seems to be wholly unreasonable; once again I drop my work and I stop listening too; I no longer want to come upon any more reinforcements; I’ve had enough of these discoveries; I drop everything; I would be perfectly happy if only I could succeed in resolving my own inner turmoil. Once again, I allow myself to be drawn away by my passages, I come to others, ever more remote, that I have not seen since my return and are still untouched by my scrabbling claws, whose silence is roused by my coming and settles over me. I don’t surrender to it though, I don’t even know what I’m looking for, probably just to pass the time. I wander around until I get to the labyrinth, I am drawn to listen at the moss cover; these are the remote objects, remote at any rate for the time being, that hold my interest. I go up there and listen. Profound silence; how I love it, no one disturbs my burrow here, everyone has his own business which has nothing to do with me, how ever did I manage to get to this point? Here under the moss is now perhaps the only place in my burrow where I can listen for hours and hear nothing. A complete reversal, my vulnerable point has become a place of peace, while the citadel has been polluted by the noise and perils of the world. And worse, even here there is in reality no peace, nothing has changed, silent or rackety, danger lurks just as it did above the moss, but I have become insensitive to it, too much preoccupied with the hissing within my walls. Am I overwhelmed by it? It grows louder, it comes closer, but I wend my way through the labyrinth and stop up here under the moss, it’s almost as if I were leaving the building to the hisser, happy just to have a little peace up here. The hisser? Am I coming to a different and definitive sense of the source of the noise? The noise surely comes from the runnels dug by the small fry? Isn’t that my settled opinion? I don’t think I’ve departed from it. And if it doesn’t come directly from their runnels, then somehow it does so indirectly. And if it should be nothing to do with them, then there are no assumptions to be made, and one would have to wait for the source to appear or to be found. One could even now be toying with suppositions; it would be possible to say for instance that a water leak must have happened far away, and what I take to be a hissing or whistling is actually a rushing sound. But quite apart from the fact that I have no experience of this sort – the one time I stumbled upon ground water I immediately diverted it and it never came back in this sandy soil – apart from that it remains a hissing and is not to be misinterpreted as a rushing. But what good are all one’s injunctions to remain calm: the imagination refuses to rest and I still insist on believing – pointless to deny it to oneself – that the hissing comes from an animal, not from many little ones, but a single big one. There are things that suggest otherwise: the fact that the sound may be heard from all over, and always at the same volume, and indifferently day and night. Of course, one’s first assumption would be that there are many small animals, but since I surely would have encountered them in the course of my digging and haven’t, what I am left with is the existence of a single large animal, especially as what seems to contradict this assumption are just things that don’t rule that out, but merely make it dangerous beyond all imagining. That’s the only reason I refused to credit this hypothesis. Now I will desist from this self-deception. For a long time I’ve toyed with the idea that the reason it can be heard a long way away is because it’s working furiously, its progress through the soil is like a pedestrian’s over the ground, the earth shakes all around its digging, even when it’s passed through, this after-quake and the sound of its working are merged in the great distance, and I, hearing just the last ebbing away of the sound, hear it everywhere the same. What contributes to this is the fact that the animal is not heading towards me, which is why the noise doesn’t change, rather it has a plan whose purpose I can’t detect, but I have to assume that this animal – perhaps without even being aware of my existence – is encircling me, it has probably already traced several circles around my burrow since I first became aware of it. And now it seems the noise is getting louder, which means the circles are closing in. What gives me pause is the quality of the sound, the hissing or whistling. When I scrape and scratch at the soil in my way, it sounds very different. The only way I can account for the noise is by saying to myself that the principal tools of this animal are not its claws – though maybe they are used in some auxiliary way – but its snout or trunk, which, aside from its immense strength, evidently must have some kind of edge as well. Presumably it drills its trunk into the soil with a single mighty thrust and rips out a large piece of it, and all this time I hear nothing – this is during the pause – but then it draws breath for a fresh thrust, and this drawing of breath, which must be an earth-shattering sound, not just on account of the animal’s brute strength, but also because of its haste, its zeal, this sound comes through to me as a soft hissing. What I remain unable to account for is its uninterrupted working, perhaps the rhythmic intervals allow it tiny rest periods, but it hasn’t needed a substantial period of rest yet, day and night it digs, always equally fresh and strong, with its mind focused on the plan it wants to carry out, and for which it possesses all needful attributes. Now, I wasn’t ready for such an opponent. But apart from its idiosyncratic qualities, all this just betokens something I always had cause to fear, and should always have made preparations for: someone is coming. How was it, I wonder, that things remained blissfully quiet for so long? Who so directed the paths of my opponents that they made great detours around my property? Why was I kept sheltered for so long, only to be so alarmed now? What were all those minor threats I spent my time thinking through, compared to this one! Did I hope, as owner of this burrow, to prevail against all comers? When, as owner of this great and sensitive work, I am truly defenceless against any serious attacker, when the joy of ownership has spoilt me, the burrow’s vulnerability has rendered me vulnerable, its injuries hurt me as much as if they had been mine own. This is what I should have thought about in advance, not just my own defence – though how irresponsibly and inconsequentially I did that! – but that of the burrow. Care should have been exercised that individual parts of the burrow, and as many of these as possible, if they came under attack, should have been targeted by landslides that could be arranged at a moment’s notice, to separate the attacker from the less exposed parts, and by using such quantities of earth and to such effect that the attacker would not even have guessed that the actual burrow still lay ahead of him. And more, these landslips should have been calculated not merely to conceal the burrow, but also to bury the assailant. And I didn’t undertake the least step in this direction, I was childishly irresponsible, I spent my adult years with childish things; even the thought of danger to me was something to play with and I neglected to think about actual dangers. And there was no shortage of warnings either. Not admittedly anything on the scale of the present warnings, but still there was something similar during the infancy of the burrow. I was working then as a sort of junior apprentice on the first passageway – the labyrinth had been laid out in a crude way, I had already hollowed out the first little plaza, but its dimensions and the finish of the walls were inadequate; in short, everything was so much in its initial stages that it could only be accounted a trial, something that, when your patience gives out, you could abandon without any great regrets. Then, during one of the breaks in the work – all my life I allowed for far too many breaks in the work – I was lying among piles of soil and suddenly
I heard a sound in the distance. Young as I was, I was more curious than frightened. I dropped my work and settled myself to listen, at least I knew to listen and wasn’t running up to the moss to stretch my limbs and not hearing anything. At least I was listening. I could clearly tell that there was digging, like mine, a little feebler from the sound of it, but how much of that was attributable to the distance I couldn’t tell. I was excited, but somehow remained calm. Perhaps I am in someone else’s burrow, I thought, and the owner is on his way. If that had turned out to be the case, then I, who have never been aggressive or acquisitive, would have decamped, to build elsewhere. But remember I was still young and without a burrow of my own, so I could still be calm and collected. What happened next provoked no greater excitement; it was just hard to interpret. If the party digging was really trying to get to me because he had heard me digging, then, if he really was changing direction, as he seemed to be doing, it wasn’t easy to tell whether he was doing so because I, by stopping, had robbed him of his sense of direction, or if he had merely changed his mind. Perhaps I had deceived myself entirely, and he had never been making for me; at any rate the noise for a while grew louder, as though he was drawing nearer, and as a young person I might not even have been unhappy to see the digger suddenly rise up through the soil, but nothing of the sort happened; from a certain point on, the sound of digging began to weaken, it grew quieter and ever quieter, as though the digger had gradually changed direction, and suddenly it stopped altogether, as though he had decided in favour of a completely different direction and was moving away from me into the distance. I listened for him in the silence for a long time before getting back to work. Well, the threat was clear enough, but soon enough I forgot all about it, and it barely had any effect on my building plans.

  Between that time and the present I came to man’s estate, but it still feels as though nothing has really happened, I still make great pauses in my work and listen at the wall, and the digger has again changed his intentions, he has turned tail, he is coming back from a journey, he thinks he has left me enough time to get ready to welcome him. But on my side, everything is even less prepared than it was then, the great burrow lies defenceless, and I am not a little apprentice any more, I am an old master builder and whatever strength I still have denies itself to me when it comes to making a decision. But however old I am, it seems to me that I wouldn’t mind being older still, so old that I couldn’t even get up from my billet under the moss. Because in reality I can’t stand it here, I hurtle down into the burrow as though I had filled myself with fresh anxieties and not with calmness. What was the state of things now? Had the hissing got quieter? No, it had grown louder. I listen at ten random spots and my mistake is clear to me: the hissing has remained the same, nothing has changed. There are no changes over there; they are quiet and unworried about time, while here every instant jolts me, the listener. And I take the long way down to the citadel, everything around me seems in a state of turmoil, seems to be staring at me, seems to be avoiding my eye, so as not to disturb me, and then strains to read the saving intentions from my expression. I shake my head, I have none as yet. Nor do I go to the citadel to carry out any sort of plan. I pass the place where I was going to start digging the trench, I test it again, it would have been a good place, the trench would have gone in the direction where most of the little airshafts are, which would have greatly facilitated the work, perhaps I wouldn’t even have had to dig all that far, wouldn’t have had to dig as far as the source of the noise, perhaps further listening at the airshafts would have sufficed. But no thought is strong enough to motivate me for this trench-digging. So this trench is to give me certainty? I have reached a point where I don’t even want certainty. In the citadel I select a nice piece of skinned red meat and crawl off onto one of the earth piles, there will be silence there, inasmuch as there is any silence still to be had anywhere. I lick and nibble at the meat, think by turns of the strange animal making its way in the distance and then of me and the time I have remaining to enjoy my stockpiles. This last is probably the only realistic plan I have. Otherwise, I am trying to second-guess the animal. Is it migrating or is it working on its own burrow? If it’s migrating, then it might be possible to come to some accommodation with it. If it breaks through into my terrain, then I can give it some of my provisions, and it will be on its way. Yes, it will want to be gone. On my pile of earth I can of course dream of everything, even of accommodation, even though I know for a fact that such a thing is impossible and that the moment we clap eyes on each other, yes, even the moment we sense one another’s proximity, both equally insensate, neither first, neither second, with a wholly new hunger, even if in other respects we are completely satiated, we will bury our claws and teeth into one another. And as ever, so here with all justification, because even if he’s migrating, who, in view of this burrow, wouldn’t change his plans? But maybe the animal is digging in his own burrow, in which case I mustn’t even dream of an accommodation. Never mind that it’s such an exotic animal that its burrow would tolerate a neighbour, I know that mine won’t, at least not one within earshot. Now the animal admittedly seems to be very far off, if only it would withdraw a little further, maybe the sound would disappear too, perhaps then everything would turn out as before, then it would remain a grim but harmless experience, it would spur me on to the varied improvements, when I have calm and am no longer under the immediate press of danger, I am capable of quite respectable work. Maybe, given all the extraordinary possibilities of its technique, the animal will give up and stop extending its burrow in the direction of mine, and will compensate itself in the other direction. That too is not something that can be arranged by negotiation, but purely by the mind of the animal itself, or through some force exerted from my side. Either way, what will be decisive is whether and what the animal knows of me. The more I think about it, the more unlikely it seems to me that the animal has even heard me; it’s possible, if hardly likely, that it has had some news of me, without hearing me. As long as I hadn’t known about it, it won’t have heard me at all, because I was keeping quiet, there is nothing more quiet than the reunion with the burrow; then, when I embarked on my relief trench, it might have been able to hear me, even though my style of digging is really terribly discreet; whereas if it had heard me, I surely would have noticed something, it would have stopped in its work from time to time to listen – but everything went on unchanged—

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  This collection first published in Penguin Classics 2017

  Translation and Foreword copyright © Michael Hofmann, 2017

  The moral right of the translator has been asserted

  Cover photograph © Jaromir Funke. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Jean-Claude Planchet

  ISBN: 978-0-141-39561-6

  * In June 1914, Maurice Maeterlinck published a long essay called ‘The Thinking Horses of Elberfeld’, about the then widely reported efforts of one Karl Krall to train animals in quasi-human thinking and feeling.