The Great Wall of China

by Franz Kafka

  Nothing has ever happened before to approach the gravity of the present situation, but all the same there was an incident not unlike it in the earliest days of the burrow. The main difference lies simply in the fact that those were the burrow’s earliest days. At that time, as really no more than a young apprentice, I was still working on the first passageway; the labyrinth was only sketched out in rough outline; I had already hollowed out one small chamber, but in its proportions and in the treatment of the walls it was a total failure; in short, everything was so rudimentary that it could only be regarded as an experiment, as something which one could still abandon without much regret if one were to lose patience with it. Then one day it happened, as I lay among my heaps of earth during a pause from my work – throughout my life I have taken too many pauses from my work – that I suddenly heard a noise in the distance. Being young at the time I was more curious than frightened. I let my work lie and began to listen; at that time I did at least listen, instead of running up to my hiding-place beneath the moss, to stretch out there and avoid having to listen. I did at least listen. I could clearly recognize that it was the noise of some sort of digging like my own; it sounded rather fainter, but how far that was attributable to the distance it was impossible to say. I was tense, but otherwise calm and cool. Perhaps I am in someone else’s burrow, I thought, and now the owner is digging his way towards me. If that assumption had proved to be correct I would have moved off to build somewhere else, for I have never had any desire for aggression or conquest. But of course I was still young then, I had as yet no burrow, so I could afford to be calm and cool. The further development of this incident did not cause me any real disturbance either, although it was not to easy to interpret. If whoever was digging there was really making for me because he had heard me digging, then it was not clear why he should change direction, as now in fact happened; was it that my pause from work had deprived him of his bearings, or was it rather that he had changed his own plans? But perhaps I had been deceived altogether, and he had never been actually heading in my direction; at all events the noise went on growing louder for a while, as if he were approaching, and being young at that time I might not have been at all displeased to see the burrower suddenly emerging out of the earth; but nothing like that happened, from a certain point on the sound of digging began to fade, it grew fainter and fainter, as if the burrower were gradually moving away from his original course, and all at once it broke off completely, as if he had now decided on a diametrically opposite course and were moving directly away from me into the distance. For a long time I went on listening for him in the silence, before I returned once more to my work. Well, that warning was clear enough, but I soon forgot about it, and it has had scarcely any influence on my building plans.

  Between that day and this lie the years of my manhood; but is it not as if nothing at all lay between them? Here I am still taking a long break from my work, and listening at the wall, and the burrower has recently changed his intention, he has turned about, he is returning from his journey, he thinks that in the meantime he has allowed me long enough to prepare his reception. But on my side everything is worse prepared than it was then; the great burrow stands here defenceless; and I am no longer a young apprentice, but an old master-builder, and such powers as I still have desert me when it comes to the decision. Yet, old as I am, it seems to me that I would gladly be still older, so old that I could no longer raise myself from my resting-place beneath the moss. For the fact is that I cannot bear to remain up here after all, I raise myself to my feet and charge down into the house again, as if this place had filled me, not with peace, but with fresh anxieties. How had things stood when I was last below? The whistling had grown fainter? No, it had grown louder. I listen at ten points at random, and my error is clearly discernible: the whistling has remained constant, nothing has changed. Over there on the other side no changes occur, there one is at peace and beyond the reach of time, while here every instant grips the listener by the throat. And back I go again down the long road to the castle keep; all round me the burrow seems to be agitated, seems to look at me, then to look away again at once so as not to disturb me, then again to search my expression eagerly for signs of the decisions that will save us. I shake my head, I have still not reached any. Nor am I going to the castle keep in order to carry out any particular plan. I pass the spot where I had intended to build my exploratory tunnel, I examine it once more, the place would have been a good one; the tunnel would have led in the direction where most of the little ventilation channels lie, which would have eased my work considerably; perhaps I should not have had to dig very far after all, perhaps it would never have been necessary to dig right up to the source of the noise, perhaps listening at the ventilation holes would have sufficed. But no consideration is strong enough to inspire me to undertake this laborious excavation. This tunnel is supposed to bring me certainty? I have reached the stage where I no longer have any wish for certainty. In the castle keep I select a good piece of skinned red meat and creep with it into one of the heaps of earth; there at least I shall have silence, in so far as silence is still to be had here at all. I lick and nibble at the meat, thinking now of the strange beast pursuing its way in the distance, and then again that I ought to enjoy my supplies to the full while I still have the chance. This last is probably the only practicable plan that I have. For the rest I try to unriddle the plan of the beast. Is it on its travels or is it working in its own burrow? If it is on its own travels then perhaps some understanding with it might be possible. If it really does break through to me I shall give it some of my supplies and it will continue on its way. Continue on its way, indeed! In my heap of earth I can of course dream of anything, even of an understanding, though I know well enough that there can be no such thing, and that the instant we see each other, indeed the instant we sense each other’s presence, we shall both immediately, blindly, show each other our claws and our teeth, neither of us a second sooner, neither a second later, both filled with a new and different sort of hunger, however gorged we may otherwise be. And with entire justice, as always, for who, even if he were on a journey, would not change his itinerary and his future plans on catching sight of the burrow? But perhaps the beast is digging in its own burrow, and in that case I cannot even dream of an understanding. Even if it should be such a strange beast that its burrow could tolerate a neighbour, my burrow cannot; at least it cannot tolerate an audible neighbour. But it is true that the beast does seem to be a long way off; if it were only to withdraw a little bit further, then probably the noise would disappear too, then perhaps everything might come right again as in the old days; all this would then be just a painful but salutary experience, spurring me on to make all sorts of improvements; if I have peace, and no immediate danger threatens, I am still quite capable of doing various kinds of respectable work. Perhaps the beast, in view of the enormous possibilities that its capacity for work seems to give it, may renounce the idea of extending its burrow in the direction of mine and seek compensation for that in some other quarter. That, of course, cannot be achieved by negotiation either, but only by the good sense of the beast itself, or by some compulsion exercised from my side. In both cases the decisive factor will be whether the beast knows about me, and if so how much. The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that the beast has heard me at all; it is possible, though I cannot myself conceive it, that it has received some news of me by other means, but it is most improbable that it has heard me. So long as I was unaware of it, it simply cannot have heard me, for at that time I was keeping quiet, nothing could be more quiet than my returning to the burrow; afterwards, when I was making my test borings, it could perhaps have heard me, although my style of digging makes very little noise; but if it had heard me, then I too would have observed some sign of it, for at least it would have had to interrupt its work frequently in order to listen; but everything remained unchanged…

  ll of China