by Franz Kafka
This whole incident is by no means isolated – this is typically how things happen. Yes, there are instances now and again of petitions being approved, but in those cases it is as though the colonel had done so on his own initiative as a powerful individual, and it has – not literally, but in terms of the feeling of the thing – positively to be kept from the government. Now, in our little town, the eyes of the colonel, so far as we can tell, are the eyes of the government as well, but some sort of distinction is being made here that we can’t quite understand.
In matters of importance, however, the citizenry may be assured of a rejection on every occasion. And the thing here is just as extraordinary, because we seem not to be able to do without this rejection, even though for us our application and its rejection is by no means a formality. In a continual spirit of freshness and earnestness, we make our way there and leave again, while not exactly strengthened and contented, then at least not shattered and exhausted.
There is, though, I have sometimes thought to observe, a certain age group that is not happy, and these are young people of between seventeen and twenty: young whippersnappers who from their perspective are unable to gauge the effect of a wholly insignificant or incipiently revolutionary thought. And it is among these that dissatisfaction has sneaked in.
On the Matter of our Laws
Our laws are unfortunately not widely known: they are the secret of the small group of nobles who govern us. We are convinced that these old laws are scrupulously observed, but it remains vexing to be governed by laws one does not know about. I am not thinking here of various questions of interpretation and the disadvantages entailed when only certain individuals are able to participate in the interpretation and not the population as a whole. These disadvantages may not be all that great. The laws are so old, after all – centuries have worked on their interpretation, and even though this interpretation has in a sense itself become codified, surely there is a certain freedom of interpretation still possible, though it will be very limited. Moreover, the nobility has no reason to be influenced by self-interest against us because the laws were from the very beginning set down in favour of the nobility, the nobility is outside the law and that is why the laws seem to have been given exclusively into their hands. There is wisdom in this disposition – who could question the wisdom of the old laws? – but also a torment for the rest of us, presumably that is not to be avoided.
Even these seeming laws can only be guessed at. It is a tradition that they exist and were entrusted to the nobility as a secret, but it is no more than an old – and by virtue of its age, a plausible – tradition, nor can it be more, because the character of the law demands that their existence be a matter of secrecy. If we members of the people have from time immemorial attentively observed the actions of our nobles, possess treatises written about them by our forefathers, and have in a sense perpetuated them, and if we think we can discern principles that would appear to suggest this or that legal stipulation, and if we try to arrange ourselves a little in accordance with these most carefully sifted and ordered conclusions – then all this is most uncertain, nothing more than a game of reason, because perhaps the laws we try to guess at don’t exist at all. There is a small political party that believes this and that seeks to prove that if a law exists, then its form can only possibly be: what the nobles do is the law. This party sees only arbitrary acts on the part of the nobility, and disdains the popular tradition that in its opinion has brought only slight, accidental advantages, along with a great deal of serious harm, since they have given the people a false sense of security in relation to coming events. This harm is undeniable, but the large majority of our people see its cause in the insufficient reach of the tradition, arguing that more work needs to be done on it, and that, however extensive it seems to us, it is still inadequate, and centuries will have to pass before it is sufficiently established. The only bright spot in this otherwise discouraging schema is the belief that one day a time will come when tradition and its study will breathe a sigh of relief and reach a conclusion, when everything will have been made clear – that the law is the property of the people – and the nobility will disappear. This is not said with any animus towards the nobility – not at all and not by anyone – we would rather hate ourselves because we are not yet worthy of the law. And that is why this, on the face of it, very attractive party, which believes in no law as such, has remained so small, because it also completely recognizes the nobility and its right to exist. It is really only possible to express this in a kind of self-contradiction: a party that would reject the nobility as well as the belief in the laws would straightaway have the entire population behind it, but such a party cannot come into being, because no one dares to reject the nobility. We live on the edge. An author once put it this way: the only visible unquestionable law that has been imposed on us is the nobility, and who are we to rob ourselves of the only law we have?
The Troop Levy
Troop levies – a neccessity in view of the constant violation of our frontiers – happen as follows:
Orders are given that on a certain day in a certain part of town, all the inhabitants – men, women and children alike – are to remain at home. As a rule, some time towards midday, the young nobleman who is to conduct the levy appears in the part of town where a detachment of soldiers, infantry and cavalry have been waiting since early morning. He is a young man, slender, not tall, frail, casually dressed, with tired eyes, racked with anxiety like an invalid with shivering fits. Without looking at anyone, he makes a sign with the whip that is the only thing he carries, and a handful of soldiers fall in with him when he walks into the first building. A soldier who knows all the inhabitants personally reads out the list of names. Generally, all are present, standing there in a line in the best room, their eyes fixed on the nobleman, as though they were soldiers already. But it can also happen that one or two, always a man or men, are missing. No one dares to come up with an excuse, much less a lie; everyone is silent, they can barely stand the pressure of the order which someone in the house has violated, but the silent presence of the nobleman holds them all in place. The nobleman gives a signal, not even a nod of the head, it’s just there in his eyes, and two soldiers go off to look for the missing person. It’s not at all difficult. He’s never actually gone from the building, nor does he really mean to absent himself from his service, it’s only out of fear that he hasn’t presented himself, fear not of the service itself, but shyness of it, the order is too vast, too frighteningly great for him, he can’t comply with it voluntarily. Nor has he fled, he’s merely hidden himself, and when he hears that the nobleman is in the building, then in all probability he creeps out of his hiding-place to the door of the room, and is seized by the soldiers the moment they step outside. He is brought before the nobleman who clutches his whip in both hands – he is so feeble, he could do nothing at all with one hand – and beats the man. It won’t have hurt him much, because half in exhaustion, half in disgust, he drops his whip, and the man has to pick it up and return it to him. Only then is he permitted to step back into the line of those waiting; incidentally, it is almost certain that he will not be taken. There are also times – and this actually happens more frequently – when there are more people present than appear on the list. A girl is there, for instance, and she stares at the nobleman; she is from somewhere else, the provinces somewhere, the levy has brought her here; there are many women who are unable to resist the lure of such a levy in some other place – it has a different character than at home. And strangely, there is nothing culpable about a woman giving into this temptation; on the contrary, it is something that in some people’s opinion women need to go through – an obligation, something they owe to their gender. It always happens the same way. The girl or woman gets to hear that a levy is happening somewhere, perhaps very far away, with relatives or friends. She asks her family for permission to travel, they give their consent – they can hardly refuse – she puts on her best dress, she’s more che
erful than normal, and calm and friendly at the same time, indifferent as she may be the rest of the time, and behind all the friendliness and the calm she is inaccessible as a complete stranger who is going home now and has nothing else on her mind. The family where the levy is taking place welcomes her quite unlike a normal guest: everything is done to flatter her, she is shown around all the rooms of the house, leans out of all the windows and if she happens to lay her hand on someone’s head, it signifies more than a father’s blessing. When the family gets ready for the levy, she is given the best seat, which is the one beside the door where she will have the best view of the nobleman and will be best seen by him. She is honoured, but only until the nobleman enters; thereafter she positively withers. He looks at her as little as he looks at anyone else, and even if he happens to direct his gaze at someone, that person will not feel as if they’ve been seen. She wasn’t expecting that, or rather that was exactly what she had been expecting, because it can happen no other way, but it wasn’t the expectation of the contrary that led her to come here, it was just something that is now at an end. She feels shame to a degree that our own women perhaps never feel, only now does it dawn on her that she has forced her way into a levy belonging to others, and when the soldier has read out the list and her name didn’t occur, there is a brief moment of silence, and she flees trembling and bowed out of the door, and is sent on her way by a blow on the back from the soldier.
If there is a man over, then he will want nothing but to be taken in the levy, even if it’s not his house. That too is completely hopeless, as no such supernumerary has ever been conscripted, nor will anything of the kind ever happen.
Poseidon
Poseidon was sitting at his desk working. The administration of all the waters was a huge task. He could have had as many assistants as he wanted, and in fact he did have a large staff, but since he took his job very seriously and checked all the calculations himself, assistants were of little use to him. One couldn’t say that the work made him happy either; he only did it because it was his to do. Yes, he had often requested happier work, as he put it, but whenever they came back to him with suggestions, it turned out that nothing appealed to him. It was actually very difficult to find anything else for him. It was hardly possible to put him in charge of a particular sea, quite apart from the fact that the calculations involved were just as onerous, only on a lesser scale of magnitude, since great Poseidon was only ever in line for a senior executive post. And if he was offered a job with a different department, the very thought of it was enough to turn his stomach, his divine breath became restless, his bronze thorax quaked. Not that they took his complaints all that seriously: if a great power kicks up, then you have to be seen to give into him, even in the most hopeless cause; no one seriously thought of having Poseidon removed from office, he had been god of the seas from the beginning of time, and would have to remain such.
The thing that most angered him – and this was the principal cause of his unhappiness in his job – was when he got to hear what people thought it involved, that is, forever parting the waves with his trident. And when all the time he was sitting at the bottom of the ocean up to his ears in figures, the occasional visit to Jupiter was really the only break in the monotony; a visit, moreover, from which he usually returned in a towering bad temper. He saw very little of the seas, only fleetingly on his hurried way up to Olympus, and he had never sailed them as such. He tended to say he was waiting for the world to end first, because there was bound to be a quiet moment when he had signed off on his last calculation and would be able to take himself on a little cruise somewhere.
Friendship
We are five friends who once emerged from a house one after the other; first one of us came out and stood beside the gate, then the second, or rather he slipped out of the gate as easily as a ball of mercury, and came to a stop next to the first, then the third, the fourth, the fifth. Finally we were all standing there in a row. People noticed us, pointed to us and said: Look, those five men have just come out of that building. Since that time we’ve been living together, and it would have been a peaceful life if it hadn’t been for the efforts of a sixth to get involved all the time. He doesn’t do anything, but he irritates us, and that’s enough; why try to impose on us when we don’t want him? We don’t know him, and we don’t want to include him. The five of us didn’t know each other before and, if you like, we don’t really know each other now, but what is possible and tolerated among the five of us is not possible and not tolerated with a sixth. Besides, we’re five, and we don’t want to be six. And what’s this continual being together in aid of anyway? Even with the five of us it’s pointless, though now we’re together and we’re staying together – but we don’t want a further union, simply on the basis of our experiences together. But how to tell that to the sixth – giving long explanations would be almost like adopting him into our group, so we prefer not to explain anything, and just not to adopt him. Never mind how much he pouts, we push him away with our elbows; but never mind how much we push him away, he keeps coming back.
Our City Coat of Arms
At first, everything to do with the Tower of Babel was in good order, yes, perhaps even too good, and there was too much attention to signposts, interpreters, workers’ lodgings and supply roads, as though centuries of work lay ahead. The prevailing orthodoxy was that it was impossible to work too slowly; it wasn’t even necessary to exaggerate this view, and one could still shrink back in alarm from laying the foundations. The argument ran like this: the kernel of this whole enterprise is the thought of building a tower that will reach into heaven. Next to this thought, everything else is negligible. This thought, once entertained in its full scope, is incapable of disappearing; as long as there are people in the world, there will be a strong desire to complete the tower. In this respect, then, one needs have little concern for the future; on the contrary, human knowledge will grow, the art of building has made progress and will make more; a job that may take us a year, in a hundred years’ time may only take six months, and be better, moreover, more durable. So why work at the limits of our endurance already? That would only make sense if we could hope to build the tower in the space of a single generation. But that was not to be expected. Rather, we might think that the following generation, with their improved knowledge, would find fault with the work of their predecessors, and have the structure torn down, to begin again. Such thoughts paralysed us, so that, more than with the tower itself, people busied themselves with the building of the workers’ city. Every national crew wanted to have the most splendid quarters, and the upshot was quarrels that were exacerbated into bloody conflicts. These conflicts were unending; for the leaders they were a further argument that the tower should be built either very slowly, because of our poor concentration, or preferably only following the return of peace. But people did not just spend the time fighting: in the intervals they beautified the town, which only provoked fresh envy and fresh conflicts. So the first generation passed, but none of those following was any different – craftsmanship improved but with that came the desire to fight.
A further factor was that by the second or third generation the futility of the infinite tower was seen, but everyone had become too committed to it to leave the town. Everything the town has produced by way of legends and songs is informed by a yearning for a prophesied day on which the town will be shattered by a giant fist in five quick consecutive blows. That is why the city has a mailed fist on its coat of arms.
The Helmsman
‘Am I not the helmsman?’ I called out. ‘You?’ asked a tall dark man, rubbing his eyes as though to dispel a dream. I had stood by the wheel in the dark night, with the feebly burning lantern over my head, and now this fellow had turned up and was trying to push me aside. And since I wouldn’t yield, he put his foot on my chest and slowly pushed me down, while I clung to the spokes of the wheel and, as I slid to the ground, pulled the wheel right round. Then the man grabbed hold of it, straightened the c
ourse, and pushed me away. But I thought quickly, ran to the passageway that led down to the mess room and called out: ‘Shipmates! Comrades! Quick! A stranger has got me away from the wheel!’ Slowly they came, climbing the steps up – staggering, tired, mighty forms. ‘Am I not the helmsman?’ I asked. They nodded, but only had eyes for the stranger. They stood around him in a half-circle, and when he ordered ‘Get out of my way’, they grouped together, nodded to me and went back down the stairs. Those people! Do they ever think, or do they just shuffle stupidly across the planet?