by Franz Kafka
While talking to him Georg had been able to sit his father down again, and carefully pulled off his socks and the knitted drawers he wore over his linen undergarments. At the sight of these not especially clean things, he reproached himself for having neglected his father. It was surely part of his responsibility to supervise the changing of his father’s underwear. He had not yet talked to his fiancée about how they were to arrange his father’s future for him, but they had tacitly assumed that he would remain behind on his own in the old flat. But now he suddenly and irrevocably decided to take his father with him into their future household. It almost looked, on closer inspection, that the care his father would receive there from both of them would be a little too late.
He took his father to bed in his arms. It was very upsetting to notice how, while he carried him the few steps to his bed, his father was fiddling with Georg’s watch chain. He was unable to lay him straight down in his bed, because of the way he was gripping the watch chain.
Once he was in bed, though, all seemed well. He was able to cover himself up, and even pulled the blanket especially high over one shoulder. He looked up at Georg in a not unfriendly way.
‘You do remember him, don’t you?’ Georg asked, nodding encouragingly at him.
‘Am I properly tucked in now?’ his father asked him, as if unable to see for himself that his feet were covered.
‘You’re feeling a little happier in your bed already,’ said Georg, and straightened the covers for him.
‘Am I properly tucked in?’ his father asked him again, and seemed to be waiting for the answer.
‘Everything’s fine, you’re properly tucked in.’
‘No!’ shouted his father, in such a way that his answer collided with the question, threw the blanket back with such strength that it seemed to float for a while in mid-air, and stood upright on his bed. With one hand he supported himself lightly on the ceiling. ‘You wanted to tuck me in, sunshine, I know that, but I’m not buried yet. And even if it’s with my last remaining strength, I’m still enough for you, more than enough for you! I know your friend very well. He would have been a son after my own heart. That’s why you strung him along all those years. Why else? Do you imagine I didn’t weep for him? But that’s why you lock yourself up in your office, do not disturb, the director is busy — just so that you can write those mendacious letters of yours to Russia. It’s just as well a father doesn’t need lessons to help him see through his son. The way you thought just now you’d got him beaten, beaten so you can plonk your bottom on him, and he can’t do anything about it, that’s when my son takes it into his head to get married!’
Georg looked up at the terrifying vision of his father. His friend in Petersburg, whom his father suddenly knew so well, moved him as never before. He pictured him, lost in the vast expanses of Russia. He saw him at the door of his empty, plundered business. Barely managing to stand among the rubble of his shelves, the shredded wares, the falling gas brackets. Why had he had to move so far away!
‘Now look at me!’ shouted his father, and Georg, almost distracted, ran to the bed, to try to take everything in, but faltered part way there.
‘Because she hoicked up her skirts,’ his father began to tootle, ‘because she hoicked up her skirts like this, and like this, the disgusting slut,’ and, by way of demonstration, he lifted up his night-shirt so far that the scar from his war wound could be seen on his thigh, ‘because she hoicked up her skirts like this and like this and like this, you nuzzled up to her, and to be able to gratify yourself with impunity, you disgraced the memory of your mother, and betrayed your friend, and trussed your father up in bed, so that he can’t move any more. But tell me now: can he move, or can’t he?’
And he stood there, kicking up his legs, without holding on to anything. He looked radiant with insight.
Georg stood in a corner, as far away from his father as he could get. A long time ago, he had determined to observe everything absolutely precisely, so that nothing could take him by surprise whether from behind, or from above, or wherever. Now he remembered this long since forgotten resolution, and quickly forgot it again, like someone pulling a short thread right through the eye of a needle.
‘But your friend wasn’t betrayed after all!’ shouted his father, and his wagging index finger supported him. ’I was his representative here.’
‘You play-actor!’ Georg was unable to refrain from shouting. Straightaway he realized the damage he had done, and with staring eyes, but too late, he bit his tongue, till he doubled over with pain.
‘Yes, I was play-acting! Play-acting! A good word. What other comfort remains for an old widower of a father? Tell me — and while you think about your reply, you can remain my living son — what else was there for me, in my back room, hounded by my disloyal staff, old to the marrow? And my son passing through the world in jubilation, concluding deals I had prepared, turning somersaults of glee, and turning his back on his father with the doughty expression of a man of honour! Do you imagine I didn’t love you, I, from whom you sprang?’
‘Now he’s going to lean forward,’ thought Georg. ‘I wish he would fall down and break into little pieces!’ The phrase hissed through his brain.
His father did indeed lean forward, but he didn’t fall. As Georg didn’t come nearer, as he had expected he would, he straightened himself up again.
‘Stay where you are, I don’t need you! You think you have enough strength to come here, and are merely staying back because that’s what you have chosen to do. You are mistaken! I am still by far the stronger of us. Alone, I might have had to give best to you, but your mother left me all her strength. I have made a wonderful pact with your friend, and I have all your customers right here in my pocket!’
‘So he’s even got pockets in his shirt!’* Georg said under his breath, and thought the remark would make his father impossible in the world. The thought came and went, as everything did, because he was continually forgetting everything.
‘Just you try slipping your arm through your fiancée’s and coming to meet me! I’ll swat her away from you, you have no idea!’
Georg pulled a face, as though of disbelief. His father merely nodded towards Georg’s corner, in confirmation of what he had said.
‘How you amused me today when you came along and asked me whether you should tell your friend about the engagement. He knows everything, you silly boy, everything! I wrote to him, because you forgot to deprive me of my writing implements. That’s why he hasn’t come for years, he knows everything a hundred times better than you. In his left hand he crumples up your letters unopened, while in his right he holds mine in front of him to read!
In his enthusiasm, he swung his arm over his head. ’He knows everything a thousand times better!’ he shouted.
‘Ten thousand times!’ said Georg, to mock his father, but even as he spoke them the words sounded deadly earnest.
‘For years I’ve been waiting for you to approach me with your question. Do you think anything else had the least interest for me? Do you imagine I read the newspapers? Here!’ and he tossed Georg a page from the newspaper, which had somehow been carried into bed with him. An old newspaper, with a name that didn’t sound at all familiar to Georg.
‘How long you dilly-dallied before reaching maturity! Your mother was unable to witness the joyful day, she had to die first, your friend is going under in Russia; three years ago he was so yellow he was obviously not long for the world, and as for me, you see what condition I’m in. It seems you have enough vision to see that!’
‘So you were lying in wait for me!’ shouted Georg.
Pityingly, his father remarked: ‘I expect you meant to say that earlier. It doesn’t fit in here.’
And then, louder: ‘So now you know what else there was besides yourself; up till now all you knew was you! You were an innocent child, really, but it would be truer to say you were a veritable fiend! — And now pay attention: I sentence you to death by drowning!’
Georg felt himself expelled from the room, the crash with which his father came down on the bed ringing in his ears as he sprinted away. On the stairs, which he took like a smooth incline, he collided with the charwoman, who was just on her way upstairs to give the flat its morning clean. ‘Oh my God!’ she exclaimed, and buried her face in her apron, but he was already gone. He sprang through the gate, crossed the road, and raced towards the river. Already he was gripping at the rails, like a hungry man his food. He swung himself over them, like the excellent gymnast he had been in his early years, to the pride of his parents. His grip was beginning to weaken, when through the rails he spied a motor omnibus that would easily cover the sound of his fall, softly he called out, ‘Dear parents, I have always loved you,’ and let himself drop.
At that moment, a quite unending flow of traffic streamed over the bridge.
*Kafka’s variation on the German proverb that says the last shirt — the shroud — has no pockets in it.
The Stoker
A Fragment*
As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child by him, sailed slowly into New York harbour, he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her form.
‘So high,’ he said to himself, and quite forgetting to disembark, he found himself gradually pushed up against the railing by the massing throng of porters.
A young man with whom he had struck up a slight acquaintance during the crossing said to him in passing: ‘Well, don’t you want to get off yet?’ ‘I’m all ready,’ said Karl laughing to him, and in his exuberance and because he was a strong lad, he raised his suitcase on to his shoulder. But as he watched his acquaintance disappearing along with the others, swinging a cane, he realized that he had left his umbrella down in the ship. So he hurriedly asked his acquaintance, who seemed less than overjoyed about it, to be so good as to wait by his suitcase for a moment, took a quick look around for his subsequent orientation, and hurried off. Below deck, he found to his annoyance that a passage that would have considerably shortened the way for him was for the first time barred, probably something to do with the fact that all the passengers were disembarking, and so he was forced instead to make his way through numerous little rooms, along continually curving passages and down tiny flights of stairs, one after the other, and then through an empty room with an abandoned desk in it until, eventually, only ever having gone this way once or twice previously, and then in the company of others, he found that he was totally and utterly lost. Not knowing what to do, not seeing anyone, and hearing only the scraping of thousands of human feet overhead and the last, faraway wheezings of the engine, which had already been turned off, he began without thinking to knock at the little door to which he had come on his wanderings. ‘It’s open!’ came a voice from within, and Karl felt real relief as he opened the door. ‘Why are you banging about on the door like a madman?’ asked an enormous man, barely looking at Karl. Through some kind of overhead light-shaft, a dim light, long since used up in the higher reaches of the ship, fell into the wretched cabin, in which a bed, a wardrobe, a chair and the man were all standing close together, as though in storage. ‘I’ve lost my way,’ said Karl. ‘I never quite realized on the crossing what a terribly big ship this is.’ ‘Well, you’re right about that,’ said the man with some pride, and carried on tinkering with the lock of a small suitcase, repeatedly shutting it with both hands to listen to the sound of the lock as it snapped shut. ‘Why don’t you come in,’ the man went on, ‘don’t stand around outside.’ ‘Aren’t I bothering you?’ asked Karl. ‘Pah, how could you bother me?’ ‘Are you German?’ Karl asked to reassure himself, as he’d heard a lot about the dangers for new arrivals in America, especially coming from Irishmen. ‘Yes, yes,’ said the man. Still Karl hesitated. Then the man abruptly grabbed the door handle, and pulling it to, swept Karl into the room with him. ‘I hate it when people stand in the corridor and watch me,’ said the man, going back to work on his suitcase, ‘the world and his wife go by outside peering in, it’s quite intolerable.’ ‘But the passage outside is completely deserted,’ said Karl, who was standing squeezed uncomfortably against the bedpost. ’Yes, now,’ said the man. ‘But now is what matters,’ thought Karl. ‘He is an unreasonable man.’ ‘Lie down on the bed, you’ll have more room that way,’ said the man. Karl awkwardly clambered on to the bed, and had to laugh out loud about his first vain attempt to mount it. No sooner was he on it, though, than he cried: ‘Oh God, I’ve quite forgotten all about my suitcase!’ ‘Where is it?’ ‘Up on deck, an acquaintance is keeping an eye on it for me. What was his name now?’ And from a secret pocket that his mother had sewn into the lining of his jacket for the crossing, he pulled a calling-card: ‘Butterbaum, Franz Butterbaum.’ ‘Is the suitcase important to you?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Well then, so why did you give it to a stranger?’ ‘I forgot my umbrella down below and went to get it, but I didn’t want to lug my suitcase down with me. And now I’ve gone and gotten completely lost.’ ‘Are you on your own? There’s no one with you?’ ‘Yes, I’m on my own.’ I should stay by this man, thought Karl, I may not find a better friend in a hurry. ‘And now you’ve lost your suitcase. Not to mention the umbrella,’ and the man sat down on the chair, as though Karl’s predicament was beginning to interest him. ‘I don’t think the suitcase is lost yet.’ ‘Think all you like,’ said the man, and scratched vigorously at his short, thick, black hair. ‘But you should know the different ports have different morals. In Hamburg your man Butterbaum might have minded your suitcase for you, but over here, there’s probably no trace of either of them any more.’ ‘Then I’d better go back up right away,’ said Karl and tried to see how he might leave. ‘You’re staying put,’ said the man, and gave him a push in the chest, that sent him sprawling back on the bed. ‘But why?’ asked Karl angrily. ‘There’s no point,’ said the man, ‘in a little while I’ll be going up myself, and we can go together. Either your suitcase will have been stolen and that’s too bad and you can mourn its loss till the end of your days, or else the fellow’s still minding it, in which case he’s a fool and he might as well go on minding it, or he’s an honest man and just left it there, and we’ll find it more easily when the ship’s emptied. Same thing with your umbrella.’ ‘Do you know your way around the ship?’ asked Karl suspiciously, and it seemed to him that the otherwise attractive idea that his belongings would be more easily found on the empty ship had some kind of hidden catch. ‘I’m the ship’s stoker,’ said the man. ‘You’re the ship’s stoker,’ cried Karl joyfully, as though that surpassed all expectations, and propped himself up on his elbow to take a closer look at the man. ‘Just outside the room where I slept with the Slovak there was a little porthole, and through it we could see into the engineroom.’ ‘Yes, that’s where I was working,’ said the stoker. ‘I’ve always been terribly interested in machinery,’ said Karl, still following a particular line of thought, ‘and I’m sure I would have become an engineer if I hadn’t had to go to America.’ ‘Why did you have to go to America?’ ‘Ah, never mind!’ said Karl, dismissing the whole story with a wave of his hand. And he smiled at the stoker, as though asking him to take a lenient view of whatever it was he hadn’t told him. ‘I expect there’s a good reason,’ said the stoker, and it was hard to tell whether he still wanted to hear it or not. ‘And now I might as well become a stoker,’ said Karl. ‘My parents don’t care what becomes of me.’ ‘My job will be going,’ said the stoker, and coolly thrust his hands into his pockets and kicked out his legs, which were clad in rumpled, leather-like iron-grey trousers, on to the bed to stretch them. Karl was forced to move nearer to the wall. ‘You’re leaving the ship? ‘Yup, we’re off this very day.’ ‘But what for? Don’t you like it?’ ‘Well, it’s circumstances really, it’s not always whether you like some
thing or not that matters. Anyway you’re right, I don’t like it. You’re probably not serious about saying you could become a stoker, but that’s precisely how you get to be one. I’d strongly advise you against it myself. If you were intending to study in Europe, why not study here. Universities in America are incomparably better.’ ‘That may be,’ said Karl, ‘but I can hardly afford to study. I did once read about someone who spent his days working in a business and his nights studying, and in the end he became a doctor and I think a burgomaster, but you need a lot of stamina for that, don’t you? I’m afraid I don’t have that. Besides, I was never especially good at school, and wasn’t at all sorry when I had to leave. Schools here are supposed to be even stricter. I hardly know any English. And there’s a lot of bias against foreigners here too, I believe.’ ‘Have you had experience of that too? That’s good. Then you’re the man for me. You see, this is a German ship, it belongs to the Hamburg America Line, everyone who works on it should be German. So then why is the senior engineer Rumanian? Schubal, his name is. It’s incredible. And that bastard bossing Germans around on a German ship. Don’t get the idea’ — he was out of breath, and his hands flapped — ‘don’t you believe that I’m complaining for the hell of it. I know you don’t have any influence, and you’re just a poor fellow yourself. But it’s intolerable.’ And he beat the table with his fist several times, not taking his eyes off it as he did so. ‘I’ve served on so many ships in my time’— and here he reeled off a list of twenty names as if it was a single word, Karl felt quite giddy — ‘and with distinction, I was praised, I was a worker of the kind my captains liked, I even served on the same clipper for several years’ — he rose, as if that had been the high point of his life — ‘and here on this bathtub, where everything is done by rote, where they’ve no use for imagination — here I’m suddenly no good, here I’m always getting in Schubal’s way, I’m lazy, I deserve to get kicked out, they only pay me my wages out of the kindness of their hearts. Does that make any sense to you? Not me.’ ‘You mustn’t stand for that,’ said Karl in agitation. He had almost forgotten he was in the uncertain hold of a ship moored to the coast of an unknown continent, that’s how much he felt at home on the stoker’s bed. ‘Have you been to see the captain? Have you taken your case to him?’ ‘Ah leave off, forget it. I don’t want you here. You don’t listen to what I say, and then you start giving me advice. How can I go to the captain?’ And the stoker sat down again, exhausted, and buried his face in his hands.