by Franz Kafka
The city resembles the sun, all its light is concentrated into one dazzling central circle, you lose your way, you can’t find the street or building you’re looking for, once you’re in there you will never emerge; in a farther, much larger ring things are still compressed, but there is no longer uninterrupted radiation, there are little dark alleyways, discreet passages, even small squares that lie in dimness and cool; beyond, there is an even larger ring where the light is so diffuse that you have to look for it, great blocks of the town stand there in cold gray; and then at last you find yourself in the open country, matte, bare, late autumnal, shot through by the occasional lightning.
It is always very early morning in this city, the sky is a level, barely broken gray, the streets are empty, pure and silent, somewhere an unfixed shutter is slowly stirring, somewhere the ends of a cloth that has been laid over the rail of a balcony on one last story are shifting, somewhere in an open window a curtain is billowing, otherwise there is nothing moving.
If you keep on walking, paddling through the balmy air, your hands by your sides like fins, glimpsing in haste’s half-sleep everything you pass by on your way, you will one day let the wagon pass you. Whereas if you stop still, allowing your gaze to put down deep and broad roots, so that nothing can remove you (and yet they are not real roots but only the strength of your purposeful gaze), then you will also see the unchanging dark horizon from which nothing can come, except, on one signal occasion, the wagon, coming trundling up to you, looming ever larger, and at the moment it reaches you it fills the whole world and you sink into it like a child in the upholstery of a railway wagon driving through night and storm.
Twenty little gravediggers, none any bigger than an average pinecone, form a separate group. They occupy a wooden barrack-like building in the forest, where they rest from their arduous labors. There is smoking there, and shouting and singing, in the usual way of things when there are twenty workers in one place. How happy they are! No one pays them, no one equips them, no one has given them any orders. They have freely chosen their line of work and they freely perform it. Even in our times, there is still a manly spirit of can-do. Not everyone would be satisfied by their work, and perhaps it doesn’t quite satisfy them either, but they don’t recoil from their once-taken resolve, they are used to lugging the heaviest loads through the densest underbrush. From morning till midnight, the festive din goes on. Some are telling stories, others are singing, a few are silently smoking their pipes, but all pass the great quartern of brandy around the table. At midnight their leader gets up and bangs on the table, the men take down their caps from nails, take up rope, shovels, and pickaxes from the corner, and get into formation, two by two.
Children are all over the church steps as if in a playground, calling to one another in vulgar terms they of course do not understand but merely take in their mouths, the way infants suck on a pacifier. The priest comes out, brushes the back of his surplice, and sits down on a step. He wants to calm the children, since their noise is audible in his church. All he’s able to do, however, is pull the occasional child to himself, the mass eludes him and continues to play all around him as before. He does not understand how their game functions, not remotely. Like balls repeatedly bounced on the ground, they are hopping and skipping indefatigably and effortlessly on all the steps and have no more connection than through their shouts, it’s tiring to watch. As though overcome by sleep, the priest reaches out for the nearest child, a little girl, undoes the top of her dress — which she requites by smacking him playfully in the face — sees some signal he wasn’t expecting or perhaps was expecting, exclaims Aha! pushes the girl away, calls out Yuck! and spits and makes the sign of the cross and gets up to dash back inside. There in the doorway he runs into a young gypsy-looking woman, she is barefoot, has a red-and-white patterned skirt and a half-unbuttoned white blouse and a wild tangle of hair. “Who are you?” he exclaims, his voice still irate on account of the children. “Emilie, your wife,” she replies softly, and presses herself against his chest. He is quiet and listens to her heart beat.
He gripped his lower lip with his upper teeth, stared into space, and didn’t move. “Your behavior is senseless. What’s happened to you after all? Your business may not be booming, but it’s not terrible either; even if it were to go bust — and there’s no question of that — you’ll still find it easy to get a start somewhere else, you’re young, hale, strong, energetic and have a good grounding, you have only yourself and your mother to look after, so, please, man, get a grip, and tell me why you’ve summoned me in the middle of the day, sitting there like that?” There was a short pause; I was sitting on the windowsill, he was on a chair in the middle of the room. Eventually he said: “All right, I’ll tell you. Everything you said was right but remember this: it’s been raining incessantly since yesterday about five o’clock” — he looked at his watch — “it started yesterday and it’s still raining at four today. That gives a man something to think about. While it usually rains in the street and not indoors, this time it seems to be the other way around. Look out the window, will you, it’s dry outside, isn’t it? You see. Whereas in here the water level’s rising all the time. Well, let it, let it. It’s bad, but I can stand it. With a bit of goodwill, you can stand it, your chair bobs up a little, not too much changes, things bob around and you bob a little higher than they do. It’s the rain pattering on my head I can’t stand. It may appear to be a detail, but this detail is more than I can stand or perhaps I would be able to except that I feel so helpless in the face of it. And I am helpless, I put on a hat, I open the umbrella, I hold a piece of board over my head, nothing helps, either the rain goes through everything or somewhere just beneath the hat brim, the board, the umbrella, a fresh rain begins just as powerfully.”
There was a small pond where we drank, belly and chest on the earth, forelegs, trembling from the bliss of drinking, sunk in the water. Soon we had to go back, though, and the most conscientious of us tore himself free and called: “Brothers, let’s return!” And we ran back. “Where were you?” we were asked. “In the woods.” “No, you were at the pond.” “No, we didn’t go there.” “Liars, you’re still dripping!” And out came the whips. We ran down long passages full of moonlight, here and there one of us was hit and would leap up in the air in agony. The chase finished in the ancestral gallery, where the door was slammed shut, and we were left alone. We were all of us still thirsty, licking the water from our fur and our faces, sometimes instead of water we would find blood on our tongues, that was from the whips [. . .]
I stood in front of the mine engineer in his office. It was a lean-to on clayey, barely flattened ground. A bare bulb hung down over the middle of his desk. “So, you’re looking for work?” said the engineer, propping his forehead in his left hand and in his right holding the pen over a piece of paper. It wasn’t a real question, he was just saying it to himself, he was a frail young man of less than medium height, he had to be very tired, his eyes were probably naturally small and narrow, but he gave the appearance of not being able to open them all the way. “Sit down,” he said, eventually. But all there was to sit on was a crate, one side of which had been ripped open, from which some ball bearings had issued forth. He had by now detached himself from his desk, only his right hand lay there as before, otherwise he was now leaning back in his chair; his left hand had migrated to his trouser pocket, and he gazed at me. “Who sent you?” he asked. “I read in a technical journal that you were hiring,” I said. “I see,” he said, with a smile, “so you read that, did you. I must say, you’re going about things very crudely.” “What do you mean?” I asked, “I don’t understand you.” “I mean,” he said, “that we are not hiring anyone. And if we’re not hiring anyone, that means we’re not about to hire you either.” “All right, all right,” I said, angrily getting to my feet. “I didn’t really have to sit down to hear that.” But then I reflected for a moment and said: “Is there any chance I could stay the night here? It’s raining outside, an
d the village is an hour away.” “I don’t have any guest rooms here,” said the engineer. “Couldn’t I stay here, in the office?” “This is where I work, and this — ” he pointed to a corner, “is where I sleep.” A few blankets and a little straw were indeed piled up there, but then there were also so many other things that I could barely make out that I hadn’t so far taken it for a sleeping place.
I am fighting; no one knows it; a few sense it, that’s hard to avoid; but no one knows. I perform my daily tasks, I am guilty of some absentmindedness, but not too much. Of course, everyone fights, but I am fighting more than the others, most people fight as though in their sleep, the way you move your hand to dispel a ghost in a dream, whereas I have stepped forward and am fighting with the most detailed and considered use of my forces. What made me step forward out of the rowdy, but in this one respect, troublingly silent crowd? Why have I drawn attention to myself? Why does my name appear on the first page of the enemy’s notes? I can’t say. A different life didn’t seem to me worth living. Born soldiers is what they call such people in books about warfare. But that’s not really the case, I am not hoping for victory and I take no delight in fighting for the sake of fighting, the only thing that rejoices me about it is that it’s the one thing to do. And as such it rejoices me more than I am in reality capable of appreciating, more than I can give away, perhaps it will be this joy, and not the fighting itself, that will spell my destruction.
Some farm laborers on their way home at night found an old collapsed figure of a man in a ditch by the side of the road. He was mumbling to himself, with eyes half-shut. At first it seemed to be a drunk, but he wasn’t drunk. Nor did he seem to be ill either, or weakened by hunger, or exhausted from walking, at least he shook his head in reply to all such questions. “So, who are you?” they finally asked him. “I am a great general,” he said, without looking up. “I see,” they said, “so that’s your trouble, is it.” “No,” he said, “I really am.” “Of course,” they said, “how could you be anything else.” “You can laugh if you want,” he said, “I won’t punish you.” “We’re not laughing,” they said, “you can be whatever you like, you can be a field marshal for all we care.” “That’s what I am,” he said, “I’m a field marshal.” “You see,” they said, “we’re on to you. Now never mind us, we just wanted to tell you that it’ll freeze tonight and that you can’t stay here.” “I’ve got nowhere to go, and I wouldn’t know where I would go.”
“Why can’t you go somewhere?”
“I can’t, I don’t know why. If I could, I’d be a general in the midst of my army in a trice.”
“I suppose they threw you out, did they?”
“Me, a general? No, I fell.”
“Fell from where?”
“From the heavens.”
“From up there?”
“Yes.”
“Is that where your army is, then?”
“No. But you’re asking too many questions. Go away and leave me here.”
A“Be honest! When will you next have the chance to sit cozily over a beer with someone who’s listening to you as today? Be honest now! Where does your power reside?”
B“Do I have power? What sort of power do you mean?”
A“You’re avoiding the issue. You’re a dishonest spirit. Maybe your power resides in your disingenuousness.”
B“My power! Because I’m sitting in this little bar, and I have an old schoolmate sitting with me, that makes me powerful.”
A“Then try it this way. Do you think you’re powerful? But be honest now, otherwise I’ll get up and go home. Do you think you’re powerful?”
B“Yes, I think I’m powerful.
A“Well then.”
B“But that’s purely my concern. No one can see a crumb of that power, not a trace, not even I.”
A“But still you think you’re powerful. So wherein does your power reside?”
B“It’s not quite correct to say that I think myself powerful. That’s an exaggeration. I, sitting here, old, dirty, and run down, do not think of myself as powerful. The power I believe in is not a power I exercise but others, and they do so by yielding to me. Of course, that can be very shaming for me and not at all glorious. Either I am their servant, whom in a fit of seigneurial good mood they have set above themselves as their master, that would just about be all right, then everything would be a matter of appearances, or again I really have been called upon to be their master, then what am I to do, poor helpless old man that I am? I can’t raise a glass to my lips without trembling, and now I’m meant to direct thunderstorms or oceans.”
A“Now see how powerful you are, and you wanted to suppress all that. But we know you. Even if you sit in a corner by yourself, all the regulars know you.”
B“Well, yes, the regulars know plenty, I hear only a fraction of their talk, but what little I hear is my only instruction and encouragement.”
A“What?! You claim to rule on the basis of what you hear?”
B“No, certainly not. But you belong to those who believe I rule?”
A“Didn’t you just say so?”
B“How could I have just said so? No, all I said is that I think I am powerful, but I don’t exercise my power. I can’t exercise it, because my assistants are already there but not yet in position, and they never will be. They are skittish, they hang around everywhere they have no business to be, from all quarters their eyes are on me, and I nod with approval at everything they do. So, was I not right in saying I had no power? And don’t call me disingenuous.”
“Of what does your power consist?”
“Do you take me for powerful?”
“I take you for extremely powerful, and almost as much as your power I admire the unselfish forbearance with which you use it, or rather the determination with which you deploy your power against yourself. Not content with forbearance, you even fight against yourself. I don’t ask why you do such a thing, that is your own deep secret, all I ask about is the source of your power. I think I am entitled to ask because I have recognized your power as not many have, and that its mere threat — which today is almost all that’s left of it as a result of your self-discipline — feels like something irresistible to me.”
“Your question is easily answered: my power rests in my two wives.”
“Your wives?”
“Yes. You’ve met them, haven’t you?”
“Do you mean the women I saw yesterday in your kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Those two fat women?”
“Yes.”
“Those women. I hardly paid them any attention. They looked, forgive my saying so, like two cooks. And they were not quite clean, and scruffily dressed as well.”
“Yes, that’s them.”
“Well, if you say so, I believe you, only you’ve now become even more of a mystery to me than you were before I was told of the two wives.”
“It’s no mystery. It’s plain to see. Let me try and tell you. So, I live with these two women, you saw them in the kitchen, though they rarely cook for me, we usually send out for food from the restaurant opposite, sometimes Resi gets it, and sometimes Alba. No one’s actually opposed to cooking at home, but it’s too difficult because the two of them don’t get along, or rather they get along beautifully but only when they can exist side by side in calm. For example, they can lie together on the narrow sofa for hours without sleeping, which given their girth is no mean feat. But they bicker when there is work to be done, then they quarrel, and they start hitting each other. And so we came to the understanding — they are very amenable to reason and good sense — that they should do as little work as possible. Which further accords with their nature. They think they have tidied the apartment when actually it’s so dirty that the first step I take across the threshold disgusts me, but then once I’ve taken it, I adjust.
“Along with work, every
pretext for strife has disappeared. Jealousy in particular is something they are quite unacquainted with. How should they be jealous? I can barely tell them apart. Maybe Alba’s nose and lips are a little more negroid than Resi’s, but sometimes I have the opposite impression. Maybe Resi has less hair than Alba — she does have disgracefully little hair — but do I make anything of it? I promise you, I can barely tell them apart.
“Also, I only get home from work in the evening, the only time I see them in the daytime is on Sundays. So, I get home late, as I like to wander around by myself after work. For reasons of economy, we don’t use the light very much. I can hardly afford to, keeping those two women, who seem to be capable of eating continuously, uses up almost my whole salary. So, I come to the dark apartment and ring the bell. I hear them come puffing up to the door. Resi or Alba says: ‘It’s him,’ and then the puffing gets a little louder. If there were a stranger at the door, he might very well be alarmed.
“Then they open the door, and I usually play the joke on them of forcing myself through the crack and grabbing them by the throat. ‘Ooh you’ says one of them, which means ‘You are incredible,’ and then they both laugh their deep, throaty laughs. From that moment on, they are entirely occupied with me, and if I didn’t twist a hand free to shut the door, I’m sure it would remain open all night.
“Then the way through the anteroom, no more than a couple of paces though it takes us perhaps the better part of an hour, along which they carry me almost bodily. I am tired, of course, at the end of a hard day, and sometimes I permit my head to drop on Resi’s soft shoulder and sometimes on Alba’s. They are both almost naked, just wearing little shifts, as they do all day long, except when company is expected, like your visit the other day, when they slip into a few dirty rags.