The Lost Writings

by Franz Kafka

  Why are you accusing me, you bad man? I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you before. You claim to have given me money to buy you confectionery in this shop here? I’m afraid you are certainly mistaken. You never gave me any money. Are you sure you’re not confusing me with my friend Fritz? He looks nothing like me. You don’t scare me by threatening to bring it up in front of the teacher. He knows me and won’t believe your accusation. And my parents will certainly not reimburse you, why on earth should they? Since I never got anything from you in the first place. And now let me go. No, you may not follow me, otherwise I’ll call a policeman. Aha, so you don’t want to go to the police, [. . .]

  Away from here, away! Don’t tell me where you’re taking me. Where is your hand, I can’t find it in the dark. If I were holding it, I think you wouldn’t try and lose me. Do you hear me? Are you even in this room? Perhaps you’re not here. What would lure you up into the ice and fog of the north, where one wouldn’t even expect to find people living. You are not here, you have slipped away from these places. But to me the question whether you are here or not is a matter of life and death.

  I have buried my reason happily in my hand, I carry my head upright, but my hand is hanging down, my reason is dragging it down to the ground. Look at my small, calloused, veined, wrinkled, proud-veined, five-fingered hand, how clever of me to harbor my reason in this unlikely container. What is of particular advantage is that I have two hands. As in a children’s game, I can ask myself: which hand am I holding my reason in, no one will be able to guess, because through the wrinkles in my hands, I can straightaway transfer my reason from hand to the other.

  It was a very difficult task, and I was afraid I would not succeed at it. Also it was late at night, I had embarked on it far too late, I’d spent the whole afternoon playing in the alley, not said anything about it to my father, who might have been able to help me, and now they were all asleep and I was sitting over my notebook all alone. “Who will help me now?” I said quietly. “I will,” said a strange man, slowly sitting down in a chair to my right along the narrow side of the table — just in the way that at my lawyer father’s, the parties slump down at the side of his desk — propped his elbows on the desk and stretched his legs out into the room. It was a shock to me, but this was my teacher; he would best be able to solve the problem he himself had set me. And he nodded in confirmation of this opinion, whether amiably or snootily or ironically I wasn’t able to say. But was it really my teacher? At first blush and from my overall impression of him he was, but if you went into detail, it became rather more doubtful. He had, for instance, my teacher’s beard, that thin, stiff, protruding, grayish-black beard covering the top lip and the entire chin. But if you leaned forward in his direction, you had the sense of some artificial arrangement, and it did nothing to allay the suspicion that my supposed teacher leaned forward in my direction, propping his beard in his hand and offering it up to my inspection.

  It is a small shop, but there is a good deal of life within it, there is no street entrance, you need to walk through the passageway and cross a small courtyard first, only then do you get to the door of the shop, which has a little board with the name of the owner hanging above it. It is a drapery, selling some finished clothes but specializing in unprocessed linen. For the uninitiated party entering the shop for the first time, it is completely astounding how much linen is sold there, or, more accurately, since one doesn’t get any sort of overview of the state of the trade, the intensity and enthusiasm with which it is sold. As I say, the shop has no street entrance, and not just that, from the courtyard you can’t see any customers enter, and yet the shop is full of people and you keep seeing new ones arriving and old ones leaving, and you don’t know where they go. There is deep shelving along the walls, but most of the units are clustered around pillars that support numerous vaulted spaces. As a result, you can never tell from any particular vantage point how many people are in the shop, new people keep emerging from behind the pillars, and the nodding of heads, the lively gestures of hands, the shuffling of feet in the crowd, the rustling of the material as it is spread out for inspection, the endless negotiations and arguments in which, even if they only implicate one salesperson and one customer, the whole shop seems to become involved — all this seems to magnify the business way past its probable real extent. There is a wooden booth in one corner, broad, but only just high enough for a person to be seated at it, and that is the office. The plank walls must be terribly strong, the door is tiny and no one thought to put in windows, there is just one peephole, but that’s kept curtained on both sides — in spite of that, it is extraordinary that anyone in this office can find enough quiet, given the noise outside, to do any writing. Sometimes the dark curtain hanging on the inside of the door is pulled aside, then one can see a small office assistant filling the entire doorway, pen stuck behind his ear and with one hand shading his eyes, looking curiously or dutifully at the pandemonium in the shop. He never takes very long, then he slips back in and lets the curtain fall shut behind him so abruptly that you can’t even snatch a peep at what might be happening within. There is a certain connection between the office and the shop’s till. This latter is situated just by the door to the shop and is managed by a young woman. She is kept less busy than one might have supposed. Not everyone pays cash, in fact only a small minority do, obviously there are other modes of accounting [. . .]

  What is bothering you? What is tearing at your heart’s support? What is testing your doorknob? What calls you from out on the street that won’t walk in through the open gate? Oh, it’s only the one you are bothering, the one at whose heart’s supports you are tearing, whose doorknob you are testing, whom you are calling from the street and through whose open gate you won’t walk [. . .]

  Let me say it unambiguously: everything that is said about me is false that has as its starting point the canard that I was the first human being to befriend a horse. It is remarkable that this monstrous claim was put about and credited in the first place, still more monstrous that the matter was taken lightly, spread around and believed, and let to rest with barely a shake of the head. There is a mystery there that would be more worth investigating than whatever paltry thing I actually did. All I did was this: for twelve months I lived with a horse as a man would live with a girl he adores but who rejects him, if there were no external hindrance to do anything that might get him to his objective. I therefore locked the horse Eleanor and myself in a stable, only leaving our joint residence to give the private lessons by which I earned our keep. Unfortunately, this meant five or six hours per day, and it is by no means impossible that the loss of this time was responsible for the ultimate failure of all my endeavors, and I should like the gentlemen to whom I made appeal for the support of my enterprise and who had needed only to cough up a small amount of money for something to which I was willing to sacrifice myself the way you sacrifice a handful of oats and stuff it between the back teeth of a horse, I should like those gentlemen to hoist that on board.

  A coffin had been made ready, and the carpenter loaded it onto his handcart to deliver it to the undertaker. The day was overcast and rainy. An old man emerged from the cross street and stopped before the coffin, ran his cane over it, and started a little conversation with the carpenter about the coffin industry. A woman with a shopping-bag coming down the main street bumped into the old gentleman, recognized a friend, and also stopped for a while. From the workshop the apprentice came out with a few questions to put to the master. The carpenter’s wife showed her face in a window over the workshop with her new baby in her arms, and from down in the street the carpenter began to coo at the little boy, and the gentleman and the woman with the shopping bag both looked up and smiled as well. A sparrow, mistakenly supposing that it might find something edible there, had settled on the coffin and was hopping around on it. A dog sniffed at the wheels of the handcart.

  There came a sudden loud knocking against the coffin lid from within. The bird flew up in panic an
d fluttered anxiously around the handcart. The dog barked furiously, he was the most excited of all, as though it had been his duty to predict this event, and he was inconsolable about his failure to do so. The old gentleman and his friend the shopper leapt aside and stood there with hands spread. On a sudden impulse the apprentice had leaped up onto the coffin and was sitting astride it, such a position seemed more tolerable than to wait for the coffin to open and the knocker to emerge. He may already have been regretting his impulse, but seeing as he was up there, he didn’t dare dismount and all the carpenter’s efforts to dislodge him were unavailing. The woman at the window, who had probably also heard the knock, but hadn’t been able to trace its source and to whom it certainly hadn’t occurred that it might have come from inside the coffin, understood nothing of what was happening below and looked on in bewilderment. A policeman, drawn to the spot by vague curiosity, and kept from it by vague apprehension, came dawdling up.

  Then the lid was pushed open with such force that the apprentice slipped off, a quick scream followed on the part of all, the woman in the window vanished, obviously to race down the stairs with her baby. Jammed into the coffin [. . .]

  When he escaped it was nighttime. Well, the house was situated on the edge of a forest. A town house, built in a town manner, single story, bow-fronted in the urban or suburban style, with a small picket-fenced front garden, lace curtains in the windows, a town house, and yet the only dwelling far and wide. And it was a winter evening and very cold out in the open. But then it wasn’t in the open, there was city traffic, because just then an electric tram came around the corner, but it wasn’t the city, because the tram wasn’t moving, it had been standing there forever, always in that position, as though coming around the corner. And it had been empty forever, and it was no tram, it was a wagon set up on four wheels, and in the moonlight diffusing through the fog, it could have been many things. And there was paving as in a city, the ground was laid out in slabs, an exemplarily smooth bit of paving, but it was just the dim shadows of the trees falling across the snowy country road [. . .]

  The housing department got involved, there were so many official rules, and we had neglected one of them, it turned out that a room in our apartment had to be given over to a subtenant, the case was not quite clear, and if we had punctually reported the room in question to the authorities and simultaneously stated our objections to having a tenant imposed on us, then our case might have been a strong one, but, as it was, our neglect of official paragraphs was held against us and the punishment was that we were not given any right of appeal against the decisions of the department. A disagreeable situation. The more so as the department now had the opportunity of finding us a tenant of its choosing. But we still hoped to be able to do something about that. I have a nephew who is studying law at the local university, his parents are close — though in reality very distant — relatives living in a country town, I barely know them. When the boy first moved to the capital he made himself known to us, a weak, timid, nearsighted boy with a crooked back and unpleasantly devious movements and ways of speaking. He may have a sound kernel, but we don’t have the time or inclination to look that far, a boy like that, such a leggy, trembling little shoot would need no end of care and observation, which is simply beyond us, and in that case it’s better not to do anything, and merely keep such a boy at a safe distance. We can give him a little support, money, advice, and in fairness we have done so already, but we have discouraged any further disagreeable and futile visits. Now, though, faced with this communication from the department, we remembered the boy. He lives somewhere up in the north of the city, certainly in pretty reduced circumstances and his board will hardly be enough to keep that weedy little body going. What about taking him in with us? Not just out of pity, we could and perhaps should have done it long ago out of pity, so not just out of pity, but we don’t need it to be counted among our indubitable good points, we would be richly rewarded if at the last moment our little nephew saved us from the diktat of our housing department, appearing as some perfectly random stranger insisting on his rights. So far as we have managed to ascertain, this would be a distinct possibility. If we were able to point to a poor student to the housing department, if we could prove that this student through the loss of his room would lose not just a room but the very thing that underwrote his existence, if finally (the nephew will not refuse his part in this little performance, we will make sure of that) we could establish that he has been living at least temporarily in this room, and only moved out to his parents in the country during the admittedly long period when he was preparing for his exams — if all this were to be successfully encompassed, then our worries would be as good as over. First of all, then, we must collect the nephew, but with a car that’s no trouble, we’ll pick up this boy who won’t know what’s happened to him [. . .]