by Franz Kafka
‘Come nearer,’ said the man after a little pause.
I obeyed him only because he was so old, otherwise I should naturally have had to insist that he give a direct answer to my direct question. At any rate, as I entered I said, ‘If putting me up causes you even the slightest difficulty, feel free to tell me so; I don’t absolutely insist on it. I can go to the inn, it wouldn’t matter to me at all.’
‘He talks so much,’ the woman said in a low voice.
It could only have been intended as an insult, thus it was with insults that they met my courtesy; yet she was an old woman, I could not say anything in my defence. And my very defencelessness was perhaps the reason why this remark to which I dared not retort had so much greater an effect on me than it deserved. I felt there was some justification for a reproach of some sort, not because I had talked too much, for as a matter of fact I had said only what was absolutely necessary, but because of other reasons that touched my existence very closely. I said nothing further, insisted on no reply, saw a bench in a dark corner near by, walked over, and sat down.
The old couple resumed their eating, a girl came in from the next room and placed a lighted candle on the table. Now one saw even less than before, everything merged in the darkness, only the tiny flame flickered above the slightly bowed heads of the two old people. Several children came running in from the garden, one fell headlong and cried, the others stopped running and now stood dispersed about the room; the old man said, ‘Go to sleep, children.’
They gathered in a group at once, the one who had been crying was only sobbing now, one boy near me plucked at my coat as if he meant that I was to come along; since I wanted to go to sleep too, I got up and, adult though I was, went silently from the room in the midst of the children as they loudly chorused good night. The friendly little boy took me by the hand and made it easier for me to find my way in the dark. Very soon we came to a ladder, climbed up it, and were in the attic. Through a small open skylight in the roof one could just then see the thin crescent of the moon; it was delightful to step under the skylight – my head almost reached up to it – and to breathe the mild yet cool air. Straw was piled on the floor against one wall; there was enough room for me to sleep too. The children – there were two boys and three girls – kept laughing while they undressed; I had thrown myself down in my clothes on the straw, I was among strangers, after all, and they were under no obligation to take me in. For a little while, propped up on my elbows, I watched the half-naked children playing in a corner. But then I felt so tired that I put my head on my rucksack, stretched out my arms, let my eyes travel along the roof beams a while longer, and fell asleep. In my first sleep I thought I could still hear one boy shout, ‘Watch out, he’s coming!’ whereupon the noise of the hurried tripping of the children running to their beds penetrated my already receding consciousness.
I had surely slept only a very short time, for when I awoke the moonlight still fell almost unchanged through the window on the same part of the floor. I did not know why I had awakened – my sleep had been dreamless and deep. Then near me, at about the height of my ear, I saw a very small bushy dog, one of those repulsive little lap dogs with disproportionately large heads encircled by curly hair, whose eyes and muzzle are loosely set into their heads like ornaments made out of some kind of lifeless horny substance. What was a city dog like this doing in the village! What was it that made it roam the house at night? Why did it stand next to my ear? I hissed at it to make it go away; perhaps it was the children’s pet and had simply strayed to my side. It was frightened by my hissing but did not run away, only turned around, then stood there on its crooked little legs and I could see its stunted (especially by contrast with its large head) little body.
Since it continued to stand there quietly, I tried to go back to sleep, but could not; over and over again in the space immediately before my closed eyes I could see the dog rocking back and forth with its protruding eyes. It was unbearable, I could not stand the animal near me; I rose and picked it up in my arms to carry it outside. But though it had been apathetic until then, it now began to defend itself and tried to seize me with its claws. Thus I was forced to hold its little paws fast too – an easy matter, of course; I was able to hold all four in one hand. ‘So, my pet,’ I said to the excited little head with its trembling curls, and went into the dark with it, looking for the door.
Only now did it strike me how silent the little dog was, it neither barked nor squeaked, though I could feel its blood pounding wildly through its arteries. After a few steps – the dog had claimed all my attention and made me careless – greatly to my annoyance, I stumbled over one of the sleeping children. It was now very dark in the attic, only a little light still came through the skylight. The child sighed, I stood still for a moment, dared not move even my toe away lest any change waken the child still more. It was too late; suddenly, all around me, I saw the children rising up in their white shifts as though by agreement, as though on command. It was not my fault; I had made only one child wake up, though it had not really been an awakening at all, only a slight disturbance that a child should have easily slept through. But now they were awake. ‘What do you want, children?’ I asked. ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘You’re carrying something,’ one of the boys said, and all five children searched my person.
‘Yes,’ I said; I had nothing to hide, if the children wanted to take the dog out, so much the better. ‘I’m taking this dog outside. It was keeping me from sleeping. Do you know whose it is?’
‘Mrs Cruster’s,’ at least that’s what I thought I made of their confused, indistinct drowsy shouts which were intended not for me but only for each other.
‘Who is Mrs Cruster?’ I asked, but got no further answer from the excited children. One of them took the dog, which had now become entirely still, from my arm and hurried away with it; the rest followed.
I did not want to remain here alone, also my sleepiness had left me by now; for a moment I hesitated, it seemed to me that I was meddling too much in the affairs of this house where no one had shown any great confidence in me; but finally I ran after the children. I heard the pattering of their feet a short distance ahead of me, but often stumbled in the pitch darkness on the unfamiliar way and once even bumped my head painfully against the wall. We came into the room in which I had first met the old people; it was empty, through the door that was still standing open one could see the moonlit garden.
‘Go outside,’ I said to myself, ‘the night is warm and bright, you can continue your journey or even spend the night in the open. After all, it is so ridiculous to run about after the children here.’ But I ran nevertheless; I still had a hat, stick, and rucksack up in the attic. But how the children ran! With their shifts flying they leaped through the moonlit room in two bounds, as I distinctly saw. It occurred to me that I was giving adequate thanks for the lack of hospitality shown me in this house by frightening the children, causing a race through the house and myself making a great din instead of sleeping (the sound of the children’s bare feet could hardly be heard above the tread of my heavy boots) – and I had not the faintest notion of what would come of all this.
Suddenly a bright light appeared. In front of us, in a room with several windows opened wide, a delicate-looking woman sat at a table writing by the light of a tall, splendid table lamp. ‘Children!’ she called out in astonishment; she hadn’t seen me yet, I stayed back in the shadow outside the door. The children put the dog on the table; they obviously loved the woman very much, kept trying to look into her eyes, one girl seized her hand and caressed it; she made no objection, was scarcely aware of it. The dog stood before her on the sheet of letter paper on which she had just been writing and stretched out its quivering little tongue toward her, the tongue could be plainly seen a short distance in front of the lampshade. The children now begged to be allowed to remain and tried to wheedle the woman’s consent. The woman was undecided, got up, stretched her arms, and pointed to the single bed and th
e hard floor. The children refused to give it any importance and lay down on the floor wherever they happened to be, to try it; for a while everything was quiet. Her hands folded in her lap, the woman looked down with a smile at the children. Now and then one raised its head, but when it saw the others still lying down, lay back again.
One evening I returned home to my room from the office somewhat later than usual – an acquaintance had detained me below at the house entrance for a long time – opened the door (my thoughts were still engrossed by our conversation, which had consisted chiefly of gossip about people’s social standing), hung my overcoat on the hook, and was about to cross over to the washstand when I heard a strange, spasmodic breathing. I looked up and, on top of the stove that stood deep in the gloom of a corner, saw something alive. Yellowish glittering eyes stared at me; large round woman’s breasts rested on the shelf of the stove, on either side beneath the unrecognizable face; the creature seemed to consist entirely of a mass of soft white flesh; a thick yellowish tail hung down beside the stove, its tip ceaselessly passing back and forth over the cracks of the tiles.
The first thing I did was to cross over with long strides and sunken head – nonsense! I kept repeating like a prayer – to the door that led to my landlady’s rooms. Only later I realized that I had entered without knocking. Miss Hefter –
It was about midnight. Five men held me, behind them a sixth had his hand raised to grab me. ‘Let go,’ I cried, and whirled in a circle, making them all fall back. I felt some sort of law at work, had known that this last effort of mine would be successful, saw all the men reeling back with raised arms, realized that in a moment they would all throw themselves on me together, turned towards the house entrance – I was standing only a short distance from it – lifted the latch (it sprang open of itself, as it were, with extraordinary rapidity), and escaped up the dark stairs.
On the top floor stood my old mother in the open doorway of our apartment, a candle in her hand. ‘Look out! look out!’ I cried while still on the floor below, ‘they are coming after me!’
‘Who? Who?’ my mother asked. ‘Who could be coming after you, son?’ my mother asked.
‘Six men,’ I said breathlessly.
‘Do you know them?’ my mother asked.
‘No, strangers,’ I said.
‘What do they look like?’
‘I barely caught a glimpse of them. One has a black full beard, one a large ring on his finger, one has a red belt, one has his trousers torn at the knee, one has only one eye open, and the last bares his teeth.’
‘Don’t think about it any more,’ my mother said. ‘Go to your room, go to sleep, I’ve made the bed.’
My mother! This old woman already proof against the assaults of life, with a crafty wrinkle round her mouth, mouth that unwittingly repeated eighty-year-old follies.
‘Sleep now?’ I cried –
12 June. Kubin. Yellowish face, sparse hair lying flat on his skull, from time to time a heightened sparkle in his eyes.
W., half blind, detached retina; has to be careful not to fall or be pushed, for the lens might fall out and then it would be all over with. Has to hold the book close to his eyes when he reads and try to catch the letters through the corners of his eyes. Was in India with Melchior Lechter, fell ill with dysentery; eats everything, every piece of fruit he finds lying in the dust of the street.
P. sawed a silver chastity belt off a skeleton; pushed aside the workers who had dug it up somewhere in Roumania, reassured them by saying that he saw in the belt a valuable trifle which he wanted as a souvenir, sawed it open and pulled it off. If he finds a valuable Bible or picture or page that he wants in a village church, he tears what he wants out of the book, off the wall, from the altar, puts a two-heller piece down as compensation, and his conscience is clear – Loves fat women. Every woman he has had has been photographed. The bundle of photographs that he shows every visitor. Sits at one end of the sofa, his visitor, at a considerable distance from him, at the other. P. hardly looks across and yet always knows which picture is on top and supplies the necessary explanations: This was an old widow; these were the two Hungarian maids; etc. – Of Kubin: ‘Yes, Master Kubin, you are indeed on the way up; in ten or twenty years, if this keeps on, you may come to occupy a position like that of Bayros.’71
Dostoyevsky’s letter to a woman painter.
The life of society moves in a circle. Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other. Thanks to their affliction they constitute a circle and provide each other mutual support. They glide along the inner borders of their circle, make way for or jostle one another gently in the crowd. Each encourages the other in the hope that it will react upon himself, or – and then it is done passionately – in the immediate enjoyment of this reaction. Each has only that experience which his affliction grants him; nevertheless one hears such comrades exchanging immensely varying experiences. ‘This is how you are,’ one says to the other; ‘instead of complaining, thank God that this is how you are, for if this were not how you are, you would have this or that misfortune, this or that shame.’ How does this man know that? After all, he belongs – his statement betrays it – to the same circle as does the one to whom he spoke; he stands in the same need of comfort. In the same circle, however, one knows only the same things. There exists not the shadow of a thought to give the comforter an advantage over the comforted. Thus their conversations consist only of a coming-together of their imaginations, outpourings of wishes from one upon the other. One will look down at the ground and the other up at a bird; it is in such differences that their intercourse is realized. Sometimes they will unite in faith and, their heads together, look up into the unending reaches of the sky. Recognition of their situation shows itself, however, only when they bow down their heads in common and the common hammer descends upon them.
14 June. How I calmly walk along while my head twitches and a branch feebly rustles overhead, causing me the worst discomfort. I have in me the same calm, the same assurance as other people, but somehow or other inverted.
19 June. The excitement of the last few days. The calm that is transferred from Dr W. to me. The worries he takes upon himself for me. How they moved back into me early this morning when I awoke about four after a deep sleep. Pištekovo Divadlo.72 Löwenstein. Now the crude, exciting novel by Soyka. Anxiety. Convinced that I need F.
How the two of us, Ottla and I, explode in rage against every kind of human relationship.
The parents’ grave, in which the son (Pollak, a graduate of a commercial school) is also buried.73
25 June. I paced up and down my room from early morning until twilight. The window was open, it was a warm day. The noises of the narrow street beat in uninterruptedly. By now I knew every trifle in the room from having looked at it in the course of my pacing up and down. My eyes had travelled over every wall. I had pursued the pattern of the rug to its last convolution, noted every mark of age it bore. My fingers had spanned the table across the middle many times. I had already bared my teeth repeatedly at the picture of the landlady’s dead husband.
Towards evening I walked over to the window and sat down on the low sill. Then, for the first time not moving restlessly about, I happened calmly to glance into the interior of the room and at the ceiling. And finally, finally, unless I were mistaken, this room which I had so violently upset began to stir. The tremor began at the edges of the thinly plastered white ceiling. Little pieces of plaster broke off and with a distinct thud fell here and there, as if at random, to the floor. I held out my hand and some plaster fell into it too; in my excitement I threw it over my head into the street without troubling to turn around. The cracks in the ceiling made no pattern yet, but it was already possible somehow to imagine one. But I put these games aside when a bluish violet began to mix with the white; it spread straight out from the centre of the ceiling, which itself remained white, even radiantly white, where the shabby electric lamp was stuck. Wave after wave of the colour – or was i
t a light? – spread out towards the now darkening edges. One no longer paid any attention to the plaster that was falling away as if under the pressure of a skilfully applied tool. Yellow and golden-yellow colours now penetrated the violet from the side. But the ceiling did not really take on these different hues; the colours merely made it somewhat transparent; things striving to break through seemed to be hovering above it, already one could almost see the outlines of a movement there, an arm was thrust out, a silver sword swung to and fro. It was meant for me, there was no doubt of that; a vision intended for my liberation was being prepared.
I sprang up on the table to make everything ready, tore out the electric light together with its brass fixture and hurled it to the floor, then jumped down and pushed the table from the middle of the room to the wall. That which was striving to appear could drop down unhindered on the carpet and announce to me whatever it had to announce. I had barely finished when the ceiling did in fact break open. In the dim light, still at a great height, I had judged it badly, an angel in bluish-violet robes girt with gold cords sank slowly down on great white silken-shining wings, the sword in its raised arm thrust out horizontally. ‘An angel, then!’ I thought; “it has been flying towards me all the day and in my disbelief I did not know it. Now it will speak to me.’ I lowered my eyes. When I raised them again the angel was still there, it is true, hanging rather far off under the ceiling (which had closed again), but it was no living angel, only a painted wooden figurehead off the prow of some ship, one of the kind that hangs from the ceiling in sailors’ taverns, nothing more.
The hilt of the sword was made in such a way as to hold candles and catch the dripping tallow. I had pulled the electric light down; I didn’t want to remain in the dark, there was still one candle left, so I got up on a chair, stuck the candle into the hilt of the sword, lit it, and then sat late into the night under the angel’s faint flame.