The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man

by Franz Kafka

  It was so quiet that he was able to take in what else was going on. The researcher looked over at the soldier and the condemned man. The condemned man was the livelier of the two, everything about the machine interested him and he bent down over it, or stretched up to see the higher parts, and he kept pointing his finger to show things to the soldier. The researcher found it painful to watch. He was determined to stay till the end, but he couldn’t have stood the sight of these two for long. “Go home,” he told them. The soldier might have been ready to leave, but the condemned man seemed to consider the order to be a punishment. He begged to be allowed to stay, bringing his hands together in supplication, and when the researcher shook his head and refused to relent, the condemned man got down on his knees. The researcher saw that orders would do no good here, he would have to go over and chase them away. At that moment, he heard a noise from the engraver. He looked across. Was the gear playing up after all? But it was something else. The engraver’s lid rose slowly and eventually flipped completely open. You could see the teeth on one of the gears, which lifted itself up until the whole wheel was in sight; it was as if some force were squeezing the engraver so that there was no space left inside for the gear; it kept turning until it reached the edge of the engraver, then fell, rolled a short distance in the sand and toppled over. But another one was already rising out of the top, and it was followed by many more, big, small, some practically identical; the same happened with all of them; each time it seemed that the engraver must now be empty, but then another especially numerous group of gears appeared, rose out of the box, fell to the ground, rolled in the sand and toppled over. Watching this, the condemned man forgot that the researcher had ordered him to leave; the gears fascinated him, he kept wanting to touch them, and called the soldier to help him, but then pulled his hand back in fright, because another gear popped out and scared him as it rolled closer.

  The researcher, on the other hand, was deeply disconcerted; the machine was obviously shaking itself apart; its smooth operation was an illusion; he felt he had to take over since the officer could no longer look after himself. But he hadn’t been watching the rest of the machine while the gears were falling; now that the last of them seemed to have left the engraver, the researcher got another, worse surprise. The harrow wasn’t writing, only stabbing; and the bed wasn’t rolling the officer’s body, only lifting it trembling into the needles. The researcher wanted to intervene, maybe stop the whole thing: this wasn’t the torture the officer had wanted, this was simple murder. He reached out his hands. But the harrow was already lifting the skewered body to the side, as it usually only did after twelve hours. Blood was streaming from a hundred wounds (unmixed with water; the little tubes had also failed). And now the final stage also malfunctioned: the body didn’t drop from the needles, just hung over the ditch, pouring out blood, without dropping. The harrow tried to return to its original position but, as if noticing that it was still carrying this weight, it stayed above the ditch. “Help me!” the researcher shouted to the soldier and the condemned man, and took hold of the officer’s feet. He wanted to push from the feet while the other two pushed from the officer’s head, so they could slowly slide him off the needles. But the other two couldn’t make up their minds to come; the condemned man turned away; the researcher had to go over to them and force them to attend to the officer’s head. There, almost against his will, he saw the corpse’s face. It was like it had been in life (there was no sign of the promised redemption); what all the others had found in the machine, the officer hadn’t; his lips were pressed together, his eyes open, alive-looking, his expression calm and assured, and through his forehead protruded the tip of the big iron spike.

  When the researcher, with the soldier and the condemned man following him, reached the first buildings of the colony, the soldier pointed at one of them and said, “That’s the tea house.”

  On the ground floor of this building was a deep, low-ceilinged, cave-like room with walls and ceiling blackened by smoke. One whole side was open to the street. Although the tea house was little different from the colony’s other buildings, which, except for the commandant’s palatial headquarters, were all fairly run down, it still evoked a sense of history in the researcher and he felt the draw of a previous era. He walked up to it, followed by his two companions, went past the unoccupied tables that stood on the street outside, and breathed in the cool, musty air that came from the interior. “The old man is buried here,” said the soldier. “The priest wouldn’t let him have a spot in the graveyard. For a while, no one could decide where to bury him and eventually he was buried here. That’s something the officer definitely didn’t tell you anything about, because that’s what he was most ashamed of. A few times, he even came here at night and tried to dig up the old man, but they always chased him away.”

  “Where is the grave?” asked the researcher, who couldn’t believe what the soldier was saying. Right away, both of them, the soldier and the condemned man, went ahead of him and pointed to where the grave was supposed to be. They led the researcher over to the back wall, where customers were sitting at a few of the tables. They were probably dock workers, strong men with gleaming black beards. None of them had a jacket, their shirts were tattered, they were a poor, beaten-down people. When the researcher came close, some of them stood up, pressed themselves against the walls and stared at him. “He’s a foreigner,” they whispered around the researcher, “he wants to see the grave.” They pushed one of the tables aside and underneath it there really was a gravestone. It was a simple stone, small enough to be hidden under a table. It carried an inscription in very small lettering; the researcher had to kneel down to read it. It said: ‘Here lies the old commandant. His followers, who are now nameless, dug this grave and placed this stone. There is a prophecy that, after a certain number of years, the old commandant will rise again and lead his followers from this house to wrest back control of the colony. Be faithful, and wait for him!’ When the researcher had read this and straightened up, he saw the men standing all around him and grinning, as if they’d read the inscription beside him, found it ridiculous and wanted him to share their opinion. The researcher acted as if he hadn’t noticed, gave out a few coins, waited until the table had been pushed back over the grave, left the tea house and walked down to the harbour.

  The soldier and the condemned man were held up by meeting some acquaintances in the tea house. But they must have torn themselves away quickly, because the researcher was still only on the long set of stairs that led down to the boats when they came after him. They probably wanted to force him to take them with him. While the researcher spoke to one of the boatmen about being ferried across to the steamship, the two of them raced down the steps, silently, because they didn’t dare shout. But by the time they reached the bottom, the researcher was already in the boat and the boatman was pushing off from the shore. They could still have jumped into the boat, but the researcher picked up a heavy, knotted rope, threatened them with it and prevented them from jumping.

  THE NEXT VILLAGE

  MY GRANDFATHER used to say: “Life is astonishingly short. When I look back now, it all seems so squashed together that I can hardly understand how a young person could, say, decide to ride to the next village without being afraid—even without any unlucky accidents—that the span of a normal, happy life would not be nearly long enough for him to get there.”

  A FIRST HEARTACHE

  A TRAPEZE VIRTUOSO—whose discipline, practised high in the vaulted domes of the great variety theatres, is famously among the most difficult of any that people can aspire to—had arranged his life in such a way that, initially out of a striving for perfection, then out of increasingly tyrannical habit, he stayed on his trapeze day and night for as long as an engagement lasted. His modest needs were catered to by a rota of attendants who were posted below and hauled everything up and down in specially made containers. The way he lived didn’t create many problems for those around him; it was a little distracting t
o have him up there during the other acts and, although he mostly stayed quiet, a few glances would nevertheless stray up to him from here and there in the audience. But the producers forgave him that because he was an extraordinary, irreplaceable artist. And of course they also understood that he wasn’t doing it on a whim, that this was his only means of staying in constant training, of keeping his art at its peak.

  It wasn’t unhealthy up there and when the weather was warm and the side windows were flung open all round the dome, letting fresh air and strong sunshine pour into the shadowy room, it could be lovely. True, his human contact was very limited; only sometimes did a fellow acrobat climb up to him on a rope ladder; then they’d both sit on the trapeze, leaning against the ropes on each side and chatting. Or some workmen fixing the roof would exchange a few words with him through an open window. Or a fireman checking the emergency lighting on the top floor shouted up one or two respectful, but barely audible, phrases. Other than that, it was quiet around him; from time to time, some stagehand who’d wandered into the empty theatre in the afternoon would glance up thoughtfully into the distant heights where the trapeze artist was practising or resting, unaware that he was being watched.

  The trapeze artist could have quietly lived like this had it not been for the unavoidable transfers from venue to venue, which badly disrupted his peace of mind. His manager did try to make sure that the artist’s discomfort was kept to a minimum: when they travelled within a city they used sports cars, ideally at night or in the earliest hours of morning, and raced through the empty streets at top speed, albeit still too slowly for the trapeze artist; on trains they would book an entire compartment, where the trapeze artist could spend the journey up in the luggage rack, an admittedly miserable approximation of his usual life, but better than nothing; in the new venues, the trapeze would be set up long before the artist arrived; all the doors leading to the stage were held open, all the corridors kept clear—and yet, the sweetest moments in the manager’s life were when the trapeze artist set foot on the rope ladder and, before you knew it, was finally hanging from his trapeze again.

  No matter how many transfers the manager successfully handled, each new one was still stressful, because aside from anything else, it wore away at the artist’s nerves.

  And once, they were travelling together again, the trapeze artist up in the luggage rack, his manager leaning against the window in the opposite corner and reading a book, when the artist spoke to him quietly. The manager was immediately attentive. The artist, biting his lip, said that from now on, instead of just one trapeze, he would need two for his performances, two trapezes opposite each other. The manager agreed at once. But the artist, as if to show that his manager’s agreement was as meaningless as any opposition would have been, said that from now on he would never, under any circumstances, perform on a single trapeze. Just the idea that it might happen again seemed to make him shudder. Once again, cautiously and on alert, his manager said that he was in full agreement, that two trapezes were better than one, and that this new arrangement would bring lots of other advantages, such as allowing more variety in the performances. At that, the trapeze artist burst into tears. Deeply shocked, his manager jumped up and asked what on earth had happened; and since he got no response, he climbed onto the seats, stroked the artist and pressed his face against the artist’s, so that his own cheeks were wet with the artist’s tears. But it was only after many questions and lots of soothing talk that the artist said through his sobs: “Only ever that one bar in my hands—how can I live like that?” After that it was easier for his manager to console him: he promised that he would telegraph ahead from the very next station and arrange the second trapeze; he blamed himself for having let the artist work on a single trapeze for so long, and thanked and praised him for having eventually pointed out his manager’s mistake. In this way, he gradually succeeded in reassuring the trapeze artist, and after a while he was able to go back to his corner. But the manager was not reassured; in grave concern he secretly watched the trapeze artist over the top of his book. Once these kinds of thoughts had begun to gnaw at him, could they ever stop again? Wouldn’t they just keep getting worse? Weren’t they a threat to everything about how he lived? And as the manager watched over the apparently peaceful sleep that the trapeze artist had fallen into once he’d stopped crying, he really thought he could see the first wrinkles beginning to etch themselves into the artist’s boyishly smooth forehead.

  A REPORT FOR AN ACADEMY

  GENTLEMEN, eminent members of the academy!

  You have done me the honour of asking me to present a report on my simian past.

  Unfortunately, however, I won’t be able to carry out that request in the sense in which it was intended. Nearly five years now separate me from my simian state, a short time when measured by the calendar, but practically endless if you galloped through it like I did, sometimes accompanied by admirable people, by advice, acclaim and orchestral music, but fundamentally alone, because anyone accompanying me, to pursue my metaphor, stayed safely offstage in the orchestra’s pit. That effort would have been impossible if I’d stubbornly tried to cling on to my origins, to memories of my youth. In fact, my highest law was to relinquish any wilfulness I found within myself; I, a free ape, bent my neck to that yoke. As a result, whatever memories I had became ever more closed off from me. Although at first I could still—had the humans wished it—have gone back through the high, wide arch that the sky forms over the earth, the way back became lower and narrower the more I drove my development forward; I started to feel more comfortable and more embedded in the human world; the storm chasing me from out of my past began to settle; today it’s no more than a breeze to cool my heels; the distant gap through which it comes and through which I once came has shrunk so small that even if I had the strength and the willpower to get back to it, I would have to scrape the hide off my body just to squeeze through. To put it frankly, even though I do like to use figures of speech for these things, to put it frankly: your own simian heritage, gentlemen, insofar as you have something like that in your past, is no more remote from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone who walks this earth feels that little tickle at his heel, from a little chimpanzee to the great Achilles.

  But I can perhaps answer your invitation in a more limited sense, and will do so with great pleasure. The first thing I learnt was: shake hands; shaking hands leads to openness; and now that I’m at the high point of my career, I’d like to add some candid speech to that first frank handshake. I won’t be able to tell the academy anything substantively new and I will fall far short of what was asked of me, which I wouldn’t be able to provide with the best will in the world—nevertheless, let me sketch the course of how someone born an ape was able to enter the human world and thrive in it. But even the little that follows I wouldn’t be willing to explain if I weren’t completely sure of myself and my position, and if I hadn’t unshakeably established myself on every great variety stage in the civilized world.

  I come from the Gold Coast. For an account of how I was captured I have to rely on the reports of others. A hunting expedition mounted by the Hagenbeck Company—with whose leader I’ve since shared many a fine bottle of claret—was waiting in a riverbank hide when I and the rest of my troop arrived for an evening drink. Shots were fired; I was the only one hit, and I was hit twice.

  Once in the cheek; that one just glanced me, but it left me with a big hairless red scar that earned me the disgusting and wholly unsuitable name Red Peter, which really might have been dreamt up by an ape and which implied that the only difference between me and a recently deceased, moderately well-known performing ape called Peter was the red mark on my cheek. That’s just by the by.

  The second shot struck me below the hip. It was more serious, that’s why I still limp a little to this day. I recently read in a piece by one of the ten thousand windbags who air their opinions of me in the newspapers that my simian nature has not yet been entirely suppressed; the proof being that,
when I have visitors, I still like to pull down my trousers to show them where that shot hit me. That hack deserves to have every finger on his writing hand shot off one at a time. I, I can pull down my trousers in front of whomever I please; you’d find nothing but a well-groomed pelt and a scar left by—let me use this specific word for this specific situation, because I don’t want to be misunderstood—the scar left by a criminal assault. All this is in the open; there’s nothing to hide; any high-minded person would drop the constraints of politeness when it’s a matter of demonstrating the truth. If, on the other hand, that scribbler were to pull down his trousers when he had visitors, it would appear in a very different light, and I take it as a sign of vestigial good sense that he doesn’t do it. But I’d like him to spare me his delicacy of feeling!

  After those shots I came round—and this is where my own memories gradually take over—in a cage below decks on the Hagenbeck steamer. It wasn’t the classic cage with four barred sides; rather, it was three-sided and fixed to a crate, with the crate making a wall. It was too low to stand up in and too narrow to sit down. So I crouched with bent, shaking knees and, probably because at first I wanted to stay in the dark and not see anyone, I faced the crate while the thin bars behind me cut into my flesh. It’s considered good practice to keep wild animals in this kind of accommodation during their first moments in captivity, and after my experiences I can’t now deny that from the human perspective that is correct.