by Franz Kafka
Absorbed in such thoughts he approached the stoker slowly, pulled the latter’s right hand from his belt, took it in his own, and began to toy with it. “So why don’t you speak out?” he asked. “Why do you put up with everything?”
The stoker merely furrowed his brow as if he were seeking the right words with which to convey his thoughts. He glanced down at Karl’s hands and at his own.
“You’ve suffered greater injustice than anybody else on this ship, I’m quite sure of that.” And Karl drew his fingers back and forth between the stoker’s fingers; with a sparkle in his eyes, the latter looked around on every side, as though overcome by a great joy, but one that nobody ought to hold against him.
“But you must defend yourself, say yes and no, otherwise people won’t have any idea about the truth. You must promise me you’ll do as I say, for I fear that for various reasons I’ll no longer be able to help you.” And Karl wept as he kissed the stoker’s hand and took that chapped, almost lifeless hand and pressed it to his cheeks, like a treasure one must relinquish. However, his uncle, the senator, was already by his side and pulled him away, if only with the slightest pressure. “The stoker seems to have bewitched you,” he said, casting a knowing look at the captain over Karl’s head. “You felt abandoned, then found the stoker and now you’re grateful to him, which certainly speaks in your favor. But don’t carry this too far, if only for my sake, and do try to understand your position.”
A commotion began outside the door; one could hear shouts, and it even seemed as if someone was being thrust violently against the door. A sailor entered looking rather disheveled, with a maid’s apron tied around his waist. “There are a few people outside,” he cried, thrusting out his elbows as though he were still surrounded by a crowd. Finally he regained his composure and was about to salute the captain when he noticed the servant’s apron, tore it off, threw it on the ground, and shouted: “That’s revolting, they’ve tied a maid’s apron around me.” Then he clicked his heels, however, and saluted. Someone made an attempt to laugh, but the captain said severely: “Somebody appears to be in a good mood! So who’s outside?” “They’re my witnesses,” said Schubal, stepping forward. “I most humbly beseech you to excuse their unseemly conduct. Once the men have the voyage behind them they sometimes start acting like madmen.” “Call them in,” the captain commanded, and turning immediately to the senator, he said quickly but courteously: “Mr. Senator, could you be so kind as to follow this sailor, who’ll escort you to the boat? And it goes without saying, Mr. Senator, that it was a great pleasure and an honor for me to make your acquaintance. I can only hope that I shall soon get another chance to resume our interrupted conversation about the state of the American fleet, and maybe we can ensure that next time too it’ll be interrupted in an equally pleasant manner.” “Well, one nephew seems quite enough for now,” said Karl’s uncle, laughing. “Please accept my most heart felt thanks for the kindness you’ve shown, and now I should like to bid you farewell. By the way, it’s not inconceivable”—he pressed Karl to his chest affectionately—“that we could spend more time together on our next voyage to Europe.” “I should be only too delighted,” said the captain. The two gentlemen shook hands; Karl had to be satisfied with holding out his hand briefly for the captain without being able to say a word, since the latter was already preoccupied with the roughly fifteen people led by Schubal, who entered somewhat diffidently yet also very noisily. After asking the senator for permission to go ahead, the sailor divided the crowd for the senator and Karl, who made their way easily through the bowing crowd. These otherwise good-natured people seemed to regard Schubal’s fight with the stoker as nothing more than a joke, which lost none of its hilarity even in the presence of the captain. Among them Karl noticed the kitchen maid Line, who winked at him cheerfully as she tied on the apron that had been cast aside by the sailor, for it was indeed hers.
Continuing to follow the sailor, they left the office and turned into a little passageway that led them after only a few paces to a little door, from which a short stairway led down into the boat, which was already prepared for them. With one great bound their guide leaped into the boat, whereupon the sailors immediately rose and saluted. While the senator was urging Karl to take care climbing down, Karl, still on the top step, burst into vehement tears. The senator put his right hand under Karl’s chin, and with his left hand pressed him firmly against his chest and caressed him. Thus did they descend the ladder, one step at a time, and closely entwined, they stepped onto the boat, and the senator found a good spot where Karl could sit right opposite him. At a signal from the senator, the sailors pushed the boat away from the ship and immediately set to work. They had rowed only a few meters from the ship when Karl noticed with surprise that they were on the same side as the windows of the main pay office. All three windows were occupied by Schubal’s witnesses, who greeted them cordially and waved at them; even his uncle thanked them, and a sailor performed the feat of blowing a kiss up to them without interrupting the even rhythm of his rowing. It was as if the stoker had ceased to exist. Karl took a closer look at his uncle, whose knees were almost touching his own, and he began to doubt whether this man could ever take the place of the stoker. His uncle also avoided his glance and looked out at the waves heaving about their boat.
II
THE UNCLE
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In his uncle’s house Karl soon became accustomed to his new circumstances. His uncle always obliged him even in trifling matters, and Karl therefore did not have to wait to learn from those bad experiences that so often embitter the early days of one’s life abroad.
Karl’s room was on the sixth floor of a building, whose five lower floors and three additional ones deep underground were occupied by his uncle’s business. Each morning on entering his room from his little sleeping alcove, he always marveled at the light coming through two windows and a balcony door. Where might he have been obliged to live had he come ashore as a poor little emigrant? And perhaps he wouldn’t even have been admitted to the United States, which was very likely according to his uncle, who was familiar with the immigration laws, and the authorities would have sent him home, completely ignoring the fact that he no longer had a home country. For one could not hope for pity here in this country, and the things that Karl had read about America in that regard were quite true; here it was only those who were fortunate who truly seemed to enjoy their good fortune amid the indifferent faces on all sides.
A narrow balcony ran along the full length of his room. In his native city it would surely have been the highest lookout, yet here it offered little more than the view of a single street that ran in a straight line between two rows of veritably truncated buildings and therefore seemed to flee into the distance, where the outlines of a cathedral loomed monstrously out of a great haze. In the morning and in the evening and at night in his dreams, this street was filled with constantly bustling traffic, which seen from above seemed like a continually self-replenishing mixture of distorted human figures and of the roofs of all sorts of vehicles, constantly scattered by new arrivals, out of which there arose a new, stronger, wilder mixture of noise, dust, and smells, and, catching and penetrating it all, a powerful light that was continually dispersed, carried away, and avidly refracted by the mass of objects that made such a physical impression on one’s dazzled eye that it seemed as if a glass pane, hanging over the street and covering everything, were being smashed again and again with the utmost force.
Cautious as he was in all matters, Karl’s uncle advised him that he should not become seriously engaged in anything for the time being. While he should take a look at everything and always examine matters carefully, he should not let anything beguile him. Indeed, the first days of a European in America could certainly be likened to a birth, he said, and then he added—so Karl would not have any unnecessary fear—that even though one adapted more quickly here than if one were entering the world of man from the hereafter, one should also keep in mind
that one’s first judgment was always quite shaky and that maybe one should not allow it to upset all the future judgments that one would need to make if one wanted to go on living in this country. He had known recent arrivals who, instead of following these sound principles, had, say, stood about on their balconies for days on end gazing down at the street like lost sheep. It could lead only to confusion! All that solitary idleness, that wasteful staring out on a bustling New York day, was permissible for people who were traveling for pleasure, though not unreservedly so, but for anyone who wanted to remain in this country, it was a calamity—a word one could certainly use at this point even if it was an exaggeration. And indeed his uncle always grimaced in irritation whenever he encountered Karl on the balcony during one of his visits, which occurred only once daily and, moreover, always at a different time. Karl soon noticed this grimace and consequently, insofar as possible, denied himself the pleasure of standing on the balcony.
However, that was by no means his sole pleasure. In his room stood an American desk of the finest kind, such as his father had wanted for years and had sought to buy at a reasonable price at all kinds of auctions, though owing to his limited means, without success. Of course, there was no comparison between this desk here and those supposedly American desks that made the rounds at European auctions. For instance, it had in its base a hundred drawers of all sizes, in which even the President of the Union could have found a suitable place for each of his files, and what’s more it even had a regulator on the side, so that simply by turning the handle one could move about and rearrange the drawers in all sorts of combinations to suit one’s every need and whim. Thin little side panels would descend slowly, forming the bottoms of new drawers or the tops of others that rose from below; even after only a single winding, the entire base looked completely different, and depending on the speed at which one turned the handle, everything moved slowly or at a crazy pace. Though it was a most recent invention, it vividly reminded Karl of the nativity scenes at home that were shown to gaping children at the Christmas market, and Karl too had often stood before it, bundled up in his winter clothes, continually comparing the revolutions of the crank, which was being turned by an old man, with the unfolding nativity scene, the faltering progress of the three holy kings, the sudden illumination of the star, and the cramped life in the holy manger. And it always seemed as if his mother, who stood behind him, was not paying sufficient heed to all of the movements; after drawing her over until he could feel her body pressing against his back, he had spoken in a loud voice, continually pointing out the less conspicuous figures, such as a small hare lying on the grass in the foreground, which sat up and begged and then got ready to start running again, until his mother put her hand over his mouth and presumably relapsed into her prior inattentiveness. True, the desk had not been manufactured for the purpose of stirring such memories, yet throughout the history of inventions people had made associations that were just as indistinct as those in Karl’s recollections. Unlike Karl, his uncle was by no means in favor of this desk; he had merely wanted to buy Karl a regular desk, and all such desks now came equipped with this new mechanism, which possessed the further advantage that it could be attached to older desks at no great cost. Nevertheless Karl’s uncle did not refrain from advising him that he should not use the regulator at all if possible; in an effort to reinforce this advice, his uncle claimed that the mechanism was very sensitive, could be easily ruined, and was expensive to repair. It wasn’t hard to see that such comments were merely excuses, especially since one would have needed to add that the regulator could be easily fixed, which his uncle, however, neglected to do.
In the first few days, when naturally there were frequent exchanges between Karl and his uncle, he had said that he had played on the piano at home, only a little but with considerable pleasure, though he had had to make do with the beginner’s skills his mother had taught him. Karl was well aware that in telling this story he was in effect requesting a piano, but he had taken a sufficiently good look around to know that his uncle had no need to economize. Still, his request was not granted at once, but about eight days later his uncle announced, almost reluctantly, that the piano had just arrived and that, if Karl wished, he could supervise the move. That was certainly easy work, though scarcely any easier than the actual move, since the building had a special furniture elevator that could easily accommodate an entire furniture vehicle, and it was in this elevator that the piano glided up to Karl’s room. Karl could have taken the same goods elevator as the piano and the workers, but since the passenger elevator right beside it happened to be free, he chose that one instead, keeping himself at the same height as the other elevator with the help of a lever and constantly looking through the glass panels of the elevator at the beautiful instrument that now belonged to him. When it stood in his room and he struck the first keys, he felt such wild joy that, rather than continuing to play, he jumped up, preferring to stand some distance away, hands on his hips, gazing at the piano. Besides, the acoustics in the room were splendid, and that helped him overcome the slight discomfort he had initially felt on discovering that he was living in a building made of steel. In reality, though, no matter how steel-like the building seemed from the outside, in the actual room there was no sign of the steel components employed in its construction, and no one could have pointed out the tiniest item in the interior design that would have in any way spoiled the overall effect of complete comfort and ease. In his first days there Karl had hoped to accomplish a great deal through his piano playing and was not ashamed—at least just before falling asleep—to imagine that his playing might directly affect his situation in America. It certainly sounded strange whenever he stood in front of windows opening out onto the noisy street, playing an old soldier’s song from his homeland, which the soldiers, who used to lie by the barrack windows at night looking down at the dark square, would sing from one window to the next—but then when he looked down on the street he could see that it had not changed at all and merely formed one small part of a great cycle that one could not actually bring to a halt unless one were aware of all of the forces operating in the circle. His uncle tolerated his playing, did not even say anything about it, especially since, even without being admonished, Karl only rarely granted himself the pleasure of playing; he even brought Karl the scores of American marches and naturally also of the national anthem, but his love of music was surely not the only reason why one day he asked Karl, by no means in jest, whether he might not also wish to learn the violin or the French horn.
Learning English was, of course, Karl’s first and most important task. When the young teacher from a business school appeared in Karl’s room at seven o’clock each morning, he would find him already seated at his desk, poring over his notebooks or walking up and down, committing phrases to memory. Karl realized that when it came to learning English, there could be no such thing as excessive haste, and that the best way to give his uncle great joy was to make rapid progress. And although the only English words in his initial conversations with his uncle were hello and goodbye, they soon managed to shift more and more of the conversation into English, which led to their broaching topics of a more intimate nature. Such was his uncle’s satisfaction over the first American poem that Karl was able to recite one evening—a description of a great fire—that he became deadly serious. At that moment both stood by a window in Karl’s room; his uncle was looking out at the sky, from which all trace of daylight had disappeared, clapping his hands slowly and regularly in accord with the verses while Karl stood erect and glassy-eyed beside him, wrestling with the words of the difficult poem.
The greater the improvement in his English, the more eager was his uncle to have him meet his acquaintances, and he arranged that during these encounters the English teacher should for the time being always remain near Karl, simply in case of need. The very first acquaintance to whom Karl was introduced one morning was a young, thin, and incredibly supple young man, whom his uncle led into Karl’s room a
mid a shower of compliments. He was obviously one of those many millionaires’ sons whose parents consider them misfits and who lead their lives in such a way that no ordinary person could observe any day in the life of this young man without feeling sad. And as if he were aware of this or at least suspected as much and were trying to counteract it, at least insofar as lay within his power, a happy smile played constantly on his lips and around his eyes, which seemed to be directed at himself, his interlocutor, and the world at large.
With his uncle’s unconditional approval Karl spoke with this young man, a Mr. Mak, about riding together at half past five in the morning, either at the riding school or out in open country. However, Karl was initially reluctant to give his consent, for he had never sat on a horse before and first wanted to learn how to ride, but since his uncle and Mak tried to talk him into it by presenting riding as a source of pleasure and a means of healthy exercise rather than as an artistic performance, he finally consented. Now he had to rise as early as half past four, which he often found painful, for probably on account of having to stay alert all day, he suffered from real lethargy: but once in his bathroom he instantly shed all such regrets. The shower head extended over the entire length and breadth of the tub—at home, which of his fellow students, no matter how rich, had anything the like of this and, what’s more, all to himself?—and now Karl lay sprawled out there; in this tub he could spread out his arms and let the now lukewarm, now hot, now lukewarm again, and finally icy spurts of water pour down on him, over part of his body or all over, as he chose. As if still experiencing the bliss of the last few moments of sleep, he continued to lie there, taking special pleasure in catching with his closed eyelids the last separate drops, which then opened and streamed over his face.