I stuffed the folded papers back into the drawer and sat down in the chair. The papers on the desk swam together under a film of tears and I ran my hand over them as if over the surface of the ocean. A patch of cream PAPER stood out against the sea of white and I pulled it out and held it before my eyes. ‘My darling Franz, my love.’ I closed my eyes against it, the sheet of Anja’s writing.** I could feel the tears pushing against my eyelashes as though they were grains of salt, hard little stones. A coldness rolled down through my body and filled me with ice.
So Franz had won in the end. And it was the end. He had used me like a parasite. He had wormed his way into my life, into my love, and had eaten them hollow, leaving only a calcified, empty shell. Even my writing†† had been sapped by him in some mysterious way. I was like a mother who gives birth in the bloom of youth, unwillingly, and is left haggard and exhausted, having passed the energetic spark of her life on to her child. For in some ways Franz was like my child. An unwanted one.
And what was left to me now? A book I had sweated and toiled over, certain at the outset that it would be a masterpiece, which had been a complete failure. Anja was lost to me. I was nothing more now than a crippled worker at the Prague post office. Anja, Anja. Fresh tears pressed in my throat at the thought of her. Now I was left with only Uta. Uta. Her coarse face leered at me and the muscles in my ears clenched at the thought of her voice of affected childishness.
The sound of the watch was now so loud that it was shaking the room, as though the walls of the building were being struck by a battering ram. The legs of the furniture jumped and scratched over the floor. Loose sheets of paper snowed from the bed and the writing table and the clothes on the rail began to jerk their arms and legs in a phantom dance. I still had my hand wrapped around the watch, but with each beat it was becoming more and more painful to hold, and I was afraid that if I let it go I would be deafened in an instant. I waited for the space between two beats and then took the watch out, still wrapped in the useless handkerchief, and flung it onto the floor. It spun on its back like a golden beetle and I brought my foot down upon it with all my force. I felt its hard form resist painfully under my heel. The beat slowed and I seized a chair and smashed it down again and again onto the tiny metal object, until its innards, miniature wheels and cogs, all spilled out onto the floorboards in a small golden pool. In the spreading silence I could hear the tinkling music of these tiny mechanical components rolling away into cracks in the floorboards.
I went back to the bed. Franz’s whole BODY was still and lay there among the bedclothes like the discarded skin of a reptile. All the life that he yet contained had become distilled in his quivering eyes and eyelids. He was whispering something to me, the same phrase again and again, but his dry lips were two rigid straps and he could not form the words. I leaned closer and held my breath, afraid to inhale his contagion.
‘It was me she loved.’‡‡
His stale breath dampened my face as he spoke, and he said it again and again. I hissed at him to be quiet, to hold his tongue. I leaned further over him and took one of the pillows from beside his head. His eyes were closed with the effort of speaking his phrase and I hugged the pillow to my chest and let myself fall onto him, into him, the pillow between my chest and his FACE. I could feel his lips still mouthing through the layer of feathers and cloth. I leaned harder. I thought that I would crush his BONES with my weight; I could feel them rising from the mattress like a fragile construction built of twigs and paper. I closed my eyes and held my breath, and then there was nothing but darkness.±±
__________________
* The following pages were written on blank writing paper torn from a different notebook and clipped to the pages of the exercise book. The writing is written in a small hand, and is in several places barely legible. The following section contains a number of unclear words, which have been approximated and are indicated in SMALL CAPS.
† This may also read ‘reflection’.
‡ This may also read ‘regular’.
± The description of the room is an addition to the text given in the margins. The ink is the same as that used throughout the text.
° This may read ‘myself’.
∞ ‘The other’ is crossed out, and ‘F’s’ is written in the space above it.
ª ‘Anja, Anja, Anja’ is repeated here for four lines in Brod’s writing. This had been omitted in the interest of fluency and coherence.
** This line has been crossed out with several strokes, but is still easily legible.
†† ‘Body’ appears underneath the word ‘writing’, but is clearly legible.
‡‡ This sentence has been crossed out and then written again beside the crossing-out.
±± This section is followed by several pages of illegible text: heavily crossed-out writing with some pages torn and missing.
25.
*THE NEXT THING I REMEMBER IS WAKING TO THE SONG OF A BIRD and light pressing on my closed eyes, illuminating the dense network of pink veins that threaded through the insides of my eyelids. I could hear soft rustling sounds and breathing, which seemed to come from close by. There was, too, a nagging feeling that something was missing, or that I had forgotten something. I opened my eyes and the light from the window flooded the whole room with whiteness. When the features of the room came to me, I saw that I was in a completely white room, lying in a narrow bed. There was a small table next to the bed and a picture on the wall opposite of a boy holding a dog in his arms. The soft sounds came again and attached themselves to a woman, who I noticed was hunched over in one corner of the room. As I looked at her she slowly began shuffling along sideways with her face to the wall and her back to me. This animal scuttling motion of hers frightened me and made me nauseous, until I realised that she held a cloth in one hand and was cleaning the dust from a kind of picture rail that ran along the wall. She turned swiftly and when she saw me looking at her hurried out of the room.
There were several other beds in the room, all empty, and I recognised it as a hospital ward. I realised that I must have been injured; perhaps I had been in some kind of accident. I scanned my body for areas of pain, but could find none. I looked down at my arms and lifted them up in front of my face. I turned my hands this way and that, I tested my legs and the motion of my neck, but all seemed to be in order. From the bed I cast my eyes about, but nowhere in the room was there any machinery that might be used to straighten my back, which was the next explanation that came to mind. I even sat up in the bed and looked at the headboard for some traction device that might be located there, but all I could see was a small white card with a name on it that was not mine. I must have been put in the wrong bed by mistake, I thought. Although I knew it was just an administrative error, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy, as if I were being mocked.
I swung my legs out from under the bedclothes and hoisted myself to sit on the edge of the bed, preparing to get up. I noticed that my clothes had gone and I was wearing only a white nightgown. It was an effort to stand. I made my way slowly around the room looking at the labels on the other beds, in case I would find my name on one of these, but the spaces to hold the cards were all blank. I stood looking at the mislabelled bed. ‘Certainly an administrative error,’ I told myself.
The room, on closer inspection, was very bare. Nowhere was there any medical equipment to measure my vital signs, no charts to record them nor medicine to treat any illness. I had begun to shiver with cold, and turned back to the bed, but the idea of getting into that bed, which after all was labelled as not my own, was suddenly loathsome to me; like wearing another man’s clothes. I was still standing there, shivering and hesitating, when I heard steps approach the door, causing me to jump with alarm. I leaped into the bed, forgetting its irksomeness, and pulled the cover up over my insubstantial gown.
The door opened and a tall man in a suit came in, followed by a woman dressed as a nurse. I asked the man if I could speak with a doctor, and he smiled and introduced himself a
s Professor Pick. He had a perfectly neat triangular beard and heavy-lidded eyes, like a country vicar or a school principal.
‘Professor Pick,’ I said, ‘there has been a mistake. To begin with, I am not Brod; my name is Kafka. Your administrative staff have made an error.’
I gestured behind me to the label on the bed. I waited for Professor Pick to respond, but he only dropped his heavy lids over his eyes and wearily raised them a few times before saying, ‘Mmm,’ which hung in the air ominously.
Something about the man disturbed me, and the skin on my scalp began to contract in fear. I went on, a little uncertainly now, ‘Secondly, I have not the slightest thing wrong with me.’ I pushed the bedclothes off and sat on the edge of the bed in order to demonstrate my healthfulness. ‘My body, I know, appears to be weak, but I am just coming now out of a long illness, but really I can manage perfectly well.’
I looked down and was suddenly ashamed of the exposure of my naked legs, which struck me as obscenely thin and white, to this well-dressed man. I twitched the edge of the nightgown down as far as it would go to cover them.
‘Herr Brod,’ Pick said, stepping closer to me and putting one spread hand in the middle of my chest.
I wondered if the man was deaf.
‘Kafka,’ I corrected him. ‘Kafka.’ I spoke loudly and slowly and indicated myself with my hand pointed to my face. Should I spell it for him?
He pressed me rudely back into the bed. ‘I assure you, Herr Brod, that the error is yours.’
He pulled a notebook from his pocket and scrawled something in it and then left the room, trailed by the nurse. They shut the door behind them and I could hear their footsteps echoing for a long time after they’d left.
My encounter with Pick left me feeling unsettled and in the strangely empty room this quickly mounted to panic. I needed to leave the hospital immediately. I made a more thorough search of the room for my clothes, but they had disappeared. There was not even a locked cupboard or box or wardrobe that might contain them. As I much I disliked the idea, I resigned myself to going out in my nightgown.
I had expected the door to the room to be locked, but I found that it opened easily. Outside was an empty corridor. I felt very self-conscious in my bare feet and legs and the draughty nightgown and my first intention was to locate my clothing. I knew that my identification papers were in my pocketbook in my jacket, and these would surely put an end to the whole farcical situation. The corridor was long and stretched away in either direction in a perfect mirror image of itself: just rows of closed doors and blank walls. I stood, hesitating. The wall opposite was set with long windows, which looked out onto a grassed area.
Being without my clothing made me feel like a fugitive and my heart soon began to race with anxiety. I turned left and ran lightly along the corridor, the skin of my bare feet making soft kisses on the floorboards. There was no clear exit, although I could see a closed door at the end of the corridor ahead of me, still quite far away. I tried to remind myself that I was not a prisoner and there was actually no reason to be running in such an undignified manner. With an effort, I forced myself to slow to a walk. I tried swinging my arms to give the appearance, if only to myself, of nonchalance. I would have liked to hum a tune, but I could not think of one.
At that moment the door ahead of me opened and two men dressed as orderlies came out into the corridor. I tensed, ready to bound away back down the corridor. I looked wildly about me and had the mad idea of opening one of the windows and jumping out of it and running away across the lawn, but I saw that the windows were overlaid with light grilles of metal. The men came silently on and my instincts told me that, as with facing an unknown dog, I should not show any fear. I stopped walking and raised my hand loosely in greeting.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you could direct me to the central administration area? There seems to be an error with my identity.’
They ignored my request and continued to walk towards me.
‘Or perhaps you could assist me in locating my clothing, or at least my pocketbook …’ My voice trailed off. The men still advanced as if I had not spoken. Had I in fact spoken aloud? Somehow I was not certain. They were both large men, broad and muscular, but at that moment this did not bother me as much as the fact that they were clothed and I was not. Their clothing transformed them into a different and far superior type of animal. The leather capsules of their shoes enclosed their feet and the hard soles tapped along the boards in a unified percussive beat, like hooves. Their clothing fit exactly around their limbs and torsos. I felt like an urchin with my flimsy gown flapping around my white legs and my feet spreading out their cold toes along the floor, sticking slightly to it with each step.
The men came one on each side of me, took me by the elbows and propelled me back down the corridor. As we dashed along, my questioning voice trailed away behind us like a fluttering ribbon. The faces of the men were as fixed and blank as the faces of the stone gargoyles that look out over the roofs of the city. When we arrived back in the room, the nurse who had accompanied Professor Pick earlier was waiting. The men pushed me towards the bed and stood side by side just inside the door, watching me.
Again I had the feeling of revulsion towards that bed. The bedclothes and mattress lay like a heap of rags and seemed to me to be diseased. My skin shrank from contact with the bed and the thought of climbing into it was now as repulsive being asked to enter the bed of a leper. I protested that the bed was not mine, and that the owner of the bed was a murderer; he had killed me in Berlin, or tried to kill me. I frowned. There was something wrong with the order of my thoughts, but I had no time to consider it. My words flew out of my mouth and circled the room, not finding the ears of anyone present. I repeated my name, shouting it, but it felt like I was swimming upriver in a strong current and making no headway.
The men began to advance towards me and I shuffled backwards until the edge of the mattress grazed the back of my naked knees. One of the men now stood in front of me with a tired expression on his flat face. He began to lean towards me, about to push me into the bed. I could see there was nothing that I could do, so I inched myself down onto the edge of the bed of my own accord rather than give in to the further humiliation of being pushed there by the silent man. I pulled the bedclothes over my legs, holding them with two fingers only, with my teeth clenched and my face screwed up in disgust.
The nurse came forward holding a small cup, which she offered to me. I struck it out of her hand, furious and afraid. The men came towards me and held me down, and the nurse, unperturbed, turned away and then turned back again with another, identical cup. I began thrashing around in the bed with all my strength, certain that the cup contained some poison. I thrust my head from left to right, until it was seized by one of the men. I clamped my lips shut, but they were forced open and the contents of the cup were poured into me. The men held me for a few moments more, until I ceased my struggle.
My body became soft and light and the perimeter of it seemed to become elastic and merge with the objects in the room. I lost my name for myself, even the name for the idea of myself, my ‘I’. It sounds alarming, but I felt nothing more than a great sense of relief. My existence in the hospital bed became unimportant and I forgot about the whereabouts of my clothing, my urgency to leave the hospital, the problem of the names. I came to live in the fog brought by the medicine. My thoughts floated around in my head like leaves blown by the wind. I watched them from a distance, sweeping past me in long arcs, and never bothered to try to catch hold of any one.
Scenes of my life before—writing, and going to work every day, and my family and Anja—were like sequences in a novel read long ago. They were suspended at a pleasant distance, only minimally interesting and amusing, and not at all important or particularly connected to me.
Words lost their definition and drifted away from the objects to which they were usually attached. Language became a kind of alchemy, an impossible marvel: to make a s
ound, an arrangement with one’s lips and tongue and breath, which would conjure up the image of a thing, a hard object, in the mind of another. It was like a magician’s trick. I would hear the words of others coming at me through the air, and perhaps I sometimes sent out words of my own, sounds, also. Words became meaningless; I lived in the surer world—to me it seemed surer—of the senses, of hot and cold, of colours, and feelings pleasant or not.
Now and then Professor Pick would appear, although I did not recognise him at the time, and dictate notes to an assistant. At other times he would arrive with a group of young people, who I realise now must have been medical students, and who examined and measured me and asked me condescending questions. They crowded around to discuss the notes in Pick’s little book. I watched the whole proceeding as if from a vantage point outside myself, detached from the action.
I floated in this state for some time—weeks, months—and then one day something changed. There was a sensation of movement and changing lights and I became aware of being transported out of the room to a different place. Here I experienced an all-encompassing coldness, and then the air surrounding me seemed to thicken and bring warmth and lightness. My arms began to float upwards and I could feel a hard surface below me. It took me a long time to identify myself as being in a bath. The word ‘bathtub’ came to me, four-square, pleasantly solid, standing on little hooks of feet, exactly like the object. It floated before my eyes, a flag waving in the air, but after a moment it disintegrated and became only another shape to be made with the lips, a string of coloured beads to play with. I felt the sides of the bath with my hands and gripped the curled lip of the rim, trying and trying to remember. I looked blankly down at my unfamiliar body as it lay there, pink and naked, in the porcelain shell.
The Lost Pages Page 19