by Franz Kafka
“Undress him, then he will heal,
And should he not heal, then kill him!
’Tis only a doctor, ’tis only a doctor.”
Then I am undressed and, with my fingers in my beard and my head tilted, I take a calm look at the people. I am thoroughly composed and above them all, and I also remain so, although it is no help to me, for they are now taking me by the head and feet and carrying me to the bed. They lay me down by the wall on the side of the wound. Then they all leave the room; the door is closed; the singing falls silent; clouds move in front of the moon; warm are the bedclothes around me; the horseheads sway like shadows in the open windows. “You know,” said a voice in my ear, “I have very little faith in you. You were only thrown off here, after all; didn’t come here on your own feet. Instead of helping, you are crowding me in my deathbed. I’d love nothing better than to scratch your eyes out.” “That’s right,” I said, “it’s a disgrace. But I’m a doctor. What am I to do? Believe me, it’s not easy for me either.” “Am I supposed to be content with that excuse? Oh, I suppose I have to be. I always have to content myself. I came into the world with a fine wound; that was all I was given.” “My young friend,” I say, “your mistake is that you are lacking an overview. I, who have been in all sickrooms far and wide, can tell you: your wound is not all that bad. Made at an acute angle with two strokes of an ax. Many offer their sides and can hardly hear the ax in the forest, let alone that it is coming closer to them.” “Is it really so, or are you deceiving me in my fever?” “It is really so; take the district doctor’s word of honor with you on your way.” And he takes it and grows still. But now it is time to think of saving myself. The horses are still standing faithfully in their places. Clothing, fur coat, and bag are quickly gathered together; I don’t want to hold myself up by getting dressed; if the horses are to race like they did on the journey here, I would jump, so to speak, from this bed into my own. Obediently one horse withdraws from the window; I throw the bundle into the carriage; the fur coat flies too far, catching on a hook by only one sleeve. Good enough. I swing myself onto the horse. The straps dragging loosely, one horse hardly connected to the other, the carriage sways behind them, the fur coat trailing in the snow. “Gee up!” I say, but they do not gallop; we cross the snow desert as slowly as old men; for a long time, the children’s new, but mistaken song sounds after us:
“Rejoice, ye patients, rejoice,
The doctor’s been laid in bed with you!”
I’ll never get home this way; my flourishing practice is lost; a successor is stealing from me, but to no avail, for he cannot replace me; in my house, that revolting groom is raging; Rose is his victim; I can’t bear to think of it. Naked, exposed to the frost of this ill-fated age, with an earthly carriage and unearthly horses, I, an old man, roam about. My fur coat is hanging on the back of the carriage, but I cannot reach it, and no one in that agile mob of patients lifts a finger. Betrayed! Betrayed! Once you have followed the false toll of the night bell—it can never be put right.
A HUNGER ARTIST
In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has declined significantly. Whereas it was once profitable to organize large performances of this kind on your own, today it is entirely impossible. Those were different times. Then, entire cities paid attention to the hunger artist; the interest grew from hunger-day to hunger-day; everyone wanted to see the hunger artist at least once a day; on the later days, there were subscribers who sat before the little wire cage for days; there were even visits at night, by torchlight to enhance the effect; on pleasant days the cage was brought outdoors and then it was especially the children that the hunger artist was shown to; whereas he was often just an amusement to the adults, who took part in it because it was fashionable, the children would watch in amazement, with open mouths, holding one another’s hands for safety, as he sat on scattered straw, spurning even a chair, pale, in a black leotard, with starkly jutting ribs, nodding once politely before answering questions with a strained smile, also stretching his arm through the bars to allow his leanness to be felt, before sinking entirely into himself again, concerning himself with no one, not even with the striking of the clock, the only piece of furniture in his cage, that was so important to him, but merely staring ahead with his eyes almost closed, and sipping now and then from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips.
Apart from the changing spectators, permanent watchmen, selected by the audience, were also there, often butchers, strangely enough, who, always three at a time, had the task of observing the hunger artist day and night to make sure that he didn’t consume food in some secret way. But it was simply a formality, introduced to appease the masses, for insiders knew that the hunger artist would never, under any circumstances, not even under duress, eat the slightest thing during the hunger period; the honor of his art forbade it. Of course, not every watchman could fathom this; sometimes groups of night watchmen were formed who carried out their duty very laxly; they intentionally sat together in a distant corner and delved into a card game with the apparent intention of allowing the hunger artist a little refreshment, which he, in their opinion, could remove from some secret stock. Nothing was more torturous to the hunger artist than such watchmen; they made him miserable; they made the hungering dreadfully difficult. Sometimes he overcame his weakness and sang during their watch, as long as he could bear it to show the people how unjustly they were suspecting him. But that didn’t help much; they were then only surprised at his ability to eat even while singing. He much preferred the watchmen who sat close by the cage, who, because they were not satisfied with the dim nighttime lighting in the hall, illuminated him with the electric flashlights that the impresario had provided them with. The glaring light didn’t bother him; he couldn’t sleep at all in any case, and he was always able to doze a little with any lighting and at any hour, even in an overfilled, clamorous hall. He was very content to spend the entire night with such watchmen entirely without sleep; he was content to joke with them, to tell them stories from his life as a traveler, to then listen to their stories, everything just to keep them awake, to be able to show them again and again that he had nothing edible in his cage and that he was hungering, like none of them could. But he was the happiest when morning came and they were served a lavish breakfast at his expense, on which they flung themselves with the appetites of healthy men after a hard night of keeping watch. Indeed, there were even people who wanted to see this breakfast as an improper manipulation of the watchmen, but that was going rather too far, and when they were asked to take on the night watch merely for the sake of the cause without breakfast, they made themselves scarce, but they still kept their suspicions.
Indeed, this was among those suspicions that are an inextricable part of hungering. No one, of course, was capable of continuously spending all their days and nights with the hunger artist as watchman; so no one could know from their own experience whether the hungering had truly been without interruption or fault; only the hunger artist himself could know this, so at the same time he could be the only fully satisfied spectator of his own hungering. But there was another reason that he was never satisfied; perhaps it was not the hungering at all that had made him so emaciated that many, to their regret, had to stay away from the performances because they could not bear the sight of him, but rather that he was so emaciated out of his own dissatisfaction with himself. He alone, however, knew what no insider knew: how easy it was to hunger. It was the easiest thing in the world. He made no secret of it but no one believed him; at best they thought him to be modest, but mostly they thought he craved publicity or was even a swindler, for whom hungering was indeed easy because he knew how to make it easy, and then even had the nerve to half admit it. He had to accept all of this, had become accustomed to it over the years, but on the inside this dissatisfaction always gnawed at him, and never, after no hunger period—this they had to grant him—had he left the cage voluntarily. The impresario had determined that the maximum amount of time for hunge
ring was forty days; he never allowed hungering to go beyond that, not even in the great cities, and this was for a good reason. From experience, he knew that a city’s interest could be stirred up for about forty days by gradually increasing advertisements, but then the public would lose interest and a significant decrease in popularity was noted; in this respect of course, there were small differences between one town or country and another, but as a rule, forty days was the maximum time. So on the fortieth day when the door to the flower-crowned cage was opened, an ecstatic audience filled the amphitheater, a military band played, two doctors entered the cage to carry out the necessary measurements on the hunger artist, the results were announced to the hall through a megaphone, and finally, two young ladies, delighted that their names were drawn, came and attempted to lead the hunger artist out of the cage and down a few steps where, on a little table, a carefully selected invalid’s meal had been served. And at this moment, the hunger artist always resisted. Although he voluntarily laid his bony arms in the helpfully outstretched hands of the ladies who were bending down toward him, he would not stand up. Why stop now after forty days? He would have held out longer, for an unlimitedly long time; why stop now, when he was doing his best, indeed not even his best, hungering? Why did they want to rob him of the fame of continuing to hunger, of not only becoming the greatest hunger artist of all time, which indeed he probably already was, but also of surpassing himself beyond all comprehension, for he felt no limits in his ability to hunger. Why had this crowd, who pretended to admire him so much, have so little patience with him; if he could continue to endure the hunger, why couldn’t they endure it? He was also tired; he was sitting comfortably in the straw and was now supposed to stand up straight and tall and walk to the food, the very thought of which made him nauseous, the expression of which he refrained from demonstrating out of consideration for the ladies. And he looked up into the eyes of these ladies, who appeared to be so kind, but in reality were so cruel, and shook his overly heavy head on his weak neck. But then there happened what always happened. The impresario came forward, raised his arms silently—the music made it impossible to speak—above the hunger artist as though he were inviting heaven to behold his work here, this pitiful martyr, which the hunger artist certainly was, only in an entirely different sense; he grasped the hunger artist around his thin waist, doing so with exaggerated caution to show what a frail thing he had to do with here; and he handed him over—not without secretly shaking him a little, so that the hunger artist swayed uncontrollably with his legs and torso—to the ladies who had meanwhile become deathly pale. Now the hunger artist endured everything; his head lay on his chest, as though it had rolled away and was mysteriously lingering there; his body was hollowed out; his legs, in an instinct of self-preservation, were tightly pressed together, but they still scraped along the ground as if it were not the real one and the real one were still being sought; and the entire, albeit very slight, weight of his body rested on one of the ladies, who, seeking help and panting—this was not how she had imagined her honorary post—first craned her neck as far as possible to keep her face at least from touching the hunger artist, but then, because this didn’t work, and her more fortunate companion did not come to her aid but contented herself with carrying the hunger artist’s hand, that little bundle of bones, she burst into tears amid rapturous laughter in the hall and had to be relieved by an attendant who had been positioned there for this purpose. Then came the food, a little of which the impresario had managed to pour into the hunger artist’s mouth during a spell of unconscious half-sleep as he chatted cheerfully in an attempt to draw attention away from the hunger artist’s condition; then a toast was raised to the public, which, as the impresario claimed, was prompted by something the hunger artist had whispered into his ear; the orchestra reinforced everything with a great fanfare, people dispersed, and no one was justified in being dissatisfied with what they had seen, no one, only the hunger artist, always only the hunger artist.
He lived this way, with regular short rest intervals, for many years, in apparent glory, honored by the world, but mostly in a miserable mood, which was made even more miserable due to the fact that no one knew how to take him seriously. But what were they to console him with? What more could he wish for? And if some good-natured person turned up who felt sorry for him and tried to explain that his sadness was probably due to the hunger, it could happen, especially at an advanced stage in hungering process, that the hunger artist responded with an outburst of anger and, to everyone’s horror, by starting to shake at the bars of his cage like an animal. But for such fits, the impresario had a means of punishment that he was fond of using. He would make excuses for the hunger artist before the assembled audience, admitting that the irritability, which was induced by the hunger and not readily comprehensible for satiated people, excused the hunger artist’s behavior; in this context, he would then refer to the hunger artist’s claim that he was able to hunger much longer than he hungered now, which could also be explained in this way; he would praise the noble aspiration, the good will, the great self-denial that were surely also contained in this assertion; but then he would attempt to refute the assertion by simply displaying photographs, which were simultaneously being sold, for in the pictures, one saw the hunger artist on his fortieth day of hungering, in bed, almost extinguished by exhaustion. This distortion of the truth, well known to the hunger artist but nevertheless always unnerving, was too much for him. The consequence of prematurely ending the hungering was being portrayed here as the cause! Combating this ignorance, this world of ignorance, was impossible. Again and again he had listened eagerly and in good faith to the impresario, clinging to the bars, but every time the photographs appeared, he would let go of the bars, sink back into the straw, and the reassured public could come forward again and observe him.
When those who witnessed such scenes thought back to them a few years later, they often failed to comprehend themselves. For in the meantime, the aforementioned change had set in; it happened almost abruptly; the reasons may have been deeper, but who could be bothered to discover them; in any case, one day the pampered hunger artist found himself abandoned by the pleasure-seeking crowd, which preferred to flock to other spectacles. The impresario sped through half of Europe once more to see if here or there the old interest might not be rediscovered; all in vain; as if by some secret agreement, an outright aversion to hungering displays had developed everywhere. Of course, this could not really have come about so abruptly, and in hindsight, they now recalled some warning signs that were neither heeded nor suppressed sufficiently in the throes of success, but it was now too late to do anything about it. Although the time for hungering was sure to come again, this was no consolation to those living now. So what was the hunger artist to do? He who had been celebrated by thousands could not show himself in show booths at little village fairs, and the hunger artist was not only too old, but also too fanatically devoted to hungering to learn a new profession. So he dismissed the impresario, companion of an unparalleled career, and began an engagement with a large circus; to spare his own sensibility, he did not even look at the terms of contract.
A large circus, constantly replacing and supplementing its countless number of people and animals, can always use anyone at any time, even a hunger artist, with his modest demands, of course; and besides, it was not only the hunger artist who was being engaged, but also his old famous name. In fact, one could not even say, given the peculiarity of this art form, which had not diminished with increasing age, that a worn-out artist, who was no longer at the height of his ability, was trying to take refuge in a quiet circus job. On the contrary, the hunger artist ensured that he hungered just as well as before, which was entirely credible; indeed, he even claimed that if they would let him have his way—and this they promised without further ado—he would actually now, for the first time, give the world cause for justified astonishment; a claim that, in consideration of the sentiment of the times, which the hunger artist in
his eagerness easily forgot, only made the professionals smile.