by Franz Kafka
It was so easy to imitate these people. I could already spit in the very first days. Then we spat in each other’s faces; the difference was only that while I licked my face clean afterwards, they didn’t lick theirs. Soon I was smoking the pipe like an old man; if I then also pressed my thumb into the bowl, the whole steerage cheered; only it was a long time before I understood the difference between a pipe that was empty and one that was filled.
The brandy bottle gave the most trouble. The smell tormented me; I forced myself with all my strength, but weeks passed before I overcame myself. Strangely enough, people took this inner struggle more seriously than anything else about me. I don’t distinguish between people even in my memories, but there was one who came again and again, alone or with comrades, by day, by night, at all kinds of hours; he positioned himself before me with a bottle and gave me lessons. He didn’t understand me; he wanted to solve the mystery of my being. He slowly uncorked the bottle and then looked at me to see if I had understood; I admit, I always looked at him with wild, excessive attentiveness; such a human student could not find a human teacher on the whole round earth. Once the bottle is uncorked, he raises it to his mouth; I follow him with my eyes right into his gullet; he nods, satisfied with me, and sets the bottle to his lips; I, delighted by gradual understanding, screech as I scratch myself up and down and wherever it happens to itch; he is pleased, raises the bottle and takes a drink; I, impatient and desperate to emulate him, soil myself in my cage, which again gratifies him enormously; and then, holding the bottle far from himself and raising it up again with a swing and leaning back with didactic exaggeration, he empties it in one draught. I, exhausted from far too much eagerness, can’t follow any longer and hang weakly on the bars while he ends the theoretical lesson by stroking his belly and grinning.
Now the practical exercises begin. Am I not already far too exhausted by the theoretical part? Certainly, far too exhausted. This is part of my destiny. And yet I reach as best I can for the bottle that is extended to me; uncork it trembling; with my success, new strength gradually emerges; I raise the bottle, hardly to be distinguished from the original; put it to my lips—and throw it with disgust, with disgust, although it is empty and only filled with the smell, throw it with disgust to the floor. To the sorrow of my teacher, to the greater sorrow of myself; it is no conciliation for him or myself that, after throwing the bottle away, I don’t forget to stroke my belly magnificently, grinning as I do so.
All too often, this was how the lesson went. And to my teacher’s credit, he wasn’t angry with me; true, he did sometimes hold his burning pipe to my fur until it started to smolder somewhere that was difficult for me to reach, but then he put it out again himself with his huge, kind hand; he wasn’t angry with me; he realized that we were fighting on the same side against my ape nature and that I had the more difficult part.
But what a victory it was for him as well as for me when one evening, in front of a large circle of spectators—perhaps it was a celebration, a gramophone was playing, an officer was walking among the people—when on this evening, unnoticed at the moment, I grabbed a brandy bottle that had accidently been forgotten in front of my cage, uncorked it as I had been taught amid the growing attention of the company, put it to my mouth, and, without hesitation, without turning up my mouth, like an expert drinker, with eyes rolling and throat swashing, really and truly emptied the bottle; threw the bottle down, no longer in desperation but as an artist; indeed, forgetting to stroke my belly. But for that, because I couldn’t help it, because I felt an urge, because my senses were surging, I called out a brief “Hello!” breaking out into human speech, sprang with this call into the human community, and its echo—“Listen, he’s speaking!”—felt like a kiss on my entire sweat-drenched body.
I repeat: I did not find it appealing to imitate humans; I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason. And little had been achieved by that victory. My voice failed me immediately; it only came back months later; the aversion to the brandy bottle returned even stronger. My course, however, had been set once and for all.
When I was handed over to my first trainer in Hamburg, I quickly realized that two possibilities were available to me: the Zoological Gardens or variety theater. I didn’t hesitate. I told myself: make every effort to get to the variety theater; that is the way out; Zoological Garden is only a new cage; if you are put in that, you are lost.
And I learned, gentlemen. Oh, you learn when you must; you learn when you want a way out; you learn ruthlessly. You oversee yourself with the whip; you lash yourself at the slightest resistance. My ape nature hurtled out of me, rolling over itself and away, so that my first teacher almost became apish himself, soon had to give up our lessons and be brought into a mental institution. Fortunately he came out again soon.
But I used up many teachers, indeed several teachers at the same time. When I had become more sure of my abilities, when the public followed my progress, when my future began to look bright, I hired my own teachers, had them situated in five adjoining rooms, and studied with all of them simultaneously by constantly jumping from one room to the next.
The progress I made! Those rays of knowledge penetrating my awakening brain from all sides! I won’t deny that it delighted me. But I also admit that I did not overestimate it, not even then, much less now. With an exertion that has not yet been repeated anywhere on earth, I have attained the average education of a European. In itself, that would perhaps be nothing, but it is something after all insofar as it helped me out of the cage and provided me with this particular way out, this human way out. There is an excellent German figure of speech: to disappear into the bushes; this I have done, I have disappeared into the bushes. I had no other way, assuming always that freedom was not an option.
When I review my development and its purpose thus far, I neither complain nor am I satisfied. My hands in my pockets, the bottle of wine on the table, I half lie, half sit in my rocking chair and look out the window. If a visitor comes, I receive him with propriety. My impresario sits in the anteroom; if I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. I almost always have performances in the evenings, and I could hardly be more successful. When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific societies, from social gatherings, a small half-trained chimpanzee awaits me and I indulge myself in the apelike fashion. I do not wish to see her by day; you see, she has the insanity of the confused, trained animal in her eyes; I am the only one who sees it, and I find it unbearable.
All in all, I have in any case achieved what I wanted to achieve. You can’t say it wasn’t worth the effort. Otherwise, I don’t want any human judgment; all I want is to spread insight; I am only reporting; to you as well, honored Gentlemen of the Academy, I have only been reporting.
CHILDREN ON THE COUNTRY ROAD
I heard the wagons passing by the garden fence, sometimes I also saw them through the slightly swaying gaps in the leaves. How the wood of their spokes and shafts creaked in the hot summer! Workers came from the fields and laughed, so that it was a disgrace.
I was sitting on our little swing, I was resting among the trees in my parents’ garden.
Beyond the fence, it didn’t stop. Children ran past in the blink of an eye; grain wagons with men and women on the sheaves and all around the darkened flower beds; toward evening, I saw a gentleman with a cane taking a leisurely stroll and a couple of girls, approaching him arm in arm, stepped aside into the grass with a greeting.
Then birds flew up like sparks; I followed them with my eyes, saw how they rose in one breath, until I no longer believed they were rising but that I was falling, and holding myself tight on the ropes out of faintness, began to swing a little. Soon I was swinging higher; as the air blew cooler, and in place of the flying birds, quivering stars had appeared.
By candlelight, I received my supper. Often I had both arms on the wooden counter, already tired, I bit into my buttered bread. The intricately embroidered curtains billowed i
n the warm wind, and sometimes someone passing by outside would hold them in their hands if they wanted to see me better and talk to me. Usually the candle would go out quickly and the mosquitoes would hang about in the dark candle smoke for a while. If someone interrogated me from the window, I would look at him as though I were gazing at the mountains or the plain air, and he was also not very eager for an answer.
If someone then leapt over the windowsill and announced that the others were already in front of the house, I would, of course, get up with a sigh.
“Come on, what are you sighing about? What happened? Something especially tragic that can never be made right? Will we never be able to recover from it? Is all really lost?”
Nothing was lost. We ran out to the front of the house. “Thank God, there you are at last!”—“You’re just always late”—“Why me?”—“Especially you, stay at home if you don’t want to come along.”—“No mercy!”—“What? No mercy? That’s no way to talk!”
We broke through the evening headfirst. There was no day or nighttime. Soon the buttons on our waistcoats were grinding together like teeth; soon we were running at a steady distance, fire in our mouths, like animals in the tropics. Like cuirassiers in old wars, stamping and high in the air, we goaded one another down the short alley and with this momentum in our legs, further on up the country road. Some stepped into the roadside ditch, hardly had they vanished before the dark escarpment when they appeared up on the path, standing like strangers, and looked down.
“Why don’t you come down here?”—“Come up here first!”—“So you can push us down? Wouldn’t cross our minds, we’re too clever for that.”—“You’re too cowardly, you meant to say. Come on, come!”—“Really? You? You of all people are going to push us down? I’d like to see you try!”
We attacked, took a blow to the chest and laid ourselves down in the grass of the roadside ditch, falling willingly. Everything was evenly warm, we did not feel warmth, not coldness in the grass, one just grew tired.
If you turned onto your right side, placing a hand under your ear, you would want to fall asleep. You would want to rouse yourself again with your chin raised high, but instead you would fall into a deeper ditch. Then you would want to throw yourself against the air, holding your arm crosswise, your legs blown askew, and surely fall again into an even deeper ditch. And you would not want to stop.
How to stretch out fully in the last ditch, especially in the knees, was hardly something you thought about and you lay, ready to cry, like an invalid, on your back. You blinked when a boy, elbows at his hips, once leapt over us with dark soles from the escarpment to the road.
You could already see the moon quite high in the sky, a mail coach drove by in its light. A slight wind rose all around, also in the ditch it could be felt, and nearby the forest began to rustle. It was then no longer so important to be alone.
“Where are you?”—“Come here!”—“All together!”—“Why are you hiding, stop messing around!”—“Didn’t you know that the mail already passed?”—“No! It’s already past?”—“Of course, it passed by while you were sleeping.”—“I was sleeping? Imagine that!”—“Be quiet, one can see it on your face.”—“Surely not”—“Come on!”
We ran closer together, some joined hands, we could not hold our heads high enough because we were going downhill. One of us let out an Indian war cry, we got a gallop in our legs like never before, as we leapt, the wind lifted us by the hips. Nothing could have held us back; we were so much in stride that we could cross our arms and have a look around even as we passed one another.
We stopped on the bridge over the wild stream; those who had run farther turned back. The water below pounded at stones and roots as if it were not already late evening. There was no reason why one of us did not leap onto the bridge’s railing.
A train drove out from behind bushes in the distance, all its compartments were lit up, the glass windows certainly lowered. One of us began to sing a street song, but we all wanted to sing. We sang far more quickly than the train was traveling, we swung our arms because our voices were not enough, with our voices we entered a crowd that we felt good in. If you mix your voice among others, you are trapped like one who has been caught with a fishhook.
So we sang, the forest behind us, in the distant passengers’ ears. The adults were still awake in the village, the mothers were preparing the beds for the night.
It was time. I kissed the one standing next to me, held out my hands to the next three, began to walk back, no one called me. At the first crossing where they could no longer see me, I turned and followed the paths back into the forest. I was headed for the city in the south, of which they said in our village:
“The people there! Just imagine, they don’t sleep!”
“And why not?”
“Because they don’t get tired”
“And why not?”
“Because they are fools”
“Don’t fools get tired?”
“How could fools get tired!”
OUTING IN THE MOUNTAINS
"I don’t know," I cried soundlessly. “I just don’t know. If nobody comes, then nobody comes. I’ve done nobody any harm, nobody has done me any harm, but nobody wants to help me. Absolutely nobody. But that’s not really the way it is. Only that nobody is helping me—otherwise absolutely nobody would be quite nice. I would very much like—and why not, after all?—to go on an outing with a group of nobodies. To the mountains, of course, where else? How these nobodies press against one another, all the many arms stretched across and linked together, the many feet, separated by tiny steps! Naturally, everyone is in tailcoats. We stroll along, the wind blowing through the gaps that we and our limbs leave open. Throats become free in the mountains! It is a miracle that we are not singing.”
A MESSAGE FROM THE EMPEROR
The Emperor—so they say—has sent to you, the single, pathetic subject, the miniscule shadow that has fled the imperial sun to the most distant distance. To you of all people the Emperor has sent a message from his deathbed. He had the messenger kneel down at his bedside and whispered the message into his ear; it was so important to him that he had it repeated back into his ear again. With a nod of his head he confirmed the accuracy of that which was said. And before the entire spectatorship of his death—all obstructing walls are broken down and in a circle on the wide, high swinging flights of stairs the empire’s great men are standing—before all of them he had given the messenger his instructions. The messenger sets off at once; a strong, untiring man; stretching one arm, then the other out before him, he creates a path through the crowd; if he meets resistance, he points to his chest, which bears the sign of the sun; and he advances with more ease than anyone else. But the crowd is so vast; their dwellings never come to an end. How he would fly if open fields were to emerge before him, and you would soon hear the glorious pounding of his fists on your door. But instead, he labors uselessly; he is still forcing himself through the chambers of the inner palace; he will never get through them; and if he does manage this, nothing would be gained; he would have to fight his way down the stairs; and if he manages this, nothing would be gained; the courtyards would have to be crossed; and after the courtyards, the second outer palace; and again steps and courtyards; and again a palace; and so on through millennia; and were he to finally stumble through the outermost gate—but this can never, never happen—the royal city will still lie before him, the center of the world, piled high with its own dregs. No one gets through here even with a message from a dead man.—But you, you will sit at your window and dream it up for yourself, as evening falls.
THE WINDOW TO THE STREET
He who lives a lonely life and would still like to make some kind of contact from time to time, he who simply wants, in consideration of the changes in the time of day, the weather, the job circumstances, and the like, to have an arm that he can hold on to,—he will not last long without a window to the street. And if his state is such that he isn’t looking for anythi
ng at all, and only walks up to his windowsill as a tired man, whose eyes move up and down between the crowd and the sky, and who refuses and has bent his head back a little,—even then the horses below will draw him down into their entourage of carts and noise and thereby finally into human unity.
UNMASKING A CON MAN
Finally, at about ten in the evening, and in the company of a man whom I had once met only fleetingly, and who this time had unexpectedly joined me again and spent two hours dragging me around the streets, I arrived at the stately house to which I had been invited for a social gathering.
“Well then!” I said and clapped my hands to signal the absolute necessity for us to part. I had already made several less determined attempts. I was feeling very tired.
“Are you going up now?” he asked. In his mouth I heard a sound like the clashing of teeth.
“Yes.”
I had been invited, after all; I had told him straightaway. But I had been invited to come upstairs, where I would very much have liked to have already been, and not standing down here at the door and staring over the ears of the man opposite me. Nor standing silent with him as well, as though we were set to stay at this spot a long time. The surrounding houses were also taking part in this silence, as was the darkness above them up to the stars. And the footsteps of invisible passersby, whose path no one cared to guess, the wind, pressing persistently against the opposite side of the street, a gramophone, singing against the closed windows of some room,—they let themselves be heard in this silence, as though it had always been their property and always would be.
And my companion acquiesced on his own behalf and—after a smile—also on mine, stretched his right arm up along the wall and leaned his face against it, closing his eyes.