Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales From the Time of the Cult

Mr. Kafka

Every morning my landlord enters my room on tiptoe. I can hear his footsteps. The room is so long that you could ride a bicycle from the door to my bed. My landlord leans over me, turns, signals to someone in the doorway, and says:

“Mr. Kafka’s here.”

He prods the air three times with his finger, then walks slowly back to the door, where my landlady hands him a tin tray with a breakfast roll and a small cup of coffee on it. He carries it back to me and because his hands shake, the cup rattles on the tray. Sometimes, after such an awakening, I get to thinking: supposing my landlord came to wake me and announce my presence and I weren’t there? He’d be terribly startled, because he’s been declaring my presence for several years now, just to remind me of that first week, when they’d bring me breakfast in bed each day and I would be absent.

Back then, the rain was falling as hard as it had in the time of the Flood, the river carried the water along in the same measured tempo as it always had, and I stood in the downpour not knowing if I should tap on the door with my finger or simply walk away. The linden leaves chattered like sparrows in the treetops, the light from the streetlamps oozed through the branches, and in the room beyond the half-open door a body was undressing, for sleep or for love. The light inside the room cast a broken shadow on the white enamel of the door and I wondered if the origin of the shadow was alone or with someone else. I shivered. The night rain was cold and my footprints vanished in the muddy downpour. And yet, I thought, it’s good to live in anxiety, good to hear one’s teeth chatter in fear, good to push life to the brink of ruin and start afresh next morning. It’s also good to part forever and to praise misfortune, like wily old Job. At the time, though, I stood there in the incessant rain not knowing whether to knock on the door or walk away, because I lacked the courage to pluck the eye of jealousy from my mind. I prayed: O Rainy Night, do not leave me standing here, do not abandon me to the mercy of banal beauties; let me at least kneel in the mud and stare at the locked house.

One morning, I asked: “Poldinka, do you still love me?”

“Do you still love me?” was her reply.

When next I awake, I’ll ask her, “Are you still asleep, Your Holiness?” One day, perhaps, the mirror I hold to her mouth will fail to fog up.

I enter the building where I live. In the old days, a bell in the Tyn Church’s spire broke loose mid-peal, plummeted through the air, through the tiled roof, through the ceiling, and into the room I now occupy. Now, the landlady is leaning against the window frame lost in thought; the curtains billow and the invisible world is refreshed. Leaning out of my third-floor window I can almost touch the church’s stone wall. My landlady lets her russet hair tumble over me like asparagus fronds. Her breath smells of blueberry wine. I gaze at the Mother of God affixed to the church wall, looking as grave as the Margrave Gero. Pedestrians stroll past the bomb-damaged town hall and greet the unknown soldier.

“You know what?” my landlady whispers at my back. “How would it be if we just gave each other a friendly little kiss. How about it, Mr. Kafka?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I say, “but I’m true to my girl.”

“Look at you!” she hisses. “But you’re hot stuff when it comes to boozing and lollygagging around.” And she sweeps out of the room, leaving behind the lingering aroma of blueberry wine. The curtains billow, subside, then a thousand hummingbirds lift the organdy fabric in their tiny beaks like the train of a royal wedding gown, and the curtains billow again in the breeze. Somewhere in the building, someone is playing piano exercises from Czerny’s School of Velocity; a shabbily dressed man stands below the window, his face as pockmarked as his vulcanite suitcase. Mercury runs down the church wall. Bloated owls and baboons have fallen asleep on the cornices.

“May I interest you in these toothbrushes?”

“No, that’s impossible.”

“All the way from France, and of course, yes, they’re nylon — two hundred and sixty-eight crowns a dozen.”

“No, no, no — that’s impossible!”

“Too expensive? Maybe so, but imagine, sir, how elegantly your customers will swirl round the dance floor polished with our product.”

“So that’s why she made such a fuss.”

“And for something new, I can tell you that we have children’s hairbrushes in stock. Can I put you down for some?”

“Yes, but I can never bring myself to leave her.”

“Indeed, and the raw material is a hard-currency item.”

“I’ll drown your house in flowers and curses.”

“And I’ll give you two percent off if you pay in cash.”

“I could send the goods franco à bord and you’d have them next week. What’s this? It’s a concoction made by Hřivnáč & Co. Yes, the one who hung himself. Why? I couldn’t say. You’d have to tell me first why our district judge went mad and why the coroner laughed. Just tighten your tie a little and ask your shadow: brother, are you really living?”

I leap out of bed, crane my neck out the window, and look into the street as if peering down a well. I see a blonde female head nestling up to a young man, hear the sound of kisses like the crack of a whip carried all the way to my bedside by the breeze.

“Don’t back away. You can’t have gone off me completely,” the blonde implores, and bubbles of silence rise to the moon chinning itself on the crossbar of the night. I can still hear the cook that used to live here snoring through three walls. He snored so loudly I had to buy a fresh loaf of bread every day and plug my ears with soft tampons of bread, walling myself in each night, just so I could get to sleep. Now the blonde lies back tenderly on a pile of sand beside the church and pulls the young man down on top of her, setting loose several plaster-covered metal hoops that clatter over the lovers, but they’re oblivious. A white hoop rolls down the narrow alley like a full moon. The Mother of God’s hands are locked in cement and she can’t even shield her son’s eyes.

The Figaro Bar, the Spider, the Chapeau Rouge, the Romania, and the Magnet are all closing for the night. Someone around the corner vomits, and near the Old Town Square a citizen yells: “I, sir, am a proud Czechoslovak!”

Someone else slaps his face and says, “So what?”

A woman with blood streaming from her nose looks out from under a colonnade as though she, too, had just told the same mean-spirited citizen that she was a proud Czechoslovak. And in the middle of the square, a man in black drags a woman wearing a floral dress through a puddle, cursing the heavens. “A right slut I married!”

The woman clings to his legs but the man in black kicks her away. Curling up, she collapses in the pool of water, a photograph in an oval frame, her hair floating like seaweed in the filthy water. Finally the man is satisfied. He kneels in the water, twists her hair into a wet knot, turns her weeping face upward, and runs a loving finger over her features. Then he helps her to her feet, they cling to each other, kiss, and together they walk slowly away, like the holy family. When they reach the Small Square, just outside the Prince Regent, the man in black flings his arms wide as if unsheathing a sword from its scabbard and declares to the empty square: “The spirit has triumphed over the flesh!”

A streetcar rumbles by with a few dead men inside hanging by their hands. A pedestrian stumbles to his knees and tries to ignite a cobblestone. A giant bull bestrides the city, invisible except for a set of pink testicles.

Sometime before noon, I’m walking to the open-air market U Kotců. On the corner, I buy a horoscope for every month of the year and watch colored ribbons streaming from the salesgirls’ noses as they measure the material with their arms. Each day, sun umbrellas sprout from the heads of the crones selling medicinal herbs. I often see old ladies tottering out of the dark recesses of the market, their faces scarred with signs of the zodiac, two patches of leopard spots for eyes, dragging their outlandish knickknacks into the light of day. One of them is selling green roses made from tiny feathers, an admiral’s sword, and accordion buttons, another is offering war-surplus boxer shorts, canvas waterbuckets, and a stuffed monkey. In the Coal Market, the salesgirls carry tulips of every color around in their kangaroo pouches. Doves bill and coo in the shop windows on Rytířská Street, and parakeets flit about in their cages like poetic metaphors. Several Canadian hamsters are working their way to freedom in the tall chimneys of their glass cages. Once, for three hundred crowns, I became a saint for an instant: I bought up all the goldfinches, then released them from my hand. Oh, what a feeling when a terrified little bird flies from your palm to freedom!

I enter the covered market where old ladies sell blood pudding by the plateful. The air in here smells of newborn babies, damp garlic clusters, vinegar, and hemp. Men are unloading slaughtered lambs from the backs of trucks. Strange how the high holidays demand animal sacrifice: fish at Christmas; goats and lambs at Easter. I think of the time we slaughtered a pig back home and bungled slitting its throat and it burrowed into the manure pile, preferring to drown in piss and shit rather than face once more the butcher with a knife in his hands.

I get a move on, but it’s too late. The bucket of beer I’d gone out to fetch has gone flat. In the office of the Zinner Brothers, with its five floors of toys, the warehouse manager is shaking with rage. “Look, waterboy,” he says, “we sent you for beer, not the bloody elixir of life. You certainly took your time, you really did!”

And the goods handler adds his two cents worth: “Hey, Kafka! When’s your Uncle Adolf going to die again? Seems he’s been passing away in installments.”

“Any day now,” I say, and I take the invoices and spend the rest of the day double checking and ticking off two consignments of children’s toys: one foot soldier with rifle; one soldier in rowboat; one soldier with helmet; one officer, marching; one general in overcoat; one drummer; one trumpeter; one French horn; one large drum; one soldier, prone, with rifle; one artillery gunner with ramrod; one officer, erect, with map…

I check off the figurines and think about how they’re always mistaking me for someone else. I’ve been living on my own for years now, but the moment there’s a pool of vomit anywhere, or someone makes a racket at night, the neighbors come rushing over and give mother an earful. That young upstart of yours was raising a ruckus last night. Does he really get such a kick out of it?

Gunner with rangefinder; one man with telephone, taking notes; one motorcyclist; one wounded soldier, supine; two medics; one doctor in white lab coat; one ambulance dog; one prone soldier with cigarette; one dragoon on horseback…

My aunt died at the Maryseks, and the next morning Mrs. Marysková hurried over to mother’s and complained that I had pounded on the window that night and my aunt was so startled she probably had a fit before she died. It was definitely my fault, because Mrs. Marysková ran out and heard my awful cackling laughter, even though it’s been years since I’ve lived at home.

One cow, grazing; one cow, mooing; one calf, standing; one colt, grazing; various piglets; one cat with ribbon, standing; one chicken pecking; one tiger cub; one spotted hyena, one bear on hind legs; one American buffalo; one polar bear cub; one monkey, scratching…

Once, I watched a vet bending over a sick calf and telling the owner he’d prescribe an infusion, but then the vet yelled at me to come over at once and take this brush and scrub between the cloves of the animal’s hoof, like that, then he insisted I take the brush handle and swab out the creature’s mouth, like that. I could only stare at him, unable to bring myself to say I was a bystander, not a stable hand.

One mountain goat; one wild boar; one shepherd boy; one farmer; one chimney sweep; one cowboy standing; one Indian throwing a lasso; one large rabbit sitting; one boy scout in a hat; one sheepdog…

I entered the synagogue, and a mud-spattered Jew leaned over to me and whispered: “Might you also be from the East?” I nodded. Later, when I stopped off for a beer, two fellows were sitting there and one of them said to me, “You’re a baker!” and I nodded, and the fellow rubbed his hands together and said, “See? I could tell right off!” He called for a deck of cards and said, “We need a third for a game of mariáš. Betl for a crown, Durch for two. .. Low card deals.”

One Mary; one baby Jesus; one Joseph; one wise man standing; one black wise man; one shepherd with lamb; one angel; one Bedouin; grazing sheep; one sheep dog…

I check off two consignments of toys at the Zinner Brothers on Maislová Street, wholesalers in toys and fine leather goods, which is why I love to go walking after work, though I’m always tripping over the toys that have passed through my hands that day. I like walking through Kampa Park where children on all fours scrawl chalk drawings on the asphalt pavement, and they continue their drawings up the walls of buildings, as high as they can reach. I’m struck by a picture of a man whose hat has been drawn simultaneously front and back. His hidden ear is sketched above his head like a question mark, like a coat of arms.

“Did you draw that?” I ask the little girl who has just finished drawing it. Her elbows are blue, the color of shotgun-shell casings.

“Yes, but it’s nothing,” she says. She uses her foot to erase a portrait that wouldn’t be out of place in an art gallery. “Would you comb my hair for me?”

“If you’d like,” I say.

The girl straddles the bench, then tucks one leg under herself, while I sit behind her. She hands me a comb over her shoulder and I comb her hair, and she half closes her eyes. Then she looks at a falling leaf and says, “That leaf’s hands are sore, so it had to let go.”

Darkness descends rapidly and cyclists wind their way down the serpentine pathways of Petřín Hill with miners’ lamps on their heads. Small boats ply the jade water, with every stroke they lift a dozen aluminum teaspoons from the water. A blind man walks past the row of benches, following the radar sweep of his white cane.

“What do you think about when you draw on the pavement?” I ask.

“The way that bird over there sings,” she says, pointing into the branches. She lowers her chin to her chest. She’s still a child, but in five years, a beautiful parasite will awaken inside her, full of pungent matter with a hint of borax, and gradually flood her life with happiness. I comb her hair, weighing the thick, soft tresses in my hand, then I tie it up with a ribbon. The little girl puts her hand out and very precisely places her finger on the first knot so I can make the second and finish it off with a magnificent bow. Then she turns around, undoes the cord tied around her waist, tightens the two ends of the rope around herself, sticks out her little tummy, and I put my finger on the spot where each end of the cord crosses so she can make a knot and then a bow. And then, in a flash, she kisses the back of my hand and is gone.

From Kampa Park, Charles Bridge looks like a long trough in which pedestrians appear to be gliding along on roller skates. Prague, its broken ribs in the river, moans in pain. The arches of the bridge vault across the water like hounds on the hunt, leaping from one bank to the other. I could visit my cousin in the brewery, or go back to my landlady, who’s invited me to join her for a bottle of blueberry wine, but I’d rather just walk as the spirit moves me.

On Malá Karlová Street a shopkeeper stands in front of his well-lit shop, under a sign with his firm’s name on it: Alfred Wieghold.

“A good evening to you, Mr. Wieghold,” I say, and in my mind, I ask his forgiveness for staring at his prosthetic hands, as chipped as the hands of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa.

“Looks like rain,” I say, and I can’t take my eyes off his artificial arms.

“Young man,” Mr. Wieghold says, “why do you go walking past my shop on your hands? Put them in your pockets. Experience those pockets to the full.”

And he bursts out laughing, this king of marionettes, drumming on his shop window with his artificial limbs, both arms creaking like a weathercock in an autumn wind. Then I walk down Michalská Street, and see a sign that says: “The Iron Door: Strengthens one like fortified wine.”

In the passageway I look into a watchmaker’s shop and see an apprentice sweeping the floor. He keeps blinking, and his eyes are crusted; he must have conjunctivitis, and I’ll bet he has to pry his eyes open every morning to find his way to the washbasin.

Today, I’m encountering walkers in series, as if they were connected by an invisible line: ten people with bandaged heads, a dozen pedestrians with eyebrows meaningfully arched, apparently trying to tell me something, seven people with eye patches…

But it’s the women I notice most. The current fashion is enough to drive you mad. Each one looks as though she’s just arisen from a bed of love. What do they have under those blouses? Some sort of scaffolding, or a structure of whalebone that makes their breasts poke one in the eye? And the way they walk! A man in a big city needs a wardrobe of fantasies not to want to commit a homicidal crime of passion provoked by all that trumped-up beauty. At this point a man falls in beside me and starts telling me about the many strange jobs he’s had: how he worked in Prague’s first automated cafeteria, the Koruna, and how he had to sit concealed inside the contraption and check the one-crown coin people put in the slot, and if it was genuine, he’d put a sandwich on a plate and rotate the mechanism, and he could hear the oohs and ahhs of astonishment at this wonderful invention; or how he had sat inside the huge clock at the exhibition grounds and, with a pocket watch in one hand, he’d push the big hand forward once every minute. As he told me this, he stood there, still transfixed at the wonder of his life.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“A practical philosopher,” he replies.

“Then would you kindly explain Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason to me,” I say.

We walk up Štěpánská Street. Prague, as if on a hydraulic lift, sinks lower, and the practical philosopher’s hair touches the place where stars are born. Then he invites me for a grilled sausage, and on the way, on Rybničká Street, he gives me an explanation. Then he makes the sign of the cross over his fly and slaps himself so hard on the forehead that he sets the streetlamps trembling.

“The old lady over there usually has decent sausages,” I say.

The acetylene lamp casts its light on the old woman, and Rembrandt comes back from the dead. She rests her hands on her stomach as though she were laying them on the Prodigal Son’s back. A single tooth shines in her mouth.

“Gentlemen,” she asks, “is it midnight yet?”

The practical philosopher lifts a finger to the sky, and in that instant he is as beautiful as Rabbi Loew, or as Vincent’s severed ear. The night is full of black slag, silver pinwheels, nuts and bolts. It is redolent of ammonia, sour milk, the intimate toiletry of women, essential oils, lipstick. The clock on Štěpánská Street begins to sound the stroke of midnight; other Prague clocks chime in, then those that are running behind. The practical philosopher eats his grilled sausage with gusto, then walks away without a word of farewell.

A prostitute ambles by, resplendent in a white dress, like an angel; she turns, the pod of her mouth splits open, and two rows of white peas come tumbling out. I long to etch colorful words into her smile, hoping that next morning she’ll read them as she stands before the mirror, her toothbrush in hand.

“Ma’am,” I say to the old sausage seller, “did you ever know a Franz Kafka?”

“Oh my Lord!” she says. “My name is Františka Kafková, and my father, a horsemeat butcher, was František Kafka. Then I knew a headwaiter at the station restaurant in Bydžov who was also called Kafka,” she goes on, leaning closer, her single tooth gleaming in her mouth like a soothsayer’s. “But sir, if you’d like something extra, I can tell you, you’re not going to die a natural death. Have yourself cremated, deed me your ashes and I’ll use you to polish my forks and knives so that something splendid will come of you, like a gift, like misery, like love, hee hee hee…” and she turns her sizzling sausages with a fork.

“I also read cards,” she goes on, “and sir, if you weren’t surrounded by a little cloud, you’d make beautiful things. .. But go on! Get out of here!… Here it is again!” she cries, sweeping something off her skirt and kicking it away with her foot.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Nothing. It’s just Hedvička, the countess’s daughter who drowned. It’s her spirit… d’you see? She’s always with me, and now she’s tugging at my apron. D’you understand?”

“I understand,” I say, backing away from the circle of light cast by the acetylene lamp.

Then I headed home. At the entrance to the Turandot someone is trying to persuade the doorman that he’s got money. At the Šmelhaus, music is coming out of the cellar, along with two old men, laughing. Kožná Street is full of obscene signs and movements. A red rose is lying in the gutter, as though fallen from a bouquet. I sit down beside the fountain in the Old Town Square and my shadow is green and outlined in purple. Someone is carrying a large cactus, each nodule tied with a red ribbon. A lady who looks as if she has stepped out of an Ibsen play is walking along Paris Street, wearing an overcoat over her pyjamas. She clearly can’t sleep and is on her way down to the river to lean on the balustrade and gaze at the water. A man has just propped himself up against a streetlamp, as if listening to serious music; then he vomits and the liquid runs out of his mouth as though he’d dropped a pocket watch on a chain. I see light in my windows, the curtains billowing, my landlady pacing back and forth, crossing herself. No doubt she has her Bible open on the table propped up against a cooking pot. A traffic cop has emerged from Dlouhá Street, looking as though he’d plunged both of his forearms in plaster of Paris.

I’m thinking of you, my Poldinka, remembering how you told me: “You I hate least of all. In your saliva, I taste a bottomless pit excavated by love. In your teeth, I touch a wall dripping with sadness. Darling, you had salami for supper, because I have a piece of meat on my lips, but it doesn’t matter; kiss me and kiss me again, and again chew the flesh around the hollows of my eyes, around the chasm of my mouth. And say it again, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like this, nor are the birds of the air, nor the lilies of the field as comely as I. Say it again and again. Ignite fiery sacrifices between my legs, set my loins aflame. And when you go home in the morning and see a dress hanging in the window, think nothing of it. It’s just me embracing a building charged with sweet memory. They say you can still feel the lost needles of sunlight in the railings.”

That was what Poldinka told me back then. We were strolling down to the river where the city walks on its hands. I wondered then why the cars were driving along the river upside down, their wheels in the air, as though sledding along on their roofs, and why passersby greeted each other as though they were scooping water into their hats.

Poldinka said, “Where do you find the strength to deal in those idiotic toys, toothbrushes, and combs, and still have such wild dreams?”

I said: “Poldinka, you alone have understood the words with which I have inundated your mouth, your hair, the air in your lungs: tiny words plucked from the evening papers. Poldinka, you alone have always known when the wick in my eyes has been trimmed, you alone understand what will remain when I depart, my face leaden and unhearing, because like you, I have never wanted to take my pleasure by the book; like you, I have never wanted to forfeit my right to pain and grief. .. But why Poldinka, you perverse, deviant, degenerate woman, why do you bring panic into my life, like a stalactite, like a vampire bat?”

I jump up from the bench in the Old Town Square. A policeman is standing in front of me, his legs apart, his sleeves dipped in quicklime. There’s no one around, so I confide in him.

“From this day on, I will never again be free of the desire to walk with the Aramaic professor of laughter, you know? From now on, I will never be rid of the cracks in my brain, because to be free is a joy. And so I’m drowning in happiness itself — in weddings, in pleasure — as I work at the Zinner Brothers, checking off turtle doves, Easter eggs, souvenir chapels, angel hair, Christmas decorations, toys. Do you understand? We are all brothers, brothers in l’art pour l’art, as beautiful as entartete kunst, as truthful as a nightingale, as perverse as a rose. Do you really see what I’m saying? You can’t live without cracks in the brain. You can’t rid yourself of freedom the way you’d rid yourself of lice, brother. Do you understand?”

The policeman’s reply was harsh: “Don’t carry on like that, Mr. Kafka. Why are you shouting? You’ll end up with a fine for disturbing the peace.”