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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781925576962 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2017 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 276 |
| File size: | 536 KB |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
I STILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I SAW FRANZ; A DAY THAT seems now either the beginning of or the beginning of the end of my life's misfortune. It was October, when the days are still bright and sharp, and Prague was just beginning to fall into the quiet embrace of autumn. At that time I was writing a book about Schopenhauer, and I was to give a lecture on the subject. I had studied Schopenhauer since my university days and, although I am no authority on the man and his theories, I certainly know more about him than most. The lecture room where the talk was to take place was small but crowded, and the shuffling of bodies and the scratching of pens on paper formed a constant accompaniment to my voice.
I had hardly been speaking ten minutes when a voice sang out from somewhere at the back of the crowd.
'You idiot!'
The outburst caused me to pause momentarily. I had just mentioned in passing Schopenhauer's assertion that this world was the worst of all possible worlds, since a worse world could not continue to exist — an idea with which I happen to agree, its flaws notwithstanding. I decided to ignore the man and push on with my lecture. Perhaps I had misheard.
But I had not. After a moment he called out again.
'What a load of shit. Any fool can argue against that.'
The heckler was blocked from my view, but his voice was young and self-important. People began shifting in their seats and craning their necks to look at him. I had given many lectures and talks, but this had never happened to me before and I did not know what to do. Was it better to ignore the heckler and continue, or to answer him? I stood, hesitating. By now the heckler had taken the attention of a good part of the room, which from my perspective had transformed from rows of faces to rows of head-backs and collars.
His voice came once more.
'You are a fool if you truly believe that. There is an infinite number of possible worlds that are worse than this.'
I cleared my throat. 'Well,' I began, 'problems do exist with —'
'Consider yourself personally,' he interrupted.
He stood up and I saw him for the first time. He was of a slight build, dark and handsome in a somewhat delicate way. His handsomeness surprised and angered me.
He went on, 'I could name a thousand things that could be changed about the world that would make the world worse for you, and it would still continue to exist. You could lose your voice, for example.'
There were a few scattered laughs from the audience. I ignored them.
'But of course Schopenhauer is not referring to individuals; greater human existence is his theme,' I said.
'It is merely an example,' he said. 'There could be incremental changes in any condition in the world — choose any one! — and still we would go on. Things can always be a little worse.'
He sat down again, seeming to be satisfied with having voiced his disagreement. I struggled to appear composed, and wavered between countering him, which I felt compelled to do, or ignoring him, which I knew was the more dignified approach. His face peered out from the crowd, goading me, but I resolutely turned my eyes back to my page of notes. For the rest of the lecture, the heckler limited himself to snorts and noisy sighs, but I had nevertheless lost the attention of most of the room. Each of the heckler's percussive snorts would trigger a chorus of smiles and whispers in the crowd, and by the time I had reached the end of my talk I felt that he had certainly made the world of my evening worse than it could have been.
I was expecting a volley of questions from him during the question time at the end, and braced myself, but he remained silent; indeed, he seemed to have disappeared. Now I could see only a gap in the crowd where his dark head had been. As soon as I left the lecture hall, however, there he was again. He lunged out from the shadows of the corridor and tried to block my way, but I was able to dodge around him. I heard him scurrying after me, calling out my name and then an apology. I walked on. He followed me outside, where he fell into step beside me on the footpath and began to talk about my novel, which had had some success the year before. He flattered me in an ingratiating tone that I hated, but he piled his pretty words up and up, and soon I had fallen into his trap. I am as vain as the next man and, because I have no grounds for pride on any other front in my life, my writing is my weak spot. Later, when everything lay ruined around me, I thought often about how my life would have been different had I not spoken to Franz that night, had I been able to resist him.
He walked with me all the way to my house, and when we were at the door he thrust a sheaf of papers at me — his short stories, he said. He asked me to look over them, perhaps show them to my publisher. This had happened to me a good deal since the success of my novel; I admit that I always felt a bloom of pleasure at the request, especially with the inevitable realisation that the stories or poems or novels that were pressed on me were no good — or at least nowhere near as good as my own writing. I acceded to Franz's request in an offhand way, and then promptly lost the stories among the drifts of paper that covered my desk.
A few weeks later, I found his short stories again and read them, not remembering at first what they were. As my eyes passed over the pages a slow horror grew in me, sending my body cold. The stories were not merely good; they were exceptional. I read them again, and then sat for a long time with the papers in my hands. I turned to the title page and stared at the name printed there: Franz Kafka. How that name would come to haunt me.
I could tell you that I was moved and instantly sent the works to Theodor, my publisher; that I hastened to have Kafka's work brought out into the world; that I eagerly welcomed what was to become such an important addition to the modern German canon. I could tell you that I felt pleased and proud to bring his work to light, but it would be a lie. All I felt was the sick poison of jealousy, the panic of self-preservation, and a determination to stop Franz at all costs. To show these stories to Theodor would have meant certain death for my literary career, which was at a critical stage. I had had one success, it was true, but now I faced the enormous pressure of cementing my literary reputation with an equally brilliant second work. I began to have nightmares about Franz: of him meeting Theodor, and the two of them conspiring to thwart me; of Theodor telling me that he was no longer interested in me; of Franz taking my place. I would wake from these dreams breathless and rigid. A terrifying abyss seemed to open in front of me; if I lost my status as a writer, what did I have left?
I wanted to destroy Franz's stories, and I thought often about it, but I had not yet sunk quite so low. Instead I stuffed them into the drawer of my writing table and locked it. I can say nothing much in my own defence, only that I have not been a fortunate man, nor a happy one, and I was fixed on defending to the death what little I had wrested from the world.
* * *
It turned out that even if I had burned the stories, as I had wanted to, it would not have made the slightest difference. Even without my help, they found their way into print. Some months later, I was invited to the launch of the new edition of Hyperion, to which I had contributed, and in which I saw Franz had published his first story. I had been reluctant to attend the party, knowing there was a strong likelihood that both Franz and Theodor would be there. The thought of being present as Theodor and Franz met, watching them smiling at one another and shaking hands, made me suffer with the hot jealousy of spurned love. But the alternative was to stay away from the party, which would mean that this meeting would take place out of my view, leaving my imagination free to adorn and amplify, as I knew it would, to the point of madness. I decided that, no matter now distasteful the occasion might be, it was better to be present. It was also prudent, I knew, to appear pleased at the coming union, and to keep Franz close — to make a friend of him, in fact. I braced myself, and on that Thursday evening I set out, a sick feeling in my stomach.
The party was being held at the Café Slavia. I had arrived on foot, walking for part of the way along the Moldau, the slide of its black water keeping pace with my step. It was a clear night, and cold, and the slick river was like a sheet of moving glass, the surface so smooth that the orbs of lamplight mirrored in it were no less solid and steady than the light of the real lamps high on the bank.
Couples and small groups hustled along either bank on their way to the theatre or the opera, and the swinging skirts of the women corresponded in some musical way with the swaying of the trees above their heads. Ahead of me, I could see the bright lights spilling from the café windows, making orange tongues on the footpath. When I arrived at the Slavia, my legs were already aching from the walk, and I longed for a chair, but still I stood, composing myself, on the corner of the street. I could feel the compact bulk of the National Theatre rearing up into the empty sky behind me, compressing the air around it. The dark awnings above the café windows swayed like flags. The windows were uncurtained, and I saw the little tableau of a party scene. A woman held a small glass poised at her lips, her pale wrist an elegant curve against her dark-clad breast. A man leaned over her shoulder in the act of whispering something to her. Behind her, two men embraced and clapped each other on the back in a syncopated pattern.
Bursts of laughter and music trickled out of the café onto the street. Then the doors swung open, letting out a blast of heat and noise, and two men came out onto the footpath. I saw them look at me and felt immediately ashamed of my solitary watching. I caught the doors as they were swinging closed and plunged inside.
I had not even managed to find a drink for myself before I was set upon by a small group, eager to claim me. They clustered around and gave me their opinions of my novel and quizzed me on what I was writing now. While I spoke, I was the whole time surreptitiously looking around for Franz, but I could not see him. The room was very crowded and I felt an urgent need to find him. With difficulty, I extricated myself from the group around me and slowly struggled through the crush in search of him, impeded every few steps by someone wanting to congratulate me on my book or ask my opinion on their story in the magazine.
Stacks of Hyperion stood on tables. The idea of Franz's story printed there beside mine roused a gnawing resentment that was hard to ignore. I tried to imagine how Franz must feel about his first publication. I remembered that, when I had first seen my own book in print, I had thought it to be the best moment of my life, and, looking back now, perhaps it was. The smooth and solid surface of the book, my book, had seemed to give off a radiant energy that was absorbed by the skin on my hands and fingers, and travelled up my arm into my chest, where it expanded to warm and relax me, as though it were a narcotic. I had taken up a copy, and gripped it first in one hand and then both, feeling its weight, the texture of the cover. I opened it and ran my fingertips and palms over the pages like a blind man. I held the book up to my face and fanned the pages and breathed in the smell of paper and ink. And it was not a question of just one book; the boxes on the floor of the publisher's office were full of copies, the cover-pages and spines made unreal by their repetition. Theodor had laughed.
'I often feel I should leave the room when first-time authors see their work in print. I feel like I'm intruding on a lovers' tryst,' he had said. His polished face, egg-like, had shone with good humour.
There seemed to be no sign of Franz, or Theodor either, for that matter. I would have been quite happy not to have to see Theodor at all: he would certainly be keen to remind me of my approaching deadline. Lately, the process of writing had become mysterious to me, and at times it felt fraudulent to call myself a writer at all. Most of the time I could not quite believe that I had produced the book that had brought me such success, and I could not understand how I had done it. Looking at the book now was like looking at some complicated mechanical object and being told that I had built it, when I understood not the first thing about its inner workings or how it was put together.
I stood there and scanned the room. Suddenly the crowd shifted and I could make out a plump figure on the far side of the room. It was Uta. She was struggling along, her elbows protruding at awkward angles to shelter the two glasses of schnapps that she was ferrying towards me. The sight of her immediately caused a small knot of muscles in my neck and shoulders to contract in an unpleasant spasm, and I had the impulse to duck behind someone or run from the room. I turned my back to her, hoping, uselessly, to make myself invisible. My body tensed in anticipation of her approach.
Once, at some long-ago point in my life, I might have found Uta attractive, in desperate circumstances with limited light. She was blonde and round with sticky, pinkish skin and a penetrating voice of calculated vivaciousness. I had first come across her at one of the earlier public readings I had given from my novel. At that stage, I was still overwhelmed by the amount of attention I was receiving, particularly female attention, and had, I now saw, responded to her far too warmly. She began to shadow me and attend every reading I gave, besieging me with questions and coy turns of her head. Soon she was appearing regularly on my street at just the moment I was leaving the house to go to work. I would see her everywhere: on the tram, walking on the Laurenziberg, in cafés I frequented. When these tactics of hers brought no return of her affection she managed to befriend my sister Sophie, using her to gain access to my home. Sophie is a girl of infinite kindness and, through her, Uta rapidly won the acceptance of the rest of my family, who were soon loudly proclaiming her charms. To me she seemed like a pestilent cloud that blew through the city, to be avoided at all costs.
I sensed a commotion in the crowd behind me and braced myself for the inevitable tap, which soon came. I made an effort to affix an expression of friendly politeness to my face and turned, groaning inwardly and already planning my escape, but my eyes fell not upon Uta's frizzed blonde hair and pouting lips but on another face altogether. It was shaped like a heart, with wide cheeks slanting to a little pointed chin, and eyes that were dark and warm: black, with flecks of gold. The eyebrows flew out over them in two straight wings, grave and intense, but the pink lips twitched up at the corners, parted, with two white tooth tips visible within.
'Excuse me,' the woman said to me, 'but are you Herr Kafka?' I was stunned, able only to look at her.† The beauty of her face burned into me like a flame, and I wondered that people did not collapse in the street at the sight of it. She was like a woman in a Philipp Veit painting: gentle, and with an air of such sweet melancholy that I wanted to reach out and touch her.
She spoke to me, and for a moment I simply stood and listened to the sound of her voice as though it were music, without understanding the words she uttered. The timbre of her voice was unusually low, with a pleasant burring undertone. If it were the voice of an instrument, it would be a cello, slow and quiet. When the meaning of her words reached me, I realised she was praising Franz's story.
'I'm sorry,' I said, interrupting her. 'I am Brod. Max Brod. But Kafka is a very good friend of mine.' I extended my hand, which until then had hung paralysed by my side. She shook it, and introduced herself as Fräulein Anja Zelezný, but I thought I caught a flash of disappointment in her eyes.
While I still held her hand clasped in mine, I felt another tap on my shoulder, and this time when I turned I was greeted with the face that I had been expecting earlier. The closeness of the room had deposited a shining film over Uta's pink complexion and small beads of perspiration studded the down that grew on the upper corners of her mouth. She stood very close to me and handed me one of the glasses of schnapps, inserting her body at an angle that blocked me from Fräulein Zelezný.
She gave a pouting smile that left her eyes unmoved and began in a loud voice to talk some familiar nonsense of my family, seeking to display a closeness between us that was pure fiction. Uta's voice droned on and on, with the high-pitched cadences of an unpleasant insect trapped in a summer room, beating its head against the hot glass of the windows. After a while I gave up trying to interject and fell silent, hoping for rescue.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lost Pages"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Marija Pericic.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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