But I can’t work the way you do, I’m different.
You don’t know what you’re like, she says with assurance.
And who does?
I do, because I love you.
So what am I like?
You’re more passionate than rational.
I don’t know whether I am passionate. I know that she is. Her passion will destroy us both one day.
Next time I found her in tears amidst fragments of clay. The stand was empty.
What happened?
Nothing. What should have happened? Better leave again, I’m out of sorts today!
Has anybody hurt you?
Everybody’s hurting me, but that’s not the point.
So what is?
How could I ask? Didn’t I understand, couldn’t I see? All we were doing was pointless, nothing but a self-important and vain playing at art. Nothing but desperate caricaturing and endless repetition of what had already been repeated a thousand times. And if she’d now and then managed to catch something more, to realise some higher clue, who’d detect it, who’d notice it? Why did she have to choose this particular occupation, such a useless, joyless and exhausting drudgery? She hated all art! She didn’t want to exhibit anywhere, she didn’t want to show anyone her fumblings. There was no sense in it!
What about Barlach’s angel?
Yes, Barlach’s angel – but they’d had it removed, hadn’t they? He survived only because angels are immortal. She’s laughing through her tears. If you’d sit for me I’d make you a pair of wings and maybe you’d be immortal too.
I’ll sit for you.
Better lie down with me!
We embrace and she forgets all her sorrow. She looks forward to our love-making on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Three days later the organisation, or rather agency whose task it is to organise, in other words authorise, exhibitions abroad informed her that it would not handle her exhibition.
I want to know why she’s been refused but she only shrugs.
I suspect that it might have been because of me.
It’s possible, darling, they’re envious of me because I have you, they know that nobody loves them so much.
However, we composed a letter of protest to the authorities; she’ll probably not send it off. She then went out to see her fortune-teller friend to discover what the cards had to say about the chances of her appeal. Told that they weren’t too good, she decided to hold an exhibition in Kutná Hora instead of Geneva.
We were still walking in the direction where I expected the depot to be. The trees all round were more and more heavily festooned with tattered pieces of plastic. At the base of the miserable little tree-trunks dirty crumpled bags were tumbling about, and whenever there was a gust of wind the yellowed pages of some jerkish newspaper rose up from the ground like monstrous emaciated birds and weakly flapped their mutilated wings.
Franz Kafka became a sacrificial victim by his own decision. It does not seem as if those around him were as anxious to sacrifice him as he was himself. Time and again he recorded the state of mind experienced by the victim. With few exceptions the victim resists, and even thinks up elaborate means of self-defence, but his tragic end is unalterable. In this respect Kafka certainly anticipated the fate of the Jews in our age of upheaval. His youngest sister met her end in a gas chamber. That is where he would probably have met his end too if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die young.
Jewish authors, such as Kafka’s contemporary Werfel, or later Bellow and Heller, keep returning to the theme of the sacrificial lamb with an obsession that is possibly subconscious and possibly prophetic. The theme of the victim of sacrifice and the person staging sacrifices, of an increasingly random victim and of the victimiser prepared to drag to the altar of his god any number of human beings, if not indeed the whole of mankind, is increasingly becoming the theme of the present-day world, of a mankind that once believed in an earthly paradise and in the beneficial effect of revolutions in leading it there.
At last we emerged from the forest. Before us, behind a high wire fence, we saw a mountain with many ridges, crevices and humps. Its slopes glistened here and there as the fragments of plastic reflected the sun’s rays. Along its long crest a yellow bulldozer was moving, its scoop pushing a multicoloured mass before it. From one side a road led up to the mountain. Access, however, was barred by a red-and-white striped barrier. Just then an orange dumpster came hurtling out of the forest, an invisible guard raised the barrier, and the vehicle entered the enclosure. As it slowly climbed up the slope of the artificial mountain some fat crows rose up from both sides of the path, beating their massive wings. On the crest the garbage truck stopped, its body bright in the sunlight. Then it began to evacuate its entrails. No sooner had it begun to move off than a group of little figures rushed out from some invisible hiding place. I counted thirteen of them – if Daria had been here she’d have said an unlucky number! – men, women and children. The grown-ups had rakes in their hands, and pitchforks and poles fitted with hooks, or else they were pushing discarded prams. They all pounced on the fresh rubbish and began to dig around in it as if in a race; they flung items from one pile onto another, a few items they picked out and put aside for themselves, and others, which were evidently still useful for something or other, i.e. for sale, they flung straight into handcarts or prams.
I was reminded of the woman whose things I’d moved. Disease was eating up her soul, she believed in Armageddon, and she took delight in things she’d saved from the dustbins. Here she’d be in her element. She wouldn’t have sold any of the items she found here, she’d have piled them into a heap which would have grown ever higher and wider. She’d have laboured till she dropped, not until nightfall would she have sat down by the base of her own mountain and anxiously rested in its shelter for a while. Like Sisyphus, that woman would never have completed her work, not only because the supply of new garbage will never stop, but also because an inner emptiness cannot be filled even with all the objects in the world.
We soon became aware that nothing that was happening before us was happening without a plan, and that all the running around and exploratory digging was directed by a massive bald-headed fatty in a black suit. Unlike all the rest, he never once bent down to pick up anything, but merely strolled about as their supervisor. And just then his name came to me and I surprised Lída with the information that, to the best of my knowledge, that fellow was called Demeter, and that he’d had to pay a good deal of money for the right to mine the treasures in this mountain, though I didn’t know to whom. Now and again the searchers might dig up a pewter plate, an antique coffee grinder, a discarded television set, or a banknote thrown out by mistake.
When the Kampuchean victim-makers, known as the Khmer Rouge, occupied Phnom Penh they broke into the abandoned bank buildings, burst open the safes, carried out armfuls of banknotes and flung them out of the windows – not only rials but also American dollars, Swiss francs and Japanese yen, the banknotes of every country in the world sailed out of the windows, but none of those who were still alive in the city dared pick any of them up. The coloured pieces of printed paper were gently scattered by the wind. They rose into the air alongside scraps of newspaper, torn posters and blank picture postcards, then settled by the kerbs or in the middle of the streets which nobody came to sweep. The rubbish gradually rotted, unless the monsoon rains washed it away and the waters of the Mekong carried it down to the sea.
What Kafka was longing for most in his life was probably a human encounter. At the same time it represented for him a mysterious abyss whose bottom seemed to him unfathomable. But he lived at a period which, more than anything else, began to exalt revolution. Only what was revolutionary in art, as much as in the social order, seemed worthy of admiration or at least of interest.
For that reason, too, they looked in his sentences and images for a revolutionary message. But when I read his letters to the two women he loved, or at least tried to love, for whom he yearned and of whom he was afraid, I realised that if I did the same I had no hope of understanding him.
His first love lasted for more than five years. He invited her to him, he drove her away again, he implored her not to leave him unless she wished to destroy him, and he implored her to leave him or they would destroy one another. He got engaged to her and immediately afterwards he fled from her. When she kept silent and failed to answer his letters he lamented his fate and begged for a single word of favour. Encounter, coming close together with a woman he loved was for him a chance of fulfilling his life, a chance he persistently missed. The struggle he was waging with himself totally consumed and exhausted him.
Could a person as honest as that write about anything other than what was shaking his whole being, what occupied him day and night? About anything other than the struggle he was waging, even though that struggle, by comparison to the revolutionary events in the world, was less than trivial? Although he mostly speaks of himself and although his heroes are, even in their names, avowedly himself, he yet concealed the true nature of his struggles. He was not only shy, he was so much an artist that he expressed everything he experienced in images. The torturing machine, which slowly murders the sentenced man, was invented by him at the very moment when, after a bitter inner struggle, he decided to get engaged after all. A few weeks later, when he broke off his engagement, treacherously as he himself felt, he conceived the trial in which the tribunal judges the accused for an offence that is not clear to the reader and has often been interpreted as metaphysical guilt, as a metaphor of original sin.
Even in a revolutionary period there were undoubtedly other writers whose works, without our feeling obliged to search them for hidden messages about the meaning of existence, were full of images and metaphors. But in Kafka’s work there is something more than just a cleverly invented image, something that moves us and grips us, something that lures us fatally on like a sheer drop.
Daria’s exhibition was being set up in three reasonably sized rooms of a Gothic house. The exhibition – including twenty drawings – comprised seventy-three items. She could easily have shown a few items more or less, but that number seemed to her the most suitable. 1973 was the year her daughter was born.
For almost two weeks we packed and heaved crates with figures and paintings. Our faces and hair were covered with a layer of wood-shaving dust.
You’re so kind to me, she said, brushing the dust off her jeans and embracing me. And I’m not devoting myself to you at all. Have a glass of wine at least!
She promised to make it all up to me. We’d travel somewhere that I’d like, there wouldn’t have to be any water there, she knew that I didn’t care for water, she’d come to the mountains with me.
I wasn’t anxious to go either to the water or to the mountains, I didn’t need a rest, I’d much rather work undisturbed. But I behaved like a good boy, I didn’t raise any objections, I unpacked the sculptures we’d brought along, I helped to nail pedestals together and hang cords from the ceiling, I adjusted the lights, and in the evening I drove her back home as fast as I could.
My wife, it seemed to me, still had no suspicion of how I was spending most of my time. Or didn’t she want to suspect? The day before the opening of the exhibition she was leaving for an ethological conference and wanted to know if I minded being left on my own for so long.
I didn’t betray my relief at her going away just: then. I assured her I could look after myself.
If I wished, she suggested, I might come along with her. I was sure to find the people at the conference interesting. For a while she told me earnestly about people who kept snakes or exotic butterflies, about experts on owls, marmosets and white stags. She wanted to provide some diversion for me, some experiences I wouldn’t have in my solitude, and when I declined her offer I felt guilty. I was about to repay her offer of help with betrayal.
It was her husband who drove my lover out to the private view of her exhibition. He’d finally emerged from the darkness. I suggested to her that I stay at home that day, I’d seen her work anyway. But she didn’t want me to leave her at such a moment. I had to overcome a cowardly wish to avoid what would be an awkward encounter, to make the excuse of being ill, or of the car being out of action. There are plenty of excuses a man can invent, but I didn’t wish to lie, at least not to her, so I went.
I knew her husband only from photographs, but I instantly identified his tall athletic figure. The room was crowded by then and I don’t know if he noticed me too. He was talking to a bald-headed, wizened old man, almost certainly her father, whom I hadn’t met either. I didn’t know any of the people in the room, I belonged solely to her, to her who was severed from all ties and relationships. I felt so much out of place that it depressed me.
She came over to me almost instantaneously. Unfamiliar, almost strange in a long poppy-crimson dress. Even her features seemed strange to me, the little lines which I’d so often touched with my lips were skilfully covered by a layer of cream and powder. She kissed me, as no doubt she’d kissed other guests as well, and whispered that she loved me. Then she asked me if I wanted to meet her husband. She declared herself as belonging to me in front of everybody – ‘My lover’ – and I suddenly wasn’t sure whether I was pleased about it or not.
After all, why shouldn’t I shake hands with you? her husband said to me and gave me a slightly injured smile. Although I’m not exactly short, he was a head taller than me, and also ten years younger. At first glance he was one of those men women run after of their own accord. He said that Daria had worked pretty hard these past few weeks, they’d scarcely seen her at home, and he shrugged as if to say: And on top of everything there’s you and that’s really a bit much. But instead he said he’d read my new stories, and this would have been the right moment for me to shrug but he gave me his injured smile again and walked away. I hung about near the door but lacked the courage to make a getaway. I had a feeling that they were all furtively watching me, for the moment I had become one of the exhibits. I might have a little card by my feet: Banned but active in another field. Or: The lover presented. Or simply: That’s him!