I dutifully read through several monographs and even found something in the university library. It was Franz’s letters to Felice that interested me the most. From them I learned about his odd relationship to this woman he claimed to love. I found a similar relationship to Milena Jesenská in his letters to her. To my surprise, Kafka suddenly started to appear differently than he did to most scholars working on him (with perhaps the exception of Canetti). They searched his works for a symbolic expression of abstruse ideas about justice, human fate, society, man’s alienation, and even the future fate of the Jews. I was almost certain things were precisely the opposite.
Literary theorists, critics, and historians are used to moving in a world of ideas, and they express generalizations and then force their abstract world onto the writer they’re studying. When they criticized the works of Franz Kafka, whose often dreamlike visions seduce one to ambiguous interpretations, a drastic discrepancy arose between Kafka’s ideas and theirs.
In my opinion, Kafka was not interested in the world of ideas; even the world around him held little appeal. Kafka was concerned almost exclusively with himself. He wrote most of all about his imperfections, his inability to grow up — that is, to extricate himself from his father’s influence and become a mature man who builds a family. He was also shy and possessed the vision of an artist, and because his fantasy had greater significance than any kind of intellectual system, he expressed himself in apparently ambiguous and mysterious images.
His inability to grow up expressed itself even in his inability to complete a more extensive work. However, even from those unfinished fragments and several prose pieces that he nevertheless finished, one can deduce, in my opinion, the source of his inspiration.
As an example, I adduced the ostensibly indecipherable and bizarre story of one of the more extensive works he completed, “In the Penal Colony.” Kafka writes about a traveler who arrives on an island and meets with some sort of conservative officer. Most of the story is devoted to the officer’s explanation of the execution device, their traditional system of justice, and, finally, a demonstration of the device. Its mechanism is composed of a system of needles that slowly impale the body of the condemned man. The officer sets the device in motion. We learn about the prisoner, a man who looked so like a submissive dog that one might have thought he could be left to run free on the surrounding hills and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin. He has been convicted for an infraction that really wasn’t an infraction but just an unwillingness to be beaten. This seemingly incomprehensible, even absurd story has received bizarre interpretations. I was intrigued by Kafka’s diary entry about his first engagement to Felice, when he seemed tied hand and foot like a criminal. Furthermore, Kafka broke off the engagement after six weeks and journeyed with a friend to the seaside, where he composed the story.
Then I noticed in a letter to Milena a remarkable passage concerning Kafka’s idea of marriage.
You know, if I want to write something about [our engagement,] swords slowly begin to circle around me and approach my body, it’s the most complete torture; when they begin to graze me it’s already so terrible that at the first scream I betray you, myself, everything.
This was a condensed description of the execution device from “In the Penal Colony” from his Selected Short Stories, and, if I understood the motifs that inspired Kafka, he saw himself in the man condemned to lie on the bed beneath the approaching needles. I was almost certain that in two of Kafka’s last unfinished novels I saw an image of his self-tormenting relationship to women. He tried to draw close to them, but owing to his inability to consummate any sort of relationship, he was condemned and punished like a criminal. For him, women became an impenetrable castle, and when they finally accepted him into their beds, he was overcome with weariness, anxiety, and his own indecisiveness and could not avail himself of the opportunity and could not accept their favors.
He could not effectuate any substantive relationship, just as he could not complete any extensive work. Finally, death was the only resolution for him, and he accepted his tuberculosis.
My talk was too long for someone to read at the conference; nevertheless, I took it to Wolfgang to send to Vancouver.
Markéta translated and read part of my paper at the conference. The text then came out in an English edition of my essays and later in many languages, even Chinese.
I once again applied for my passport. To my surprise, I received it. Although it didn’t allow me to go to Vancouver, I could travel to the so-called people’s democracies.
*
Helena’s fearless colleague, Dr. Lukavský, offered her a part-time job in his marriage counseling office, but she had to travel all the way to Mělník. The trip across Prague and then farther by bus was tiring, so Helena slept there once or twice a week. In her free time, she attended secret psychoanalysis training (psychoanalysis was forbidden).
Alone at home, I was depressed. Time seemed to me unfilled and directionless. The most varied images started coming into my mind. What was love: blindness, passion?
The opposite of love seemed to me to be refuse: garbage — not only real garbage, but emotional and intellectual as well. Images of garbage and love alternated through my thoughts. But I knew nothing of garbage with the exception of when I burned it during my short tenure as a hospital orderly.
What kind of people came into contact with real garbage most often? Those who stood only on the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder — street sweepers. I still wasn’t sure if I could somehow lay out these thoughts and string them together into a story, but it couldn’t hurt to get acquainted with the job of a street sweeper.
Street sweeping seemed to me to be a job requiring so few qualifications that whoever applied would not be asked if he’d ever held a broom before; if he’d previously been a priest, a university professor, or a writer; if he’d just been let out of prison; or if he was a student or retiree who needed a few more crowns.
One morning I presented my identity card to the work center in our district and was issued an orange vest and a broom. A permanent employee of the sanitation department formed us into a group and distributed more valuable equipment such as a wheelbarrow and shovels. Then we set off at a sluggish pace to the location we were supposed to clean.
All types of people imaginable worked as street sweepers. I soon learned that their efforts were applied not to cleaning streets but to waiting out — as effortlessly and unperturbed as possible — the necessary time between starting work and collecting the day’s pay. After two hours of work, we sat for a long while in a pub and then dawdled away another couple of hours, since all we had left to do was finish cleaning a street that had previously been scrubbed with a street-sweeping machine.
I listened to some of the workers’ stories and gossip, but everything I heard was drowned out by thoughts of Father’s illness. His health had suddenly taken a turn for the worse and he was seized by bouts of fever. His temperature would suddenly rise to forty-two degrees Celsius over the course of two hours, as if he had malaria, and then a few hours later it would come back down to normal. This happened every day, and the doctor had no explanation. Father obediently submitted himself to ice packs and swallowed pills to lower his temperature, but it seemed that this peculiar illness was not responding to any external stimuli; it had its own rules. Father grew weak, and his usually clear mind became confused. When he awoke from a feverish state, he would lose all sense of time. In the evening, he thought it was morning, and when I tried to convince him otherwise (as if it was important to him), he would obediently admit that he believed me, since I, as a healthy person, maintained it.