The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man
FRANZ KAFKA
THE UNHAPPINESS
OF BEING
A SINGLE MAN
Essential Stories
Edited and translated from the German
by Alexander Starritt
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
Contents
Title Page
Translator’s Preface
A Message from the Emperor
A Short Fable
The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man
Poseidon
The Verdict
The Truth about Sancho Panza
The Bridge
The Married Couple
Before the Law
A Hunger Artist
The Trees
The New Lawyer
An Old Journal
In the Penal Colony
The Next Village
A First Heartache
A Report for an Academy
Homecoming
Jackals and Arabs
The Silence of the Sirens
The Stoker
Give up!
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Copyright
Translator’s Preface
IN ENGLISH, the word that usually follows ‘Kafkaesque’ is ‘nightmare’. Hardly the thing to make you think, ‘Hurray, a new translation. No Netflix for me tonight.’ And in truth, Kafka’s work is respected far more than it is loved.
Potential book buyers sense that reading one of his novels might be unpleasantly similar to appearing in it: boring and painful at the same time. Like a circle of hell reserved for bureaucracy and anxiety dreams, where you fill in meaningless forms until the end of time, and then discover the pen is actually a beetle. That feeling only gets stronger when you flick to the back of The Castle and see how many pages there are.
I can’t say I really disagree. There’s no question about how startling Kafka’s vision is, nor about how, despite the surrealism and the grotesquerie, it all feels so familiar. But are the novels a great read? I have my doubts.
Not so about the short stories. There, the ideas that can feel interminable in the novels are quick, funny, strange and sad. Some are fables, some are jokes, some seem placid at first then throw you out the window, some put pictures in your mind that no one but Kafka ever could and that will keep resurfacing for years afterwards as metaphors for your lived reality. Some you read and think, oh I see, this is Kafka, this is why Kafka was such an earthquake, this is why he’s unforgettable.
Just to be blunt: I think the short stories you hold in your hand are the best thing Kafka ever wrote, and the best of them are as good as anything ever written by anyone. If you don’t want to take my word for it, on the back of my German edition it says, “The short stories form the actual core of all Kafka’s work.”
So why are they less known than the novels? I think it’s probably because people tend to buy novels rather than short story collections, and therefore publishers tend to push them. Kafka’s short stories have often appeared in unwieldy compendia, aimed at devotees, or appended to an edition of his most famous piece, The Metamorphosis.
Translation also creates an extra cost that makes it harder for publishers to take the gamble on an unpopular form. And although Kafka has had some excellent translators, like Michael Hofmann, in many editions you see the marks left by the economics of publishing: underpaid translators work quickly and hurry to get things finished.
I hope this collection takes these short stories out from under the novels’ shadow. I haven’t put them in chronological order, or tried to showcase his different modes; my principle for inclusion has been: only the best.
A MESSAGE FROM THE EMPEROR
THE EMPEROR—they say—has sent you, you alone, his lowly subject, you tiny shadow thrown far off into the furthest corner by the imperial sun, you, of all people, the Emperor has sent a message from his deathbed. He had his messenger kneel down beside him and whispered the message directly into his ear; it was so important to him that he had the message repeated back into his own. With a nod he confirmed that what had been said was correct. In front of the entire audience of his death—every obstructing wall had been torn down and the great and good of the empire were gathered around, crowding onto the sweeping staircases that led up to him—in front of them all he sent the messenger on his way. The messenger, a strong, a tireless man, set off at once; pushing himself forward arm over arm, he clears a path through the crowd; if someone blocks his way, he points to the symbol of the sun emblazoned on his chest; and he gets through faster than anyone else ever could. But the crowd is so big; there’s no end to them and their city. If he could get onto the open road, he’d be flying along, and soon you’d hear the wonderful hammering of his fists on your door. But how futile his efforts are; he’s still fighting his way through the apartments of the innermost palace; he’ll never make it out of them; and even if he did, nothing would be gained; he’d still have to fight his way down the staircases; and even if he did that, nothing would be gained; he’d still have to cross the courtyards; and after the courtyards the second, outer palace; and again staircases and courtyards; and then another palace; and so on through thousands of years; and if finally he burst out of the outermost gate—but never, never can that happen—he’d still have the whole imperial capital ahead of him, the centre of the world, its buildings piled high and its streets clogged up. Nobody can push through that, least of all carrying a message from a dead man. — But you sit at your window and dream of what it says, when evening comes.
A SHORT FABLE
“ACH,” said the mouse, “the world gets narrower every day. At first it was so wide it was frightening; but I kept running and I was glad when I finally saw some walls far off to the left and right of me, but now those long walls are hurrying towards each other so fast that I’m already in the final room, and there in the corner is the trap I’m running into.” — “All you have to do is run in the other direction,” said the cat, and ate it.
THE UNHAPPINESS OF BEING A SINGLE MAN
IT SEEMS A TERRIBLE THING to stay single for good, to become an old man who, if he wants to spend the evening with other people, has to stand on his dignity and ask someone for an invitation; to be ill and spend weeks looking out of the corner of your bed at an empty room; always to say goodbye at the door; never to squeeze your way up the stairs beside your wife; to live in a room where the side doors lead only to other people’s apartments; to carry your dinner home in one hand; to be forced to admire children you don’t know and not to be allowed to just keep repeating, “I don’t have any”; to model your appearance and behaviour on one or two bachelors you remember from childhood.
That’s how it’s going to be, except that in reality both today and in the future you’ll actually be standing there yourself, with a body and a real head, as well as a forehead, which you can use your hand to slap.
POSEIDON
POSEIDON SAT at his desk and went through his accounts. Being in charge of all the seas and oceans was an endless amount of work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted, and indeed he did have very many of them, but because he took his position very seriously, he checked over every calculation again himself, and so his assistants were little help to him. You couldn’t say that the work gave him pleasure; he actually just did it because it had been assigned to him. In fact he’d often asked for some work that would be what he called a bit more cheerful, but whenever suggestions were made to him it turned out that nothing suited him as well as the position he already had. It was also very difficult to find something else for him. It would have been impossible to appoint him to a particular sea, for example. Even leavi
ng aside that the amount of bookkeeping would have been no smaller, merely pettier, the great Poseidon could of course only be given a role at a very senior level. And if he was offered something outside the water altogether, just the idea of it made him ill, his divine breathing grew laboured and his powerful ribcage started to heave. Also, his complaints weren’t taken very seriously; when a powerful person starts fretting, you have to look like you’re trying to help them no matter how pointless the matter at hand; but no one ever really thought that Poseidon would be allowed to resign his position. He’d been appointed god of the seas at the beginning of time and that’s the way things would have to stay.
What annoyed him most—and this was mostly due to dissatisfaction with his work—was when he heard about what people imagined he was like, for example that he was always careening through the waves with a trident. Meanwhile he was sitting down here in the depths of the ocean constantly going through the books. The only interruption to this monotony were occasional visits to Jupiter, visits, by the way, from which he usually returned in a fury. So he’d hardly seen anything of the seas, only ever briefly on the hurried ascent to Olympus, and never really travelled around them. He would say that he was waiting for the end of the world; at that point there would surely be a quiet moment before it was all over in which, after finishing off the last of the accounts, he’d have time for a quick look around.
THE VERDICT
A story for Ms Felice B.
IT WAS A SUNDAY MORNING at the height of spring. Georg Bendemann, a young businessman, was sitting in his room on the first floor of one of those low, straight-forwardly built houses that run in a long line beside the river, differing from each other only in their height or colour. He’d just finished writing a letter to a childhood friend and folded it shut with whimsical attentiveness, then, resting his elbows on the desk, he looked out of the window at the river, the bridge and the pale green hills on the other bank.
He was thinking about how this friend, dissatisfied with the way his life was going at home, had all but fled to Russia several years ago. These days he ran a business in St Petersburg, which had got off to a very good start but now seemed to have been stagnating for some time, something the friend complained about on his increasingly rare visits. He was fruitlessly working himself into the ground in a far-off country, his foreign-looking beard only patchily covering his familiar face, which was developing a yellowish tinge that hinted at some emerging illness. From what he said, he didn’t have any real connections out there among the expatriate community, nor much social contact with Russian families, and so was preparing himself for permanent bachelorhood.
What could you write to a man like that, who had obviously made the wrong choices, someone you could sympathize with but not help? Should you maybe advise him to come home, to move his life back here, to take up all his old friendships again—there was no reason he couldn’t—and in general to put his trust in the fact that his friends would help him? But doing that would be tantamount to saying—and the more gently it was put, the more hurtful it would be—that all his efforts so far had failed, that he should finally let it go, that now he had to come back and let himself be stared at by everybody who knew he’d come back for good, that his friends had known better than him what to do with their lives and that actually he was just an overgrown child who should concentrate on imitating those who’d made a success of staying where they were. And was is it even certain that all the pain he’d have to go through would be worth it? Perhaps they wouldn’t even be able to convince him to come back—he said himself that he didn’t understand his home country any more—and in that case he’d stay abroad despite everything, embittered by his friends’ advice and alienated even further from them. Whereas if he did take the suggestion to come back and then ended up downtrodden at home—of course not on purpose, but just because it turned out like that—if he couldn’t get on with his friends or get by without them, found himself humiliated, friendless and more truly displaced than before, wouldn’t it be much better for him if he’d stayed abroad? Could you really expect, given all these considerations, that he’d be able to make a go of things back here?
That was why, if you wanted to keep up a correspondence with him, you couldn’t give him any actual news, the kind you would unthinkingly write to even your most distant acquaintance. His friend hadn’t been home for more than three years, offering the unconvincing explanation that it was because of the uncertain political situation in Russia, which apparently wouldn’t permit a small businessman to leave the country for a few weeks even while hundreds of thousands of Russians were traipsing around all over the world. For Georg, however, a lot had changed in those three years. The death of Georg’s mother, which had happened about two years ago and prompted Georg and his father to move back in together, was something he’d told his friend, who’d expressed his condolences in a letter so dry that it could only be because the sorrow of something like that becomes completely unimaginable from far away. Since that time, Georg had thrown himself more purposefully into the family business, as he had into everything else. Perhaps it was because, while his mother was alive, his father’s insistence on managing things at work had held Georg back from really taking it on as his own; perhaps it was because his father, although he did still come to the office, had now become more withdrawn; perhaps, and in fact very probably, certain far happier events had had an important role to play, but in any case, the business had made unexpected strides in these past two years, they’d had to double the staff, turnover had gone up fivefold and even greater gains were there for the taking.
The friend had no idea about this altered state of affairs. Previously, maybe the last time had been in that condolence letter, he’d tried to persuade Georg to emigrate to Russia and written at length about the opportunities there were for Georg’s line of business in St Petersburg. The numbers he’d mentioned were vanishingly small compared with the level that Georg’s business had already reached. But Georg hadn’t wanted to tell his friend about his commercial successes at the time, and to do so retrospectively really would seem bizarre.
So Georg limited himself to writing about the meaningless happenings that drift randomly into your mind if you sit and think on a quiet Sunday. All he wanted was to avoid disturbing the image of home that his friend must have created and come to terms with during his long absence. That’s how Georg ended up telling his friend about some completely uninteresting person getting engaged to an equally uninteresting girl three times in three different letters sent quite far apart, eventually piquing his friend’s interest in this strange affair.
But Georg would far rather write about things like that than admit that he himself had got engaged to a Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family, about a month earlier. He often spoke to his fiancée about this friend and the unusual written relationship he had with him. “So that means he won’t come to our wedding,” she said, “even though I’ve got the right to meet all your friends.”
“I don’t want to put him out,” said Georg. “Don’t get me wrong, he would probably come if we asked him, but he’d feel pressured into it and annoyed, maybe jealous of me and certainly unhappy, and afterwards he’d have to go back to Russia by himself, feeling like he’d never be able to put that unhappiness aside, let alone overcome it. By himself—do you remember how that felt?”
“But might he not hear about our wedding from someone else?”
“I can’t guarantee that he won’t but, given the way he lives, it’s unlikely.”
“If that’s what your friends are like, Georg, you shouldn’t have got engaged in the first place.”
“Well, that’s both our fault, but now we’re here I wouldn’t have it any other way.” And when she, breathing quickly under his kisses, said, “But actually it does bother me,” he thought that it might be harmless after all to tell his friend everything. ‘This is who I am and he has to take me as I am,’ he said to himself. ‘I can’t take a pair of s
cissors to myself and cut out a person who’d be better suited to being his friend.’
And in the long letter he wrote that Sunday morning he did indeed tell his friend that the engagement had taken place, in the following words: “I’ve saved the best news for last. I’m engaged to a Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a comfortably-off family that only moved here after you left, so the name probably won’t mean anything to you. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunity to tell you more about her, but for now just know that I’m very happy and that this changes nothing about our friendship, except that instead of having a completely normal friend you now have a very happy one. Also, in my fiancée, who sends you her love and will write to you herself soon, you now have a sincere female confidante, which is no small thing for a bachelor. I know there are all kinds of reasons that keep you from visiting us, but wouldn’t my wedding be the right moment to throw all the obstacles out of the window for once? But be that as it may, don’t worry about me and just do what you think is best.”
With this letter in his hand Georg sat at his desk a long time, facing the window. An acquaintance walking down the alley said hello and Georg barely responded, just giving him an absent smile.
Finally he put the letter in his pocket and, leaving his room, went straight across the little hallway into his father’s, which he hadn’t been in for months. There was no need to, since he was constantly in his father’s company at work, they had their lunch together at a local eatery every day and, although they did separate things in the evening, if Georg wasn’t out with friends or visiting his fiancée, as he usually was these days, they’d sit together for a little while, each with his own newspaper, in their shared living room.