Authors: Franz Kafka
Like a small ghost a child blew in from the pitch-dark corridor, where the lamp was not yet lit, and stood a-tiptoe on a floor board that quivered imperceptibly. At once dazzled by the twilight in my room she made to cover her face quickly with her hands, but contented herself unexpectedly with a glance at the window, where the mounting vapor of the street lighting had at last settled under its cover of darkness behind the crossbars. With her right elbow she supported herself against the wall in the open doorway and let the draught from outside play along her ankles, her throat, and her temples.
I gave her a brief glance, then said ‘Good day,’ and took my jacket from the hood of the stove, since I didn’t want to stand there half-undressed. For a little while I let my mouth hang open, so that my agitation could find a way out. I had a bad taste in my mouth, my eyelashes were fluttering on my cheeks, in short this visit, though I had expected it, was the one thing needful.
The child was still standing by the wall on the same spot, she had pressed her right hand against the plaster and was quite taken up with finding, her cheeks all pink, that the whitewashed walls had a rough surface and chafed her finger tips. I said: ‘Are you really looking for me? Isn’t there some mistake? Nothing easier than to make a mistake in this big building. I’m called So-and-so and I live on the third floor. Am I the person you want to find?’
‘Hush, hush,’ said the child over her shoulder, ‘it’s all right.’
‘Then come farther into the room, I’d like to shut the door.’
‘I’ve shut it this very minute. Don’t bother. Just be easy in your mind.’
‘It’s no bother. But there’s a lot of people living on this corridor, and I know them all, of course; most of them are coming back from work now; if they hear someone talking in a room, they simply think they have a right to open the door and see what’s happening. They’re just like that. They’ve turned their backs on their daily work and in their provisionally free evenings they’re not going to be dictated to by anyone. Besides, you know that as well as I do. Let me shut the door.’
‘Why, what’s the matter with you? I don’t mind if the whole house comes in. Anyhow, as I told you, I’ve already shut the door, do you think you’re the only person who can shut doors? I’ve even turned the key in the lock.’
‘That’s all right then. I couldn’t ask for more. You didn’t need to turn the key, either. And now that you are here, make yourself comfortable. You are my guest. You can trust me entirely. Just make yourself at home and don’t be afraid. I won’t compel you either to stay or to go away. Do I have to tell you that? Do you know me so little?’
‘No. You really didn’t need to tell me that. What’s more, you shouldn’t have told me. I’m just a child; why stand on so much ceremony with me?’
‘It’s not so bad as that. A child, of course. But not so very small. You’re quite big. If you were a young lady, you wouldn’t dare to lock yourself so simply in a room with me.’
‘We needn’t worry about that. I just want to say: my knowing you so well isn’t much protection to me, it only relieves you of the effort of keeping up pretenses before me. And yet you’re paying me a compliment. Stop it, I beg you, do stop it. Anyhow, I don’t know you everywhere and all the time, least of all in this darkness. It would be much better if you were to light up. No, perhaps not. At any rate I’ll keep it in mind that you have been threatening me.’
‘What? Am I supposed to have threatened you? But, look here. I’m so pleased that you’ve come at last. I say “at last” because it’s already rather late. I can’t understand why you’ve come so late. But it’s possible that in the joy of seeing you I have been speaking at random and you took up my words in the wrong sense. I’ll admit ten times over that I said something of the kind, I’ve made all kinds of threats, anything you like. Only no quarreling, for Heaven’s sake! But how could you think of such a thing? How could you hurt me so? Why do you insist on spoiling this brief moment of your presence here? A stranger would be more obliging than you are.’
‘That I can well believe; that’s no great discovery. No stranger could come any nearer to you than I am already by nature. You know that, too, so why all this pathos? If you’re only wanting to stage a comedy I’ll go away immediately.’
‘What? You have the impudence to tell me that? You make a little too bold. After all, it’s my room you’re in. It’s my wall you’re rubbing your fingers on like mad. My room, my wall! And besides, what you are saying is ridiculous as well as impudent. You say your nature forces you to speak to me like that. Is that so? Your nature forces you? That’s kind of your nature. Your nature is mine, and if I feel friendly to you by nature, then you mustn’t be anything else.’
‘Is that friendly?’
‘I’m speaking of earlier on.’
‘Do you know how I’ll be later on?’
‘I don’t know anything.’
And I went to the bed table and lit the candle on it. At that time I had neither gas nor electric light in my room. Then I sat for a while at the table till I got tired of it, put on my greatcoat, took my hat from the sofa, and blew out the candle. As I went out I tripped over the leg of a chair.
On the stairs I met one of the tenants from my floor.
‘Going out again already, you rascal?’ he asked, pausing with his legs firmly straddled over two steps.
‘What can I do?’ I said, ‘I’ve just had a ghost in my room.’
‘You say that exactly as if you had just found a hair in your soup.’
‘You’re making a joke of it. But let me tell you, a ghost is a ghost.’
‘How true. But what if one doesn’t believe in ghosts at all?’
‘Well, do you think I believe in ghosts? But how can my not believing help me?’
‘Quite simply. You don’t need to feel afraid if a ghost actually turns up.’
‘Oh, that’s only a secondary fear. The real fear is a fear of what caused the apparition. And that fear doesn’t go away. I have it fairly powerfully inside me now.’ Out of sheer nervousness I began to hunt through all my pockets.
‘But since you weren’t afraid of the ghost itself, you could easily have asked it how it came to be there.’
‘Obviously you’ve never spoken to a ghost. One never gets straight information from them. It’s just a hither and thither. These ghosts seem to be more dubious about their existence than we are, and no wonder, considering how frail they are.’
‘But I’ve heard that one can fatten them up.’
‘How well informed you are. It’s quite true. But is anyone likely to do it?’
‘Why not? If it were a feminine ghost, for instance,’ said he, swinging onto the top step.
‘Aha,’ said I, ‘but even then it’s not worth while.’
I thought of something else. My neighbor was already so far up that in order to see me he had to bend over the well of the staircase. ‘All the same,’ I called up, ‘if you steal my ghost from me all is over between us, forever.’
‘Oh, I was only joking,’ he said and drew his head back.
‘That’s all right,’ said I, and now I really could have gone quietly for a walk. But because I felt so forlorn I preferred to go upstairs again and so went to bed.
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
I
T WAS
a Sunday morning in the very height of spring. Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, was sitting in his own room on the first floor of one of a long row of small, ramshackle houses stretching beside the river which were scarcely distinguishable from each other in height and coloring. He had just finished a letter to an old friend of his who was now living abroad, had put it into its envelope in a slow and dreamy fashion, and with his elbows propped on the writing table was gazing out of the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the farther bank with their tender green.
He was thinking about his friend, who had actually run away to Russia some years before, being dissatisfied with his prospects at home. Now he was carrying on a business in St. Petersburg, which had flourished to begin with but had long been going downhill, as he always complained on his increasingly rare visits. So he was wearing himself out to no purpose in a foreign country, the unfamiliar full beard he wore did not quite conceal the face Georg had known so well since childhood, and his skin was growing so yellow as to indicate some latent disease. By his own account he had no regular connection with the colony of his fellow countrymen out there and almost no social intercourse with Russian families, so that he was resigning himself to becoming a permanent bachelor.
What could one write to such a man, who had obviously run off the rails, a man one could be sorry for but could not help. Should one advise him to come home, to transplant himself and take up his old friendships again – there was nothing to hinder him – and in general to rely on the help of his friends? But that was as good as telling him, and the more kindly the more offensively, that all his efforts hitherto had miscarried, that he should finally give up, come back home, and be gaped at by everyone as a returned prodigal,
that only his friends knew what was what and that he himself was just a big child who should do what his successful and home-keeping friends prescribed. And was it certain, besides, that all the pain one would have to inflict on him would achieve its object? Perhaps it would not even be possible to get him to come home at all – he said himself that he was now out of touch with commerce in his native country – and then he would still be left an alien in a foreign land embittered by his friends’ advice and more than ever estranged from them. But if he did follow their advice and then didn’t fit in at home – not out of malice, of course, but through force of circumstances – couldn’t get on with his friends or without them, felt humiliated, couldn’t be said to have either friends or a country of his own any longer, wouldn’t it have been better for him to stay abroad just as he was? Taking all this into account, how could one be sure that he would make a success of life at home?
For such reasons, supposing one wanted to keep up correspondence with him, one could not send him any real news such as could frankly be told to the most distant acquaintance. It was more than three years since his last visit, and for this he offered the lame excuse that the political situation in Russia was too uncertain, which apparently would not permit even the briefest absence of a small businessman while it allowed hundreds of thousands of Russians to travel peacefully abroad. But during these three years Georg’s own position in life had changed a lot. Two years ago his mother had died, since when he and his father had shared the household together, and his friend had of course been informed of that and had expressed his sympathy in a letter phrased so dryly that the grief caused by such an event, one had to conclude, could not be realized in a distant country. Since that time, however, Georg had applied himself with greater determination to the business as well as to everything else.
Perhaps during his mother’s lifetime his father’s insistence on having everything his own way in the business had hindered him from developing any real activity of his own,
perhaps since her death his father had become less aggressive, although he was still active in the business, perhaps it was mostly due to an accidental run of good fortune – which was very probable indeed – but at any rate during those two years the business had developed in a most unexpected way, the staff had had to be doubled, the turnover was five times as great; no doubt about it, further progress lay just ahead.
But Georg’s friend had no inkling of this improvement. In earlier years, perhaps for the last time in that letter of condolence, he had tried to persuade Georg to emigrate to Russia and had enlarged upon the prospects of success for precisely Georg’s branch of trade. The figures quoted were microscopic by comparison with the range of Georg’s present operations. Yet he shrank from letting his friend know about his business success, and if he were to do it now retrospectively that certainly would look peculiar.
So Georg confined himself to giving his friend unimportant items of gossip such as rise at random in the memory when one is idly thinking things over on a quiet Sunday. All he desired was to leave undisturbed the idea of the home town which his friend must have built up to his own content during the long interval. And so it happened to Georg that three times in three fairly widely separated letters he had told his friend about the engagement of an unimportant man to an equally unimportant girl, until indeed, quite contrary to his intentions, his friend began to show some interest in this notable event.
Yet Georg preferred to write about things like these rather than to confess that he himself had got engaged a month ago to a Fräulein Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family. He often discussed this friend of his with his fiancée and the peculiar relationship that had developed between them in their correspondence. ‘So he won’t be coming to our wedding,’ said she, ‘and yet I have a right to get to know all your friends.’ I don’t want to trouble him,’ answered Georg, ‘don’t misunderstand me, he would probably come,
at least I think so, but he would feel that his hand had been forced and he would be hurt, perhaps he would envy me and certainly he’d be discontented and without being able to do anything about his discontent he’d have to go away again alone. Alone – do you know what that means?’ ‘Yes, but may he not hear about our wedding in some other fashion?’ I can’t prevent that, of course, but it’s unlikely, considering the way he lives.’ Since your friends are like that, Georg, you shouldn’t ever have got engaged at all.’ ‘Well, we’re both to blame for that; but I wouldn’t have it any other way now.’ And when, breathing quickly under his kisses, she still brought out: ‘All the same, I do feel upset,’ he thought it could not really involve him in trouble were he to send the news to his friend. ‘That’s the kind of man I am and he’ll just have to take me as I am,’ he said to himself, ‘I can’t cut myself to another pattern that might make a more suitable friend for him.’
And in fact he did inform his friend, in the long letter he had been writing that Sunday morning, about his engagement, with these words: ‘I have saved my best news to the end. I have got engaged to a Fräulein Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family, who only came to live here a long time after you went away, so that you’re hardly likely to know her. There will be time to tell you more about her later, for today let me just say that I am very happy and as between you and me the only difference in our relationship is that instead of a quite ordinary kind of friend you will now have in me a happy friend. Besides that, you will acquire in my fiancée, who sends her warm greetings and will soon write you herself, a genuine friend of the opposite sex, which is not without importance to a bachelor. I know that there are many reasons why you can’t come to see us, but would not my wedding be precisely the right occasion for giving all obstacles the go-by? Still, however that may be, do just as seems good to you without regarding any interests but your own.’