The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction

by Franz Kafka

  If that is indeed so, then the case is settled. Though settled for grown-ups doesn’t settle it for the little ones. I was running around, telling people, asking questions, making accusations, investigating and wanting to drag anyone at all off to the place where it had all happened, to show everyone where I had stood and where the seven had been and where and how they had danced and made music, and if anyone had been willing to go there with me, instead of shaking me off and laughing at me, then I would have been prepared to sacrifice my being without sin, and would have tried to get up on my hind legs, to make everything utterly clear. Well, people are hard on children, though in the end they tend to forgive them. It seems I have kept my childlike nature, even as I have grown into an old dog myself. And so I never stopped talking aloud about that incident, though I place less importance on it today, breaking it up into its component parts, trying it out on all and sundry without regard to the society in which I found myself, always thinking about the issue, bending the ears of others as my own were bent, only – and this was the major difference between us – I felt impelled to get to the bottom of it, so as to free my mind for the quiet satisfactions of day-to-day living. I have gone on applying myself, though with less childish means – the difference isn’t as great as one might have expected – and yet even today I’m not much further along.

  But it all began with that concert. I am not complaining, by the way, it’s my inborn nature which, even if there had been no concert at all, would have found some other occasion to express itself. I only regretted the fact that it occurred so soon and took up such a lot of my childhood; the happy life of young dogs, that some are able to stretch out over many years, in my case was over in a matter of months. Well, never mind! There are more important things than childhood. And perhaps old age, worked for over the course of a hard life, will offer me more in the way of childish happiness than an actual child would have the strength to endure, though I now will.

  It was then that I embarked on my investigations. I wasn’t short of material: rather, the excess of it drove me to distraction in my dark hours. I began to study what keeps us dogs nourished. Now, of course that’s not a straightforward question; it’s what’s been preoccupying us from time immemorial. It is the main object of our research; a vast body of observations and theories and opinions has been assembled on the topic, it has become a science whose dimensions exceed the comprehension not just of any given individual, but of the totality of all scholars, and can finally only be borne by nothing less than the entirety of dogdom, and even then only partially and not without complaint; because bits of long-held historic knowledge are continually crumbling away, demanding to be painfully replaced, not to mention the complexities and the scarcely possible demands of integrating the new learning.

  So don’t come to me with this objection. I know all that at least as well as the dog on the street; it doesn’t occur to me to consider what I do as in any way scientific, I am full of healthy respect for science, but to add to it I lack the understanding and the application and the peace of mind and – not least, especially over the last few years – the appetite. I gulp my food down as and when I find it, but don’t consider it worth my while to subject it to any methodical agricultural examination. In this respect I am content to abide by the accepted distillation of all wisdom, the little rule with which the mother sends her pup from her dugs out into the wide world: ‘Wet everything as well as you can.’ And doesn’t that indeed say pretty much everything? What has science, launched by our forebears, substantially to add to that? Details, details, and how uncertain all that is, whereas this rule will endure as long as dogs are dogs. It concerns our principal food; admittedly, we have other, auxiliary sources, but in general, and if times aren’t too hard, then we can live from this principal source that we can find on the ground, while what the ground needs from us is our water, which nourishes it, and it is at that price that it gives us our food, whose production – lest it be forgotten – can be accelerated by certain invocations, songs and ritual movements. But that really in my opinion is the sum total of everything that can usefully be said on the subject from this point of view. Here I am in full agreement with the great majority of dogdom, and I will have nothing to do with other views, which I consider to be heretical.

  Truly, I am not concerned with special pleading or being proved right, I am happy to be in agreement with my fellows, and that is the case here. But my research leads me in another direction. I know from appearances that the earth, when sprinkled and worked according to all the rules of science, gives us nourishment in sufficient quantity and quality of such kinds, in such places, and at such times as accord with the principles partly or wholly established by science. I accept this, but my question remains: ‘From where does the earth take this food?’ A question many claim not to understand, and to which at best the answer comes: ‘If you haven’t got enough to eat, we’ll give you some of ours.’ Mark this answer. I know that sharing individually obtained food with the generality is not among the strong points of the canine community. Life is hard, the earth is mean; science, so rich in understanding, is less so in practical outcomes; whoever has food will keep it; nor is that to be termed selfishness – it’s the opposite, it’s the law of the dog, a unanimous popular decision, proceeding from the overcoming of selfishness, because those in possession are always in the minority. Hence the reply, ‘If you haven’t got enough to eat, we’ll give you some of ours’ is a joke, a tease, a bon mot. I have not forgotten that. But it had all the more significance for me because to me, going about the world with my questions, they left out the humorous aspect; I was still given nothing to eat – where would it have been obtained, in any case? And if someone just happened to have something, then of course, crazed with hunger as he was, any kind of compassionate regard was forgotten, but the offer was meant seriously and here and there I really did get the odd morsel, if I was quick enough to take possession of it. Why was it that others behaved so differently towards me? Favoured me, spared me? Because I was a feeble scrawny dog, badly fed, and too little concerned with nourishing myself? But the world is full of badly fed dogs and we like to snatch even the worst food from their chops, if we can – not out of greed, but on principle.

  No, I received preferential treatment, not to the extent that I could prove it in detail, but that certainly was my firm impression. So was it my questions that gave pleasure, that were taken to be particularly thoughtful? No, they gave no pleasure and some even thought they were stupid. And yet it could only be my questions that gained me their attention. It was as though they would rather do the extraordinary thing and stuff my mouth with food – they didn’t do it, but they wanted to – than attend to my questions. But then they would have done better to chase me away, and have done with my questions that way. But no, they didn’t want to do that, they might not have wanted to hear my questions, but they didn’t want to chase me away just because of them either. It was as if, no matter how much I was laughed at, treated as a silly little animal, pushed this way and that, it was actually the time I was treated with the greatest respect; never again did anything similar happen to me; I was able to go everywhere, nothing was kept from me; under the pretext of brusqueness I was actually given kid-gloved treatment. And it had to be all on account of my questions, my impatience, my desire to investigate. Did they want to lull me, lead me off the false path without violence – almost lovingly – from a path whose wrongness wasn’t so self-evident that it might have permitted the use of violence; in any case, a certain respect and fear may have kept them from violence. At the time I sensed something of the sort; today I know it much better than those who did it to me then: they did indeed want to divert me from my path. They weren’t successful; they achieved the opposite and my attentiveness was heightened. I even had the impression that it was I who wanted to lead the others, and to some extent my attempt was successful. It was only with help from the dog community that I began to understand what my own questions were about. I
f I asked, for example, where does the earth get the food from, did I care, as it might have appeared that I did, about the earth and its concerns? Not in the least, as I soon discovered, that was furthest from my thoughts – all I cared about were the dogs, nothing else. For what is there apart from dogs? To whom else can one appeal in an otherwise empty world? All science, the totality of all questions and all answers, lies with us dogs. If only one could make this science productive, bring it to the light of day. If only they didn’t know so infinitely more than they admit, even to themselves. The most garrulous dog is laconic by comparison with those places that offer the best food. You slink around your fellow dog, you froth with avidity, you lash yourself with your tail, you ask, you beg, you howl, you bite and finally you achieve – well, you achieve what you would have achieved without any exertion: a kindly hearing, friendly touches, respectful snufflings, intimate embraces, my and thy howls commingle – everything tends to make you find oblivion in delight. But the one thing you wanted above all to achieve – confirmation of what you know – that remains denied to you; to that request, whether tacit or voiced, if you have taken wheedling and tempting as far as they will go, you will be treated at best to blank expressions, dull, veiled eyes, looks askance.

  It’s not so very different from the way it was back then, in my youth, when I called out to the musician dogs and they were silent. Now you might say: ‘Here you are complaining about your fellow dogs and their silence on various crucial questions. You claim they know more than they’re saying, more than they want to have said in their lives, and this silence, the reason and secret of which of course forms part of their silence, is poisoning your life, making it unendurable for you. You had to change it or quit it, maybe so, but aren’t you a dog yourself, don’t you have dog-knowledge? Well, tell us, not only in the form of a question, but as an answer. If you were to articulate it, who would be able to resist you? The great chorus of caninity would chime in with you, as if it had just been waiting for this moment. Then you would have truth, clarity, admission – as much as you wanted. The roof of the lowly life about which you have so many bad things to say will open, and we all, dog by dog, will rise through it into freedom and openness. And if the last should prove impossible, if it should all turn out to be worse than before, if the whole truth should be more unbearable than half the truth, if it should be confirmed that the silent ones are in the right because they are the sustainers of life, and should the slim hope we have now turn into utter helplessness, it will still have been worth the attempt, since you are unwilling to live as you are permitted to live. How can you hold their silence against others, and keep silent yourself?’

  Easy answer: because I am a dog. Basically like the others, tight shut, offering resistance to my own questions, rigid with fear. Am I in fact, at least since I have become an adult, looking to dogdom for answers to my questions? Are my hopes so foolish? Do I see the foundations of our life, and sense their depth, watch the workers on the site, doing their grim work, and still expect that as far as my questions go, all that will be ended, torn down, abandoned? No, I really don’t expect that any more. With my questions I am only chasing myself, driving myself on with the silence that is the only answer I get from all around me. How long do you think you can stand it that dogdom, which through your questions you are gradually bringing to consciousness, is silent and will always be silent? How long can you stand it: beyond all individual questions, that is the question of questions for my life; it’s been put specifically to me, and troubles no one else. Unfortunately I can answer it more easily than the detailed, supplementary questions: I will presumably be able to stand it until my natural end – old age is placid and gets better and better at withstanding the restless questioning. I will probably die in silence, surrounded by silence, a peaceful death, and I am almost reconciled to it. An admirably strong heart and lungs not to be worn out ahead of time were given to us dogs almost out of malice, we resist all questions, even our own, being the barricade of silence that we are.

  More and more often of late, thinking about my life, I seek out the decisive and fundamental mistake I have probably committed – and can’t find it. And yet I must have committed it, because if I hadn’t and had still not attained what I wanted to attain, in spite of the honest endeavours of a long life, then it would have been proof that what I wanted was impossible, and the consequence would be utter hopelessness. Behold thy life’s work! First of all, there were my investigations on the question: from where does the earth take our food. A young pup, avid for life, I renounced all pleasures, avoided all entertainments, when tempted I buried my head between my legs, and set to work. This was no scientific task, neither in terms of erudition, or method, or purpose. They were my mistakes, yes, but I don’t suppose they were decisive ones. I learned little, because I left my mother at an early age, roamed at large, and soon became accustomed to independence; premature independence is inimical to the systematic acquisition of knowledge. But I saw and heard many things. I talked to dogs of all sorts and degrees, and understood reasonably well what I was told; integrating single observations into the whole, that stood in to some extent for erudition, and besides, independence, though it may be a disadvantage where the acquisition of knowledge is concerned, yet for research it is a great advantage. It was all the more necessary in my case because I was unable to follow the proper scientific method, which would have been to use the work of predecessors and to seek out my scientific contemporaries. Instead, I was utterly self-reliant, I began at the very beginning, and with the awareness – so enchanting to the young, so profoundly dispiriting for the elderly – that whatever chance point I happened to reach would also define my whole endeavour. But was I really so alone with my investigations, all this time? Yes and no. It is impossible to think that the odd dog hasn’t found himself – doesn’t find himself today – in my situation. Things can’t be that desperate for me. I am not a hair’s breadth outside the doggish norm. Every dog has, as I do, the urge to question. And I, like all dogs, have the compulsion to be silent. All have the urge to ask questions. Could my questions otherwise have had the least effect, which I was fortunate enough to behold with delight, albeit greatly overstated delight? And the fact that I also have a compulsion to silence, that needs no particular support. Fundamentally, then, I am not so different from any other dog, and that is why basically everyone will recognize me and I them, despite the differences of opinion and taste that may exist between us. Only the proportion of the constituent elements varies; to me personally the difference is substantial, but in terms of the species as a whole it is negligible. How should the mixture of elements, either now or in the past, not have given rise to the likes of myself or even (if one wants to call the result unfortunate in my case), something still more unfortunate? Why, that would fly in the face of all experience. We dogs are busy in the most varied professions and callings, such professions as one would hardly credit, if it wasn’t that one had the most reliable information about them.

  I like to think at this point about air-dogs. The first time I heard of one such, I laughed and refused to be persuaded of their existence. What?! A minuscule dog, not much bigger than my head, even when fully mature, and this dog, utterly feeble of course – by appearances an artificial, immature, excessively coiffed thing, quite incapable of an honest to goodness leap – a dog like this was said to move largely through the air, and without any visible effort either, but to do so in a state of rest. No, to seek to convince me of such a thing was to take advantage of the earnest credulousness of a young dog, or so I thought. But then I heard tell, from a separate source, of a second air-dog. Was this some sort of conspiracy to make fun of me? This was when I encountered the musician dogs, and from that time forth, I thought everything was possible. I allowed no prejudice to set limits to my imagination, I pursued the most outrageous rumours, investigating them to the best of my ability; the most senseless things in this farraginous thing we call life seemed to be more plausible than any amou
nt of sense, and in terms of my research, especially useful. These air-dogs were one example. I learned a lot about them, to this day I haven’t actually seen one, but I became convinced of their existence long ago, and they occupy an important place in my overall scheme of things. As is usually the case, so here it is not the art that gives me pause. It’s wonderful – who could deny it – that these dogs are able to float through the air: in my astonishment I am one with the rest of dogdom. But much more wonderful to me is the overall feeling of farrago, the silent unreasonableness of these beings. In general there is no cause given for it – they float through the air, and that’s our lot; life goes on, here and there they talk of art and artists, and that’s it. But why, oh kindly dogdom, why do these particular dogs float? What point is there in their calling? Why no word of explanation from the creatures themselves? Why do they float up there, letting their legs, which are our pride and joy, atrophy from being parted from the nourishing mother earth, not sowing, merely reaping, apparently even being nourished particularly well by providential dogdom.