The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction

by Franz Kafka

  The results of my research were inconclusive: sometimes I was given no food and was on the point of jubilation about my discovery, but then the food presented itself, as though initially perplexed by the eccentricity of my original performance. And now, seeing its advantages, and happy to dispense with my shouts and leaps, often the food came more abundantly than before, though there were other times when none was forthcoming at all. With an industry unknown previously in young dogs, I kept exact records of all my experiments, and from time to time thought I had found a sign that would take me further, but then it was lost in the sand. Impossible to deny, too, that my lack of scientific background was a handicap. How could I prove for instance that the unforthcomingness of food was not brought on by some fault with my experiment – unscientific tilling of the ground, for instance – and if that was the case, then all my results were void. There was a perfectly precise experiment I could have conducted, that is, if I had succeeded without preparing the ground at all and then purely through a vertically directed ceremony in getting the lowering of the food, while by groundwork alone the food had failed to appear. I attempted something of the kind, but without real conviction and not under laboratory conditions, because I remain unshakeably convinced that a certain measure of preparing the ground is essential; and even if those heretics who don’t believe it were right, it still couldn’t be proved, since the sprinkling of the ground takes place under pressure and up to a point is not wholly voluntary. I had more success with a different, rather unusual experiment that attracted a certain amount of attention. In a variant of the usual interception of food in mid-air, I decided not to allow the food to fall to the ground, but not to intercept it either. To that end, I would perform a little leap in the air that was calculatedly inept; usually what happened was that it fell dully to the ground, and I would hurl myself upon it in a fury, not just of hunger but of disappointment. But in a few cases, something else happened, something actually rather miraculous: the food would not drop, but would follow me in the air – the food would follow the hungry individual. This didn’t take place in any sustained way – just for brief spells – and then it would fall after all, or disappear altogether or – this was the usual outcome – my greed would bring a premature end to the experiment and I wolfed down whatever it was.

  Still, I was happy at the time, there was a buzz around me, others were unsettled by me and began to take an interest, I found my acquaintances more open to my questions, in their eyes I saw the appeal for help; and even if it was nothing more than the reflection of my own look, I wanted nothing more, I was content. Until I learned – and others learned with me – that this experiment had been written up in science long ago, in a far grander version than mine, though it hadn’t been performed for a long time because of the degree of self-control it calls for, and also on account of its alleged scientific insignificance. It proved, so they said, only what was already known, namely that the ground does not collect nourishment in a direct vertical line, but at an angle, or even in a spiral.

  So there I was, but I wasn’t at all discouraged, I was much too young for that; on the contrary, I felt emboldened to attempt what was perhaps the greatest achievement of my life. I didn’t believe that my experiment was ultimately discredited, but this wasn’t a question of belief, but of proof, and I wanted to acquire it, and thus place my originally somewhat eccentric experiment under the harsh light and focus of science. I wanted to prove that when I shrank back from the nourishment, it wasn’t the ground that drew it down at an angle, but myself drawing it on to me. I wasn’t able to expand the experiment; to see the munchies in front of me and to go on experimenting scientifically is more than any dog can stand in the long run. But I purposed something else. I wanted to go on a fast for as long as I could bear it, while avoiding all sight of food and all temptation. If I withdrew in such a fashion, remained lying there with eyes closed day and night, attempted neither the picking up nor the intercepting of food, and as I didn’t dare claim but privately hoped, without any of the usual measures save the inevitable uncontrolled irrigation of the soil and quiet recital of speech and song (I would renounce the function of dance so as not to weaken myself), the food would descend of its own accord and, without bothering with the ground, would crave entry by knocking against my teeth – if this were to happen, then I wouldn’t have overturned the science, because science is sufficiently elastic for exceptions and isolated cases, but what would the people say, who happily possess less in the way of elasticity? After all, this wouldn’t be an exception of the sort that is handed down in stories – someone, say, with a physical malady or mental impairment refusing to work for their food, to look for it, or to consume it, upon which dogdom would assemble and recite formulas of invocation and secure a movement of the food from its usual path directly into the mouth of the afflicted party. I was in the pink, my appetite was so healthy that for days I could think of nothing else; I submitted, believe it or not, voluntarily to fasting, I was myself fully responsible for the downward course of the nourishment, I needed no help from dogdom, and even explicitly forbade it.

  I sought out an appropriate place in a remote shrubbery where I would hear no talk of food, no smacking of lips or cracking of bones, filled my belly one last time, and then lay down. It was my idea to spend all the time if possible with my eyes closed; so long as no food came, it should be night as far as I was concerned, and it would go on for days and weeks. The great difficulty was that I should not sleep either, or at least as little as possible, because I had not only to be summoning down the food to me, but also I had to be on guard lest I sleep through its coming; on the other hand, of course sleep was most welcome, because I would be able to go on fasting for much longer asleep than awake. With these thoughts, I decided to divide my time very carefully and sleep a lot, but only in very short spells. I managed this by propping my head on a thin branch that would quickly bend and thereby wake me. So there I lay, asleep or awake, dreaming or silently singing to myself. To begin with, time passed wholly uneventfully, perhaps it had not been observed, wherever food was distributed, that I was absent, opposing the usual run of things, and so all was quiet. I was a little disturbed in my endeavour by the fear that the dogs would miss me, find me and undertake some action against me. A second fear was lest, in response to a mere sprinkling, the ground, even though by the light of science it was infertile ground, would provide some so-called inadvertent nourishment, and its smile could beguile me. But for the moment nothing like that happened, and I was able to go on starving myself. My fears aside, I was quite calm to begin with, in a way I can’t remember having been before. Even though I was working against science, I felt a great contentment – almost the proverbial calm of the scientific worker. In my dreams I obtained science’s indulgence; I felt assured that it also had room for my inquiries, it sounded very soothing in my ears that, however successful my research ended up being (and especially then), I would not be lost to the ordinary life of dogs; science cast a kindly eye on me, it promised it would get to work on the interpretation of my findings, and that promise to me was fulfilment itself; I would, even as I felt expelled in my innermost being, and charged the walls of my tribe like a wild thing, I would be received with honours, the longed-for warmth of assembled dogsbodies would flow around me, I would be carried swaying, shoulder high by my people. Hunger can have a powerful effect on those unaccustomed to it. My achievement seemed to me such that out of self-pity I began to cry in my shrubbery, which didn’t quite make sense since, if I was expecting the reward I’d earned, why cry? Out of sheer contentment. I never liked to cry. Whenever I felt satisfaction, which was rarely enough, I cried. At least it was soon over. The pretty pictures faded gradually as my hunger grew, and it didn’t take long until fantasies and emotion had been purged and I was completely alone with the burning sensation in my intestines. ‘That’s what hunger feels like,’ I said to myself endlessly, as though to persuade myself that hunger and I were still two separate beings, and
I could shake it off like a tedious lover, but in reality we were a very painful entity, and when I said to myself, ‘That’s what hunger feels like’, then it was really hunger that was speaking and thus making fun of me. An awful, awful time! I still shudder to remember it, not just on account of the suffering I endured, but because I didn’t see it through to the end, because I will have to go through this hunger again if I am to achieve anything, because starvation is to me still the ultimate and most powerful tool in my investigations. The way leads through starvation; the highest is only attainable through the most extreme privation, and for us this privation is voluntary fasting.

  So when I think back to those times – and I love to brood over them – I think too about the times that loom ahead. It seems you have to almost let your life pass by before you recover from such an experiment; my entire manhood separates me from that period of starvation, and I still haven’t recovered. When next I embark on a period of starvation, I may have more resolve, as a result of my years and my superior understanding of the need for such an experiment, but my forces are still depleted from last time, I can feel myself sapped already by the prospect of the familiar terrors. My weaker appetite won’t help me; at most it will devalue my experiment and probably force me to starve for longer than I would have had to then. I think I am clear about these and other assumptions, it’s not that the long time in between has been without trial runs – often enough I have clamped my teeth round hunger, but I wasn’t strong enough for the ultimate test – and the uninhibited get-up-and-go of youth is of course gone now. It faded while I was fasting that first time.

  Some considerations tormented me. I saw the menacing spectres of our forefathers. Though I don’t say so openly, I blame them for everything: they brought us the dog’s life, and I could easily reply to their threats with counter-threats of my own; but I bow to their knowledge, it came from sources that are no longer known to us, which is why, however much I am opposed to them, I would never disregard their laws, but just beetle towards the little chinks in them for which I have a keen perception. Where hunger is concerned, I appeal to a famous conversation in the course of which one of our sages pronounced the intention of outlawing starvation, from which another tried to dissuade him with the question: ‘Who would ever think of starving themselves?’ and the former allowed himself to be persuaded and dropped the idea of the ban. Now the question comes around again: ‘Isn’t starving yourself actually forbidden?’ The great majority of commentators deny it, they see fasting as lawful, they take the part of the second wise man and are therefore not afraid of bad consequences flowing from their misleading comment. I had taken care to ascertain the facts before embarking on my programme. But now that I was writhing with hunger, and in my mental confusion kept having recourse to my hind legs, desperately licking, gnawing, sucking them all the way up to my bottom, the general interpretation of that conversation struck me as completely false. I cursed the commentators’ science, I cursed myself for having allowed myself to be misled by them; the conversation contained, as any child would see – given that it was a starving child – more than one ban on fasting; the first wise man wanted to forbid it, and whatever one wise man wants to do is already done, so hunger was already outlawed; and the second wise man not only agreed with him but even took hunger to be impossible, in effect balancing a second embargo on top of the first, this embargo deriving from the canine character itself; the first one understood this and therefore withheld the explicit embargo, that is, after discussion, he urged dogs to be prudent and simply to forswear starvation. In effect, it was a triple ban instead of the usual single one, and I had violated it.

  Now I could at least have heeded it belatedly and stopped starving myself, but running right through the pain was a kind of temptation, and I followed its trail, as if lusting after an unknown scent. I couldn’t stop, perhaps I was already too weak to get up and return to inhabited areas. I tossed and turned on my forest floor, sleeping was beyond me, I heard sounds everywhere; the world that had been asleep through my previous life seemed to have been brought to life by my hunger, I had the notion that I would never eat again, because then I would have to silence the whole world, and that was beyond me; admittedly the very loudest noise of all was in my stomach; I often pressed my ear against it and must have looked appalled because I could hardly believe what I was hearing. And as things were really getting bad, my senses became disorientated as well, and I thought of crazy ways of saving myself: I started smelling foods, exquisite things I hadn’t eaten for ages, the joys of my infancy, yes, I could smell the teats of my mother. I forgot my resolve to resist smells, or rather I didn’t; with determination, as though it were a resolution I’d set myself, I dragged myself around every which way, never more than one or two paces, and sniffed, as though I were seeking out foods so as to guard myself against them. The fact that I didn’t find any didn’t disappoint me, the food must be there, only it was always a few paces too far away for me, and my legs buckled before I could reach it. Simultaneously I knew that there was nothing there at all, that I was just carrying out these little movements for fear of the moment I would irrevocably break down somewhere and would never be able to leave. My last hopes disappeared, the last temptations: I would die miserably here, what was the point of my investigations, childish experiments from a childishly happy time; what was serious was here and now, here was where investigation could have proved its worth, but where was it? Here was a dog snapping at nothing, hurriedly and convulsively irrigating the soil over and over, though his memory was incapable of summoning a single line from the whole array of magical sayings, not even the one with which newborns take shelter under their mother.

  I felt as though I wasn’t just separated by a few yards from my brothers, but was infinitely far from all of them, and as though it wasn’t hunger that was killing me so much as my sense of abandonment. It was perfectly clear that no one was bothering about me, no one under the ground, no one over the ground, no one in the heights; I was dying from indifference, the indifference was saying: he is dying, and so it would be. And didn’t I agree? Wasn’t I saying the same thing? Had I not in fact wanted this abandonment? Yes, you dogs, but not to end here like this, to reach across to the truth from out of this world of lies, where there is no one from whom you can learn the truth, not even me, a born citizen liar. Perhaps the truth wasn’t all that far off, but it was too far for me, who was failing and would die. Perhaps it wasn’t too far, and then I wasn’t as abandoned as I thought either – not by the others, only by myself, failing and dying here.

  But the truth is you don’t die as quickly as an anxious dog believes. I merely lost consciousness, and when I came round and opened my eyes, there was an unfamiliar dog standing in front of me. I had no feeling of hunger, I felt very strong, in my joints there was a quivering, even though I made no attempt to test it by getting up. I didn’t seem to see any more than I did at other times, and yet a fine but hardly outstanding dog was standing in front of me. I saw that – nothing else – and yet I thought I saw more of him than I would ordinarily. There was blood underneath me – my first thought was that it was food, but I noticed soon enough that it was blood that I had vomited. I turned away from it, and towards the strange dog. He was lean, long-legged, tan, here and there with flecks of white, and he had a fine, strong, questing look. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘You must leave.’ ‘I can’t leave now,’ I said, without further explanation, because how could I have told him everything, and anyway he seemed to be in a hurry. ‘Please, leave,’ he said, restlessly picking up his feet in turn. ‘Let me be,’ I said. ‘Go away and forget about me; just like the others have forgotten about me.’ ‘Please, for your own sake,’ he said. ‘You can ask me for anyone’s sake you want,’ I said, ‘the fact is I can’t leave, even if I wanted to.’ ‘That’s not the issue,’ he said, smiling. ‘You can go. It’s because you seem to be weak that I’m begging you to leave in your own time. If you hesitate, you’ll only have to run l
ater on.’ ‘Let that be my concern,’ I said. ‘It’s mine too,’ he said, grieved by my stubbornness, and it was obvious he would have preferred me to stay for the moment, and use the opportunity to approach me in love. At any other time, I would have submitted to such a handsome beast gladly, but just then, I don’t know why, I felt aghast at the idea, ‘Go away,’ I screamed, all the more loudly as I had no other way of defending myself. ‘All right, I am going,’ he said, slowly stepping back. ‘You’re strange. Don’t you like me then?’ ‘I will like you once you leave me alone,’ I said, but I wasn’t as sure of myself as I wanted to sound. There was something about him that I could hear or see with my senses sharpened by hunger; it was just beginning, it was growing, it was coming nearer, and already I knew: this dog has the power to drive you away even if you can’t yet imagine how you will ever get to your feet. And I looked at him, shaking his head gently at my coarse reply, with ever greater desire. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘I’m a hunter,’ he said. ‘And why don’t you want to leave me here?’ ‘You’re in the way,’ he said. ‘I can’t hunt with you here.’ ‘Try,’ I said, ‘perhaps you will be able to.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, but you need to go.’ ‘Forget about hunting for the day!’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to.’ ‘I’ve got to leave, and you’ve got to hunt,’ I said. ‘Lots of gots there. Do you understand why?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘but there’s nothing to understand either, these are all perfectly reasonable, natural things.’ ‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘you’re sorry to have to chase me away, and still you do it.’ ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘That’s true,’ I mimicked crossly, ‘what kind of answer is that? What would be easier for you: not to hunt or not to drive me away?’ ‘Not to hunt,’ he said without any hesitation. ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘you’re contradicting yourself.’ ‘Where’s the contradiction?’ he asked. ‘You dear little dog, don’t you understand that I have to? Don’t you understand perfectly natural things?’ I didn’t say anything because I noticed – and a kind of new life surged through me, a life that was sparked by a sense of dread – noticed from certain elusive details that maybe no one but me could have noticed, that this dog was opening his chest to make ready to sing. ‘You’re about to sing,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said seriously, ‘I’m going to sing – soon, but not yet.’ ‘You’re already beginning,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not yet. But prepare yourself.’ ‘Deny it all you want, I can hear it,’ I said, trembling. He made no reply. And I thought I could tell what no dog before me had ever noticed – at least in our traditions there are no hints of it – and in endless panic and shame I hurriedly lowered my face to the puddle of blood in front of me. I thought I could tell that the dog was already singing without knowing it, yes, and more, that the melody, separate from him, was floating through the air following its own laws, through him and past him, as though it wasn’t anything to do with him, and was only aiming for me. Today of course I will deny all such perceptions and merely ascribe them to my over-stimulated condition, but even if it was an illusion, it does have something magnificent about it, as the only apparent reality I managed to salvage from that period of starvation, and shows how far we can travel if we are completely beside ourselves, as I was then.