by Philip Roth
“Well, the worst is over. May be over. At least is over for now. But while it lasted, while I couldn’t be what I had always just assumed I was, well, it wasn’t quite like anything I had ever known before. Of course you are the one on intimate terms with totalitarianism—but if you’ll permit me, I can only compare the body’s utter single-mindedness, its cold indifference and absolute contempt for the well-being of the spirit, to some unyielding, authoritarian regime. And you can petition it all you like, offer up the most heartfelt and dignified and logical sort of appeal—and get no response at all. If anything, a kind of laugh is what you get. I submitted my petitions through a psychoanalyst; went to his office every other day for an hour to make my case for the restoration of a robust libido. And, I tell you, with arguments and perorations no less involuted and tedious and cunning and abstruse than the kind of thing you find in The Castle. You think poor K. is clever—you should have heard me trying to outfox impotence.”
“I can imagine. That’s not a pleasant business.”
“Of course, measured against what you—”
“Please, you needn’t say things like that. It is not a pleasant business, and the right to vote provides, in this matter, little in the way of compensation.”
“That is true. I did vote during this period, and found it made me no happier. What I started to say about Kafka, about reading Kafka, is that stories of obstructed, thwarted K.’s banging their heads against invisible walls, well, they suddenly had a disturbing new resonance for me. It was all a little less remote, suddenly, than the Kafka I’d read in college. In my own way, you see, I had come to know that sense of having been summoned—or of imagining yourself summoned—to a calling that turns out to be beyond you, yet in the face of every compromising or farcical consequence, being unable to wise up and relinquish the goal. You see, I once went about living as though sex were sacred ground.”
“So to be ‘chaste’…” he says, sympathetically. “Most unpleasant.”
“I sometimes wonder if The Castle isn’t in fact linked to Kafka’s own erotic blockage—a book engaged at every level with not reaching a climax.”
He laughs at my speculation, but as before, gently and with that unrelenting amiability. Yes, just so profoundly compromised is the retired professor, caught, as in a mangle, between conscience and the regime—between conscience and searing abdominal pain. “Well,” he says, putting a hand on my arm in a kind and fatherly way, “to each obstructed citizen his own Kafka.”
“And to each angry man his own Melville,” I reply. “But then what are bookish people to do with all the great prose they read—”
“—but sink their teeth into it. Exactly. Into the books, instead of into the hand that throttles them.”
Late that afternoon, we board the streetcar whose number Professor Soska had written in pencil on the back of a packet of postcards ceremoniously presented to Claire at the door of our hotel. The postcards are illustrated with photographs of Kafka, his family, and Prague landmarks associated with his life and his work. The handsome little set is no longer in circulation, Soska explained to us, now that the Russians occupy Czechoslovakia and Kafka is an outlawed writer, the outlawed writer. “But you do have another set, I hope,” said Claire, “for yourself—?” “Miss Ovington,” he said, with a courtly bow, “I have Prague. Please, permit me. I am sure that everyone who meets you wants to give you a gift.” And here he suggested the visit to Kafka’s grave, to which it would not, however, be advisable for him to accompany us … and motioning with his hand, he drew our attention to a man standing with his back to a parked taxicab some fifty feet up the boulevard from the door of the hotel: the plainclothesman, he informs us, who used to follow him and Mrs. Soska around in the months after the Russian invasion, back when the professor was helping to organize the clandestine opposition to the new puppet regime and his duodenum was still intact. “Are you sure that’s him, here?” I had asked. “Sufficiently sure,” said Soska, and stooping quickly to kiss Claire’s hand, he moved with a rapid, comic stride, rather like a man in a walking race, into the crowd descending the wide stairs of the passageway to the underground. “My God,” said Claire, “it’s too awful. All that terrible smiling. And that getaway!”
We are both a little stunned, not least of all, in my case, for feeling myself so safe and inviolable, what with the passport in my jacket and the young woman at my side.
The streetcar carries us from the center of Prague to the outlying district where Kafka is buried. Enclosed within a high wall, the Jewish graveyard is bounded on one side by a more extensive Christian cemetery—through the fence we see visitors tending the graves there, kneeling and weeding like patient gardeners—and on the other by a wide bleak thoroughfare bearing truck traffic to and from the city. The gate to the Jewish cemetery is chained shut. I rattle the chain and call toward what seems a watchman’s house. In time a woman with a little boy appears from somewhere inside. I say in German that we have flown all the way from New York to visit Franz Kafka’s grave. She appears to understand, but says no, not today. Come back Tuesday, she says. But I am a professor of literature and a Jew, I explain, and pass a handful of crowns across to her between the bars. A key appears, the gate is opened, and inside the little boy is assigned to accompany us as we follow the sign that points the way. The sign is in five different tongues—so many peoples fascinated by the fearful inventions of this tormented ascetic, so many fearful millions: Khrobu/Κ могиле/Zum Grabe/To the Grave of/à la tombe de/FRANZE KAFKY.
Of all things, marking Kafka’s remains—and unlike anything else in sight—a stout, elongated, whitish rock, tapering upward to its pointed glans, a tombstone phallus. That is the first surprise. The second is that the family-haunted son is buried forever—still!—between the mother and the father who outlived him. I take a pebble from the gravel walk and place it on one of the little mounds of pebbles piled there by the pilgrims who’ve preceded me. I have never done so much for my own grandparents, buried with ten thousand others alongside an expressway twenty minutes from my New York apartment, nor have I made such a visit to my mother’s tree-shaded Catskill grave site since I accompanied my father to the unveiling of her stone. The dark rectangular slabs beyond Kafka’s grave bear familiar Jewish names. I might be thumbing through my own address book, or at the front desk looking over my mother’s shoulder at the roster of registered guests at the Hungarian Royale: Levy, Goldschmidt, Schneider, Hirsch … The graves go on and on, but only Kafka’s appears to be properly looked after. The other dead are without survivors hereabouts to chop away the undergrowth and to cut back the ivy that twists through the limbs of the trees and forms a heavy canopy joining the plot of one extinct Jew to the next. Only the childless bachelor appears to have living progeny. Where better for irony to abound than a la tombe de Franze Kafky?
Set into the wall facing Kafka’s grave is a stone inscribed with the name of his great friend Brod. Here too I place a small pebble. Then for the first time I notice the plaques affixed to the length of cemetery wall, inscribed to the memory of Jewish citizens of Prague exterminated in Terezin, Auschwitz, Belsen, and Dachau. There are not pebbles enough to go around.
With the silent child trailing behind, Claire and I head back to the gate. When we get there Claire snaps a picture of the shy little boy and, using sign language, instructs him to write down his name and address on a piece of paper. Pantomiming with broad gestures and stagy facial expressions that make me wonder suddenly just how childish a young woman she is—just how childlike and needy a man I have become—she is able to inform the little boy that when the photograph is ready she will send a copy to him. In two or three weeks Professor Soska is also to receive a photograph from Claire, this one taken earlier in the day outside the souvenir shop where Kafka had once spent a winter.
Now why do I want to call what joins me to her childish? Why do I want to call this happiness names? Let it happen! Let it be! Stop the challenging before it even starts! You need wh
at you need! Make peace with it!
The woman has come from the house to open the gate. Again we exchange some remarks in German.
“There are many visitors to Kafka’s grave?” I ask.
“Not so many. But always distinguished people, Professor, like yourself. Or serious young students. He was a very great man. We had many great Jewish writers in Prague. Franz Werfel. Max Brod. Oskar Baum. Franz Kafka. But now,” she says, casting her first glance, and a sidelong, abbreviated one at that, toward my companion, “they are all gone.”
“Maybe your little boy will grow up to be a great Jewish writer.”
She repeats my words in Czech. Then she translates the reply the boy has given while looking down at his shoes. “He wants to be an aviator.”
“Tell him people don’t always come from all over the world to visit an aviator’s grave.”
Again words are exchanged with the boy, and, smiling pleasantly at me—yes, it is only to the Jewish professor that she will address herself with a gracious smile—she says, “He doesn’t mind that so much. And, sir, what is the name of your university?”
I tell her.
“If you would like, I will take you to the grave of the man who was Dr. Kafka’s barber. He is buried here too.”
“Thank you, that is very kind.”
“Ηe was also the barber of Dr. Kafka’s father.”
I explain to Claire what the woman has offered. Claire says, “If you want, go ahead.”
“Better not to,” I say. “Start with Kafka’s barber, and by midnight we may end up by the grave of his candlestick maker.”
To the graveyard attendant I say, “I’m afraid that’s not possible right now.”
“Of course your wife may come too,” she starchily informs me.
“Thank you. But we have to get back to our hotel.”
Now she looks me over with undisguised suspiciousness, as though it well may be that I am not from a distinguished American university at all. She has gone out of her way to unlock the gate on a day other than the one prescribed for tourists, and I have turned out to be less than serious, probably nothing but a curiosity seeker, a Jew perhaps, but in the company of a woman quite clearly Aryan.
At the streetcar stop I say to Claire, “Do you know what Kafka said to the man he shared an office with at the insurance company? At lunchtime he saw the fellow eating his sausage and Kafka is supposed to have shuddered and said, ‘The only fit food for a man is half a lemon.’”
She sighs, and says, sadly, “Poor dope,” finding in the great writer’s dietary injunction a disdain for harmless appetites that is just plain silly to a healthy girl from Schenectady, New York.
That is all—yet, when we board the streetcar and sit down beside each other, I take her hand and feel suddenly purged of yet another ghost, as de-Kafkafied by my pilgrimage to the cemetery as I would appear to have been de-Birgittized once and for all by that visitation on the terrace restaurant in Venice. My obstructed days are behind me—along with the unobstructed ones: no more “more,” and no more nothing, either!
“Oh, Clarissa,” I say, bringing her hand to my lips, “it’s as though the past can’t do me any more harm. I just don’t have any more regrets. And my fears are gone, too. And it’s all from finding you. I’d thought the god of women, who doles them out to you, had looked down on me and said, ‘Impossible to please—the hell with him.’ And then he sends me Claire.”
That evening, after dinner in our hotel, we go up to the room to prepare for our early departure the next day. While I pack a suitcase with my clothes and with the books I have been reading on the airplanes and in bed at night, Claire falls asleep amid the clothing she has laid out on the comforter. Aside from the Kafka diaries and Broďs biography—my supplemental guidebooks to old Prague—I have with me paperbacks by Mishima, Gombrowicz, and Genet, novels for next year’s comparative literature class. I have decided to organize the first semester’s reading around the subject of erotic desire, beginning with these disquieting contemporary novels dealing with prurient and iniquitous sexuality (disquieting to students because they are the sort of books admired most by a reader like Baumgarten, novels in which the author is himself pointedly implicated in what is morally most alarming) and ending the term’s work with three masterworks concerned with illicit and ungovernable passions, whose assault is made by other means: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and “Death in Venice.”
Without awakening her, I pick Claire’s clothes off the bed and pack them in her suitcase. Handling her things, I feel overwhelmingly in love. Then I leave her a note saying that I have gone for a walk and will be back in an hour. Passing through the lobby I notice that there are now some fifteen or twenty pretty young prostitutes seated singly, and in pairs, beyond the glass doorway of the hotel’s spacious café. Earlier in the day there had been just three of them, at a single table, gaily chatting together. When I asked Professor Soska how all this is organized under socialism, he had explained that most of Prague’s whores are secretaries and shopgirls moonlighting with tacit government approval; a few are employed full-time by the Ministry of the Interior to get what information they can out of the various delegations from East and West that pass through the big hotels. The covey of miniskirted girls I see seated in the café are probably there to greet the members of the Bulgarian trade mission who occupy most of the floor beneath ours. One of them, who is stroking the belly of a brown dachshund puppy that lies cuddled in her arms, smiles my way. I smile back (costs nothing) and then am off to the Old Town Square, where Kafka and Brod used to take their evening stroll. When I get there it is after nine and the spacious melancholy plaza is empty of everything except the shadows of the aged façades enclosing it. Where the tourist buses had been parked earlier in the day there is now only the smooth, worn, cobblestone basin. The place is empty—of all, that is, except mystery and enigma. I sit alone on a bench beneath a street lamp and, through the thin film of mist, look past the looming figure of Jan Hus to the church whose most sequestered proceedings the Jewish author could observe by peering through his secret aperture.
It is here that I begin to compose in my head what at first strikes me as no more than a bit of whimsy, the first lines of an introductory lecture to my comparative literature class inspired by Kafka’s “Report to an Academy.” the story in which an ape addresses a scientific gathering. It is only a little story of a few thousand words, but one that I love, particularly its opening, which seems to me one of the most enchanting and startling in literature: “Honored Members of the Academy! You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape.”
“Honored Members of Literature 341,” I begin … but by the time I am back at the hotel and have seated myself, with pen in hand, at an empty table in a corner of the café, I have penetrated the veneer of donnish satire with which I began, and on hotel stationery am writing out in longhand a formal introductory lecture (not uninfluenced by the ape’s impeccable, professorial prose) that I want with all my heart to deliver—and to deliver not in September but at this very moment!
Seated two tables away is the prostitute with the little dachshund; she has been joined by a friend, whose favorite pet seems to be her own hair. She strokes away at it as though it is somebody else’s. Looking up from my work, I tell the waiter to bring a cognac to each of these petite and pretty working girls, neither of them as old as Claire, and order a cognac for myself.
“Cheers,” says the prostitute pleasing her puppy, and after the three of us smile at one another for a brief, enticing moment, I go back to writing what seem to me then and there somehow to be sentences of the most enormous consequence for my happy new life.
Rather than spend the first day of class talking about the reading list and the general idea behind this course, I would like to tell you some things about myself that I have never before divulged to any of my students. I have no business doing this, and until I came into the room and took my sea
t I wasn’t sure I would go through with it. And I may change my mind yet. For how do I justify disclosing to you the most intimate facts of my personal life? True, we will be meeting to discuss books for three hours a week during the coming two semesters, and from experience I know, as you do, that under such conditions a strong bond of affection can develop. However, we also know that this does not give me license to indulge what may only be so much impertinence and bad taste.
As you may already have surmised—by my style of dress, as easily as from the style of my opening remarks—the conventions traditionally governing the relationship between student and teacher are more or less those by which I have always operated, even during the turbulence of recent years. I have been told that I am one of the few remaining professors who address students in the classroom as “Mr.” and “Miss,” rather than by their given names. And however you may choose to attire yourselves—in the getup of garage mechanic, panhandler, tearoom gypsy, or cattle rustler—I still prefer to appear before you to teach wearing a jacket and a tie … though, as the observant will record, generally it will be the same jacket and the same tie. And when women students come to my office to confer, they will see, if they should even bother to look, that throughout the meeting I will dutifully leave open to the outside corridor the door to the room where we sit side by side. Some of you may be further amused when I remove my watch from my wrist, as I did only a moment ago, and place it beside my notes at the beginning of each class session. By now I no longer remember which of my own professors used to keep careful track of the passing hour in this way, but it would seem to have made its impression on me, signaling a professionalism with which I like still to associate myself.
All of which is not to say that I shall try to keep hidden from you the fact that I am flesh and blood—or that I understand that you are. By the end of the year you may even have grown a little weary of my insistence upon the connections between the novels you read for this class, even the most eccentric and off-putting of novels, and what you know so far of life. You will discover (and not all will approve) that I do not hold with certain of my colleagues who tell us that literature, in its most valuable and intriguing moments, is “fundamentally non-referential.” I may come before you in my jacket and my tie, I may address you as madam and sir, but I am going to request nonetheless that you restrain yourselves from talking about “structure,” “form,” and “symbols” in my presence. It seems to me that many of you have been intimidated sufficiently by your junior year of college and should be allowed to recover and restore to respectability those interests and enthusiasms that more than likely drew you to reading fiction to begin with and which you oughtn’t to be ashamed of now. As an experiment you might even want during the course of this year to try living without any classroom terminology at all, to relinquish “plot” and “character” right along with those very exalted words with which not a few of you like to solemnize your observations, such as “epiphany,” “persona,” and, of course, “existential” as a modifier of everything existing under the sun, I suggest this in the hope that if you talk about Madame Bovary in more or less the same tongue you use with the grocer, or your lover, you may be placed in a more intimate, a more interesting, in what might even be called a more referential relationship with Flaubert and his heroine.
