The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man

by Franz Kafka

  Back then I couldn’t think like that. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a way out; at least there was no way out directly ahead of me; directly ahead of me was the crate, with each board nailed firmly to the next. There was in fact one small gap between them, something I greeted with rapturous howls of unreason when I first discovered it, but which was not nearly big enough to fit even just my tail through and which all my simian strength was unable to widen.

  I was told later that I made unusually little noise, leading the hunters to conclude that either I would soon give up the ghost or, if I managed to survive the difficult first phase, I would take very well to training. I survived the first phase. Muted sobbing, painful searches for fleas, weary licking of coconuts, knocking my skull against the crate, sticking out my tongue when someone came—these were the first occupations of my new life. But all of them came with the same feeling: no way out. Of course I now only have human words to sketch an ape’s emotions, but even if I can no longer precisely describe the old simian truths, the gist is correct, there’s no doubt about that.

  Until that moment I had always had so many ways out, and now I had none. I’d been run to ground. I would have been no less free if I’d been nailed to the floor. Why was that? Scratch the flesh between your toes until it starts to bleed, and you still won’t understand. Push yourself backwards against the bars until they almost cut you in two, and you won’t understand. I had no way out, but I had to make myself one, because I couldn’t live without it. To be pressed up against that crate for the foreseeable—it would have been the end of me. For Hagenbeck, however, the place for apes was next to that crate—so I ceased to be an ape. A lucid, beautiful deduction, one that I must have somehow gestated in my stomach, because apes think with their bellies.

  I’m afraid it will be hard to understand exactly what I mean by a way out. I’m using the term in its most everyday and fullest sense. I’m intentionally not saying freedom. I don’t mean that magnificent feeling of having freedom all around you. I may have known it as an ape and I’ve met humans who long for it. For my part, I’ve never demanded freedom, neither then nor now. Incidentally, for humans the idea of freedom is all too often a means of deceiving themselves. And although freedom is among the most exalted of feelings, so is the illusion of freedom among the most exalted of illusions. Often in variety shows, while waiting to go on, I’ve seen some pair of performers doing their work on the trapeze. They swing about, they rock back and forth, they jump around, they glide into each other’s arms. I saw one hold the other by clamping her hair in his mouth. ‘This is another example of human freedom,’ I thought, ‘movement as self-congratulation.’ What a mockery of sacred nature! A troop of apes would have laughed hard enough to blow down the building.

  No, I didn’t want freedom. Just a way out; right, left, wherever; I wanted nothing else; even if the way out proved to be an illusion, what I wanted was modest, the illusion would not be any bigger. Onwards, onwards! Anything but to stand still, arms lifted, pressed against the side of a crate.

  Today I see clearly that I could never have got away if I hadn’t had the greatest inner calm. It’s quite possible that I owe everything I’ve become to the calm that came over me after the first few days on board. And that calm I owe, in turn, to the people on that ship.

  They are good people, in spite of everything. To this day I still fondly remember the noise of their heavy footsteps echoing in my half-sleep. They were in the habit of doing everything extremely slowly. If one of them wanted to rub his eyes, he lifted his hand as if it were a dumbbell. Their jokes were crude but cheerful. Their laughter always came mixed with a coughing that sounded dangerous but meant nothing. They always had something in their mouths they could spit, and where they spat didn’t matter to them. They constantly complained that my fleas would jump across onto them; but they were never actually angry about it; they accepted as facts of life that fleas thrive in fur and that fleas are jumpers; they made their peace with it. When they were off duty, they would sometimes sit in a semicircle around me; hardly speaking, just grunting at each other; smoking their pipes as they lay stretched out on crates; slapping their thighs whenever I made the slightest movement; and now and then one of them would take a stick and scratch me where I liked it. If today I were invited to travel on that ship again I would certainly decline, but it’s equally true that my memories of my time below decks are not all horrible.

  The main effect of the calm I learnt among that circle of humans was to keep me from attempting any kind of escape. Looking back today, it seems as if I must have intuited at least that I had to find a way out if I wanted to live, but that that way out couldn’t be found by escaping. I don’t know any more whether escape was possible, but I imagine it was; for an ape, escape should always be possible. These days, my teeth are so weak I have to be careful just cracking a nut, but back then I should have managed eventually to bite through the lock. I didn’t do it. What would I have gained? As soon as I’d stuck my head out of the cage, they’d have caught me again and locked me into somewhere even worse; or I would have crept in with the other animals, the giant constrictors, say, and sighed my last in their embrace; or I might even have managed to creep up onto the deck and throw myself overboard, where I would have bobbed around for a while before drowning. Acts of despair, all of them. I wasn’t calculating in this human way, but under the influence of my surroundings I behaved as though I was.

  As I say, I didn’t calculate, but I quietly watched what was happening around me. I saw these humans come and go, always the same faces, the same movements; sometimes it seemed to me as if there were only one of them. This human or these humans could go where they wanted. A distant goal dawned on me. Nobody promised me that if I could become like them my cage would be opened. Promises aren’t made on such seemingly impossible conditions. But if you succeed in fulfilling those conditions, those promises seem to retrospectively appear precisely where you previously searched for them in vain. Now, it has to be said that there was nothing very appealing about these humans in themselves. If I’d been a devotee of the freedom described earlier, I’m sure I would have preferred the ocean to the way out that I glimpsed in their dull faces. In any case, I watched them for a long time before I began to think of these things; in fact I think it was this mass of observations that pushed me in that direction.

  It was so easy to imitate the humans. Spitting I managed after only a few days. After that we spat in each other’s faces; the only difference was that I licked my face clean afterwards; they didn’t. I could soon smoke a pipe like an old hand; if I then also tamped down the bowl with my thumb, the whole crew started cheering; the only thing was that for a long time I couldn’t grasp the difference between the pipe being full or empty.

  What I had most trouble with was the rum bottle. Just the smell tormented me; I forced myself towards it with everything that I had, but weeks went by before I could overcome my own resistance. Strangely enough, the humans took this inner struggle more seriously than anything else about me. It’s hard to distinguish between them in my memories, but there was one who came again and again, by himself or with the others, at all hours of day and night; he’d stand in front of me with a bottle and give me lessons. He didn’t understand me and he wanted to solve the riddle of what I was. He slowly uncorked the bottle and looked at me to check whether I’d understood; I admit that I always watched him with greedy, savage attention; no teacher on earth could have found a pupil like me; after the bottle had been uncorked, he lifted it to his mouth; I follow with my eyes; he nods, he’s pleased with me, and he puts the bottle to his lips; I’m delighted by incipient understanding and screech and scratch myself from head to toe; that makes him happy, he lifts the bottle and takes another swig; I’m impatient and desperate to imitate him, so I soil my cage, which he finds very satisfying; and then, holding out the bottle at arm’s length before swinging it up to his mouth, and bending backwards exaggeratedly to help me understand, he empties it
in one. Worn out by such a powerful sense of need, I can’t follow what he’s doing any more and just hang weakly from the bars, while he ends the theory lesson by rubbing his belly and grinning.

  Only now do we move onto the practical lesson. Aren’t I already too exhausted from the theory part? Yes, I’m completely drained. That’s the way it goes. Nevertheless, I grab the proffered bottle as well as I can; uncork it, trembling; getting that to work makes me stronger; I lift the bottle, I’m already all but indistinguishable from the original; I put it to my mouth and—throw it away in disgust, in disgust, although it’s empty and holds nothing more than the smell of what used to be inside; in disgust I throw the bottle on the floor. To the chagrin of my teacher, to my own greater chagrin, I remember—after I’ve thrown away the bottle—to rub my belly and give an exemplary grin.

  All too often my lessons ran along these lines. And it’s to the credit of my teacher that he was never angry with me; sometimes he did hold his burning pipe against my fur at some hard-to-reach spot until it began to smoulder, but he always extinguished it himself with a big, kindly hand; he wasn’t angry with me, he understood that we were fighting on the same side against my simian nature and that my part of the struggle was harder.

  So it was a victory for him as well as me when, one evening, in front of a big audience—it must have been some kind of celebration, a gramophone was playing, an officer was strolling around among the crew—on that evening, when I wasn’t being watched, I reached for a bottle of rum accidentally left near my cage, opened it in textbook style, then, under the growing attention of the crowd, put it to my mouth and, without hesitating, without pulling my mouth away, like a first-class drinker, my eyes bulging, my Adam’s apple bobbing, drank the whole thing dry; then threw the bottle away, not in desperation but as a flourish; admittedly forgot to rub my belly, but instead, because I couldn’t stop myself, because I was urged on by something inside me, because my senses were reeling, I shouted “Hello!”, breaking into human speech, making the leap into human society with that shout, and experiencing its echo—“Listen to that, he speaks!”—like a kiss pressed against my entire sweat-drenched body.

  As I said earlier, I felt no longing to be like the humans; I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason. And even that victory didn’t help me much. My voice immediately gave out again and only came back after months; my resistance to the rum bottle actually grew stronger; but my course had been set once and for all.

  When I was handed over to my first trainer, in Hamburg, I soon recognized that there were two possibilities for me: the zoo or the variety shows. I didn’t hesitate. I said to myself: strain every nerve to get into the variety shows; that’s the way out; the zoo is just a different cage; if you end up in there, you’re lost.

  And I learnt, gentlemen. Oh, how you can learn when you have to; you learn because you want a way out; you learn ruthlessly. You hold the whip over your own head; you lacerate yourself at the slightest reluctance. My simian self, tumbling over itself in haste, rushed out of me so quickly that my first teacher became almost monkeyish in turn, soon having to give up the lessons and move into a psychiatric hospital. I’m glad to say he was quickly released again.

  But I used up very many teachers, sometimes more than one teacher at once. As I became more confident in my abilities and the public began to follow my progress, when my future started to glitter, I took on my own teachers, had them set up in five connecting rooms, and learnt from all of them at once by leaping uninterruptedly from one room into the next.

  What progress I made! Enlightenment broke into my awakening mind from every angle! I can’t deny that it was a joy. But I can also admit that I never overestimated it, not even then and certainly not today. Through an effort that has never yet been paralleled anywhere in the world, I’ve reached the educational level of the average European. In itself, that’s nothing at all, but it meant something insofar as it helped me get out of the cage and gave me this particular way out, the human way out. There’s a wonderful idiom I love: to make yourself scarce. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve made myself scarce. I had no other way open to me, since grand freedom wasn’t on offer.

  When I look back over my development and what I’ve achieved so far, I neither criticize myself nor am I content. Hands in my pockets, a bottle of wine on the table, I half sit, half lie in a rocking chair and look out of the window. If someone visits, I welcome them in politely. My manager sits in the front room; if I call, he comes in and listens to what I have to say. In the evenings, I almost always have a show, and my successes there probably won’t be surpassed. When I come home late from a banquet, from a learned society, from some cosy get-together, I have a little half-trained chimp waiting for me, and I let her look after me in the simian style. I never see her during the day; she has the bewilderment of a trained animal in her eye; only I can see it and I can’t bear to look at it.

  Overall, I’ve certainly achieved what I wanted to achieve. I would never say that it hasn’t been worth the effort. Nor am I looking for anyone’s approval; I just want to spread what I’ve learnt. All I do is report on what I’ve experienced; even for you, gentlemen, members of the academy, all I’ve done is report.

  HOMECOMING

  I’VE COME BACK, come in through the gate, and I take a look around. It’s my father’s old farmyard. The puddle in the middle. Old, useless machinery, gathered into a heap, blocks the trapdoor into the cellar. The cat lurks on the railing. A torn piece of cloth, once wrapped around a pole in a game, lifts in the wind. I’ve arrived. Who’ll be the one to greet me? Who’s waiting behind the door to the kitchen? There’s smoke rising out of the chimney, they’re making coffee for their supper. Is it cosy, do you feel at home? I don’t know, I’m not sure. It’s my father’s house, but each brick lies cold against the next, as if occupied with its own affairs, which I’ve partly forgotten, partly never knew. What use am I to them, even if I am my father’s, the old farmer’s, son. And I don’t dare to knock at the kitchen door, I just listen from a distance, I listen standing at a distance, not so that I could be caught listening. And because I’m listening from a distance, I hear nothing, all I hear is a quiet clock chime, or I think I’ve heard it, chiming out of my childhood. What else is happening in the kitchen is a secret known only to those sitting inside it, who were here before me. The longer you hesitate outside the door, the more of a stranger you become. What would it be like if someone opened the door now and asked me a question. Wouldn’t I seem like someone who wants to keep his secrets.

  JACKALS AND ARABS

  WE’D MADE CAMP at an oasis. The others were asleep. An Arab, tall and white, came past me; he’d been seeing to the camels and was heading for the tents.

  I threw myself down on the grass; I wanted to sleep, but I couldn’t; a jackal howled in the distance; I sat back up again. And what had been far off was suddenly very near. Jackals swarming all around me; eyes glowing a matt gold before dulling again; slender bodies, their movements as nimble and synchronized as if under threat of a whip.

  One came forward from the back, pushed himself under my arm, right up against me, as if he needed my warmth, then stood in front of me so we were almost eye to eye, and spoke: “I’m the oldest jackal anywhere round here. And I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to welcome you. I’d almost given up hope, because we’ve been waiting for you almost since for ever; my mother waited for you, and her mother, and all their mothers back to the mother of all jackals. Believe me!”

  “That’s astonishing,” I said, and forgot to light the wooden torch that was supposed to keep the jackals away with its smoke. “I’m astonished to hear that. It’s only by chance that I’ve come here from the far north, and this is only a brief trip. What is it you want, jackals?”

  And as if encouraged by what was maybe an over-friendly response, they drew their circle tighter around me; I could hear them panting quick and hot.

  “We know,” the oldest one went on, �
�that you come from the north, that’s what our hopes are based on. Up there, you have a rationality that you’ll never find among the Arabs. They’re so cold and arrogant, you know, that you can never strike a spark of sense on them. They kill animals for food, and won’t touch carrion.”

  “Not so loud,” I said. “There are Arabs sleeping nearby.”

  “You really must be a foreigner,” said the jackal. “Otherwise you would know that never in the history of the world has a jackal been afraid of an Arab. Be afraid of them? Isn’t it bad enough that we have to live beside them?”

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” I said. “I wouldn’t presume to judge things that are so alien to me; it seems to be a very old feud; it’s probably in the blood, so it may well only end with bloodshed.”

  “You’re very wise,” said the old jackal, and they all panted even faster, their lungs racing even though they were standing still; a bitter stink streamed from their open muzzles and I sometimes had to clench my teeth to tolerate it. “You’re very wise; what you say is in our ancient teachings. We’ll take their blood and the feud will be over.”

  “Oh!” I said, more wildly than I wanted. “They’d defend themselves; they’d use guns to shoot you down in droves.”

  “You misunderstand us in the human way,” he said, “even if you are from the far north. The Nile doesn’t have enough water to wash us clean. Just the sight of their living bodies sends us running off for cleaner air, into the desert, that’s why it’s our home.”

  And all the jackals around me, who had been joined by many more from further away, put their heads down between their forelegs and scrubbed them with their paws; it was as if they were trying to hide their disgust, and it was so horrible that I would have liked to leap right over them, out of their circle, and flee.