Франц Кафка - The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man - Essential Stories

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.