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

The stoker knocked respectfully on the door and, when someone shouted “Enter,” he gestured at Karl not to be afraid and to come in. Karl did go inside, but stayed close to the door. Out of the room’s three windows he could see the waves of the open sea, and as he watched their cheerful movement, his heart thudded as if he hadn’t just been looking at the sea nonstop for five long days. Huge ships crossed one another’s paths, so heavy that they shifted only slightly with the force of the waves. If you narrowed your eyes, it looked as if these ships were swaying under their own weight. On their masts they flew long, narrow flags, blown taut by their speed but still wriggling from side to side. Gun salutes rang out, presumably from warships, and the long barrels of one passing quite close by, shining brightly as the sun struck its steel cladding, were rocked back and forth by the ship’s steady, smooth but not quite perfectly horizontal motion. The smaller boats and launches could only be seen in the distance, at least when standing by the door, but there were swarms of them running in through the gaps between the big ships. Behind all this stood New York, watching Karl through its skyscrapers’ hundred thousand windows. Yes, in this room you knew where you were.

At a round table sat three men, one a ship’s officer in his blue jacket, the two others officials from the port authority in black American uniforms. Stacked high on the table in front of them were all sorts of documents, which the officer skimmed over with a pen in his hand, then passed to the two others, who read or copied out certain sections and put them in their briefcases, pausing only when one of them, who kept making a clicking noise with his teeth, dictated something for his colleague’s report.

Sitting at a desk by the window, with his back to the door, sat a diminutive man working through a row of heavy ledgers lined up at his eye level on a strong shelf. Next to him was an open, empty-looking cash box.

The second window was unobstructed and gave the best view. Near the third, however, stood two more gentlemen having a murmured conversation. One, wearing a naval uniform and toying with the hilt of his sword, was leaning against the window frame. The man he was talking to was facing the window, and now and then his movements revealed part of a row of decorations on the first man’s chest. He was in civilian clothes and carried a thin bamboo cane, which, because his hands were on his hips, stuck out like a sword of his own.

Karl didn’t have much time to take all this in because a steward came up to them and, giving the stoker a look that plainly said he didn’t belong there, asked what he wanted. The stoker answered, as quietly as he’d been asked, that he would like to speak to the chief purser. The steward, for his part, rejected this request with a gesture, but nonetheless walked softly across to the man with the ledgers, making a wide detour around the table. The purser—you could see it clearly—literally stiffened at what the steward said to him, but eventually turned towards the stoker and sternly waved his hand to dismiss him, and then dismissed the steward, too, for good measure. At that, the steward came back to the stoker and, as if confiding something to him, said, “Leave this room at once!”

Upon receiving this response, the stoker looked down at Karl as if Karl were the stoker’s heart and he were silently lamenting his sorrows to it. Without a second thought, Karl set off and marched straight across the room, even lightly brushing the officer’s chair as he passed; the steward went after him, leaning forward with his arms held out ready to grab him, as if he were chasing a bug, but Karl was first to the purser’s table and he held on to it in case the steward tried to pull him away.

Of course the whole room suddenly got very lively. The officer at the table jumped to his feet, the men from the port authority were calm but alert, the two gentlemen at the window stepped closer together, while the steward retreated, believing that anywhere the higher-ups showed an interest was somewhere he was out of place. The stoker, still by the door, waited nervously for his help to be called upon. The chief purser finally swung his chair around to the right.

Karl rummaged in his secret pocket, which he had no hesitation in revealing to these people, fished out his passport and laid it open on the table without any other introduction. The chief purser seemed to consider this passport irrelevant and flicked it aside with his fingers, at which Karl, as if this formality had been correctly taken care of, put it back in his pocket.

“I have to say,” he then began, “that in my opinion this stoker has been unjustly treated. There’s a certain Schubal who keeps doing him down. He’s already served on very many ships, all of which he can name for you, to the complete satisfaction of their captains, he’s hard-working, takes his job seriously, and it really doesn’t make any sense that, on this one ship, where what’s required isn’t especially difficult, not like it is on a merchant clipper, for example, he wouldn’t be up to the mark. It can therefore only be slander that’s preventing him from getting ahead and robbing him of the recognition he deserves, and which he would certainly otherwise be getting. I’m only giving the general outline here, the specific complaints he’ll present to you himself.” Karl had directed this speech to everyone in the room, because they were already listening and because it seemed far more likely that there would be one fair-minded man among the group than that that man would happen to be the chief purser. Cunningly, Karl had omitted that he’d known the stoker for such a short time. And he would actually have spoken much better if he hadn’t been thrown off by the red face of the gentleman with the bamboo cane, which he could see properly from his new vantage point.

“It’s all true, every word,” said the stoker before anyone had asked him, indeed before anyone had even looked at him. This over-hastiness would have been a big mistake had the gentleman with the decorations, who Karl now realized was the captain, not already made the decision to listen to the stoker. He reached out his hand and told the stoker, “Come over here!” with a voice so hard you could have hit it with a hammer. Now everything depended on the impression the stoker made; Karl didn’t have any doubts about the rightness of his cause.

Luckily, in this moment it turned out that the stoker was a man of the world. With exemplary calm, he neatly fished a little bundle of papers and a notebook out of his suitcase and, as if it were the obvious thing to do, simply bypassed the chief purser and took his papers straight to the captain, for whom he spread his evidence out on the window sill. The chief purser had no choice but to go over there himself. “The man is a well-known troublemaker,” he said in explanation, “He spends more time at the cash desk than in the engine room. He’s driven Schubal, that quiet soul, to the brink of desperation. Now listen here!” he turned to the stoker, “don’t you think you’ve finally taken this pushiness of yours too far? How many times have you already been thrown out by the cashiers, just as you and your completely and utterly unwarranted demands entirely deserve! How many times have you come running from there to this office! How often have you already been told, quite rightly, that Schubal is your direct superior and that it’s him you have to sort these things out with! And now you’ve got so shameless that you come barging in when the captain’s present and bother him with this, and you’re not even embarrassed about bringing along this boy, who I’ve never seen on the ship before, to trot out these ridiculous allegations for you!”