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

Karl had to keep himself from lunging forward. But the captain was already there, saying, “Let’s hear what the man has to say. It’s true that Schubal has recently been getting a bit too independent for my liking—which isn’t to say anything in your favour.” The latter was directed at the stoker, but it was natural that the captain couldn’t take up his case just like that, and everything seemed to be on the right track. The stoker began his explanation and even managed to give Schubal the title “Mr”. How happy Karl was, standing by the chief purser’s abandoned desk, where he kept pressing down a parcel scale with his fingers, out of sheer delight.—Mr Schubal is unfair! Mr Schubal gives preferential treatment to foreigners! Mr Schubal ejected the stoker from the engine room and sent him to scrub the toilet, which was certainly not his job!—At one point doubt was even cast on Mr Schubal’s work ethic, which was apparently discussed rather more than it really existed. At that, Karl stared at the captain with all his might, candidly, as though they were colleagues, so that he wouldn’t let himself be unfavourably influenced by the stoker’s slightly clumsy way of expressing himself. Nevertheless, for all the stoker talked, he didn’t actually bring up anything concrete, and although the captain still looked straight at him, his face set with determination to hear him out this time, the other men started to get impatient and the stoker’s voice lost its hold on the room’s attention, which was not a good sign. The first was the gentleman in civilian clothes who began to toy with his bamboo cane, tapping it, albeit quietly, on the parquet floor. The others began to glance around the room and the two officials from the port authority, who were obviously pressed for time, took up their files and started looking through them again, if still a bit absent-mindedly; the ship’s officer shifted his chair closer to them, and the chief purser, who thought he’d won the day, heaved a deep and ironic sigh. Only the steward seemed unaffected by the air of distraction that was setting in among the others, because he sympathized with the plight of a poor man put in front of the powerful, and he nodded seriously at Karl as if trying to assure him of something.

Meanwhile, the life of the harbour went on outside the window: a flat cargo barge carrying a mountain of barrels, which must have been ingeniously stacked not to roll off, went by and plunged the room into shadow; small motor launches, which Karl could now have got a good look at if he’d had a moment, swooshed past in dead straight lines, twitching with the hands of the men standing upright at the helms; strange floating objects kept popping up out of the unsettled waters, but they were swamped again at once and sank out of Karl’s astonished sight; boats belonging to the ocean liners were rowed ashore by toiling sailors, each stuffed with passengers who quietly and expectantly sat where they’d been told to, even though a few couldn’t resist turning their heads from side to side to see the changing backdrop. It was motion without end, a restlessness transferred from the restless deep to these helpless people and their works!

The whole situation urged speed, clarity, the most precise description, but what did the stoker do? He talked himself up into a sweat, his hands trembled so much he couldn’t hold the papers on the window sill; he thought of endless complaints to make about Schubal and in his opinion any one of them should have been enough to bury him for good, but what he managed to present to the captain was just a sad mishmash of all of them. The man with the bamboo cane had already started whistling quietly and looking at the ceiling, the men from the port authority had drawn the ship’s officer over to their table and showed no sign of releasing him again, the chief purser was visibly holding himself back from butting in only because the captain had stayed so calm, and the steward was waiting attentively for the order that the captain must soon give about what to do with the stoker.

Karl couldn’t stand idly by any longer. He went slowly over to the group, and as he went he thought quickly about the cleverest way he could get a grip on what was happening. The time was ripe: only a little more of this and he and the stoker would both be thrown out of the office. The captain might be a good man and might also, as it seemed to Karl, have some particular reason for presenting himself as a fair commander, but at the end of the day he wasn’t an instrument you could play however you wanted—and that was exactly how the stoker was trying to handle him, albeit out of sincere and boundless indignation.

Karl said to the stoker: “You’ve got to explain it more simply, more clearly; the captain can’t take it seriously, the way you’re explaining it. Do you think the captain knows the surname of every engineer and errand boy, or their Christian names, so that you can just refer to them like that and he’ll know who you’re talking about? You’ve got to arrange your complaints, say the most important thing first, then the other things in descending order, and it might turn out that most of them you don’t even have to mention. You’ve always explained it so clearly to me!” If you can steal suitcases in America, you can also tell a little white lie here and there, he thought apologetically.

If only it had helped! Wasn’t it already too late? The stoker broke off as soon as he heard Karl’s familiar voice, but his eyes were glazed with the tears of wounded male pride, of dreadful memories, of an extreme predicament, and he couldn’t even properly make out Karl’s face any more. How could he now—Karl silently understood this as he stood in front of the silent man—how could he now suddenly change his whole manner of speech, especially when it must seem to him that he’d already put forward all there was to say, without anything to show for it, while at the same time, it also seemed that he hadn’t really said anything yet and couldn’t expect these gentlemen to keep on listening to the rest of the story. And in this moment, here comes Karl, his only supporter, trying to give him some good advice, but instead only showing him that all, truly all, is lost.

‘If only I’d come quicker instead of looking out of the window,’ Karl said to himself, then bowed his face away from the stoker and clapped his hands against the seams of his trousers as a sign that every hope was at an end.

But the stoker misunderstood, somehow getting the idea that Karl was secretly criticizing him, and, hoping to win him round, he—on top of everything—started to quarrel with Karl. He did so at a point when the men at the round table had long since become resentful of the unnecessary noise disturbing their important work, when the chief purser was beginning to find the captain’s patience incomprehensible and was on the brink of erupting, when the steward had reverted to being entirely his bosses’ man and was weighing up the stoker with a wild look in his eye, and when the gentleman with the bamboo cane, to whom the captain occasionally sent a friendly glance and who was by now totally indifferent to the stoker, even disgusted by him, took out a small notebook and, evidently preoccupied with something else entirely, let his attention wander back and forth between the notebook and Karl.

“I know, I know,” said Karl, who was finding it difficult to defend himself against the tirade that the stoker had now directed at him, but nevertheless still kept up an amiable smile for him. “You’re quite right, absolutely, I never doubted it.” He would have liked to grab the stoker’s gesticulating hands, for fear of being struck, but would have liked even more to push him into a corner and whisper a few quiet, comforting words that no one else would have needed to hear. But the stoker was totally beside himself. Karl began to take some solace from the thought that, if need be, the stoker would be able to subdue all seven men present with the strength of his despair. On the desk, however, there was a raised section with far too many buttons, all connected to the electrical system; simply pressing a hand down on it would have roused the whole ship and filled its corridors with people hostile to them.