Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

I write to you after we are both dead. Whereas you don’t stir. There won’t be any response from you, I know that. You began that letter by saying you were afraid of me — and then you were afraid to let me read it. And now you’ve escaped altogether. Because without the Kafka will-power you can’t reach out from nothing and nowhere. I was going to call it a desert, but where’s the sand, where’re the camels, where’s the sun — I’m still mensch enough to crack a joke — you see? Oh excuse me, I forgot — you didn’t like my jokes, my fooling around with kids. My poor boy, unfortunately you had no life in you, in all those books and diaries and letters (the ones you posted, to strangers, to women) you said it a hundred times before you put the words in my mouth, in your literary way, in that letter: you yourself were ‘unfit for life’. So death comes, how would you say, quite naturally to you. It’s not like that for a man of vigour like I was, I can tell you, and so here I am writing, talking. . I don’t know if there is a word for what this is. Anyway, it’s Hermann Kafka . I’ve outlived you here, same as in Prague.

That is what you really accuse me of, you know, for sixty or so pages (I notice the length of that letter varies a bit from language to language, of course it’s been translated into everything — I don’t know what — Hottentot and Icelandic, Chinese, although you wrote it ‘for me’ in German). I outlived you, not for seven years, as an old sick man, after you died, but while you were young and alive. Clear as daylight, from the examples you give of being afraid of me, from the time you were a little boy: you were not afraid, you were envious. At first, when I took you swimming and you say you felt yourself a nothing, puny and weak beside my big, strong, naked body in the change-house — all right, you also say you were proud of such a father, a father with a fine physique. . And may I remind you that father was taking the trouble and time, the few hours he could get away from the business, to try and make something of that nebich , develop his muscles, put some flesh on those poor little bones so he would grow up sturdy? But even before your barmitzvah the normal pride every boy has in his father changed to jealousy, with you. You couldn’t be like me, so you decided I wasn’t good enough for you: coarse, loud-mouthed, ate ‘like a pig’ (your very words), cut my fingernails at table, cleaned my ears with a toothpick. Oh yes, you can’t hide anything from me, now, I’ve read it all, all the thousands and thousands of words you’ve used to shame your own family, your own father, before the whole world. And with your gift for words you turn everything inside out and prove, like a circus magician, it’s love, the piece of dirty paper’s a beautiful silk flag, you loved your father too much , and so — what? You tell me. You couldn’t be like him? You wanted to be like him ? The ghasa , the shouter, the gobbler? Yes, my son, these ‘insignificant details’ you write down and quickly dismiss — these details hurt. Eternally. After all, you’ve become immortal through writing, as you insist you did, only about me, ‘everything was about you, father’; a hundred years after your birth, the Czech Jew, son of Hermann and Julie Kafka, is supposed to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Your work will be read as long as there are people to read it. That’s what they say everywhere, even the Germans who burned your sisters and my grandchildren in incinerators. Some say you were also some kind of prophet (God knows what you were thinking, shut away in your room while the rest of the family was having a game of cards in the evening); after you died, some countries built camps where the things you made up for that story ‘In The Penal Colony’ were practised, and ever since then there have been countries in different parts of the world where the devil’s work that came into your mind is still carried out — I don’t want to think about it.

You were not blessed to bring any happiness to this world with your genius, my son. Not at home, either. Well, we had to accept what God gave. Do you ever stop to think whether it wasn’t a sorrow for me (never mind — for once — how you felt) that your two brothers, who might have grown up to bring your mother and me joy, died as babies? And you sitting there at meals always with a pale, miserable, glum face, not a word to say for yourself, picking at your food. . You haven’t forgotten that I used to hold up the newspaper so as not to have to see that. You bear a grudge. You’ve told everybody. But you don’t think about what there was in a father’s heart. From the beginning. I had to hide it behind a newspaper — anything. For your sake.

Because you were never like any other child. You admit it: however we had tried to bring you up, you say you would have become a ‘weakly, timid, hesitant person’. What small boy doesn’t enjoy a bit of a rough-house with his father? But writing at thirty-six years old, you can only remember being frightened when I chased you, in fun, round the table, and your mother, joining in, would snatch you up out of my way while you shrieked. For God’s sake, what’s so terrible about that? I should have such memories of my childhood! I know you never liked to hear about it, it bored you, you don’t spare me the written information that it ‘wore grooves in your brain’, but when I was seven years old I had to push my father’s barrow from village to village, with open sores on my legs in winter. Nobody gave me delicacies to mess about on my plate; we were glad when we got potatoes. You make a show of me, mimicking how I used to say these things. But wasn’t I right when I told you and your sisters — provided for by me, living like fighting-cocks because I stood in the business twelve hours a day — what did you know of such things? What did anyone know, what I suffered as a child? And then it’s a sin if I wanted to give my own son a little pleasure I never had.

And that other business you schlepped up out of the past — the night I’m supposed to have shut you out on the pavlatche . Because of you the whole world knows the Czech word for the kind of balcony we had in Prague! Yes, the whole world knows that story, too. I am famous, too. You made me famous as the father who frightened his child once and for all: for life. Thank you very much. I want to tell you that I don’t even remember that incident. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, although you always had an imagination such as nobody ever had before or since, eh? But it could only have been the last resort your mother and I turned to — you know that your mother spoilt you, over-protected they would call it, now. You couldn’t possibly remember how naughty you were at night, what a little tyrant you were, how you thought of every excuse to keep us sleepless. It was all right for you, you could nap during the day, a small child. But I had my business, I had to earn the living, I needed some rest. Pieces of bread, a particular toy you fancied, make wee-wee, another blanket on, a blanket taken off, drinks of water — there was no end to your tricks and whining. I suppose I couldn’t stand it any longer. I feared to do you some harm. (You admit I never beat you, only scared you a little by taking off my braces in preparation to use them on you.) So I put you out of harm’s way. That night. Just for a few minutes. It couldn’t have been more than a minute. As if your mother would have let you catch cold! God forbid! And you’ve held it against me all your life. I’m sorry, I have to say it again, that old expression of mine that irritated you so much: I wish I had your worries.

Everything that went wrong for you is my fault. You write it down for sixty pages or so and at the same time you say to me ‘I believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement.’ I was a ‘true Kafka’, you took after your mother’s, the Löwy side, etc. — all you inherited from me, according to you, were your bad traits, without having the benefit of my vitality. I was ‘too strong’ for you. You could not help it; I could not help it. So? All you wanted was for me to admit that , and we could have lived in peace. You were judge, you were jury, you were accused; you sentenced yourself, first. ‘At my desk, that is my place. My head in my hands — that is my attitude.’ (And that’s what your poor mother and I had to look at, that was our pride and joy, our only surviving son!) But I was accused, too; you were judge, you were jury in my case, too. Right? By what right? Fancy goods — you despised the family business that fed us all, that paid for your education. What concern was it of yours, the way I treated the shop assistants? You only took an interest so you could judge, judge. It was a mistake to have let you study law. You did nothing with your qualification, your expensive education that I slaved and ruined my health for. Nothing but sentence me. — Now what did I want to say? Oh yes. Look what you wanted me to admit, under the great writer’s beautiful words. If something goes wrong, somebody must be to blame, eh? We were not straw dolls, pulled about from above on strings. One of us must be to blame. And don’t tell me you think it could be you. The stronger is always to blame, isn’t that so? I’m not a deep thinker like you, only a dealer in retail fancy goods, but isn’t that a law of life? ‘The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having.’ You think I’ll believe you’re paying me a compliment, forgiving me, when you hand me the worst insult any father could receive? If it’s what I am that’s to blame, then I’m to blame, to the last drop of my heart’s blood and whatever this is that’s survived my body, for what I am , for being alive and begetting a son! You! Is that it? Because of you I should never have lived at all!