Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

All that talk about going away. You called your home (more riddles) ‘My prison — my fortress’. You grumbled — in print, everything ended up in print, my son — that your room was only a passage, a thoroughfare between the living room and your parents’ bedroom. You complained you had to write in pencil because we took away your ink to stop you writing. It was for your own good, your health — already you were a grown man, a qualified lawyer, but you know you couldn’t look after yourself. Scribbling away half the night, you’d have been too tired to work properly in the mornings, you’d have lost your position at the Assicurazioni Generali (or was it by then the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt für das Königreich Böhmen, my memory doesn’t get any better, here). And I wasn’t made of money. I couldn’t go on supporting everybody for ever.

You’ve published every petty disagreement in the family. It was a terrible thing, according to you, we didn’t want you to go out in bad weather, your poor mother wanted you to wrap up. You with your delicate health, always sickly — you didn’t inherit my constitution, it was only a lifetime of hard work, the business, the family worries that got me, in the end! You recorded that you couldn’t go for a walk without your parents making a fuss, but at twenty-eight you were still living at home. Going away. My poor boy. You could hardly get yourself to the next room. You shut yourself up when people came to visit. Always crawling off to bed, sleeping in the day (oh yes, you couldn’t sleep at night, not like anybody else), sleeping your life away. You invented Amerika instead of having the guts to emigrate, get up off the bed, pack up and go there, make a new life! Even that girl you jilted twice managed it. Did you know Felice is still alive somewhere, there now, in America? She’s an old, old woman with great-grandchildren. They didn’t get her into the death camps those highly educated people say you knew about before they happened. America you never went to, Spain you dreamt about. . your Uncle Alfred was going to find you jobs there, in Madeira, the Azores. . God knows where else. Grandson of a ritual slaughterer, a schochet , that was why you couldn’t bear to eat meat, they say, and that made you weak and undecided. So that was my fault, too, because my poor father had to earn a living. When your mother was away from the flat, you’d have starved yourself to death if it hadn’t been for me. And what was the result? You resented so much what I provided for you, you went and had your stomach pumped out! Like someone who’s been poisoned! And you didn’t forget to write it down, either: ‘My feeling is that disgusting things will come out.’

Whatever I did for you was dreck . You felt ‘despised, condemned, beaten down’ by me. But you despised me ; the only difference, I wasn’t so easy to beat down, eh? How many times did you try to leave home, and you couldn’t go? It’s all there in your diaries, in the books they write about you. What about that other masterpiece of yours, ‘The Judgement’. A father and son quarrelling, and then the son goes and drowns himself, saying ‘Dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same.’ The wonderful discovery about that story, you might like to hear, it proves Hermann Kafka most likely didn’t want his son to grow up and be a man, any more than his son wanted to manage without his parents’ protection. The meshuggener who wrote that, may he get rich on it! I wouldn’t wish it on him to try living with you, that’s all, the way we had to. When your hunchback friend secretly showed your mother a complaining letter of yours, to get you out of your duty of going to the asbestos factory to help your own sister’s husband, Brod kept back one thing you wrote. But now it’s all published, all, all, all the terrible things you thought about your own flesh and blood. ‘I hate them all’: father, mother, sisters.

You couldn’t do without us — without me. You only moved away from us when you were nearly thirty-two, a time when every man has a wife and children already, a home of his own.

You were always dependent on someone. Your friend Brod, poor devil. If it hadn’t been for the little hunchback, who would know of your existence today? Between the incinerators that finished your sisters and the fire you wanted to burn up your manuscripts, nothing would be left. The kind of men you invented, the Gestapo, confiscated whatever papers of yours there were in Berlin, and no trace of them has ever been found, even by the great Kafka experts who stick their noses into everything. You said you loved Max Brod more than yourself. I can see that. You liked the idea he had of you, that you knew wasn’t yourself (you see, sometimes I’m not so grob , uneducated, knowing nothing but fancy goods, maybe I got from you some ‘insights’). Certainly, I wouldn’t recognise my own son the way Brod described you: ‘the aura Kafka gave out of extraordinary strength, something I’ve never encountered elsewhere, even in meetings with great and famous men. . the infallible solidity of his insights never tolerated a single lacuna, nor did he ever speak an insignificant word. . He was life-affirming, ironically tolerant towards the idiocies of the world, and therefore full of sad humour.’

I must say, your mother who put up with your faddiness when she came back from a day standing in the business, your sisters who acted in your plays to please you, your father who worked his heart out for his family — we never got the benefit of your tolerance. Your sisters (except Ottla, the one you admit you were a bad influence on, encouraging her to leave the shop and work on a farm like a peasant, to starve herself with you on rabbit-food, to marry that goy) were giggling idiots, so far as you were concerned. Your mother never felt the comfort of her son’s strength. You never gave us anything to laugh at, sad or otherwise. And you hardly spoke to me at all, even an insignificant word. Whose fault was it you were that person you describe ‘strolling about on the island in the pool, where there are neither books nor bridges, hearing the music, but not being heard.’ You wouldn’t cross a road, never mind a bridge, to pass the time of day, to be pleasant to other people, you shut yourself in your room and stuffed your ears with Oropax against the music of life, yes, the sounds of cooking, people coming and going (what were we supposed to do, pass through closed doors?), even the singing of the pet canaries annoyed you, laughter, the occasional family tiff, the bed squeaking where normal married people made love.

What I’ve just said may surprise. That last bit, I mean. But since I died in 1931 I know the world has changed a lot. People, even fathers and sons, are talking about things that shouldn’t be talked about. People aren’t ashamed to read anything, even private diaries, even letters. There’s no shame, anywhere. With that, too, you were ahead of your time, Franz. You were not ashamed to write in your diary, which your friend Brod would publish — you must have known he would publish everything, make a living out of us — things that have led one of the famous Kafka scholars to study the noises in our family flat in Prague. Writing about me: ‘It would have been out of character for Hermann Kafka to restrain any noises he felt like making during coupling; it would have been out of character for Kafka, who was ultra-sensitive to noise and had grown up with these noises, to mention the suffering they caused him.’

You left behind you for everyone to read that the sight of your parents’ pyjamas and nightdress on the bed disgusted you. Let me also speak freely like everyone else. You were made in that bed. That disgusts me: your disgust over a place that should have been holy to you, a place to hold in the highest respect. Yet you are the one who complained about my coarseness when I suggested you ought to find yourself a woman — buy one, hire one — rather than try to prove yourself a man at last, at thirty-six, by marrying some Prague Jewish tart who shook her tits in a thin blouse. Yes, I’m speaking of that Julie Wohryzek, the shoemaker’s daughter, your second fiancée. You even had the insolence to throw the remark in my face, in that letter you didn’t send, but I’ve read it anyway, I’ve read everything now, although you said I put ‘In The Penal Colony’ on the bedside table and never mentioned it again.