Outliving Kafka

Iwatch Franz Kafka as he writes alone in his room just before dawn breaks in Prague, I watch him hesitate, I watch him write down— tentatively, then with haste and anticipation, like a last dying breath—the final sentence of the novel he has yet to complete, the novel he may never complete. Almost immediately, almost as if what happens is the consequence of the line he has just chosen as the ending of his unfinished book, Franz Kafka hears a knock at the door, we both hear it. It is the morning of July 3, 1914, and today Franz Kafka is thirty-one years old. It is not the only anniversary this Friday brings. Exactly one year ago he announced his engagement to Felice Bauer, a marriage he has now decided to call off, a decision he will have to defend in Berlin two weeks from today, if he has the courage, that is, to confront his former bride and her parents and sister, explain the sudden rupture in front of that family tribunal. He does not attend right away to that knock, wonders if it is not an illusion. He is exhausted by the long night of writing in the apartment at Bilekgasse 10 that his sister has loaned him, even more exhausted by all the work that lies ahead if he wishes to conclude his novel, so many episodes that still have to be filled in. And he has no strength. It may be his birthday, but he is expected at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute two hours from now and then at the asbestos factory later in the afternoon—and, of course, there is the imminent war, the archduke murdered barely a week ago, the troops of Austria-hungary marching toward Russia and Serbia, all the friends who will soon die. For a moment, maimed hands and crippled legs flash through Franz Kafka’s mind, fingers missing, an eye gouged out by a machine, men on crutches slipping on the cobblestones of his city. He has spent many years trying to prevent these accidents from afflicting workers insured by his company, and now, now he knows all too well that he will be unable to prevent even one injury of the many that, like a flood, cannot be stopped. All he can do, all he wants to do, is keep writing, more so now that he has painstakingly spelled out the ending to his novel. Given these precise circumstances, he should, of course, have expected that knock, and probably the second one, which, a few seconds later, more peremptory and demanding, also startles him. Perhaps what he