Franz Kafka moved in with me today into my rented flat with a broken radiator hissing like a dying animal.
His hair is greasy with the slime of the grave. His bald pate, coloured like a palm tree in the middle of an oasis of hair, shakes dandruff sequins from the desert mirage onto the floor. His hollow eyes, the size of a vulture’s, penetrate me.
“Franz,” I say, “what are you doing at an hour like this? You ought to be in bed!”
Franz winks and smiles wide, revealing what remains of his two teeth.
“Franz, why don’t you talk to me? Speak. That’s what you were born to do.”
“I’ve been talking all my life,” he says, “but no one listened. In death it’s too late to speak.”
After the fact. Poor boy. He never looked like a man. There he sits, in a Halloween costume: a white sheet with boogeyman eye slits beneath his forehead, trapped inside a boy’s body, frozen at the age of twenty-two.
“Franz, I feel sorry for you. You’re stuck inside a boy’s body. You look twenty-two.”
“If you’d let me marry you,” he continues with my rhyme, “I wouldn’t be so blue.”
“That’s cheap. You can do better than that. We’ve made great strides since your time in the realm of poetry, and you don’t stand a chance of catching up with us.”
“And what about prose?” he asks.
I sit up in bed. “The novel — alas the novel! — always lags behind. You’re still ahead of us in that area, bro.”
He thinks it strange that I speak with him on such familiar terms, my being a woman and all, but I explain to him the sexual revolution and finally comprehension’s light bulb flickers.
The radiator hisses, interrupting our silence.
“It’s simple,” I say. “The world has changed in unfathomable ways since you were born. War didn’t even have a shape back then. Now it resembles a blob of chewing gum that expands as you add one more blob to the mixture. We keep chewing, chewing, chewing, until some nasty fink comes along and rips it out of our mouth.”
“When will that happen?” he asks.
“When the world ends,” I say. “Nuclear war.”
“How come you know all this?” he asks. “How can you sound so certain?”
“It takes practice.” I lean against him to make him smell the beer on my tongue, the froth still fresh on my lips. “I have a talent for truth.”
“Women were certainly different in my day and age. They were more delicate. I liked them better that way.”
We go on like this for hours. I disagree with nearly everything he says, yet I am entranced. I am glad to meet him now, but I wish we were alive together at the same time. Then I could have truly exposed my soul. We would have walked the streets of Prague arguing about syntax and tracing gargoyles on ancient churches. I feel the cold cobblestones on the soles of my feet and smell the Vltava River as it snakes through the city, earthy and fresh, wafting the scent of fish and bread that I hope we will break together. He could have been the love of my life, although I might have been jealous too. Not of other women, but of his relationship to words. I would have yearned for him to see me as his equal.
We drink stale coffee late into the night, as he shares stories from his days as an insurance clerk at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute near the edge of Prague’s Old Town. He tells me about a man whose hand was crushed while he was working in a factory. Since he could no longer write, his wife had to come to his office to fill out the compensation form.
“I tried to help her,” he explained, “but the claim was refused.” I see tears forming in his hollow eye sockets. I wonder if the sockets are deep enough to hold the tears.
His tales keep me up in the middle of the night, refusing me sleep. I tell him that I want to continue exploring the dreamworld with him, but I need to sleep, because I have to get up early for work.
He disagrees and tells me that life is too short for sleep. Franz is a talker. I’m a listener. His steady voice grates against my ear, an ax that hurts so much that finally I ask him what’s the point.
“The point of what?” he says, confused. This is the first time that I have interrupted him in the middle of a speech.
“The point of writing,” I explain. “The point of it if it doesn’t redeem your pain.”
“Easy,” he says. “The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune. They make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves. They make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide —”
“Franz,” I interrupt again, worried, “why do you say that?” He ignores me.
The radiator knocks, as if something is trying to escape the pipes.
“ — lost in a forest remote from human habitation. A book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.”
A sharp pain slices through my chest, as if I were myself the victim of his words. A half-filled glass trembles on the windowsill. Now that he’s coined a phrase I don’t think he’ll ever shut up. Franz’s voice is a lonely trumpet in the middle of the sea, but his loneliness is a matter of indifference to him, as well as, perhaps, to me. Franz keeps talking. He slouches behind his laptop screen, glowing with unfinished sentences.
Meanwhile, I turn to a stack of unpaid bills on the table and begin processing them.
“Why do you waste your life in pointless bureaucracy?” he asks me.
“Someone has to pay the rent, after all,” I say. It will not be him.
The Tributary 