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ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
Gustav Janouch
15
16
Gustav Janouch
DAMP OCTOBER
A theRAINY,
corridors of the Accident
DAY. In
Insurance
Institution the lights were on. Kafka's office
was like a twilit cave. He sat bent low over his
desk. In front of him lay an octavo sheet of
greyish office paper. In his hand was a long
yellow pencil. As I approached him, he laid the
pencil down on the paper, which was covered
with hastily executed sketches of strange figures.
"You've been drawing?"
Kafka gave an apologetic smile: "No! These
are only doodles."
"May I look? As you know, I'm very interested in drawing."
"But these aren't drawings to be shown to
anyone. They are purely personal, and therefore
illegible, hieroglyphs."
He took the piece of paper and with both
hands pressed it into a ball which he tossed
into a waste-paper basket beside the desk. "My
figures have no proper spatial proportions. They
have no horizon of their own. The perspective
of the shapes I try to capture lies outside the
paper, at the other unsharpened end of the
pencilin myself!"
He reached into the waste-paper basket, took
out the ball of paper he had just thrown in,
smoothed out the crumpled sheets and tore it
into very small pieces, which with a vigorous
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Gustav Janouch
18
at Kafka's wide
of all the varied architectural
features of the city. He was familiar not only
with its palaces and churches but also with the
most obscure alleys of the Old Town. He knew
the medieval names of the houses even though
their ancient signs no longer hung over their
entrances but in the city museum in the Poric.
Kafka read the city's history out of the walls
of its ancient houses. He conducted me by
crooked alleyways into narrow, funnel-shaped
interior courtyards in Old Prague, which he
called "spittoons of light"; he walked with me,
near the old Charles Bridge, through a baroque
entrance hall, across a court no bigger than a
handkerchief with round Renaissance arches
and through a dark tubular tunnel, to a tiny
inn enclosed in a small court which bore the
name of The Stargazer (Czech: U hvezddru),
because here Johannes Kepler had lived for
many years, and here, in the year 1609, his
famous book, which far outstripped all the
scientific knowledge of his day, the Astronomia
Nova was born.
Kafka loved the streets, palaces, gardens and
churches of the city where he was born. He
looked with joyful interest through the pages
of all the books on the antiquities of Prague
which I brought to him in his office. His eyes
and hands literally caressed the pages of such
publications, though he had read them all long
before I placed them on his desk. His eyes
shone with the look of a passionate collector.
Yet he was the precise opposite of a collector.
The past was for him not some historically
dead collector's piece, but a supple instrument
of knowledge, a bridge to today. . . .
OFTEN MARVELLED
I knowledge
Lederer,
M Y gave me an anthology ofErnstexpressionist
SCHOOLFELLOW,
19
KAFKA: SELF-CARICATURE
20
Gustav Janouch
C E A F T E R S U P P E R I mentioned my
O Nafternoon
walks with Kafka to my father.
He said: "Kafka personifies patience and kindness. I cannot remember an occasion when
there was trouble in the Institution on his
account. Yet his approachability is not a sign
of weakness or a desire to please. On the contrary; he is easy to get on with because, by
being completely fair, just, and at the same time
understanding towards others, he commands a
similar response from everyone around him.
People speak freely to him, and if they find it
hard to agree with him, they prefer to say nothing rather than disagree. This happens in fact
quite often,
because Kafka
expresses
unpopular views which are completely his own
and contradict accepted opinion. The people at
the Accident Insurance Institution don't always
understand him. But all the same they are fond
of him. For them, he is some strange kind of
saint. But so he is to many others. Not so long
ago an old labourer whose leg had been
smashed by a crane on a building site said to
me: 'He's no lawyer. He's a saint.' The labourer
was to receive only a paltry pension from us.
He brought an action against us which was not
in the proper legal form. The old man would
certainly have lost his case, if at the last
moment a well-known Prague lawyer had not
visited him andwithout being paid a penny
by the old manhad not expertly redrafted the
labourer's case, so that he helped the poor devil
to win it. The lawyer, as I learned later, had
been instructed, briefed and paid by Kafka, so
that, as the legal representative of the Accident
Insurance Institution, he might honourably lose
the case against the old labourer."
I was delighted, but my father looked
anxious.
He said: "It's not the only case which Kafka
has conducted in this way. The staff take different views about it. Some admire him. Others
say he is a bad lawyer."
"And you?" I interrupted my father. "How
do you feel?"
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Gustav Janouch
22
some
A interesting details about hisI learned
relations with
FEW
DAYS
LATER
the anarchists.
Kafka and I were walking from the
Altstadter Ring through the Geistgasse and
past the Church of the Brothers of Mercy, to
the Moldau. There we turned to the left,
crossed the square in front of the Parliament
House and sauntered along the Kreuzherrengasse to the Charles Bridge, where we entered
the Karlsgasse and so returned to the Altstadter
Ring.
During our walk we met various passers-by
of no particular interest. On the corner of the
Ekidi and the Karlsgasse, however, we almost
collided with two ladies of a quite unmistakable kind. One had an almost circular,
white-powdered face, under a great bird's nest
of red hair, while the other, somewhat smaller,
had a painted mousy face and the slightly
swarthy complexion of a gypsy.
We stood against the wall, but the two
women in any case took no notice of us. They
were too deeply occupied with an event which
had occurred shortly before.
"He took me by the scruff of the neck and
shot me out of the door," the darker one
whined.
Red-Head bleated triumphantly: "What did
I tell you? You're not allowed inside the
place."
"What rubbish! The Altstadter Cafe's open
to the public like any other cafe?'
"But not to you. You're not allowed in. Not
since you jabbed fat Emma in the stomach."
"She deserved it. The old sow."
"Yes, so she is. But the porter's her old man.
That's why he kicked you out."
"What a ravachoV. The way he held me"
The pair vanished into an alley.
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Gustav Janouch
24
HEN
ENTERED
HIS
everything is in order. What is written illuminates the world. But the writer disappears into
darkness. So away with it!"
He pulled out the middle drawer, opened the
side compartments, and began to stuff the
pile of books and papers into the desk.
I wanted to help him. But when I handed
him one of the files he shook his head
vigorously.
"Leave it! Quite by accident we might be
unlucky enough to put things in order. Then
I'd be in trouble. I might lose the excuse, which
is extremely important to every conscientious
official, that I had been unable to perform my
appointed task, not through lack of professional competence, but because of the infernal
disorder of my desk. That would be a terrible
revelation, which I must avoid at all costs.
Therefore I must carefully preserve the disorder of my desk."
As a proof, he slammed the middle drawer
shut with a violent jerk, and said, in an exaggeratedly sinister and conspiratorial voice: "My
complaints about the disorder in the office, and
especially around myself, are only a trick, by
which I try to hide the insecurity of my existence from the accusing and inquisitive gaze of
the outside world. In reality, I only manage to
live because of the disorder, from which I
steal the last remnant of personal freedom."
OFFICE,
3
Erich Miihsam (1878-1934), socialist poet,
dramatist
and essayist.
4
Arthur Holitscher (1869-1941), impressionist
novelist,
dramatist and essayist.
5
Oskar Baum (1883-1941) went blind early in
life and made his livelihood as a teacher of music.
His writings were deeply autobiographical: Uferdasein. Aus dem Blindeneben (Living on the Bank.
A Blind Man's Life); Das Leben ist Dunkel (Life
in Darkness), 1909; in addition, Die Tiir ins Vnmogliche (The Door to The Impossible), 1919.
His play Das Wunder (The Miracle) received its
first performance in Prague in 1920.
25
Icontaining
Prague
26
Gustav Janouch
O NturesKafka's
and
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M.J.L.
A Symposium
(in)
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