Kafka in Brontëland
My parents belonged to the lost generation, and when I was growing up their drawers were full of old letters, stopped watches, bits of broken history: a Hebrew prayer book, an unblessed mezuzah, nine views of Budapest between the wars. I drew pictures on the prayer book, mislaid the mezuzah, swapped the postcards for Peruvian stamps; and when my parents were dead and I was fully grown I looked at the hoard and saw it was nothing but junk. Then I hired a skip and threw the lot—watches, pictures, letters and prayers—onto the heap of forgotten things, and came up here to start a new clean life; but I rattled the cans of the past behind me willy-nilly.
There is a man in the village, they call him Mr. Kafka. I do not know if that is his real name. He does not often speak to people. He is very old. Every day he walks down the village in the company of an elderly and asthmatic wire-haired terrier.
He does not speak to people. But he smiles occasionally: a faint and distant, somewhat dreamy smile. In this respect, but in no other, he resembles a little the Kafka of the photographs.
Derek the builder says that he is Dutch. Kafka is a Dutch name. No, no, I tell him, it is Czech, it is the Czech for jackdaw. It is like the writer Kafka, who was born in Prague. Who? The writer. Kafka the writer. The one who wrote The Trial.
Well, you never know, says Derek. And he tells me a story of how people die and come back to life. How young Philip Shackleton, who used to work at the quarry over Dimples Hill, fell into the crusher one day and disappeared. “Never found his body. Just traces of blood in the stones. Next year he turns up in Torremolinos.”
The main question, however, is whether there are beams behind my cottage ceiling. Derek taps the plasterboard with his implement.
“Yes, I should think you’ve got a nice set of beams under there. Pine. Shall I go whoops with the crowbar?”
I say we had better wait a little.
When he has gone I dart across to the Fleece for a box of matches. Mr. Kafka is sitting in the corner over a pint of dark beer. He wears a dirty mackintosh and a buff-coloured hat like James Joyce, and he stares into his beer as though time has ended for him. I consider making conversation, but I haven’t the courage.
When I was a girl I wanted to be Emily Brontë, but this summer I am reading Kafka with all the new enthusiasm of an adolescent. I walk the moors with a book, utterly entranced. I have fallen in love with him. Sometimes I imagine that I am him.
These literary obsessions are hardly innocent. My urge to be Emily, for instance, has altered my entire life. That is why I am here, alone in Brontëland. I grew up determined to live in passionate isolation. Only recently did I realise I had been misled: that she never spent a single day of her life alone in Haworth parsonage.
And now I have chosen to fall in love with Kafka. Kafka, child of the city. Kafka the outcast, Kafka the Jew. He wasn’t inspired by spaces, he didn’t belong in the hills. He didn’t care for weather. He would have hated it here.
Emily Brontë called these mountains heaven. Today they are referred to as the white highlands. Down in the valley, in the poor town, live the Asians, Pakistanis, Muslims from Karachi and Lahore.
