Kafka in Brontëland
Even so, he was always very close. Sometimes she was certain she could hear him talking in the next room. When she opened the door there was nobody there, but the room was filled with a feeling of warmth and love.
We are talking about death, and we are not making much progress with Alice in Wonderland. Death is less perplexing: we share many certainties regarding it.
“I think they are still here: I think they are listening,” says Mrs. Rahim. “My father suffered very much. But he is happy now.”
Mrs. Rahim reaches for her big torn handbag and brings out a man’s wallet, worn, old-fashioned, foreign-looking. It is stuffed with papers covered in tiny handwriting. She clasps the wallet between her palms and holds it to her nose: sniffs deeply as though it is some redolent flower.
“I always keep it with me. It is like him.”
I have a cold. She makes me milky tea boiled with cardamom, ginger and sugar. She slips a dozen bangles up my arm. Later, in an aura of almost sacred comradeship, we look at the Koran, which she carries to the table wrapped in a silver cloth.
She cannot touch it, she explains, because she is menstruating. Nevertheless I turn the pages for her reverently as she reads. She reads beautifully. I dare not tell her I am menstruating too.
“Kafka. K-a-f-k-a. Kafka.”
“What sort of a name is that, then? Is it Russian?”
“No, it’s Czech.”
“Have you tried under foreign titles? I don’t think we have any books in Czech.”
“He wrote in German, actually. But he’s been translated.”
“Oh, look, it’s here, Jean: someone must have put it back in the wrong place.”
A robust copy of The Trial, wrapped in institutional plastic: they leave me to it. Avidly I check the date stamps and the opening page.
Why do I do this? It’s a symptom of the literary obsessive: merely the desire to see the cherished works in as many editions as possible. As though one could open them up and discover new words, new revelations. I myself possess four different copies of Wuthering Heights. With Kafka, it is something else. I need to see which translation it is. This I can tell immediately, from the first sentence. “Someone must have traduced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” I don’t like ‘traduced.’ It’s an immediate stumbling block. A lot of people don’t know what it means. “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” That’s better. Comprehensible. This copy is a traduced.
I didn’t expect the people of Brontëland would have much call for a book like The Trial. There would be a few lonely borrowings, half-hearted attempts, defeated best intentions. But I get a surprise. The label is a forest of date-stamps, repeated and regular, going back years: there are even a couple of old labels pasted beneath with their columns filled. I pick up The Castle. That will be different, I think: everybody reads The Trial. The Castle is, if anything, just as popular. There is a kind of frenzy in the frequent date-stamps which suggests, even, a profound need for Kafka in Brontëland.
It could all have been the same borrower, of course.
