The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.' Gustave Flaubert
KAFKA'S HAIRBRUSH
Stefano Boscutti
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Stefano Boscutti
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This is a work of fiction. While many of the characters portrayed here have counterparts in the life and times of John Grisham, the characterizations and incidents presented are products of the author's imagination.
KAFKA'S HAIRBRUSH
Something is surely amiss, thinks Kafka.
He has been pacing outside the pharmacy in the old town square for almost half an hour, waiting for the store to open on this fine autumn day. He is anxious to be back at the office before lunch.
Perhaps his watch is broken? A glance at the astronomical clock on the southern wall of the city hall confirms the lateness of the hour. Perhaps Herr Hermann has taken ill. Even pharmacists must get sick from time to time.
The clock, the tower, the worn arches and stolen alleys lost in their own shadows. This old square, this old city has been his life. A beautiful place, a miserable place.
The remarkable light of the summer is easing into autumn, the shadows growing longer, deeper. An old charlady with white hair sweeps the darkened doorway to a boarding house.
As a boy, he once walked for hours, ducking in and out of the vaulted arcades in order to give a beggar-woman a succession of single pennies. Too embarrassed to give her a large coin, he wanted her to think the money was coming from different children.
Kafka looks out across the square and traces a small box in the air with his finger, framing his is whole life. Where he was born, attended school and university, lives with his parents and works in the insurance office. Surely thsi is where he is going to die.
The city will not let him go. Its claws clench tight around his heart. He is never going to be free.
On the way to the office this morning, he had seen a pale white horse amongst the passageways, seemingly lost in the middle of the city, no doubt wishing to escape. He had not realized how long it had been since he had seen a horse in the city.
Kafka needs quiet for his writing, but the city is never still. Automobiles and electric tramcars rumble and clatter through the main thoroughfares. The city is ablaze with noise.
It is no quieter in the family apartment, except for very late at night when everyone else is asleep.
He dreams of moving to the country where his sister lives, but perhaps such quietness makes one's hearing all the more acute. The whisper of the grass, the ripple of the leaves, the wind brushing over a field becomes unbearable.
Kafka looks over at the pharmacy. A golden crest of a snake, mouth agape, hangs above the narrow door. The window display of perfumes and the latest women's fineries holds little interest.
He sees his reflection in the glass. Tall, thin, with neat black hair swept back. He wears his usual dark suit, but his tipped shirt collar feels tight around his neck. Perhaps he should loosen his tie a touch.
‘Away with you, loiterer. Away, away.’
The old charlady is trying to shoo Kafka away with her broom. Dust flies onto his pants.
‘Madam, I am hardly loitering. I am waiting for the pharmacy to open.’
‘Why are you not at work? Do you not have a job?’
‘I have a career, madam.’
‘Why are you shopping in the middle of the morning? What sort of a man goes shopping with himself? Where is your wife?’
‘I am not married.’
‘A bachelor, is that it?’
Kafka sighs under his breath. Why is this old woman talking to him? Every time she says something, he feels compelled to answer. Why does she not be quiet, why does she not keep to herself?
‘Madam, please keep your voice down?’
‘What shall you do? Arrest me? Where is your hat? What sort of man wanders the streets without a hat?’
Kafka had misplaced his hat at the office. Surely it had not become a crime to misplace one's hat?
‘They came at dawn.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The men, they came at dawn.’
Kafka has no idea what the old woman is gabbling about.
‘They came in a truck, they did. It took four of them to pick up the wooden box, and take it inside. Herr Hermann was shouting at them at the top of his voice not to drop it.’
‘What kind of box?’
The old woman steps inside the entrance of the boarding house.
‘The kind that you can fit a child in.’
Kafka straightens his vest, pats his pocket lightly to check the letter to F. is still there. He had written last night to convince her of his unsuitability as a husband. He wrote that he had misled her, that she had failed to understand who he really is. No lighthearted chatter, arm in arm along the promenade, but a monastic life at the side of a man who is peevish, miserable. A man chained to invisible literature by invisible chains.
He will mail it on the way back to the office.
For Kafka, breaking the engagement from F. would free him to return to the solitude that seems so necessary for his writing.
His doubts and anxieties have been growing. His thirtieth birthday is only days away. He has told himself many times that if he cannot work, he cannot live.
He looks through an open window into a ground floor apartment. A young mother and child look up, he shuts his eyes embarrassed.
The only thing he never doubts is his own guilt.
As a child he would write to God, but God never replied. His fate as a writer has thrust all matters into the background. His life has dwindled dreadfully.
As a boy, an Uncle once took away his notebook, and read the pages. He said it was nothing, the usual stuff.
Kafka never forgot or forgave the remark. He burnt his first manuscript.
Now he writes reports on industrial accidents and health hazards in the insurance office by day, and works on his stories by night. His profession marks the formal, legalistic language of his stories which avoid all sentimentality and moral interpretations. Such decisions seem better left to the reader.
Earlier this morning he had hidden in his room and waited for Father and Mother to leave. He could never face Father.
His brothers died when he was very small and his sisters came along only much later, so that he alone had to bear the brunt of it, and for that he was much too weak.
Father had strength, health, appetite. He felt Father could trample him underfoot, so that nothing was left of him.
Kafka was a slight, weakly son. A quiet boy, spoiled by Mother. Whenever he did something Father did not like, he felt the prospect of failure. He lost confidence in his actions, he became wavering and doubtful in his very marrow.
He is afraid his shame will outlive him.