Life Times Stories

Something Out There





At the Rendezvous of Victory


A young black boy used to brave the dogs in white men’s suburbs to deliver telegrams; Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu has those bite scars on his legs to this day.

So goes the opening paragraph of a ‘profile’ copyrighted by a British Sunday paper, reprinted by reciprocal agreement with papers in New York and Washington, syndicated as far as Australia and translated in both Le Monde and Neue Züricher Zeitung.

But like everything else he was to read about himself, it was not quite like that. No. Ever since he was a kid he loved dogs, and those dogs who chased the bicycle – he just used to whistle in his way at them, and they would stand there wagging their long tails and feeling silly. The scars on his legs were from wounds received when the white commando almost captured him, blew up one of his hideouts in the bush. But he understood why the journalist had decided to paint the wounds over as dog bites – it made a kind of novel opening to the story, and it showed at once that the journalist wasn’t on the side of the whites. It was true that he who became Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu was born in the blacks’ compound on a white man’s sugar farm in the hottest and most backward part of the country, and that, after only a few years at a school where children drew their sums in the dust, he was the post office messenger in the farmers’ town. It was in that two-street town, with the whites’ Central Hotel, Main Road Garage, Buyrite Stores, Snooker Club and railhead, that he first heard the voice of the brother who was to become Prime Minister and President, a voice from a big trumpet on the top of a shabby van. It summoned him (there were others, but they didn’t become anybody) to a meeting in the Catholic Mission Hall in Goodwill Township – which was what the white farmers called the black shanty town outside their own. And it was here, in Goodwill Township, that the young post office messenger took away the local Boy Scout troop organised by but segregated from the white Boy Scout troop in the farmers’ town, and transformed the scouts into the Youth Group of the National Independence Party. Yes – he told them – you will be prepared. The party will teach you how to make a fire the government can’t put out.

It was he who, when the leaders of the party were detained for the first time, was imprisoned with the future Prime Minister and became one of his chief lieutenants. He, in fact, who in jail made up defiance songs that soon were being sung at mass meetings, who imitated the warders, made pregnant one of the women prisoners who polished the cell floors (though no one believed her when she proudly displayed the child as his, he would have known that was true), and finally, when he was sent to another prison in order to remove his invigorating influence from fellow political detainees, overpowered three warders and escaped across the border.

It was this exploit that earned him the title ‘General Giant’ as prophets, saints, rogues and heroes receive theirs: named by the anonymous talk of ordinary people. He did not come back until he had wintered in the unimaginable cold of countries that offer refuge and military training, gone to rich desert cities to ask for money from the descendants of people who had sold Africans as slaves, and to the island where sugar-cane workers, as his mother and father had been, were now powerful enough to supply arms. He was with the first band of men who had left home with empty hands, on bare feet, and came back with AKM assault rifles, heat-guided missiles and limpet mines.

The future Prime Minister was imprisoned again and again and finally fled the country and established the party’s leadership in exile. When Sinclair ‘General Giant’ met him in London or Algiers, the future Prime Minister wore a dark suit whose close weave was midnight blue in the light. He himself wore a bush outfit that originally had been put together by men who lived less like men than prides of lion, tick-ridden, thirsty, waiting in thickets of thorn. As these men increased in numbers and boldness, and he rose in command of them, the outfit elaborated into a combat uniform befitting his style, title and achievement. At the beginning of the war, he had led a ragged hit-and-run group; after four years and the deaths of many, which emphasised his giant indestructibility, his men controlled a third of the country and he was the man the white army wanted most to capture.

Before the future Prime Minister talked to the Organization of African Unity or United Nations he had now to send for and consult with his commander-in-chief of the liberation army, Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu. General Giant came from the bush in his Czech jeep, in a series of tiny planes from secret airstrips, and at last would board a scheduled jet liner among oil and mineral men who thought they were sitting beside just another dolled-up black official from some unheard-of state whose possibilities they might have to look into sometime. When the consultation in the foreign capital was over, General Giant did not fidget long in the patter of official cocktail parties, but would disappear to find for himself whatever that particular capital could offer to meet his high capacities – for leading men to fight without fear, exciting people to caper, shout with pleasure, drink and argue; for touching women. After a night in a bar and a bed with girls (he never had to pay professionals, always found well-off, respectable women, black or white, whose need for delights simply matched his own) he would take a plane back to Africa. He never wanted to linger. He never envied his brother, the future Prime Minister, his flat in London and the invitations to country houses to discuss the future of the country. He went back imperatively as birds migrate to Africa to mate and assure the survival of their kind, journeying thousands of miles, just as he flew and drove deeper and deeper into where he belonged until he reached again his headquarters – that the white commandos often claimed to have destroyed but could not be destroyed because his headquarters were the bush itself.

The war would not have been won without General Giant. At the Peace Conference he took no part in the deliberations but was there at his brother’s, the future Prime Minister’s side: a deterrent weapon, a threat to the defeated white government of what would happen if peace were not made. Now and then he cleared his throat of a constriction of boredom; the white delegates were alarmed as if he had roared.

Constitutional talks went on for many weeks; there was a ceasefire, of course. He wanted to go back – to his headquarters – home – but one of the conditions of the ceasefire had been that he should be withdrawn ‘from the field’ as the official term, coined in wars fought over poppy meadows, phrased it. He wandered about London. He went to nightclubs and was invited to join parties of Arabs who, he found, had no idea where the country he had fought for, and won for his people, was; this time he really did roar – with laughter. He walked through Soho but couldn’t understand why anyone would like to watch couples making the movements of love-making on the cinema screen instead of doing it themselves. He came upon the Natural History Museum in South Kensington and was entranced by the life that existed anterior to his own unthinking familiarity with ancient nature hiding the squat limpet mines, the iron clutches of offensive and defensive hand grenades, the angular AKMs, metal blue with heat. He sent postcards of mammoths and gasteropods to his children, who were still where they had been with his wife all through the war – in the black location of the capital of his home country. Since she was his wife, she had been under police surveillance, and detained several times, but had survived by saying she and her husband were separated. Which was true, in a way; a man leading a guerrilla war has no family, he must forget about meals cooked for him by a woman, nights in a bed with two places hollowed by their bodies and the snuffle of a baby close by. He made love to a black singer from Jamaica, not young, whose style was a red-head wig rather than fashionable rigid pigtails. She composed a song about his bravery in the war in a country she imagined but had never seen, and sang it at a victory rally where all the brothers in exile as well as the white sympathisers with their cause, applauded her. In her flat she had a case of special Scotch whisky, twelve years old, sent by an admirer. She said – sang to him – Let’s not let it get any older. As she worked only at night, they spent whole days indoors making love when the weather was bad – the big man, General Giant, was like a poor stray cat, in the cold rain: he would walk on the balls of shoe soles, shaking each foot as he lifted it out of the wet.

He was waiting for the OK, as he said to his brother, the future Prime Minister, to go back to their country and take up his position as commander-in-chief of the new state’s Defence Force. His title would become an official rank, the highest, like that of army chiefs in Britain and the United States – General Zwedu.

His brother turned solemn, dark in his mind; couldn’t be followed there. He said the future of the army was a tremendous problem at present under discussion. The two armies, black and white, who had fought each other, would have to be made one. What the discussions were also about remained in the dark: the defeated white government, the European powers by whom the new black state was promised loans for reconstruction, had insisted that Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu be relieved of all military authority. His personality was too strong and too strongly associated with the triumph of the freedom fighter army for him to be anything but a divisive reminder of the past, in the new, regular army. Let him stand for parliament in the first peacetime election, his legend would guarantee that he win the seat. Then the Prime Minister could find him some safe portfolio.

What portfolio? What? This was in the future Prime Minister’s mind when General Giant couldn’t follow him. ‘What he knows how to do is defend our country, that he fought for’, the future Prime Minister said to the trusted advisers, British lawyers and African experts from American universities. And while he was saying it, the others knew he did not want, could not have his brother Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu, that master of the wilderness, breaking the confinement of peacetime barracks.

He left him in Europe on some hastily invented mission until the independence celebrations. Then he brought him home to the old colonial capital that was now theirs, and at the airport wept with triumph and anguish in his arms, while schoolchildren sang. He gave him a portfolio – Sport and Recreation; harmless.

General Giant looked at his big hands as if the appointment were an actual object, held there. What was he supposed to do with it? The great lungs that pumped his organ-voice failed; he spoke flatly, kindly, almost pityingly to his brother, the Prime Minister.

Now they both wore dark blue suits. At first, he appeared prominently at the Prime Minister’s side as a tacit recompense, to show the people that he was still acknowledged by the Prime Minister as a co-founder of the nation, and its popular hero. He had played football on a patch of bare earth between wattle-branch goal posts on the sugar farm, as a child, and as a youth on a stretch of waste ground near the Catholic Mission Hall; as a man he had been at war, without time for games. In the first few months he rather enjoyed attending important matches in his official capacity, watching from a special box and later seeing himself sitting there, on a TV newsreel. It was a Sunday, a holiday amusement; the holiday went on too long. There was not much obligation to make speeches, in his cabinet post, but because his was a name known over the world, his place reserved in the mountain stronghold Valhalla of guerrilla wars, journalists went to him for statements on all kinds of issues. Besides, he was splendid copy, talkative, honest, indiscreet and emotional. Again and again, he embarrassed his government by giving an outrageous opinion, that contradicted government policy, on problems that were none of his business. The party caucus reprimanded him again and again. He responded by seldom turning up at caucus meetings. The caucus members said that Zwedu (it was time his ‘title’ was dropped) thought too much of himself and had taken offence. Again, he knew that what was assumed was not quite true. He was bored with the caucus. He wanted to yawn all the time, he said, like a hippopotamus with its huge jaws open in the sun, half-asleep, in the thick brown water of the river near his last headquarters. The Prime Minister laughed at this, and they drank together with arms round one another – as they did in the old days in the Youth Group. The Prime Minister told him – ‘But seriously, sport and recreation are very important in building up our nation. For the next budget, I’ll see that there’s a bigger grant to your department, you’ll be able to plan. You know how to inspire young men . . . I’m told a local team has adapted one of the freedom songs you made up, they sang it on TV.’

The Minister of Sport and Recreation sent his deputy to officiate at sports meetings these days and he didn’t hear his war song become a football fans’ chant. The Jamaican singer had arrived on an engagement at the Hilton that had just opened conference rooms, bars, a casino and nightclub on a site above the town where the old colonial prison used to be (the new prison was on the site of the former Peace Corps camp). He was there in the nightclub every night, drinking the brand of Scotch she had had in her London flat, tilting his head while she sang. The hotel staff pointed him out to overseas visitors – Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu, the General Giap, the Che Guevara of a terrible war there’d been in this country. The tourists had spent the day, taken by private plane, viewing game in what the travel brochure described as the country’s magnificent game park but – the famous freedom fighter could have told them – wasn’t quite that; was in fact his territory, his headquarters. Sometimes he danced with one of the women, their white teeth contrasting with shiny sunburned skin almost as if they had been black. Once there was some sort of a row; he danced too many times with a woman who appeared to be enjoying this intimately, and her husband objected. The ‘convivial minister’ had laughed, taken the man by the scruff of his white linen jacket and dropped him back in his chair, a local journalist reported, but the government-owned local press did not print his story or picture. An overseas journalist interviewed ‘General Giant’ on the pretext of the incident, and got from him (the minister was indeed convivial, entertaining the journalist to excellent whisky in the house he had rented for the Jamaican singer) some opinions on matters far removed from nightclub scandal.

When questions were asked in parliament about an article in an American weekly on the country’s international alliances, ‘General Giant’ stood up and, again, gave expression to convictions the local press could not print. He said that the defence of the country might have been put in the hands of neo-colonialists who had been the country’s enemies during the war – and he was powerless to do anything about that. But he would take the law into his own hands to protect the National Independence Party’s principles of a people’s democracy (he used the old name, on this occasion, although it had been shortened to National Party). Hadn’t he fought, hadn’t the brothers spilled their blood to get rid of the old laws and the old bosses, that made them nothing? Hadn’t they fought for new laws under which they would be men? He would shed blood rather than see the party betrayed in the name of so-called rational alliances and national unity.

International advisers to the government thought the speech, if inflammatory, so confused it might best be ignored. Members of the cabinet and Members of Parliament wanted the Prime Minister to get rid of him. General Giant Zwedu? How? Where to? Extreme anger was always expressed by the Prime Minister in the form of extreme sorrow. He was angry with both his cabinet members and his comrade, without whom they would never have been sitting in the House of Assembly. He sent for Zwedu. (He must accept that name now; he simply refused to accommodate himself to anything, he illogically wouldn’t even drop the ‘Sinclair’ though that was the name of the white sugar farmer his parents had worked for, and nobody kept those slave names any more.)

Zwedu: so at ease and handsome in his cabinet minister’s suit (it was not the old blue, but a pinstripe flannel the Jamaican singer had ordered at his request, and brought from London), one could not believe wild and dangerous words could come out of his mouth. He looked good enough for a diplomatic post somewhere . . . Unthinkable. The Prime Minister, full of sorrow and silences, told him he must stop drinking. He must stop giving interviews. There was no mention of the Ministry; the Prime Minister did not tell his brother he would not give in to pressure to take that away from him, the cabinet post he had never wanted but that was all there was to offer. He would not take it away – at least not until this could be done decently under cover of a cabinet reshuffle. The Prime Minister had to say to his brother, you mustn’t let me down. What he wanted to say was: What have I done to you?

There was a crop failure and trouble with the unions on the coal mines; by the time the cabinet reshuffle came the press hardly noticed that a Minister of Sport and Recreation had been replaced. Mr Sinclair Zwedu was not given an alternative portfolio, but he was referred to as a former minister when his name was added to the boards of multinational industrial firms instructed by their principals to Africanise. He could be counted upon not to appear at those meetings, either. His director’s fees paid for cases of whisky, but sometimes went to his wife, to whom he had never returned, and the teenage children with whom he would suddenly appear in the best stores of the town, buying whatever they silently pointed at. His old friends blamed the Jamaican woman, not the Prime Minister, for his disappearance from public life. She went back to England – her reasons were sexual and honest, she realised she was too old for him – but his way of life did not recover; could not recover the war, the third of the country’s territory that had been his domain when the white government had lost control to him and the black government did not yet exist.





The country is open to political and trade missions from both East and West, now, instead of these being confined to allies of the old white government. The airport has been extended. The new departure lounge is a sculpture gallery with reclining figures among potted plants, wearily waiting for connections to places whose directions criss-cross the colonial North – South compass of communication. A former Chief-of-Staff of the white army, who, since the black government came to power, has been retained as chief military adviser to the Defence Ministry, recently spent some hours in the lounge waiting for a plane that was to take him on a government mission to Europe. He was joined by a journalist booked on the same flight home to London, after a rather disappointing return visit to the country. Well, he remarked to the military man as they drank vodka and tonic together, who wants to read about rice-growing schemes instead of seek-and-destroy raids? This was a graceful reference to the ex-Chief-of-Staff’s successes with that strategy at the beginning of the war, a reference safe in the cosy no man’s land of a departure lounge, out of earshot of the new black security officials alert to any hint of encouragement of an old-guard white coup.

A musical gong preceded announcements of the new estimated departure time of the delayed British Airways plane. A swami found sweets somewhere in his saffron robes and went among the travellers handing out comfits with a message of peace and love. Businessmen used the opportunity to write reports on briefcases opened on their knees. Black children were spores attached to maternal skirts. White children ran back and forth to the bar counter, buying potato crisps and peanuts. The journalist insisted on another round of drinks.

Every now and then the departure of some other flight was called and the display of groups and single figures would change; some would leave, while a fresh surge would be let in through the emigration barriers and settle in a new composition. Those who were still waiting for delayed planes became part of the permanent collection, so to speak; they included a Canadian evangelical party who read their gospels with the absorption other people gave to paperback thrillers, a very old black woman dry as the fish in her woven carrier, and a prosperous black couple, elegantly dressed. The ex-Chief-of-Staff and his companion were sitting not far behind these two, who flirted and caressed, like whites – it was quite unusual to see those people behaving that way in public. Both the white men noticed this although they were able to observe only the back of the man’s head and the profile of the girl, pretty, painted, shameless as she licked his tiny black ear and lazily tickled, with long fingers on the stilts of purple nails, the roll of his neck.

The ex-Chief-of-Staff made no remark, was not interested – what did one not see, in the country, now that they had taken over. The journalist was the man who had written a profile, just after the war: a young black boy used to brave the dogs in white men’s suburbs . . . Suddenly he leant forward, staring at the back of the black man’s head. ‘That’s General Giant! I know those ears!’ He got up and went over to the bar, turning casually at the counter to examine the couple from the front. He bought two more vodka and tonics, swiftly was back to his companion, the ice chuntering in the glasses. ‘It’s him. I thought so. I used to know him well. Him, all right. Fat! Wearing suede shoes. And the tart . . . where’d he find her!’

The ex-Chief-of-Staff’s uniform, his thick wad of campaign ribbons over the chest and cap thrust down to his fine eyebrows, seemed to defend him against the heat rather than make him suffer, but the journalist felt confused and stifled as the vodka came out distilled once again in sweat and he did not know whether he should or should not simply walk up to ‘General Giant’ (no secretaries or security men to get past, now) and ask for an interview. Would anyone want to read it? Could he sell it anywhere? A distraction that made it difficult for him to make up his mind was the public address system nagging that the two passengers holding up flight something-or-other were requested to board the aircraft immediately. No one stirred. ‘General Giant’ (no mistaking him) simply signalled, a big hand snapping in the air, when he wanted fresh drinks for himself and his girl, and the barman hopped to it, although the bar was self-service. Before the journalist could come to a decision an air hostess ran in with the swish of stockings chafing thigh past thigh and stopped angrily, looking down at the black couple. The journalist could not hear what was said, but she stood firm while the couple took their time getting up, the girl letting her arm slide languidly off the man; laughing, arranging their hand luggage on each other’s shoulders.

Where was he taking her?

The girl put one high-heeled sandal down in front of the other, as a model negotiates a catwalk. Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu followed her backside the way a man follows a paid woman, with no thought of her in his closed, shiny face, and the ex-Chief-of-Staff and the journalist did not know whether he recognised them, even saw them, as he passed without haste, letting the plane wait for him.





Letter from His Father


My dear son,

You wrote me a letter you never sent.

It wasn’t for me – it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!) You were never open and frank with me – that’s one of the complaints you say I was always making against you. You write it in the letter you didn’t want me to read; so what does that sound like, eh? But I’ve read the letter now, I’ve read it anyway, I’ve read everything, although you said I put your books on the night-table and never touched them. You know how it is, here where I am: not something that can be explained to anyone who isn’t here – they used to talk about secrets going to the grave, but the funny thing is there are no secrets here at all. If there was something you wanted to know, you should have known, if it doesn’t let you lie quiet, then you can have knowledge of it, from here. Yes, you gave me that much credit, you said I was a true Kafka in ‘strength . . . eloquence, endurance, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale’ and I’ve not been content just to rot. In that way, I’m still the man I was, the go-getter. Restless. Restless. Taking whatever opportunity I can. There isn’t anything, now, you can regard as hidden from me. Whether you say I left it unread on the night-table or whether you weren’t man enough, even at the age of thirty-six, to show me a letter that was supposed to be for me.

I write to you after we are both dead. Whereas you don’t stir. There won’t be any response from you, I know that. You began that letter by saying you were afraid of me – and then you were afraid to let me read it. And now you’ve escaped altogether. Because without the Kafka will-power you can’t reach out from nothing and nowhere. I was going to call it a desert, but where’s the sand, where’re the camels, where’s the sun – I’m still mensch enough to crack a joke – you see? Oh excuse me, I forgot – you didn’t like my jokes, my fooling around with kids. My poor boy, unfortunately you had no life in you, in all those books and diaries and letters (the ones you posted, to strangers, to women) you said it a hundred times before you put the words in my mouth, in your literary way, in that letter: you yourself were ‘unfit for life’. So death comes, how would you say, quite naturally to you. It’s not like that for a man of vigour like I was, I can tell you, and so here I am writing, talking . . . I don’t know if there is a word for what this is. Anyway, it’s Hermann Kafka. I’ve outlived you here, same as in Prague.

That is what you really accuse me of, you know, for sixty or so pages (I notice the length of that letter varies a bit from language to language, of course it’s been translated into everything – I don’t know what – Hottentot and Icelandic, Chinese, although you wrote it ‘for me’ in German). I outlived you, not for seven years, as an old sick man, after you died, but while you were young and alive. Clear as daylight, from the examples you give of being afraid of me, from the time you were a little boy: you were not afraid, you were envious. At first, when I took you swimming and you say you felt yourself a nothing, puny and weak beside my big, strong, naked body in the change-house – all right, you also say you were proud of such a father, a father with a fine physique . . . And may I remind you that father was taking the trouble and time, the few hours he could get away from the business, to try and make something of that nebich, develop his muscles, put some flesh on those poor little bones so he would grow up sturdy? But even before your barmitzvah the normal pride every boy has in his father changed to jealousy, with you. You couldn’t be like me, so you decided I wasn’t good enough for you: coarse, loud-mouthed, ate ‘like a pig’ (your very words), cut my fingernails at table, cleaned my ears with a toothpick. Oh yes, you can’t hide anything from me, now, I’ve read it all, all the thousands and thousands of words you’ve used to shame your own family, your own father, before the whole world. And with your gift for words you turn everything inside out and prove, like a circus magician, it’s love, the piece of dirty paper’s a beautiful silk flag, you loved your father too much, and so – what? You tell me. You couldn’t be like him? You wanted to be like him? The ghasa, the shouter, the gobbler? Yes, my son, these ‘insignificant details’ you write down and quickly dismiss – these details hurt. Eternally. After all, you’ve become immortal through writing, as you insist you did, only about me, ‘everything was about you, father’; a hundred years after your birth, the Czech Jew, son of Hermann and Julie Kafka, is supposed to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Your work will be read as long as there are people to read it. That’s what they say everywhere, even the Germans who burned your sisters and my grandchildren in incinerators. Some say you were also some kind of prophet (God knows what you were thinking, shut away in your room while the rest of the family was having a game of cards in the evening); after you died, some countries built camps where the things you made up for that story ‘In The Penal Colony’ were practised, and ever since then there have been countries in different parts of the world where the devil’s work that came into your mind is still carried out – I don’t want to think about it.

You were not blessed to bring any happiness to this world with your genius, my son. Not at home, either. Well, we had to accept what God gave. Do you ever stop to think whether it wasn’t a sorrow for me (never mind – for once – how you felt) that your two brothers, who might have grown up to bring your mother and me joy, died as babies? And you sitting there at meals always with a pale, miserable, glum face, not a word to say for yourself, picking at your food . . . You haven’t forgotten that I used to hold up the newspaper so as not to have to see that. You bear a grudge. You’ve told everybody. But you don’t think about what there was in a father’s heart. From the beginning. I had to hide it behind a newspaper – anything. For your sake.

Because you were never like any other child. You admit it: however we had tried to bring you up, you say you would have become a ‘weakly, timid, hesitant person’. What small boy doesn’t enjoy a bit of a rough-house with his father? But writing at thirty-six years old, you can only remember being frightened when I chased you, in fun, round the table, and your mother, joining in, would snatch you up out of my way while you shrieked. For God’s sake, what’s so terrible about that? I should have such memories of my childhood! I know you never liked to hear about it, it bored you, you don’t spare me the written information that it ‘wore grooves in your brain’, but when I was seven years old I had to push my father’s barrow from village to village, with open sores on my legs in winter. Nobody gave me delicacies to mess about on my plate; we were glad when we got potatoes. You make a show of me, mimicking how I used to say these things. But wasn’t I right when I told you and your sisters – provided for by me, living like fighting-cocks because I stood in the business twelve hours a day – what did you know of such things? What did anyone know, what I suffered as a child? And then it’s a sin if I wanted to give my own son a little pleasure I never had.

And that other business you schlepped up out of the past – the night I’m supposed to have shut you out on the pavlatche. Because of you the whole world knows the Czech word for the kind of balcony we had in Prague! Yes, the whole world knows that story, too. I am famous, too. You made me famous as the father who frightened his child once and for all: for life. Thank you very much. I want to tell you that I don’t even remember that incident. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, although you always had an imagination such as nobody ever had before or since, eh? But it could only have been the last resort your mother and I turned to – you know that your mother spoilt you, over-protected they would call it, now. You couldn’t possibly remember how naughty you were at night, what a little tyrant you were, how you thought of every excuse to keep us sleepless. It was all right for you, you could nap during the day, a small child. But I had my business, I had to earn the living, I needed some rest. Pieces of bread, a particular toy you fancied, make wee-wee, another blanket on, a blanket taken off, drinks of water – there was no end to your tricks and whining. I suppose I couldn’t stand it any longer. I feared to do you some harm. (You admit I never beat you, only scared you a little by taking off my braces in preparation to use them on you.) So I put you out of harm’s way. That night. Just for a few minutes. It couldn’t have been more than a minute. As if your mother would have let you catch cold! God forbid! And you’ve held it against me all your life. I’m sorry, I have to say it again, that old expression of mine that irritated you so much: I wish I had your worries.

Everything that went wrong for you is my fault. You write it down for sixty pages or so and at the same time you say to me ‘I believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement.’ I was a ‘true Kafka’, you took after your mother’s, the Löwy side, etc. – all you inherited from me, according to you, were your bad traits, without having the benefit of my vitality. I was ‘too strong’ for you. You could not help it; I could not help it. So? All you wanted was for me to admit that, and we could have lived in peace. You were judge, you were jury, you were accused; you sentenced yourself, first. ‘At my desk, that is my place. My head in my hands – that is my attitude.’ (And that’s what your poor mother and I had to look at, that was our pride and joy, our only surviving son!) But I was accused, too; you were judge, you were jury in my case, too. Right? By what right? Fancy goods – you despised the family business that fed us all, that paid for your education. What concern was it of yours, the way I treated the shop assistants? You only took an interest so you could judge, judge. It was a mistake to have let you study law. You did nothing with your qualification, your expensive education that I slaved and ruined my health for. Nothing but sentence me. – Now what did I want to say? Oh yes. Look what you wanted me to admit, under the great writer’s beautiful words. If something goes wrong, somebody must be to blame, eh? We were not straw dolls, pulled about from above on strings. One of us must be to blame. And don’t tell me you think it could be you. The stronger is always to blame, isn’t that so? I’m not a deep thinker like you, only a dealer in retail fancy goods, but isn’t that a law of life? ‘The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having.’ You think I’ll believe you’re paying me a compliment, forgiving me, when you hand me the worst insult any father could receive? If it’s what I am that’s to blame, then I’m to blame, to the last drop of my heart’s blood and whatever this is that’s survived my body, for what I am, for being alive and begetting a son! You! Is that it? Because of you I should never have lived at all!

You always had a fine genius (never mind your literary one) for working me up. And you knew it was bad for my heart condition. Now, what does it matter . . . but, as God’s my witness, you aggravate me . . . you make me . . .

Well.

All I know is that I am to blame for ever. You’ve seen to that. It’s written, and not alone by you. There are plenty of people writing books about Kafka, Franz Kafka. I’m even blamed for the name I handed down, our family name. Kavka is Czech for jackdaw, so that’s maybe the reason for your animal obsession. Dafke! Insect, ape, dog, mouse, stag, what didn’t you imagine yourself. They say the beetle story is a great masterpiece, thanks to me – I’m the one who treated you like an inferior species, gave you the inspiration . . . You wake up as a bug, you give a lecture as an ape. Do any of these wonderful scholars think what this meant to me, having a son who didn’t have enough self-respect to feel himself a man?

You have such a craze for animals, but may I remind you, when you were staying with Ottla at Zürau you wouldn’t even undress in front of a cat she’d brought in to get rid of the mice . . .

Yet you imagined a dragon coming into your room. It said (an educated dragon, noch): ‘Drawn hitherto by your longing . . . I offer myself to you.’ Your longing, Franz: ugh, for monsters, for perversion. You describe a person (yourself, of course) in some crazy fantasy of living with a horse. Just listen to you, ‘. . . for a year I lived together with a horse in such ways as, say, a man would live with a girl whom he respects, but by whom he is rejected.’ You even gave the horse a girl’s name, Eleanor. I ask you, is that the kind of story made up by a normal young man? Is it decent that people should read such things, long after you are gone? But it’s published, everything is published.

And worst of all, what about the animal in the synagogue. Some sort of rat, weasel, a marten you call it. You tell how it ran all over during prayers, running along the lattice of the women’s section and even climbing down to the curtain in front of the Ark of the Covenant. A schande, an animal running about during divine service. Even if it’s only a story – only you would imagine it. No respect.

You go on for several pages (in that secret letter) about my use of vulgar Yiddish expressions, about my ‘insignificant scrap of Judaism’, which was ‘purely social’ and so meant we couldn’t ‘find each other in Judaism’ if in nothing else. This, from you! When you were a youngster and I had to drag you to the Yom Kippur services once a year you were sitting there making up stories about unclean animals approaching the Ark, the most holy object of the Jewish faith. Once you were grown up, you went exactly once to the Altneu synagogue. The people who write books about you say it must have been to please me. I’d be surprised. When you suddenly discovered you were a Jew, after all, of course your Judaism was highly intellectual, nothing in common with the Jewish customs I was taught to observe in my father’s shtetl, pushing the barrow at the age of seven. Your Judaism was learnt at the Yiddish Theatre. That’s a nice crowd! Those dirty-living travelling players you took up with at the Savoy Café. Your friend the actor Jizchak Löwy. No relation to your mother’s family, thank God. I wouldn’t let such a man even meet her. You had the disrespect to bring him into your parents’ home, and I saw it was my duty to speak to him in such a way that he wouldn’t ever dare to come back again. (Hah! I used to look down from the window and watch him, hanging around in the cold, outside the building, waiting for you.) And the Tschissik woman, that nafke, one of his actresses – I’ve found out you thought you were in love with her, a married woman (if you can call the way those people live a marriage). Apart from Fräulein Bauer you never fancied anything but a low type of woman. I say it again as I did then: if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. You lost your temper (yes, you, this time), you flew into a rage at your father when he told you that. And when I reminded you of my heart condition, you put yourself in the right again, as usual, you said (I remember like it was yesterday) ‘I make great efforts to restrain myself.’ But now I’ve read your diaries, the dead don’t need to creep into your bedroom and read them behind your back (which you accused your mother and me of doing), I’ve read what you wrote afterwards, that you sensed in me, your father, ‘as always at such moments of extremity, the existence of a wisdom which I can no more than scent’. So you knew, while you were defying me, you knew I was right!

The fact is that you were anti-Semitic, Franz. You were never interested in what was happening to your own people. The hooligans’ attacks on Jews in the streets, on houses and shops, that took place while you were growing up – I don’t see a word about them in your diaries, your notebooks. You were only imagining Jews. Imagining them tortured in places like your Penal Colony, maybe. I don’t want to think about what that means.

Right, towards the end you studied Hebrew, you and your sister Ottla had some wild dream about going to Palestine. You, hardly able to breathe by then, digging potatoes on a kibbutz! The latest book about you says you were in revolt against the ‘shopkeeper mentality’ of your father’s class of Jew; but it was the shopkeeper father, the buttons and buckles, braid, ribbons, ornamental combs, press studs, hooks and eyes, bootlaces, photo frames, shoe horns, novelties and notions that earned the bread for you to dream by. You were anti-Semitic, Franz; if such a thing is possible as for a Jew to cut himself in half. (For you, I suppose, anything is possible.) You told Ottla that to marry that goy Josef Davis was better than marrying ten Jews. When your great friend Brod wrote a book called The Jewesses you wrote there were too many of them in it. You saw them like lizards. (Animals again, low animals.) ‘However happy we are to watch a single lizard on a footpath in Italy, we would be horrified to see hundreds of them crawling over each other in a pickle jar.’ From where did you get such ideas? Not from your home, that I know.

And look how Jewish you are, in spite of the way you despised us – Jews, your Jewish family! You answer questions with questions. I’ve discovered that’s your style, your famous literary style: your Jewishness. Did you or did you not write the following story, playlet, wha’d’you-call-it, your friend Brod kept every scribble and you knew he wouldn’t burn even a scrap. ‘Once at a spiritualist seance a new spirit announced its presence, and the following conversation with it took place. The spirit: Excuse me. The spokesman: Who are you? The spirit: Excuse me. The spokesman: What do you want? The spirit: To go away. The spokesman: But you’ve only just come. The spirit: It’s a mistake. The spokesman: No, it isn’t a mistake. You’ve come and you’ll stay. The spirit: I’ve just begun to feel ill. The spokesman: Badly? The spirit: Badly? The spokesman: Physically? The spirit: Physically? The spokesman: You answer with questions. That will not do. We have ways of punishing you, so I advise you to answer, for then we shall soon dismiss you. The spirit: Soon? The spokesman: Soon. The spirit: In one minute? The spokesman: Don’t go on in this miserable way . . .’

Questions without answers. Riddles. You wrote ‘It is always only in contradiction that I can live. But this doubtless applies to everyone; for living, one dies, dying, one lives.’ Speak for yourself! So who did you think you were when that whim took you – their prophet, Jesus Christ? What did you want? The goyishe heavenly hereafter? What did you mean when a lost man, far from his native country, says to someone he meets ‘I am in your hands’ and the other says, ‘No. You are free and that is why you are lost’? What’s the sense in writing about a woman ‘I lie in wait for her in order not to meet her’? There’s only one of your riddles I think I understand, and then only because for forty-two years, God help me, I had to deal with you myself. ‘A cage went in search of a bird.’ That’s you. The cage, not the bird. I don’t know why. Maybe it will come to me. As I say, if a person wants to, he can know everything, here.

All that talk about going away. You called your home (more riddles) ‘My prison – my fortress’. You grumbled – in print, everything ended up in print, my son – that your room was only a passage, a thoroughfare between the living room and your parents’ bedroom. You complained you had to write in pencil because we took away your ink to stop you writing. It was for your own good, your health – already you were a grown man, a qualified lawyer, but you know you couldn’t look after yourself. Scribbling away half the night, you’d have been too tired to work properly in the mornings, you’d have lost your position at the Assicurazioni Generali (or was it by then the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt für das Königreich Böhmen, my memory doesn’t get any better, here). And I wasn’t made of money. I couldn’t go on supporting everybody for ever.

You’ve published every petty disagreement in the family. It was a terrible thing, according to you, we didn’t want you to go out in bad weather, your poor mother wanted you to wrap up. You with your delicate health, always sickly – you didn’t inherit my constitution, it was only a lifetime of hard work, the business, the family worries that got me, in the end! You recorded that you couldn’t go for a walk without your parents making a fuss, but at twenty-eight you were still living at home. Going away. My poor boy. You could hardly get yourself to the next room. You shut yourself up when people came to visit. Always crawling off to bed, sleeping in the day (oh yes, you couldn’t sleep at night, not like anybody else), sleeping your life away. You invented Amerika instead of having the guts to emigrate, get up off the bed, pack up and go there, make a new life! Even that girl you jilted twice managed it. Did you know Felice is still alive somewhere, there now, in America? She’s an old, old woman with great-grandchildren. They didn’t get her into the death camps those highly educated people say you knew about before they happened. America you never went to, Spain you dreamt about . . . your Uncle Alfred was going to find you jobs there, in Madeira, the Azores . . . God knows where else. Grandson of a ritual slaughterer, a schochet, that was why you couldn’t bear to eat meat, they say, and that made you weak and undecided. So that was my fault, too, because my poor father had to earn a living. When your mother was away from the flat, you’d have starved yourself to death if it hadn’t been for me. And what was the result? You resented so much what I provided for you, you went and had your stomach pumped out! Like someone who’s been poisoned! And you didn’t forget to write it down, either: ‘My feeling is that disgusting things will come out.’

Whatever I did for you was dreck. You felt ‘despised, condemned, beaten down’ by me. But you despised me; the only difference, I wasn’t so easy to beat down, eh? How many times did you try to leave home, and you couldn’t go? It’s all there in your diaries, in the books they write about you. What about that other masterpiece of yours, ‘The Judgement’. A father and son quarrelling, and then the son goes and drowns himself, saying ‘Dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same.’ The wonderful discovery about that story, you might like to hear, it proves Hermann Kafka most likely didn’t want his son to grow up and be a man, any more than his son wanted to manage without his parents’ protection. The meshuggener who wrote that, may he get rich on it! I wouldn’t wish it on him to try living with you, that’s all, the way we had to. When your hunchback friend secretly showed your mother a complaining letter of yours, to get you out of your duty of going to the asbestos factory to help your own sister’s husband, Brod kept back one thing you wrote. But now it’s all published, all, all, all the terrible things you thought about your own flesh and blood. ‘I hate them all’: father, mother, sisters.

You couldn’t do without us – without me. You only moved away from us when you were nearly thirty-two, a time when every man has a wife and children already, a home of his own.

You were always dependent on someone. Your friend Brod, poor devil. If it hadn’t been for the little hunchback, who would know of your existence today? Between the incinerators that finished your sisters and the fire you wanted to burn up your manuscripts, nothing would be left. The kind of men you invented, the Gestapo, confiscated whatever papers of yours there were in Berlin, and no trace of them has ever been found, even by the great Kafka experts who stick their noses into everything. You said you loved Max Brod more than yourself. I can see that. You liked the idea he had of you, that you knew wasn’t yourself (you see, sometimes I’m not so grob, uneducated, knowing nothing but fancy goods, maybe I got from you some ‘insights’). Certainly, I wouldn’t recognise my own son the way Brod described you: ‘the aura Kafka gave out of extraordinary strength, something I’ve never encountered elsewhere, even in meetings with great and famous men . . . the infallible solidity of his insights never tolerated a single lacuna, nor did he ever speak an insignificant word . . . He was life-affirming, ironically tolerant towards the idiocies of the world, and therefore full of sad humour.’

I must say, your mother who put up with your faddiness when she came back from a day standing in the business, your sisters who acted in your plays to please you, your father who worked his heart out for his family – we never got the benefit of your tolerance. Your sisters (except Ottla, the one you admit you were a bad influence on, encouraging her to leave the shop and work on a farm like a peasant, to starve herself with you on rabbit-food, to marry that goy) were giggling idiots, so far as you were concerned. Your mother never felt the comfort of her son’s strength. You never gave us anything to laugh at, sad or otherwise. And you hardly spoke to me at all, even an insignificant word. Whose fault was it you were that person you describe ‘strolling about on the island in the pool, where there are neither books nor bridges, hearing the music, but not being heard.’ You wouldn’t cross a road, never mind a bridge, to pass the time of day, to be pleasant to other people, you shut yourself in your room and stuffed your ears with Oropax against the music of life, yes, the sounds of cooking, people coming and going (what were we supposed to do, pass through closed doors?), even the singing of the pet canaries annoyed you, laughter, the occasional family tiff, the bed squeaking where normal married people made love.

What I’ve just said may surprise. That last bit, I mean. But since I died in 1931 I know the world has changed a lot. People, even fathers and sons, are talking about things that shouldn’t be talked about. People aren’t ashamed to read anything, even private diaries, even letters. There’s no shame, anywhere. With that, too, you were ahead of your time, Franz. You were not ashamed to write in your diary, which your friend Brod would publish – you must have known he would publish everything, make a living out of us – things that have led one of the famous Kafka scholars to study the noises in our family flat in Prague. Writing about me: ‘It would have been out of character for Hermann Kafka to restrain any noises he felt like making during coupling; it would have been out of character for Kafka, who was ultra-sensitive to noise and had grown up with these noises, to mention the suffering they caused him.’

You left behind you for everyone to read that the sight of your parents’ pyjamas and nightdress on the bed disgusted you. Let me also speak freely like everyone else. You were made in that bed. That disgusts me: your disgust over a place that should have been holy to you, a place to hold in the highest respect. Yet you are the one who complained about my coarseness when I suggested you ought to find yourself a woman – buy one, hire one – rather than try to prove yourself a man at last, at thirty-six, by marrying some Prague Jewish tart who shook her tits in a thin blouse. Yes, I’m speaking of that Julie Wohryzek, the shoemaker’s daughter, your second fiancée. You even had the insolence to throw the remark in my face, in that letter you didn’t send, but I’ve read it anyway, I’ve read everything now, although you said I put ‘In The Penal Colony’ on the bedside table and never mentioned it again.

I have to talk about another matter we didn’t discuss, father and son, while we were both alive – all right, it was my fault, maybe you’re right, as I’ve said, times were different . . . Women. I must bring this up because – my poor boy – marriage was ‘the greatest terror’ of your life. You write that. You say your attempts to explain why you couldn’t marry – on these depends the ‘success’ of the whole letter you didn’t send. According to you, marrying, founding a family was ‘the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all’. Yet you couldn’t marry. How is any ordinary human being to understand that? You wrote more than a quarter of a million words to Felice Bauer, but you couldn’t be a husband to her. You put your parents through the farce of travelling all the way to Berlin for an engagement party (there’s the photograph you had taken, the happy couple, in the books they write about you, by the way). The engagement was broken, was on again, off again. Can you wonder? Anyone who goes into a bookshop or library can read what you wrote to your fiancée when your sister Elli gave birth to our first granddaughter. You felt nothing but nastiness, envy against your brother-in-law because ‘I’ll never have a child.’ No, not with the Bauer girl, not in a decent marriage, like anybody else’s son; but I’ve found out you had a child, Brod says so, by a woman, Grete Bloch, who was supposed to be the Bauer girl’s best friend, who even acted as matchmaker between you! What do you say to that? Maybe it’s news to you. I don’t know. (That’s how irresponsible you were.) They say she went away. Perhaps she never told you.

As for the next one you tried to marry, the one you make such a song and dance over because of my remark about Prague Jewesses and the blouse, etc. – for once you came to your senses, and you called off the wedding only two days before it was supposed to take place. Not that I could have influenced you. Since when did you take into consideration what your parents thought? When you told me you wanted to marry the shoemaker’s daughter – naturally I was upset. At least the Bauer girl came from a nice family. What I said about the blouse just came out, I’m human, after all. But I was frank with you, man to man. You weren’t a youngster any more. A man doesn’t have to marry a nothing who will go with anybody.

I saw what that marriage was about, my poor son. You wanted a woman. Nobody understood that better than I did, believe me, I was normal man enough, eh! There were places in Prague where one could get a woman. (I suppose whatever’s happened, there still are, always will be.) I tried to help you; I offered to go along with you myself. I said it in front of your mother, who – yes, as you write you were so shocked to see, was in agreement with me. We wanted so much to help you, even your own mother would go so far as that.

But in that letter you didn’t think I’d ever see, you accuse me of humiliating you and I don’t know what else. You wanted to marry a tart, but you were insulted at the idea of buying one?

Writing that letter only a few days after you yourself called off your second try at getting married, aged thirty-six, you find that your father, as a man of the world, not only showed ‘contempt’ for you on that occasion, but that when he had spoken to you as a broad-minded father when you were a youngster, he had given you information that set off the whole ridiculous business of your never being able to marry, ever. Already, twenty years before the Julie Wohryzek row, with ‘a few frank words’ (as you put it) your father made you incapable of taking a wife and pushed you down ‘into the filth as if it were my destiny’. You remember some walk with your mother and me on the Josefsplatz when you showed curiosity about, well, men’s feelings and women, and I was open and honest with you and told you I could give you advice about where to go so that these things could be done quite safely, without bringing home any disease. You were sixteen years old, physically a man, not a child, eh? Wasn’t it time to talk about such things?

Shall I tell you what I remember? Once you picked a quarrel with your mother and me because we hadn’t educated you sexually – your words. Now you complain because I tried to guide you in these matters. I did – I didn’t. Make up your mind. Have it your own way. Whatever I did, you believed it was because of what I did that you couldn’t bring yourself to marry. When you thought you wanted the Bauer girl, didn’t I give in, to please you? Although you were in no financial position to marry, although I had to give your two married sisters financial help, although I had worries enough, a sick man, you’d caused me enough trouble by persuading me to invest in a mechulah asbestos factory? Didn’t I give in? And when the girl came to Prague to meet your parents and sisters, you wrote, ‘My family likes her almost more than I’d like it to.’ So it went as far as that: you couldn’t like anything we liked, was that why you couldn’t marry her?

A long time ago, a long way . . . ah, it all moves away, it’s getting faint . . . But I haven’t finished. Wait.

You say you wrote your letter because you wanted to explain why you couldn’t marry. I’m writing this letter because you tried to write it for me. You would take even that away from your father. You answered your own letter, before I could. You made what you imagine as my reply part of the letter you wrote me. To save me the trouble . . . Brilliant, like they say. With your great gifts as a famous writer, you express it all better than I could. You are there, quickly, with an answer, before I can be. You take the words out of my mouth: while you are accusing yourself, in my name, of being ‘too clever, obsequious, parasitic and insincere’ in blaming your life on me, you are – yet again, one last time! – finally being too clever, obsequious, parasitic and insincere in the trick of stealing your father’s chance to defend himself. A genius. What is left to say about you if – how well you know yourself, my boy, it’s terrible – you call yourself the kind of vermin that doesn’t only sting, but at the same time sucks blood to keep itself alive? And even that isn’t the end of the twisting, the cheating. You then confess that this whole ‘correction’, ‘rejoinder’, as you, an expensively educated man, call it, ‘does not originate’ in your father but in you yourself, Franz Kafka. So you see, here’s the proof, something I know you, with all your brains, can’t know for me: you say you always wrote about me, it was all about me, your father; but it was all about you. The beetle. The bug that lay on its back waving its legs in the air and couldn’t get up to go and see America or the Great Wall of China. You, you, self, self. And in your letter, after you have defended me against yourself, when you finally make the confession – right again, in the right again, always – you take the last word, in proof of your saintliness I could know nothing about, never understand, a businessman, a shopkeeper. That is your ‘truth’ about us you hoped might be able to ‘make our living and our dying easier’.

The way you ended up, Franz. The last woman you found yourself. It wasn’t our wish, God knows. Living with that Eastern Jewess, and in sin. We sent you money; that was all we could do. If we’d come to see you, if we’d swallowed our pride, meeting that woman, our presence would only have made you worse. It’s there in everything you’ve written, everything they write about you: everything connected with us made you depressed and ill. We knew she was giving you the wrong food, cooking like a gypsy on a spirit stove. She kept you in an unheated hovel in Berlin . . . may God forgive me (Brod has told the world), I had to turn my back on her at your funeral.

Franz . . . When you received copies of your book ‘In The Penal Colony’ from Kurt Wolff Verlag that time . . . You gave me one and I said ‘Put it on the night-table.’ You say I never mentioned it again. Well, don’t you understand – I’m not a literary man. I’m telling you now. I read a little bit, a page or two at a time. If you had seen that book, there was a pencil mark every two, three pages, so I would know next time where I left off. It wasn’t like the books I knew – I hadn’t much time for reading, working like a slave since I was a small boy, I wasn’t like you, I couldn’t shut myself up in a room with books, when I was young. I would have starved. But you know that. Can’t you understand that I was – yes – not too proud – ashamed to let you know I didn’t find it easy to understand your kind of writing, it was all strange to me.

Hah! I know I’m no intellectual, but I knew how to live!

Just a moment . . . give me time . . . there’s a fading . . . Yes – can you imagine how we felt when Ottla told us you had tuberculosis? Oh how could you bring it over your heart to remind me I once said, in a temper, to a useless assistant coughing all over the shop (you should have had to deal with those lazy goyim), he ought to die, the sick dog. Did I know you would get tuberculosis, too? It wasn’t our fault your lungs rotted. I tried to expand your chest when you were little, teaching you to swim; you should never have moved out of your own home, the care of your parents, to that rat-hole in the Schönbornpalais. And the hovel in Berlin . . . We had some good times, didn’t we? Franz? When we had beer and sausages after the swimming lessons? At least you remembered the beer and sausages, when you were dying.

One more thing. It chokes me, I have to say it. I know you’ll never answer. You once wrote ‘Speech is possible only where one wants to lie.’ You were too ultra-sensitive to speak to us, Franz. You kept silence, with the truth: those playing a game of cards, turning in bed on the other side of the wall – it was the sound of live people you didn’t like. Your revenge, that you were too cowardly to take in life, you’ve taken here. We can’t lie peacefully in our graves; dug up, unwrapped from our shrouds by your fame. To desecrate your parents’ grave as well as their bed, aren’t you ashamed? Aren’t you ashamed – now? Well, what’s the use of quarrelling. We lie together in the same grave – you, your mother and I. We’ve ended up as we always should have been, united. Rest in peace, my son. I wish you had let me.

Your father,

Hermann Kafka