Adam Cheshire
Let me mimic the great Czech writer; it’s what I’ve been doing most of my adult life, anyway. I imagine he’d refer to the three main characters of this story as simply the Proprietor, the Barman, and the Novelist. The Proprietor owned a little known cafe in Prague where the Barman worked as a boy, clearing away ashtrays and making sandwiches. It was there, the Barman told me, the Novelist, that he first saw Kafka, and where Kafka “wrote stories only two people have ever read.”
I had no reason to be overly enthused by the Barman’s letter regarding “a handful of typewritten pieces by Kafka that you, and only you, will be privy to upon engaging with me at my establishment,” but I had a reading scheduled later that month in Prague, and I only knew too well the treasures one can miss out on in allowing reason to completely consume childish curiosity. If anything, I expected the old man—for he had to be ancient if, as he purported, he’d been a boy in the early 1920s—to have come into possession of a handful of ephemera, reports from his job at The Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute or official records of even less interest. Mainly the deflating word was “typewritten.” Kafka’s art was produced in feverish ecstasy, pen in hand, notebooks and journals containing tiny worlds in elegant ink. He’d even remarked pejoratively at one point on the anonymous, detached mechanism of the typewriter. Some scholars have gone so far as to analyze “In The Penal Colony” solely as an elaborate metaphor for the false revelations produced by such a machine.
But once I had acquainted myself with the Barman, his tavern located in a corner of another corner of a dark alley that I felt certain only I had traversed these last few days, he alleged, in a whisper that turned out to be his highest register, that it was on the cafe Proprietor’s own typewriter, in a back study, that Kafka wrote these tremendous, unseen stories.
A keener reader of literature than many of those folks who frequented his establishment, the Proprietor took to Kafka and his writing with an eagerness that some reported—but never Kafka himself, the Barman emphasized—bordered on the obsessive. The Barman, being so young at the time, said that he never truly appreciated his propinquity to greatness. Both in regards to the writer as well as the Proprietor, for he also considered the latter exceptional in his own way. He’d let the Barman into his back study for frequent breaks and serve him candy out of a large dish. In this elegant room was an equally elegant typewriter that sat on a writing desk in the corner. The boy kept his distance from the machine, admiring it as one would a lion across a thin cage. The Proprietor bolstered the boy’s courage a few times and showed him how to use the typewriter, and stood over him with a hand on his shoulder to let him type out his name. “I walked home with tears in my eyes. There was that much joy in me.” As he spoke, the Barman would often seem to peer into the distant past, into the soul of the city itself, as if searching again for that kind old man from his boyhood.
The Barman said the Proprietor, after having surely to bolster his own courage in solitude, offered Kafka the room and the typewriter to use in the evenings when he saw fit. His only request was that Kafka keep all his writing there until he had a completed final draft, and also that he should never speak of what he produced while in the room to anyone. Kafka, the Barman claimed, agreed without hesitation. He remembered staring up at the two while they shook hands on it, gnawing on a gooey glob of sweets.
Here again I wondered, this time aloud to the Barman, enumerating Kafka’s self-lacerating diary entries, the psychologically brutal but creatively fruitful oppression of his father Hermann in the next room, the long euphoric evenings birthing his inimitable stories and fragile, beautiful fragments, hovering centimeters from the flowing script—why would the great writer find anything enticing about this stranger’s room, and the impersonal device planted in it?
“We want to believe we know every facet of Kafka,” the Barman said. “Maybe even Kafka himself felt this; that is, sensed us trying to read him in ways he never wanted to be read—if he wanted to be read at all, on certain nights, when his exaggeratedly dramatized diary was left blank and his room empty as he slipped through the night to the back door of the cafe. This place where he was offered a pure solitude he never knew anywhere else. And it’s true that he had a general aversion to typewriters; they were the machines of drudgery, after all, of the insurance company, big ugly things that seemed to grunt and groan at him. And forget the false suggestion in a German museum that Kafka kept one in his room. At least not to write fiction, in any case. Just imagine him bringing one into the home for the purposes of literature! It would be like carrying a massive black tumor into his room and expecting no comment. He would wince at every keystroke, knowing they knew when he composed. It was worse than love moans through thin walls. It was bad enough that even when he was scratching his pen quietly in the night that Herman’s eyeballs were only too close for comfort. Everywhere, in fact, that Kafka ever wrote seemed bound by a familial charity of some sort, whether the family home, the sanatoriums, or his sister’s cottage. Many scholars—and, apparently, a young novelist currently here in a Prague bar—might propose that these claustrophobic bonds were integral to Kafka being Kafka; that his art thrived because of those very conditions. In this they would be incredibly wrong. All you have to do is read what was written in the cafe study, the typewriter’s keys receptive to every thought as Kafka emptied himself out. Nothing, not even influence, left that room with him when morning came. Just as those chains that bound him to his life didn’t follow him in. What he produced in there were pieces of the highest order, by a writer already existing on the highest echelons of narrative genius. What he produced was a limitless imaginative literature that
transcended even his own best work.”
Whether I believed his story at that point (I mostly did not) was somewhat irrelevant. The prospect itself had me trembling. My heart beat uncomfortably. I took a deep breath and steadied myself, and asked the Barman the obvious question: “So just when can I see these impossibly secret stories?”
The Barman’s long-winded and at parts incoherent answer requires some synthesis. It was a label-warning of sorts, providing, I realized later, much later, ample opportunity to walk away.
Those mornings after Kafka had used the study, the Proprietor, unabashedly eager, eyes watering at the fresh paper on his desk, sat there and read until lunch time. The Barman vividly remembered the Proprietor—who was not typically an angry man—berating a cook for knocking on his study door about a lost biscuit saucer. The Barman and staff had actually attributed this uncharacteristic outburst to the cause of the Proprietor’s illness later that day, when the doctor was called in after a slight palpitation. He recovered quickly enough, it seemed. Maybe a little too quickly, for as soon as he felt up to it he returned to his study to lose himself again in the great writer’s words. And again, just as swiftly, he was laid up once more with trembling. He was too old to be taking on so many responsibilities, people remarked. The doctor demanded bed rest for a month. The Proprietor acquiesced, if only because his heart’s weakness prevented him from much protest.
The Proprietor kept a room across the hall from his study. He would keep the door cracked that first week to see if he could catch Kafka coming to write. The Proprietor still hadn’t the strength to read the papers he had stashed in the bottom drawer of the study’s desk. The Barman said that he could tell the man was debating about asking the boy something when he would make his intermittent visits to sit by The Proprietor’s bed and tell him of the day’s
customers. The only one he seemed eager to hear news of never materializing.
Only one night did Kafka make his way to the study, and this when the Proprietor was fast asleep. It was the last time he ever came to the cafe, the Barman said. “Having met Dora by then, it’s possible he no longer had the need for that space and solitude. There was his health, of course. Which they chalk up to tuberculosis, mind you, as if that solved all the questions. But he did return briefly to Prague, at this point with less than a year to live. The last thing he wrote on the typewriter was a simple thank-you note. A beautiful note, it goes without saying.”
The Proprietor, it turned out, had less time left on earth than Kafka. He would hemorrhage and die a few months after that first episode, while the Barman was reading to him in bed from those sacred papers.
“He had finally worked up the nerve to ask me to read to him,” the Barman said. “If I had known I was killing him, I of course would’ve stopped. But the old man would never have allowed that anyway. He must’ve, on some level, known at some point too. A beautiful type of suicide after all, don’t you think?”
The Barman claimed that because he’d just been a boy then, robust and resilient physically but not cerebrally developed enough to fully absorb the brilliant enigma of Kafka’s words, that he only ever suffered a minor panic attack while reading to the man, this quickening of the heart attributed in his mind to the fact that he had forgotten to feed the family dog that morning. “It wasn’t until years later,” the Barman said, unbuttoning his thin shirt as he spoke, “after the papers had been bequeathed to me and stored away in my closet that I reached for them again and felt for the first time their full effect.” By now he had pulled his shirt apart and exposed a finger-thick scar that traveled from clavicle to his blade-like hipbone. “This came as a result of my first few readings. I was too eager. Didn’t know when to stop. I limit myself now, of course, to one page a month, just to be safe.” He shrugged and buttoned up his shirt. “As safe as one can be. My time, too, is nearer than I’d probably like. Hence my invitation.”
As delicately as possible, with, I hoped, a genuine show of appreciation in thinking enough of me as a writer, and reader, to trust me with such a secret, I outlined my simple reasons for my disbelief in his implications. Both the Proprietor, and now certainly the Barman, were old. Strain of any sort, particularly that of owning a business in a precarious economy, had the potential to cause heart trouble. As far as the panic attack as a boy...well, I told him, I used to succumb to them on a daily basis just at the thought of facing the next day at school. And, the final point I had to make clear to him—because I so desperately wanted to believe him about that one thing, that there were unseen Kafka stories waiting for me somewhere close—that there exists no art that can kill a man.
The Barman again looked not so much agitated as disappointed. He nodded slowly and whispered his delicate whisper, as if still holding out hope to a dim child that he might recognize his error of deduction. “I will concede that the Proprietor was old and I was an anxious boy; however, I was in my thirties when I gorged on the secret stories and debilitated. You might say, then, well this is proof that the stories aren’t fatal because look at me, I’m practically ancient. No no, it’s ok, I have mirrors in this bar. And a calendar. And it’s true, I’ve made a long life of things. This is due only to another piece of the puzzle here. The other item, along with the papers, that was bequeathed to me. The typewriter. It is a regimen of mine, twice a day, to type on the machine. Doesn’t matter what. Letters, receipts, my own dusty thoughts. I even sent off some attempts at fiction to publishers. Slavishly derivative, without a doubt. Still serviceable. I will only say that it’s funny to me how all these publications claim to love Kafka so much, and yet when presented with a story that is almost a carbon copy, they reject it on sight. They like the idea of Kafka more so than the fiction they allegedly revere. But no matter, I keep typing. For the simple reason that it keeps me alive. It’s probable that the exquisite irony of this is an even larger factor for my longevity.
“And for the final point of yours, that art can’t kill—well, simply put, there has never been art like this. Undiluted, pure creativity from a sun-like force. It’s like staring directly at an eclipse. It’s something, I daresay, no one should read. And yet here I am, having called you here for that very purpose. A cosmic court might very well convict me of murder. Murder-suicide. And I should be willing to accept the charge.”
I felt I could trust this man; that is, I didn’t think him dangerous, just slightly delusional. And though I didn’t completely buy into the notion that great unseen works lay in his back room (which he now led me to, his grisly limp almost too much to bear) I could foresee a few notes of Kafka’s, the beginning threads of possibility, which was still an exciting prospect. But what he took from a safe buried beneath a floorboard under another safe, was magnitudes beyond mere possibility. It was—it is—the single greatest collection of writing, of art in any form, to ever exist.
If my friend The Barman were still alive, he might admonish me for writing about any of this, even here, in my latched journal. About those stories now kept tucked beneath my own floorboards, in a safe beneath a safe. If it still worked, I might’ve had the audacity to tell the story of Kafka’s typewriter on the machine itself, passed down and into the hands of the least deserving between the four of us, after all these years. I kept meaning to get it repaired, and unlike the Barman I always had a scattered, unreliable approach to a writerly timetable. Like most novelists, I’m a much better reader than I am a writer. It shows. Not only in the quality of my work, but the quality of my body as well. Approaching 41, one might mistake me for an old man. Indeed, my health has taken a turn for the worse. My only solace: if someone should care enough about me—and, more importantly, about Kafka—to tear the lock off this thing and then peel the floorboards up and crack the safe—to sit quietly, with complete attention, not moving, and read. That person—you, you are that person!—deserves everything that’s coming.
