Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) (16 page)

The drama of a whole life is contained in this diary note, the events cut like a film—unrequited love, the pain of parting, a lapsing into death, the return of a woman cheated of her happiness.

The shift into fantasy so characteristic of Kafka’s writing, also found as something to be taken for granted in the passage just quoted, has often tended to obscure the fact that the author’s apparently hopelessly eccentric consciousness in fact closely reflected the social problems of his time. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kafka’s concern with the Jewishness that was lost to him. Characteristically, academic German literary criticism, particularly in Germany, showed very little understanding until the 1980s of a subject that was obviously of prime importance to Kafka himself. Even today the critics have not really compensated for this deficiency, which is due to an almost willful lack of understanding, and consequently Zischler’s study of Kafka’s diary entry of October 23, 1921, is particularly interesting. “Afternoon, Palestine film,” writes Kafka, without further comment. Zischler explains that this film, which bore the
title
Shivat Zion
, was a documentary made in Jerusalem about the building of Jewish Palestine by the pioneers there, shown by the Zionist Selbstwehr (“Self-defense”) organization at a time when more and more Jews were thinking of emigrating because even then their situation was becoming increasingly difficult; it must, he says, have made a lasting impression on many of the Prague Jews who went to the private screening at the Lido-Bio cinema. Afterward, Zischler tells us, a film of the Eleventh Zionist Congress and Gymnastic Exhibition in Karlsbad was shown. It is not clear whether the gymnastic competition was a Jewish one, but that is not out of the question, for the realization of the Zionist utopia was primarily linked with an appeal to youth, and ideas of the physical training and physiological regeneration of the people were very much to the fore, as indeed they had been since the early nineteenth century in the emergent nationalist German ideology from which Zionism always took its cue. In the image of themselves that they projected, the two peoples, awakening from long oppression or rousing themselves from alleged neglect, were almost exactly the same, even if their standards and ambitions were different.

A reporter for the
Selbstwehr
journal, quoted by Zischler, describes how the Sunday-morning habitués of the Lido-Bio had to wait until the first showing of the Palestine film was over; it began at eight-thirty in the morning. “More and more salvos of applause are heard from the interior of the hall,” he writes, adding that a woman who had
taken a look at the screen inside told the other people waiting, “You hardly want to believe they are Jews, they don’t look like it at all, I don’t know, but their blood must have changed.” This story reminded me of another which, like my experience of the flying Robert in the movie, dates from the year 1976. I had been to a performance of Lessing’s
Nathan the Wise
at the Coburg Landestheater, against my real inclinations because I dislike both the continuing misuse of this play, which I regard as rather questionable anyway, and German theatrical culture in general. At any rate, when what turned out to be an unspeakable performance was over and I was on my way out I heard an elderly lady, who must have been in full possession of her senses during the “great days” of the German people, telling her friend in a confidential whisper: “Well, he certainly played Nathan well. You might have thought he was a real Jew.” So unfathomable is this utterance that anyone who contemplates it must surely be overcome by vertigo, as indeed one is before most of the manifestations of the German-Jewish symbiosis. The overriding concept of those mirror-image identities is the myth of the Chosen People, to which the Germans blindly subscribed at the time when their ideas of national emancipation were taking a wrong turn. Whereas Herzl may still have been trying to square the circle when he suggested that German would be the language spoken in Zion, Hitler (somewhere in his table talk, I think) came to a conclusion which he thought irrefutably justified the annihilation of the Jews: there could not be two Chosen Peoples.

The “Palestine film” was the last of Kafka’s visits to the cinema mentioned in Zischler’s book. What Kafka thought of the film we do not know, either from him or from any other source. All that is certain is that he did not go to the cinema very often afterward. At least he was spared
Triumph of the Will
, though we may wonder what he would have thought if he had been obliged to watch all that marching. Let me be allowed one more discursion. According to Zischler, on September 20, 1913, the day when Kafka, in a state of long-term depression, felt the tears come to his eyes in a movie theater in Verona, the films
Poveri bambini, Il celebro bandito Garouche
, and
La lezione dell’abisso
were showing in the cinemas of that city.
La lezione dell’abisso
(“The Lesson of the Abyss”) was the precursor of the heroic Alpine genre in which Leni Riefenstahl made her name two decades later. In 1935 Riefenstahl—who, I am told, is still swimming and diving in the blue waters of the Maldives—was shooting a film high among the snow-white, cloud-capped mountains of Bavaria. There is nothing visible but the sky, while the Führer, a numinous being who is never seen (the audience views everything as if with a divine eye hovering above the world), is in a plane approaching the city of the Meistersingers where the Reich party rally is being held. Soon afterward he drives through the streets with a great retinue. Of the old, touching Germany that once came into Kafka’s mind as he leafed through
Die Gartenlaube
(“The Garden Arbor,” a family magazine), there is nothing to be seen for the sheer press of human beings—they stand shoulder to shoulder everywhere beaming,
standing on projecting vantage points, walls, stairs, balconies, hanging out of windows. The Führer’s car moves through a positive torrent of people. And then, without warning, comes the strange, enormously evocative series of pictures in which, again looking down from high above, the audience sees a city of tents. There they are, stretching as far as the eye can see: white pyramidal structures. At first, because of the unusual perspective, you do not see exactly what they are. Day is just dawning, and gradually, in the still twilit landscape, people come out of the tents alone or in twos and threes, all going the same way as if they had been called by name. The edifying effect is rather reduced when you see the men in close-up performing their morning ablutions bare-chested, a frequent emblem of National Socialist hygiene. Nonetheless, a magical picture of those white tents lingers in the mind. A people traveling through the desert. The Promised Land appears on the horizon. They will reach it together. But eight or nine years after this vision was recorded on film we shall have, instead, the black ruins of Nuremberg, the city where Zischler was born in 1947 when it still lay in rubble and ashes.

Kafka himself is known to have distrusted all utopianism. Not long before his death he said that he had been exiled from Canaan for forty years, and even the community which he sometimes longed for was basically suspect to him; he wanted only to dissolve away by himself, as the water runs into the sea. Few people ever seem to have been as much alone as Kafka appears in the last pictures of him,
to which we may add one extrapolated from them, so to speak, and painted by Jan Peter Tripp. It shows Kafka as he might have looked had he lived eleven or twelve years longer. That would have been in 1935. The Reich party rally would have been held, just as Riefenstahl’s film shows it. The race laws would have come into force, and Kafka, if he had had his photograph taken again, would have looked at us as he does from Tripp’s ghostly picture—from beyond the grave.

The two sails were billowing in the west wind, and we set a course to take our boat cutting through the tidal current against which the mackerel, well known to be the greediest of fish, like to swim. As day dawned we cast out our lines. Soon we could see the barrier of the chalk cliffs in the twilit distance, bordered on top by the narrow band of dark fields and woods, but it was some time after that before the rays of the sun shone through the slight waves, and the mackerel showed themselves.

Crowding close together, apparently in ever increasing numbers, they shot past just below the surface of the water. Their stiff, torpedo-shaped bodies, whose outstanding feature is an overdeveloped muscular system that considerably restricts their agility, drives them straight ahead all the time. It is almost impossible for them to rest, and they can approach a destination only by describing a wide arc. Where exactly they go, unlike those fish which have more settled habits, has long been and still is a mystery. Ehrenbaum
writes that in the oceans off the American and European coasts there are regions covering many square miles, and going fathoms down into the depths, where the mackerel can be found in thousands of millions at certain times of the year, and that the fish disappear from them again as suddenly as they came. Now, however, they were shining and flashing all around us. In the blue of their backs, which has an irregular dark brown stripe down it, purple and greenish-gold spangles sparkled in an iridescent play of color. We had often noticed when we caught the fish that at the moment of their death, indeed as soon as they felt the mere touch of the strange, dry air, the iridescence quickly faded and was extinguished, fading to a leaden hue.

The strange name of the mackerel reminds us of their wonderful shimmering appearance in life, for Ehrenbaum tells us elsewhere that it derives from the Latin epithet
varius
, or to its diminutives
variolus, variellus, varellus
, meaning pied or flecked, and consequently the
petite vérole
or syphilis takes its name from them, the disease that was once most usually caught in houses where, in the French idiom,
maquerelle
was the word for a madam. Very likely the connections between the life and death of men and mackerel are far more complex than we guess. Isn’t there, I thought as I pulled in the first line, an engraving by Grandville showing half a dozen particularly coldblooded fish decked out in starched shirt fronts, ties, and evening dress, sitting at a table and eating one of their own kind, or what would be hardly less terrible one of
our
kind? Perhaps it is no coincidence that to dream of fish is said to mean death.

Yet the same fish is an emblem of fertility among many peoples. Scheftelowitz, for instance, claims that among the Jews of Tunisia it was the custom to sprinkle mackerel scales on the pillow at weddings or on the Sabbath eve, while the Viennese psychiatrist and anthropologist Aisenbruk, who emigrated to California, tells us in his unjustly neglected writings that the Tyroleans like to nail a fishtail to the parlor ceiling at Christmas.

The facts of the matter, of course, are different. None of us ultimately knows how he may end up on someone else’s plate, or what mysteries are hidden in that other person’s closed hand. Even if we turn to ichthyomancy and to instruments for dissecting the mackerel, if we carefully take it apart and question the oracle of its entrails, we shall be unlikely to get an answer, for such things only look back at us blind and dumb—the grain in planed wood, the silver bracelet, the aging skin, the broken eye—and tell us nothing of the fate of our own kind. These thoughts preoccupied me until late in the evening. We had long since returned from our fishing trip, were back on dry land and looking out again at the gray sea, when it seemed to me as if something triangular were gliding out there, visible only now and then among the waves. “Perhaps it’s someone still out sailing,” said my companion, and she added, “or else the fin of that great fish we will never net passing us far out at sea.”