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Franz Kafka
The Hunter Gracchus
The Hunter Gracchus
Two boys were sitting on the wall by the jetty playing dice. A man was
reading a newspaper on the steps of a monument in the shadow of a hero wielding
a sabre. A young girl was filling her tub with water
at a fountain. A fruit seller was lying close to his produce and looking out to
sea. Through the empty openings of the door and window of a bar two men could
be seen drinking wine in the back. The landlord was sitting at a table in the
front dozing. A small boat glided lightly into the small harbour, as if it were
being carried over the water. A man in a blue jacket climbed out onto land and
pulled the ropes through the rings. Behind the man from the boat, two other men
in dark coats with silver buttons carried a bier, on which, under a large silk
scarf with a floral pattern and fringe, a person was obviously lying. No one
bothered with the newcomers on the jetty, even when
they set the bier down to wait for their helmsman, who was still working with
the ropes. No one came up to them, no one asked them any questions, no one took a closer look at them.
The helmsman was further held
up a little by a woman with disheveled hair, who now appeared on deck with a
child at her breast. Then he moved on, pointing to a yellowish, two-story house
which rose close by, directly on the left near the water. The bearers took up
their load and carried it through the low door furnished with slender columns.
A small boy opened a window, noticed immediately how the group was disappearing
into the house, and quickly shut the window again. The door now closed, as
well. It had been fashioned with care out of black oak wood. A flock of doves,
which up to this point had been flying around the bell tower, came down in
front of the house. The doves gathered before the door, as if their food was
stored inside the house. One flew right up to the first floor and pecked at the
window pane. They were brightly coloured, well cared for, lively animals. With
a large sweep of her hand the woman threw some seeds towards them from the
boat. They ate them up and then flew over to the woman.
A man in a top hat with a
mourning ribbon came down one of the small, narrow, steeply descending lanes
which led to the harbour. He looked around him attentively. Everything upset
him. He winced at the sight of some garbage in a corner. There were fruit peels
on the steps of the monument. As he went by, he pushed them off with his cane.
He knocked on the door of the parlour, while at the same time taking off his
top hat with his black-gloved right hand. It was opened immediately, and about
fifty small boys, lined up in two rows in a long corridor, bowed to him.
The helmsman came down the
stairs, welcomed the gentleman, and led him upstairs. On the first floor he
accompanied him around the slight, delicately built balcony surrounding the
courtyard, and, as the boys crowded behind them at a respectful distance, both
men stepped into a large cool room at the back of the house. From it one could
not see a facing house, only a bare gray-black rock wall. Those who had carried
the bier were busy setting up and lighting some long candles at its head. But
these provided no light. They only made the previously still shadows positively
jump and flicker across the walls. The shawl was pulled back off the bier. On
it lay a man with wildly unkempt hair and beard and a
brown skin—he looked rather like a hunter. He lay there motionless, apparently
without breathing, his eyes closed, although his surroundings were the only
thing indicating that it could be a corpse.
The gentleman stepped over to
the bier, laid a hand on the forehead of the man lying there, then knelt down
and prayed. The helmsman gave a sign to the bearers to leave the room. They
went out, drove away the boys who had gathered outside, and shut the door. The
gentleman, however, was apparently still not satisfied with this stillness. He
looked at the helmsman. The latter understood and went through a side door into
the next room. The man on the bier immediately opened his eyes, turned his face
with a painful smile towards the gentleman, and said, “Who are you?” Without
any surprise, the gentleman got up from his kneeling position and answered,
“The burgomaster of Riva.” The man on the bier nodded, pointed to a chair by
stretching his arm out feebly, and then, after the burgomaster had accepted his
invitation, said, “Yes, I knew that, Burgomaster, but in the first moments I’ve
always forgotten it all—everything is going in circles around me, and it’s
better for me to ask, even when I know everything. You also presumably know
that I am the hunter Gracchus.”
“Of course,” said the
burgomaster. “I received the news today, during the night. We had been sleeping
for some time. Then around midnight my wife called, ‘Salvatore’—that’s my
name—‘look at the dove at the window!’ It was really a dove, but as large as a
rooster. It flew up to my ear and said, ‘Tomorrow the
dead hunter Gracchus is coming. Welcome him in the name of the city.’”
The hunter nodded and pushed
the tip of his tongue between his lips. “Yes, the doves fly here before me. But
do you believe, Burgomaster, that I am to remain in Riva?”
“That I cannot yet say,”
answered the burgomaster. “Are you dead?”
“Yes,” said the hunter, “as you
see. Many years ago—it must have been a great many years ago—I fell from a rock
in the Black Forest—that’s in Germany—as I was tracking a chamois. Since then
I’ve been dead.”
“But you are also alive,” said
the burgomaster.
“To a certain extent,” said the
hunter, “to a certain extent I am also alive. My death boat lost its way—a
wrong turn of the helm, a moment when the helmsman was not paying attention, a
diversion through my wonderful homeland—I don’t know what it was. I only know
that I remain on the earth and that since that time my boat has journeyed over
earthly waters. So I—who only wanted to live in my own
mountains—travel on after my death through all the countries of the earth.”
“And have you no share in the
world beyond?” asked the burgomaster wrinkling his brow.
The hunter answered, “I am
always on the immense staircase leading up to it. I roam around on this
infinitely wide flight of steps, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes to the
right, sometimes to the left, always in motion. From being a hunter I’ve become
a butterfly. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing,” protested
the burgomaster.
“That’s very considerate of
you,” said the hunter. “I am always moving. But when I go through the greatest
upward motion and the door is already shining right above me, I wake up on my
old boat, still drearily stranded in some earthly stretch of water. The basic
mistake of my earlier death smirks at me in my cabin. Julia, the wife of the
helmsman, knocks and brings to me on the bier the morning drink of the country
whose coast we are sailing by at the time. I lie on a wooden plank bed,
wearing—I’m no delight to look at—a filthy shroud, my hair and beard, black and
gray, are inextricably intertangled, my legs covered
by a large silk women’s scarf, with a floral pattern and long fringes. At my
head stands a church candle which illuminates me. On the wall opposite me is a
small picture, evidently of a bushman aiming his spear at me and concealing himself as much as possible behind a splendidly painted shield.
On board ship one comes across many stupid pictures, but this is one of the
stupidest. Beyond that my wooden cage is completely empty. Through a hole in
the side wall the warm air of the southern nights comes in, and I hear the
water lapping against the old boat.
“I have been lying here since
the time when I—the still living hunter Gracchus—was pursuing a chamois to its
home in the Black Forest and fell. Everything took place as it should. I
followed, fell down, bled to death in a ravine, was dead, and this boat was
supposed to carry me to the other side. I still remember how happily I
stretched myself out here on the planking for the first time. The mountains
have never heard me singing the way these four still shadowy walls did then.
“I had been happy to be alive
and was happy to be dead. Before I came on board, I gladly threw away my
rag-tag collection of guns and bags, and the hunting rifle which I had always
carried proudly, and slipped into the shroud like a young girl into her wedding
dress. Here I lay down and waited. Then the accident happened.”
“A nasty fate,” said the
burgomaster, raising his hand in a gesture of depreciation, “and you are not to
blame for it in any way?”
“No,” said the hunter. “I was a
hunter. Is there any blame in that? I was raised to be a hunter in the Black
Forest, where at that time there were still wolves. I lay in wait, shot, hit
the target, removed the skin—is there any blame in
that? My work was blessed. ‘The great hunter of the Black Forest’—that’s what
they called me. Is that something bad?”
“It not up to me to decide
that,” said the burgomaster, “but it seems to me as well that there’s no blame
there. But then who is to blame?”
“The boatswain,” said the
hunter. “No one will read what I write here, no one will come to help me. If
people were assigned the task of helping me, all the doors of all the houses
would remain closed, all the windows would be shut, they would all lie in bed,
with sheets thrown over their heads, the entire earth would be a hostel for the
night. And that makes good sense, for no one knows of me, and if he did, he
would have no idea of where I was staying, and if he knew that, he would still
not know how to keep me there, and so he would not know how to help me. The
thought of wanting to help me is a sickness and has to be cured with bed rest.
“I know that, and so I do not
cry out to summon help, even if at moments—as I have no self-control, for
example, right now—I do think about that very seriously. But to get rid of such
ideas I need only look around and recall where I am and where—and this I can
assert with full confidence—I have lived for centuries.”
“That’s extraordinary,” said
the burgomaster, “extraordinary. And now are you intending to remain with us in
Riva?”
“I have no intentions,” said
the hunter with a smile and, to make up for his mocking tone, laid a hand on
the burgomaster’s knee. “I am here. I don’t know any more than that. There’s
nothing more I can do. My boat is without a helm—it journeys with the wind
which blows in the deepest regions of death.”
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