Franz Kafka
The Hunter Gracchus
This translation by Ian Johnston of Malaspina
University-College, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright restrictions. For
information please use the following link: Copyright.
For comments or question please contact Ian
Johnston. This text was last revised in March 2009
For more links to Kafka e-texts in English click here
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 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’re 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 deviation 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 heart 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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