Kafka's Neighbors

The essential Kafka character lives and works in rented rooms, always vulnerable to trespass. Part of me did, too, while another part was losing the plot, raising Cain. It’s only so long that you can indulge that part of you that feeds at the trough (with appetites “I had long secretly indulged, and had of late began to pamper,” as Stevenson had it) before it becomes the stronger part.

Two of Kafka’s shorter stories come to mind.

In My Neighbor, the businessman, who hesitated until it was too late to rent neighboring rooms, now suspects that his new neighbor is a competitor who can eavesdrop on everything he says: “The wretchedly thin walls betray the honorable and capable man, but shield the dishonest … If I wanted to exaggerate – and one must often do that so as to make things clear in one’s mind – I might assert that [the neighbor] does not require a telephone, he uses mine, he pushes his sofa against the wall and listens … Perhaps he doesn’t even wait for the end of the conversation, but gets up at the point where the matter has become clear to him, flies through the town with his usual haste, and, before I have hung up the receiver, is already at his goal working against me.”

In The Student, another neighbor bursts into the narrator’s room every night to wrestle with him, and the narrator has found himself accommodating this nightly schedule, doing easy work that can be dropped when the neighbor, who wants to fight and nothing else, arrives: “If I wanted to give up this acquaintance once and for all I should have to give up the room, for bolting the door is of no avail. Once I had the door bolted because I wanted to read, but my neighbor hacked the door in two with an ax, and, since he can part with something only with the greatest difficulty once he has taken hold of it, I was even in danger of the ax …Well, in me he has a good opponent; accidents aside, I perhaps am the stronger and more skillful of the two. He, however, has more endurance.”

Drinking often felt like living two lives, and, eventually, these were the lives of rivals. At work it is readily apparent, in retrospect, that the walls between my ambition and my unthinking capacity to work against it have long proven to be wretchedly thin. And elsewhere, perhaps, I took too easily to easy tasks, knowing that something like an antagonist would approach at a certain hour, with endurance to beat the band.

It’s hard work keeping the upper hand; almost as hard as giving in.