Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883—June 3, 1924)
Franz was a nervous and paradoxical guy. He asked his friend Max to burn all of his writing when he died. Perhaps he knew that Max was the least likely to follow through with this because Max thought Franz was a genius.
Sometime after Franz died, Max took a briefcase full of Franz’s writing and went to Israel. Max had a secretary who was also his lover. When Max died, this woman got the briefcase full of Franz’s work. She had two daughters. When she died, one of the daughters received a lot of Franz’s writing and kept it in an apartment in Tel Aviv filled with cats.
This is how the cats began reading. It took a while for them to understand Franz’s German, with its complex and ambiguous grammar. There were the novels, yes, but they especially responded to the short prose. A cat’s mind: small worlds, quickly and deftly moving from one thing to another. And death, delicious or eluded, always a moment away.
Many cats, crawling over open notebooks, the naked pages filled with Franz’s ink. At night, the soft susurration of fur over paper, no light except the tubercular moon. The daughter sighing in her bed, asleep, dreaming of the dark sea.
For the cats, was it the inevitable and cryptic violence, the stealthy darkness, the sense of slipping through life if it had material substance, a smooth and viscous river like night? Sharp and sudden things? The surfaces of the cats’ world were Franz’s writing.
It wasn’t long before the cats themselves began to write. Did they hold pens between their claws, use a computer? It was the blood of captured mice splattered on Franz’s stories. What does it mean to write with the death of a creature? The cats batted mice around, tortured them, allowed blood to seep and trail. The daughter paid little attention, left out food and water, stroked her fingers through the sleek fur on the arched backs of the cats, attended to her life among the cats. Franz’s papers soaked in blood and urine, acrid, rust-coloured. There were books and translations of books in the world outside but only the cats knew the particular stories in this apartment, wrote and rewrote, slept and woke among them.
From the safety of their homes in walls and behind shelves, did the mice scheme then gather around the body of cats to write their own narrative in blood, did they leave a legible trail of calligraphic droppings as they chanced a run across a page? It was their deaths that were their most articulate expression, the small squeaks and tiny wails of despair as they were slowly killed by cats.
Gary Barwin is the author of 31 books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction and has published, performed and broadcast his work internationally. Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 will be published this fall by Assembly Press. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com
