Thursday, July 31, 2008

Franz Kafka's Unmasking a Confidence Trickster

I recently ran across Franz Kafka's book on short stories. So far I've loved every minute of them. They range from the bizarre to the mind blowing, all of them though are treasures. If you ever have some time to kill in a book store or library, go and read Metamorphosis or Penal Colony, you'll be rewarded.

As I was thinking about my blog I began to think that Unmasking a Confidence Trickster might be a good short story (10min) that you'll enjoy. It touches on a certain basic emotion that we all have and deal with daily. Enjoy.

Finally, at ten at night, and in the company of a man I had vaguely known some time ago, who had unexpectedly button-holed me and dragged me round the streets for a good two hours, I reached the large house where I had been asked to party.

"There" I said, and clapped my hands to indicate the absolute necessity of the parting of the ways. I had already made several less energetic efforts, and was feeling quite tired.

"Are you going up right away?" he asked. I thought I heard the teeth knocking together in his mouth.

"Yes."

I had an invitation, I had told him as much right away. I had been invited, furthermore, to come up, where I would have liked to have been for some time already, not standing around outside the gate gazing past the ears of the interlocutor. And now to lapse into silence with him too, as if we had decided on a long stay in just this spot. A silence to which the houses round about and the darkness that extended as far as the stars, all made their contribution. And the footfalls of the unseen pedestrians, whose errands one did not guess at, the wind that kept pressing against the opposite side of the street, a gramophone that was singing against the sealed windows of one of the rooms somewhere - they all came to prominence in this silence, as though it belonged and had always belonged to them.

And my companion submitted to this on his own behalf, and - after a smile - on mine too, stretched his right arm up along the wall, and, closing his eyes, learned his face against it.

But I didn't quite get to the bottom of the smile, because shame suddenly compelled me to turn away. It was only from that smile that I had understood that here was nothing more or less than a confidence trickster. And there was I, having lived in this town for months, and thinking I knew these confidence tricksters through and through, the way that at night they emerge from the sidestreets, with their hands unctuously extended like mine host, the way they loiter round the advertising billboards we are studying, as if playing hide-and-seek, and peep out with at least one eye from behind the curve of the pillar, the way they suddenly materialize in front of us on the edge of the pavement at busy crossings when we are feeling frightened. I understand them so well, they had been the first people I'd met in the city, in little pubs, and I owe them my first glimpse of an obduracy that I have begun to feel myself. The way they continued to confront one, even long after one had escaped them, when there was no more confidence to trick! The way they refused to sit down, refused to fall over, but continued to look convincing! And their methods were always the same too: they stood in front of us, making themselves as large as they could; tried to divert us from where we were headed; offered us instead a habitation in their own bosom, and, when in the end a feeling welled up in us, they took it as and embrace into which threw themselves, always face first.

These old ruses I now detected for the first time after so long in the man's company. I rubbed my fingers together, to make it appear the disgrace had never happened.

My man, though, was still leaning as before against the wall, still thinking he was a confidence trickster, and his contentment with his role mantled the one cheek of his that I could see.

"Fuck it!" I said, and tapped him lightly in the shoulder. Then I hurried up the steps, and the unreasonably devoted faces of the servants in the entrance hall were as welcome to me as some delightful surprise. I looked along the line of them, while my coat was taken off, and the dust rubbed from my boots. Then, taking a deep breath and drawing myself up to my full height, I entered the hall.

If you want to learn all there is to know about Franz Kafka, click here.

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