A Kafka Travelogue
A Kafka Travelogue
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, June 03, 1987
PRAGUE in late autumn chills both body and soul with a grey, swirling, misty void. We knew as much even before embarking on our journey. For Franz Kafka had said so in his writings.
It was November, 1983. My wife and I were official guests of the Czech government, on a travel grant too good to resist. We were to see as much of everything as possible — the glass workshops, the museums and galleries, the schools and vocational centers, the publishing houses, the theatre companies, the vast cultural legacy. But it was really for Franz Kafka that I had come, if only in secret.
Anyone who grew up in recent decades with even a small yen for the literary has, in one way or another, fallen under the influence of this strange and mysterious Czech writer. Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, had in fact spent much of his life there, and is buried in the shady Jewish cemetery on its outskirts. For me, it would be a pilgrimage of the heart to a land I knew only through a mystic writer's eyes.
It was deja vu. For much of modern Czechoslovakia is Kafkaesque. The Czechs themselves can be the most cruel or the most caring people in the world, a people of explosive inner conflict and passionate merry-making. There is no poverty to speak of in Czechoslovakia today, and still, a large section of the working-class citizenry longs for greener pastures outside of its closely-guarded borders.
One must take the train to and from Czechoslovakia to fully appreciate this. As you approach the border into German soil, the trains are routinely stopped at a no-nonsense military outpost where troops - armed with automatic weapons and spirited police dogs - unbolt and search everything down to your hand-carried luggage and the wall-panneling in the lavatory. No one goes in or out of there without permission.
But there was more to Kafka's Prague that defied logic, particularly with regard to the writer himself. We are soon to discover that there was no official information to be had anywhere on either Kafka or his works — this, despite the fact that we had arrived in the midst of what should have been his centennial anniversary. Faces changed abruptly whenever his name was mentioned, and even the highly-developed Czech publishing industry seemed to deliberately overlook his books.
We were told by "those in the know", if a little awkwardly, that Kafka was an alien to the present-day Czech leadership, considered a decadent Jewish writer whose thoughts were officially dismissed by the New Order as counterproductive. As far as the "sanctioned" literary circles were concerned, Kafka had never really existed, or at least, was not worth troubling about as a writer or as a thinker.
Undaunted by these initial setbacks, we had gone off in search of the few pertinent landmarks that we could uncover on our own — Kafka's tiny cottage that still stands on a cobblestone alley once reserved for alchemy shops, the medieval castle on which his famous novel had been based, his dark uptown apartment with a single window that opened not to the great outdoors, but to the interior of a massive stone church. Kafka had lived here, had taken quiet strolls through these covered courtyards, had suffered the loneliness and alienation to which he was still being subjected over half-a-century after his death in 1927, at the tragic age of 41.
And then again, perhaps Kafka himself would not have wished it any other way. As an obsessively self-effacing man tormented by religious and filial guilt, he had written only in private as an alternative to prayer and meditation, searching with a mind both lucid and confused. He wrote constantly, even as he spent the last years of his life in sanitoriums, battling against the tuberculosis that would eventually claim him. On his death-bed, he had willed that all of his manuscripts and notebooks "be burned unread" — a request that his best friend and executor had wisely decided to ignore. The bulk of his work, then, was published posthumously, and had become widely-known only through the efforts of literary and philosophical scholars who had recognized its importance to the shaping of much contemporary thought.
We visited Kafka's grave at the end of our stay, a modest plot with a single stone marker that was shared with members of his immediate family. Neatly piled along the length and breadth of that communal resting place were small pebbles that had been left there by nameless pilgrims from all over the world — a silent tribute to the singular greatness of this Czech writer long ignored by his own people. Jeanne Marie and I left three pebbles: one for each of us, and another for those at home who loved him just as dearly.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “A Kafka Travelogue” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, June 03, 1987
