Private Novelist (15 page)

YIGAL SPENT THE NEXT TWO DAYS
drunk, writing the following story based on something Kafka began writing in his diary in August 1914, “Memories of the Kalda Railway”:

A small railway in the interior of Russia: I was there only a year, long enough to learn two songs from the railway inspector. The songs were “Where Are You Going, Little Child, in the Woods?” and “Merry Comrades, I Belong to You.” Tuneless, meandering songs, each a thousand verses long, sung endlessly to the unvarying southern horizon, which I faced each day, slowly rotating my chair to follow the sun's progress. The first was a lament—quiet, with deep vibration building up in the chest and occasional sobbing. It was about a lost child, after all. The second usually came after meals and was a high, barking wail of pointless joy. The train came seldom, of course. In the five months I was stationed there, I saw it twice. It came carrying the railway inspector; after two weeks, during which we did little besides drink,
repeat the songs, and fall asleep at last in each other's arms, wrapped in our overcoats against the cold, it returned from Kalda to take him away again. When he arrived the only other passenger was a brown heifer. There was no conductor to close the doors, and when the nine empty cars pulled in, she came to the vestibule and hesitated, considering perhaps a moment on the grass while the engine took on water. I approached slowly, trying not to frighten her. She shivered and her nose seemed dry. My attention was seized by her deep brown eyes' rectangular pupils. I thought I could make out something inside—a reflected scene, but one that had nothing to do with my shed, the signal, the water tower, or the featureless prairie around us. I saw a tiny boat rocking on a river, with willows hanging over from the banks, and cattails all around. The sun was brilliant and a stone fly skittered over the water. Then the heifer closed her eyes. The locomotive bathed us in steam and pulled away. Then the inspector walked up to greet me. He offered me vodka and began teaching me the songs.

When after two weeks' oblivion I honorably left the service of the railway, I asked if I might first ride to Kalda, the end of the line, before returning home. There is little to see in Kalda: a tiny gray town of stucco and daub, a few small plazas, a broken bottle or two, where even the wind arrives tired by the thousand miles from the nearest hills. In Kalda (it was said), though the cirrus clouds race by above, taking just a minute to fly from one horizon to the other, the earthbound air is still. Black-clad women move slowly about, speaking briefly to each other on their daily rounds from the market to the laundry. Then they warm their vegetable diet, wild onions, in huge pots nestled in mounds of smoldering peat. They have nothing to sell and consequently nothing to buy;
the population is very old, dying even; all the men are gone, and the railway will soon shut down. This was the common wisdom regarding Kalda, which was held to be the remotest outpost of our civilization.

Yet someone there would receive a heifer. She stood blankly grinning as I looked into her eyes, and then as the train creaked into motion she listed gently from side to side, still watching me, generously, gently. In her eyes the boat rocked. As I turned to look for it my eyes filled with steam. Then she was gone, into slavery, or to be eaten, who knew. She was right not to seek freedom in the vast upturned bowl of the steppes. In name I was free—nothing held me there but the promise of a salary—still, as everyone says, the plains are a prison. A single shopping street in the city holds more humanity than the entire high plain. The destitute or insane person who might excite our sympathy quickly becomes an unrecognizable tangle of dry bone, immune to charity. The heifer knew this, and she voluntarily chose life in Kalda over confinement to the steppes (I am convinced of this).

I waited six months for the next train. The winter was uneventful. Snow covered the grass and starving legions of rats swept down from the north. The wind never stopped. Then, in the end, rain fell, the poppies opened their orange mouths, the sky took on a faint glow like dawn, and from an oblique angle, if one lay on the ground, the steppes appeared green. Soon I saw a weasel hunting for mice. Then the train came in a slow smear of colored smoke. After that I waited another week, teetering on the flimsy wooden rails.

This time there was a passenger, an elderly man with thick glasses and an unseasonable woolen hat. He read the same front page of a newspaper over and over while I listened to the rails, watching the landscape repeat itself as the shadows
slowly moved around the car into nightfall. The cars never stopped lurching from side to side, and when I closed my eyes I felt that I was standing on a moored rowboat. Sleep was impossible with the constant motion. The dining car was at the eastern end of the train, due to the prevailing wind. Twice a day I fixed myself a cup of tea and stole a few biscuits from an unmarked, ancient tin under the cash register. I brought tea to the old man. He never left his seat except to piss between the cars. He was shy of doing it standing in the doorway, facing that endless horizon.

When we reached Kalda it was late afternoon, warm and silent. The old man turned away from the station and fought his way, wheezing with effort, alone into the tall grass.

I had only one night in Kalda before the train would leave again for six months, and like a sailor with one night's shore leave I was uncertain how to spend it. I could not stay even two nights without committing myself to walking back to the city, which was impossible. Perhaps with an oxcart to carry water I could have walked, but as far as I knew there was only one animal in Kalda. The station faced a dusty plaza ringed with low gray buildings. There was no glass in the windows, as if no one had used them for a long time.

I fell asleep. When I awoke the little heifer was nibbling my hand. Its cheek rested on my thigh and its lips curved upward in a smile. It looked up to me with eyes blank as tar. In the pupils nothing was to be seen, but in the glassy surface I could make out my own reflection. My beard was long, both gray and red, and my eyes formed dark circles. My face was sunburned in patches and my nose looked almost purple. I suddenly felt my lips and tongue, and struggled to wet my mouth with saliva. It and my eyes were gummy with dust. I stroked the heifer's head as she smiled and tried to lick my
hands. The sun dropped below the horizon with a start and I realized I was cold.

There has never been an inn in Kalda. I moved a coin to my shirt pocket and began to think about asking for shelter. Looking around, I saw that someone was approaching us. She was all in black and carrying a heavy walking stick. The heifer's ears perked upright and she left off licking me for a moment. When the woman was very close to me, close enough to see that under my filth and fatigue I had the features of a young man, she threw back her hood. She had fine, dusty yellow hair that fell thickly past her shoulders and was tucked into her coat. She looked no more than twenty-five years old.

I started to my feet and wiped the grime from my mouth. The heifer nuzzled against my hips and drove the two of us back down the black, silent street through the dark to her house.

In the morning, instead of returning to the station, I went alone to the fields to mow last year's mustard and turn it under. To do otherwise would have been tantamount to murder. There were no young men in Kalda and no surplus that might have been sold to pay the fares for the old men and women to leave for the cities. No one was strong enough to walk a hundred miles, let alone a thousand. So the empty train made its way back and forth, and the people ate wild onions. With my help there would be potatoes.

Her name was Mary. Her mother seemed at first very proud and silent, but I learned much later that she had been the victim of a beating by her husband. It had left her unable to speak. Regardless, whenever she saw me she threw her chin into the air.

The heifer was Mary's. In mid-June, when the air was thick
with black flies and mosquitoes, she gave birth to a calf. She lived at the end of a short grass rope in the courtyard. Mary fought valiantly for the milk, but I think somehow the little starved cow reserved the best for her calf. The milk she gave us was thin and sour. Mary made cheese from it. She said that if she sold enough cheese in the city, she could make enough money to leave Kalda. I encouraged her, but thought she failed to understand urban commerce. Livestock can be sent alone to Kalda, and no one but its rightful owner will think of retrieving it, but cheese cannot sell itself. Still, I did not volunteer to leave her for six months for the sake of selling the cheese. I told her that I would be able to persuade the conductor to grant her a fare on credit against the value of the cheese, and we would leave Kalda together. Of course I would pay her fare myself. What could the cheese possibly be worth, after three months in the summer heat? We devoted long nights of discussion to the fate of the cheese. One night I remarked offhand that we could sell the cheese to whoever had sent her the cow.

“Isn't that your cow?” she asked with an air of studious wonder.

“Then it must belong to someone else,” I said.

She put her arms around me. “I care for your cow because you are my husband. It is up to me to take care of all of us now, to make money so that our child will have clothing.”

For the first time I was to be a father. I embraced her passionately. When the autumn arrived I was fit and proud. From working in the fields I had strong, callused hands. We went down to the station with Mary's mother and the sack of cheese. The train pulled in slowly. A young man, a passenger, was holding the rail and leaning far out from the train, shading his eyes. “Mary! Mary!” he called.

She ran forward to him, grasping her belly. “I can no longer be your wife,” she said. Her mother grunted.

“I forgive you everything,” he said. She began to cry. He held her tenderly. I walked to our house and untied the cow and her calf. They raced off into the tall grass.

When I returned by another way to the station, Mary and her husband were nowhere to be seen, and I bought a seat in second class. The inspector joined me one stop past my old post. When he heard my story he descended from the train to buy a bottle of the cheapest vodka. He taught me a love song, a wordless march with accompanying hand motions. We became so drunk that the stars wheeled below us like carnival lights reflected in a well. But even after a week the embraces of the inspector were of so little use against my pain that I leaped gently and secretly, without saying good-bye, to the tall-grass prairie near a river, in a fertile area dotted with towns. I followed a path through the reeds to a riverbank, where a little boat lay rocking under a canopy of willow branches yellowed by autumn. The boat had waited a long time through the summer rains and falling leaves, and had to be dragged in and overturned, cleaned, and left in the sun for a day. Then with my pay jingling in my pocket I began my journey downstream.

I paused at every opportunity to explore the country. In a medium-sized market town I visited a bookstore. Among the ancient and indecipherable texts was a book by the railway inspector, which he had dedicated to me. The margins were filled with notations in his own handwriting. The topic was the history of the Kalda railway.

“Almost nothing is commonly known about the origins of Kalda,” he wrote. “That a town should spring up in isolation, where no town is needed, may surprise no one; but that such
a town should be served by a railway is strange indeed. Many are the forces which compel otherwise solitary people, whose lonely homesteads, devoid of visitors or of any variation in human contact beyond the occasional arrival of an infant, which can hardly be regarded as variation given the inevitable formative influence of its surroundings” (I didn't say the inspector wrote well; only that he wrote) “to build a forum as it were for daily contact and interaction. Some may indict certain romantic or poetical tendencies among these lonely steppe-dwellers, but it is legendary among railway personnel, of whom I am admittedly one, that in the case of Kalda the hermits of a vast tract of interior land were lured, briefly, into one place by precisely one common goal: namely, that of obtaining railway service.

“Records of the railway's initial decision to consider construction of the Kalda line make reference to a thriving market for priceless furs of fisher and sable, where common household goods such as colanders, imported from manufacturing centers, might be exchanged for their weight in gold. That these stories were believed does not bespeak gullibility on the part of the railway company, but rather great skill in deceit and falsehood on the part of the people of Kalda—or rather, the solitary hermits of the steppes who, for several days many years ago, filled the poor gray city they had prepared of mud and lime to welcome the first train, on which, I am strangely proud to say, my father rode as chief inspector. There are no citizens of Kalda, as there is no city of Kalda. To explain how an illusory city might come to occupy a prominent position on the maps of our nation and even, due to its unique isolation, on globes of the world will be one aim of this essay; a defense and, I hope, complete vindication of my father's role will be another, albeit minor, goal.”

Here in the margin the inspector had written: “Mary.”

The text continued: “The essentially solitary nature of Kalda can be disputed by no one who has visited that city. Yet with what regret must I note how few can claim to have done so! Whatever I write will be dismissed as the word of one man against a thousand, for everyone holds his own opinion of the city of Kalda, and has always held it. I who have returned from witnessing the dread desolation imposed by the vast caldron of featureless sky which oppresses our interior in general and the spurious city of Kalda in particular—unique so far as I know, in that no one who sets foot on the earth of that region can claim to have escaped its”—here I felt all at once like a descending yoke the ponderous self-aggrandizement of his prose, and turned to the appendices. Mary was named only once, as the fifth item in an alphabetical glossary of Kalda's false citizenry: “a beauty whose qualities might, given greater scope, have come to some use, had she not lost the power of speech; but the subject of this book is the little town itself, and the vindication of my father.” The book was very dull.