you catch cold! God forbid! And you’ve held it against me all your life. I’m sorry, I have to say it again, that old expression of mine that irritated you so much: I wish I had your worries.
Everything that went wrong for you is my fault. You write it down for sixty pages or so and at the same time you say to me ‘I believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement.’ I was a ‘true Kafka’, you took after your mother’s, the Löwy side, etc. – all you inherited from me, according to you, were your bad traits, without having the benefit of my vitality. I was ‘too strong’ for you. You could not help it; I could not help it. So? All you wanted was for me to admit that, and we could have lived in peace. You were judge, you were jury, you were accused; you sentenced yourself, first. ‘At my desk, that is my place. My head in my hands – that is my attitude.’ (And that’s what your poor mother and I had to look at, that was our pride and joy, our only surviving son!) But I was accused, too; you were judge, you were jury in my case, too. Right? By what right? Fancy goods – you despised the family business that fed us all, that paid for your education. What concern was it of yours, the way I treated the shop assistants? You only took an interest so you could judge, judge. It was a mistake to have let you study law. You did nothing with your qualification, your expensive education that I slaved and ruined my health for. Nothing but sentence me. – Now what did I want to say? Oh yes. Look what you wanted me to admit, under the great writer’s beautiful words. If something goes wrong, somebody must be to blame, eh? We were not straw dolls, pulled about from above on strings. One of us must be to blame. And don’t tell me you think it could be you. The stronger is always to blame, isn’t that so? I’m not a deep thinker like you, only a dealer in retail fancy goods, but isn’t that a law of life? ‘The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having.’ You think I’ll believe you’re paying me a compliment, forgiving me, when you hand me the worst insult any father could receive? If it’s what I am that’s to blame, then I’m to blame, to the last drop of my heart’s blood and whatever this is that’s survived my body, for what I am, for being alive and begetting a son! You! Is that it? Because of you I should never have lived at all!
You always had a fine genius (never mind your literary one) for working me up. And you knew it was bad for my heart condition. Now, what does it matter . . . but, as God’s my witness, you aggravate me . . . you make me . . .
Well.
All I know is that I am to blame for ever. You’ve seen to that. It’s written, and not alone by you. There are plenty of people writing books about Kafka, Franz Kafka. I’m even blamed for the name I handed down, our family name. Kavka is Czech for jackdaw, so that’s maybe the reason for your animal obsession. Dafke! Insect, ape, dog, mouse, stag, what didn’t you imagine yourself. They say the beetle story is a great masterpiece, thanks to me – I’m the one who treated you like an inferior species, gave you the inspiration . . . You wake up as a bug, you give a lecture as an ape. Do any of these wonderful scholars think what this meant to me, having a son who didn’t have enough self-respect to feel himself a man?
You have such a craze for animals, but may I remind you, when you were staying with Ottla at Zürau you wouldn’t even undress in front of a cat she’d brought in to get rid of the mice . . .
Yet you imagined a dragon coming into your room. It said (an educated dragon, noch): ‘Drawn hitherto by your longing . . . I offer myself to you.’ Your longing, Franz: ugh, for monsters, for perversion. You describe a person (yourself, of course) in some crazy fantasy of living with a horse. Just listen to you, ‘. . . for