Babel Tower (50 page)

“Oh, good,” said Frederica then. “Are you specially interested in Kafka?”

“Yes,” said the blond man. Frederica waited. “Yes, I am,” said the blond man.

And now he is about to speak. Thomas Poole and the inspector are in the back row of the circle, which is two rows deep. The lights are
dismal. Someone is crunching a Polo mint. John Ottokar stands up, holding a neat white sheaf of papers. His face is classical, broad-browed, blue-eyed, quiet-mouthed, amiable. His hair is massed and thick.

“I think I remember at school being told you must never say ‘I think,’ ” he begins. “But all I can do is say what I think, since there is no other reason for standing here. I am fortunate if you listen. No one in this book listened to K the Land Surveyor, except the official whose bed he invaded by accident, when he had the chance to speak, and he only fell asleep.

“I didn’t really read before I came to this class. So I can’t make the connections some of you make between this book and other books. This is the book of all the books we have read that has told me most about what it is to be a human being, although what it says is that to be a human being is almost nothing.

“What you notice at first is two things: the Land Surveyor who can’t get himself accepted or recognised, and the Castle.

“He can see the Castle in the distance, but there is no way of getting there, or speaking to it.

“In the village, where he seems to have to stay, everything is full of human bodies and human emotions—sex, and competition, silly quarrels and status problems like hens in a barnyard.

“You might suppose the Castle would be fine, or imposing, or a fortress. But is isn’t. It resembles the village, or a rock. Or an optical illusion. Kafka tells you several things about it, and the things give contradictory impressions, contradictory feelings. It is in the ‘glittering air’ in the white snow, it ‘soars light and free.’ It also resembles his home village he came from. ‘It was only a wretched-looking town, a huddle of village houses, whose sole merit, if any, lay in being built of stone, but the plaster had long since flaked off and the stone seemed to be crumbling away.’ Also there is a tower, ‘graciously mantled with ivy, pierced by small windows that glittered in the sun, a somewhat maniacal glitter.’ It is a
mad
tower. Kafka says it seems ‘designed by the trembling or careless hand of a child … as if a melancholy-mad tenant … had burst through the roof.’ What is this Castle? It’s where he wants to go and can’t go, it’s the place
where he isn’t now,
it’s gracious and glittering and mad. Kafka’s words don’t hang together. Nor does the Castle.

“Life in the village is a muddle and a mess. Like the worst ideas any of us have of life in groups, groups like families or also people who
work together, full of sudden hostilities and equally sudden warmth between people which isn’t real, hasn’t a reason. Everyone talks all the time. They gab and gabble, they explain and excuse themselves, they are shifty and evasive. It is all really power struggles at some level. You don’t know if the Castle is different or the same, since you can’t go there.

“Everything is like a dream, where you can grasp on to thinking processes or
complicated
human emotions, but only to be denied by the obtuseness of your own sleeping body. Or you are denied by unresponsiveness or
animosity
in the other creatures in the dream world.

“Kafka was a clerk who got pushed about by bureaucracies. He couldn’t bring himself to get married. He writes about love and power in a world of struggling maggots and puppies and dreamy muddle. He could be writing about the survival of the fittest. But although the Castle officials are well fed, they’re sleepy, too, they can’t sit up and take notice, they
don’t know what’s going on.

“That’s the key to it, really, they don’t know what’s going on. They have language, but they can’t think with it, they fuss about. They talk about love and influence but they mess those words up, they don’t
mean
anything. And freedom, what is it? If you’re sleepy to death you can’t be free. The words of this book are all dilapidated like the Castle itself. When K tries to phone the Castle at the beginning, before he knows better, he hears a funny buzz in the telephone. ‘It was like the hum of countless children’s voices—but yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing at an infinite distance—blended by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound which vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing.’

“Children singing is like heaven, but the idea of them humming and buzzing is like the playground, where you can get hurt, where there’s no order.

“All the people in this book are in a way no more than cross children. I’d like to discuss this idea more.

“Language gets you nowhere, society seems to be just a mad structure that has only one function—to keep
itself
going in an unthinking sort of a way—not for any reason.

“I read another story by Kafka, ‘The Penal Colony,’ in which there is a terrible instrument of torture, which has a bed, on which the condemned man lies, gagged, and a Harrow, which writes his sentence on his body with needles, in his own blood, and kills him with
writing. It is worked by an official who loves it. He keeps telling the other man, the explorer, that the condemned man
can’t read
his sentence but
he can feel it in his body.
There isn’t any order except this mad mechanical precision—and the torture machine, like the Castle—isn’t so good close up, its cogs make a nasty noise, its felt gag is worn out with earlier tortures. K is a Land Surveyor but he can’t get far enough out of the mess to survey. K thinks Barnabas the messenger is an Angel stepping in the blizzard, but he is ‘really’ only a boy in a dirty jerkin. The messages aren’t messages. But Kafka can write in this
non
-language, like an angel, about there not being any angels, and nothing to survey. This is an inhuman book about being human. Or a human book about being inhuman. Or am I just playing with words?”

The discussion is heated. Ghislaine Todd, the psychoanalyst, and Rosemary Bell, the hospital almoner, have developed a running argument about the reasons for male fear of women in the early twentieth century. Todd sees K’s impotence as a result of his demonisation of mother-figures, whilst Rosemary Bell sees it as a result of social oppression. Sister Perpetua observes that both these interpretations may relate to the disappearance of God, who was or is both Father and Authority, and whose Presence would make sense of the senseless Castle and the frantic earthly desires and struggles. Humphrey Maggs says Sister Perpetua may be right, but you can’t make God exist just because it would make sense of things. Ibrahim Mustafa says that God does exist, and that Kafka knows it, whether he thinks he does or not. An argument develops about K’s “assistants”—are they hostile siblings, or anarchic employees in a society without purpose, or perhaps the testicles beside the phallus. Or schizophrenic emanations from K’s own damaged psyche, says John Ottokar, or the Id running away from the controls of the Ego and the Superego. He has never said so much before: Ghislaine Todd smiles at him warmly. The inspector is delighted. He makes notes.

Afterwards, they all go to the pub. The pub is called the Goat and Compasses and has a rather clever swinging sign with a Satanic albino goat wielding a compass rather in the manner of Blake’s Urizen. It is a dark brown-leather-and-open-fireplace pub, with electric imitation coals; there are a lot of mock-vellum lampshades on mock-candles. They have their own very dark brown table in a deep dark corner, with high settle-like benches along two sides and several mock-mediaeval
stools. A good half of the class always go there, and intense relationships are formed. The whole group offers advice on Una Winterson’s marital problems, or listens to Humphrey Maggs’s views on Harold Wilson, on capital punishment, on homosexuality, the concerns of the day. They do these things in the light of Madame Bovary, of Dostoevski’s Idiot, of Proust. Frederica finds she does not want to sit near Thomas Poole, who has come with them and is deep in conversation with the battling Freudian and Marxist. She takes the opposite corner of the table, and finds herself sipping red wine next to John Ottokar. She tells him his paper was splendid. She says, “You never talked, before.”

“I don’t talk. I thought it was time.”

“I don’t really know what you do.”

“I write computer programmes. For a shipping firm. I am a mathematician.”

“George Murphy came to the class because of his Lambretta.”

“I came to learn language. I’ve never used language. I grew up without it.”

“I have a mathematical brother who’s suspicious of language.”

“My situation is complicated. I am an identical twin, and we were both mathematicians. We grew up speaking a kind of private language—almost a silent language—of signs and gestures. We closed everyone out. No one could reach us. We were like a child and a mirror that spoke to itself. I think it frightened us, but when we were frightened, it intensified—our need of each other. We didn’t relate outwards. And at the same time, we were each other’s prison.”

“Did you have the same friends?”

“No friends, until we went to university. We tried to go to different universities, but that didn’t work—we started in different places and ended up in the same one. We fought. We both wanted to work in artificial intelligence, and by then we both wanted the other to do something else. It was like being torn in two—being
half
and half. If we saw each other by accident, it was like seeing ourselves when we had thought we were invisible. I can’t explain. Anyway. I had a hard time talking to people. Except in computer languages. Algo. Fortran. Cobol. But I saw it wasn’t enough. I sat through meal after meal saying nothing. I met girls, and said nothing. Then I got my job.”

“And your brother?”

“He went another way. I may tell you, some day, not now. We had problems. He found—a way of talking I don’t like. I needed badly to
learn language in a—detached?—way. Not
personal
language. You don’t follow. I’m sorry.”

“You use language with great assurance. Look at your Kafka paper. As you must know.”

“I’m interested in whether you think if you don’t speak. I felt like—like an ape learning, or Adam in the Bible, writing that paper, making myself think thoughts. I thought, Did I think all those things before I had to write them?”

“Did you?”

“Oh yes. But not in words. In shapes. In feelings. Those words, the word ‘shape,’ the word ‘feeling’ don’t quite describe what I mean, what I thought.”

He has an eloquence, Frederica thinks, which is aware of itself but innocent; he uses words well and with glee because they all appear to him new-minted. She says, “I’m glad you came here to learn language.”

“Not only that,” he says in a low voice. “I come for another reason.”

Frederica looks at him.

“One that does and doesn’t need words,” he says. “
I want you,
” he says, quickly and quietly.

She is aware of the whole of him, blond smile, fierce intent eyes, his hands on the table, his legs and feet beneath it, near her own but not touching. She responds for a moment, in silence, with a fast flood of blood to her heart and her pale face. He smiles. She does not. He watches her trouble. He stands and walks away to fetch more drinks. He is a grown man, not a student; he is older than she is. The three words have changed everything: and nothing, for she has known, before, how things were. But now they are spoken.

On the way home, Thomas Poole congratulates her on her class. She is a born teacher, he tells her. The group has a life of its own. She remembers that he had used the word “therapy,” and is angry. Books are not therapy, she thinks, they are understanding, they are thinking. She is still out of breath because of the fierce certainty of John Ottokar. She says, “My solicitor says I’ve got to move out, but I don’t know where to go. He says I can’t go on living with you and hope to get a divorce.”

Thomas Poole says, “I had hoped you would stay permanently.” His voice does not expect her to say she will.

“I can’t,” says Frederica, striding along in the dark. “I’ve got to find somewhere innocent and unexceptionable. I don’t see how.”

She asks Daniel if he knows where she can live. He does not. She asks Tony, Alan, Hugh Pink, who are also unable to help. It is Alexander, who found her her first refuge, who comes up with her second. He sends her to see Agatha Mond.

X
 

Two people walk into Hamelin Square on a cold February day. Hamelin Square is not a square: it is a spoon-shaped cul-de-sac, in Kennington, in a part of London south of the river, where there are acres of buildings and no public green spaces that are not small, flat, and surrounded by wire fences. There are many wide, straight, dusty main roads, some of them lined with elegant Georgian rows of houses. There are many small tunnels and mazes of housing of every age, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, wartime prefabs in faded pinks and blues, and abutting these tiny homes are tall towers in monumental rectangular concrete, balcony above balcony, grey against the sky. Hamelin Square consists of early-nineteenth-century houses, with elegant long windows, decreasing in size for three floors, and basement areas reached by steps. These houses are quite pretty, in a slightly pinched way; diminished models of the grander Georgian houses on the roads. They are in an extraordinarily mixed state of repair. Some are gentrified, with bright white paint, window-boxes, brass doorknockers and pretty curtains. Some are crumbling, with dirty net curtains on sagging wires, and blistered paint. One or two are gay and incongruous in West Indian mixes of bright dark blues, plum pinks and acid greens. In the centre of the spoon-bowl is a patch of mud that is not a green, on which are two old car-seats, a rotting mattress, a new and bloodstained bright pink baby-doll nightdress.