Kafkas Selected Shorter Writings | Page 3

received the news today, during the night. We had been sleeping for some time. Then around midnight my wife called, 'Salvatore'--that's my name--'look at the dove in the window!' It was really a dove, but as large as a rooster. It flew up to my ear and said, 'Tomorrow the dead hunter Gracchus is coming. Welcome him in the name of the city."
The hunter nodded and pushed the tip of his tongue between his lips. "Yes, the doves fly here before me. But do you believe, Burgomaster, that I am to remain in Riva?"
"That I cannot yet say," answered the burgomaster. "Are you dead?"
"Yes," said the hunter, "as you see. Many years ago--it must have been a great many years ago--I fell from a rock in the Black Forest--that's in Germany--as I was tracking a chamois. Since then I've been dead."
"But you're also alive," said the burgomaster.
"To a certain extent," said the hunter, "to a certain extent I am also alive. My death ship lost its way--a wrong turn of the helm, a moment when the helmsman was not paying attention, a distraction from my wonderful homeland--I don't know what it was. I only know that I remain on the earth and that since that time my ship has journeyed over earthly waters. So I--who only wanted to live in my own mountains--travel on after my death through all the countries of the earth."
"And have you no share in the world beyond?" asked the burgomaster wrinkling his brow.
The hunter answered, "I am always on the immense staircase leading up to it. I roam around on this infinitely wide flight of steps, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, always in motion. From being a hunter I've become a butterfly. Don't laugh."
"I'm not laughing," answered the burgomaster.
"That's very considerate of you," said the hunter. "I am always moving. But when I go through the greatest upward motion and the door is shining right above me, I wake up on my old ship, still drearily stranded in some earthly stretch of water. The basic mistake of my earlier death grins at me in my cabin. Julia, the wife of the helmsman, knocks and brings to me on the bier the morning drink of the country whose coast we are sailing by at the time. I lie on a wooden plank bed, wearing--I'm no delight to look at--a filthy shroud, my hair and beard, black and gray, are inextricably intertangled, my legs covered by a large silk women's scarf, with a floral pattern and long fringes. At my head stands a church candle which illuminates me. On the wall opposite me is a small picture, evidently of a bushman aiming his spear at me and concealing himself as much as possible behind a splendidly painted shield. On board ship one comes across many stupid pictures, but this is one of the stupidest. Beyond that my wooden cage is completely empty. Through a hole in the side wall the warm air of the southern nights comes in, and I hear the water lapping against the old boat.
I have been lying here since the time when I--the still living hunter Gracchus--was pursuing a chamois to its home in the Black Forest and fell. Everything took place as it should. I followed, fell down, bled to death in a ravine, was dead, and this boat was supposed to carry me to the other side. I still remember how happily I stretched myself out here on the planking for the first time. The mountains have never heart me singing the way these four still shadowy walls did then.
I had been happy to be alive and was happy to be dead. Before I came on board, I gladly threw away my rag-tag collection of guns and bags, even the hunting rifle which I had always carried so proudly, and slipped into the shroud like a young girl into her wedding dress. There I lay down and waited. Then the accident happened."
"A nasty fate," said the burgomaster, raising his hand in a gesture of depreciation, "and you are not to blame for it in any way?"
"No," said the hunter. "I was a hunter. Is there any blame in that? I was raised to be a hunter in the Black Forest, where at that time there were still wolves. I lay in wait, shot, hit the target, removed the skin--is there any blame in that? My work was blessed. 'The great hunter of the Black Forest'--that's what they called me. Is that something bad?"
"It not up to me to decide that," said the burgomaster, "but it seems to me as well that there's no blame there. But then who is to blame?"
"The boatman," said the hunter. "No one will read what I write here, no