Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City Read Online Free PDF Page B

another tale, Gotickd duse (A Gothic Soul,1905), the 'large Christ covered with bleeding wounds that glowed in the darkness like mystical signs descended from the arms of the cross and slowly approached the altar'.
    Of course, the most famous literary visit to St Vitus's takes place in The Trial, when Josef K. is charged, by his employer at the bank where he works, with showing a visiting Italian businessman the artistic sights of the city. The Italian, with his nervous laugh and steel-grey bushy moustache - one would surely describe him as sinister except that there is nothing in this novel that is not sinister - is pressed for time and opts to restrict his viewing to the cathedral. It is all a cruel ruse, anyway; the Italian does not turn up, and Josef K. is left to loiter uneasily in the echoing nave as the morning steadily, eerily, darkens, encountering 'the silver sheen of a saint's figure', no doubt the same 'silver St John' of Nepomuk identified by the boy in Jan Ner-uda's story. Josef K. cannot account for the strange atmospherics that are affecting the daylight. 'What sort of weather could there be outside? It was not just a dreary day any more, it was the depth of night.'
    In the distance a large triangle of candle flames flickered on the high altar. K. could not have said with certainty whether he had seen them earlier on. Perhaps they had just been lit. Vergers are stealthy by profession and are scarcely noticed. When K. happened to turn round he saw not far behind him a tall thick candle also alight, this time fixed to a pillar. However beautiful it looked, it was quite inadequate to illuminate the altarpieces which mostly hung in the gloom of the side-chapels; it only made the darkness more intense.
    The scene is set for K.'s encounter with the priest, who claims to be a prison chaplain - the prison chaplain, in fact - who knows Josef K.'s name, and who tells him the terrifying parable of 'the man from the country' who comes seeking 'entry into the law' but is prevented by the implacable door-keeper, who makes him sit by the door for years, until the man grows old, and reaches the threshold of death. 'You are insatiable,' the doorkeeper tells him.
    'But everybody strives for the law,' says the man. 'How is it that in all these years nobody except myself has asked for admittance?' The door-keeper realises the man has reached the end of his life and, to penetrate his imperfect hearing, he roars at him: 'Nobody else could gain admittance here, this entrance was meant only for you. I shall now go and close it.'
    In his lengthy exegesis on the implications and possible meaning of the parable, the priest observes that 'right at the beginning [the doorkeeper] plays a joke on the man by inviting him to enter in spite of the express and strictly enforced prohibition . . .' We know that Kafka had a sly and mordant sense of humour. Of his job as an insurance assessor giving judgement on workers' claims he exclaimed in a letter to his friend Max Brod how extraordinarily accident-prone the world seemed to be, and how 'one gets a headache from all these young girls in the porcelain factories who are forever throwing themselves downstairs with mountains of dishes'. There is also the anecdote which tells of him beginning to read from The Trial to a gathering of friends, but collapsing into such laughter on the first page that he had to abandon the reading. The 'joke' in the parable of the law, however, is, as Mark Twain said of German humour, no laughing matter. A few years ago, not long before his death, the great Germanist and Kafka scholar, Eduard Goldstiicker, described to me how he and other loyal communists in Prague were rounded up in December 1951 at the beginning of a new wave of Stalinist show trials. When he asked to know why he had been arrested, the answer came with an ironic smile: 'That is what you must tell us.' I immediately thought of the prison chaplain speaking to Josef K. of the door-keeper's friendliness