The slow train to London. Twickenham. Putney. And Clapham Junction, where the track braids together with myriad others, and trains like ours run a parallel course.
My life in Manchester, in contrast to the suburbs. What was I reading in my box room by the curry house extractor fans?, W. wonders. What, as cold air seem to run from the crack in the wall? Kafka, in my own way, which is to say, spuriously.
W. read Kafka as he travelled through Europe, as he surveyed the European scene from his train window. He read about the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse, as the train passed through Freiburg, and about the generation of German Jews in its final hour as he arrived in Strasbourg.
He read about Benjamin and Scholem who, referring to Kafka, discussed the fine line between religion and nihilism in their letters in a cafe in Berne, and about their attempt to develop, each in their own way, a kind of anarcho-messianism, an apocalyptic antipolitics even as they argued about the exile of the Jews from the meaning of Law as his train crossed the Alps.
And me – what was I reading, to contextualise my Kafka studies? What, as I wandered through the university library? But I had no idea of Kafka's milieu. To me, he was only meteor who had arrived from nowhere. I read The Castle in the same astonishment with which I'd greeted it first, back in the warehouse when I borrowed it from my long-eyelashed fellow worker who wrote my name as L'arse. A meteor flashing through the sky of my stupidity … A meteor through the squalor, and the squalor of my mind, with my secondary modern education.
Sometimes W. wonders whether for all that my relation to Kafka is more pure, more intense; that the star of Kafka burns yet brighter in my sky. – 'You had nothing else to steer by', whereas W. had a cosmos, a milky way. And steer I tried to, paddling my coracle into the unknown. But where was I paddling but in circles? Where but in the spotlight of my single star?
And meanwhile, all around me, the city was regenerating. Meanwhile, they were promising to rebuild Manchester … The suburbs were coming: is that what I sensed? That the suburbs were looking for me, even here? I knew, as my studies came to an end, that I'd have to bury myself more deeply in squalor. I knew I had to disappear into the crack in the city.
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