A Crack in the City

Twickenham. Putney. And Clapham Junction, where the track braids together with a myriad of others, and trains like ours run a parallel course.

My life in Manchester, in old Manchester, before the regeneration. What was I reading in my box room by the curry house extractor fans?, W. wonders. What, as cold air seem to pour 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.

As his train crossed the Alps, W. read about Benjamin and Scholem who, making constant reference 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 whether the coming of the Messiah meant the dissolution of the law or its fulfilment.

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 a 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, as I stood on the bridge of my life, with only the swirling emptiness of my future before me. Kafka was a meteor flashing through the sky of my stupidity. A meteor flashing through the squalor of my mind.

Sometimes W. wonders whether for that reason my relation to Kafka is more pure, more intense; whether the star of Kafka burns brighter in my sky. — 'You had nothing else to steer by', whereas W. had a whole cosmos, a milky way. 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: isn’t that what I sensed? That the suburbs were looking for me, even there? I knew, as my studies came to an end, that I'd have to bury myself more deeply in squalor. I knew I’d have to find a crack in the city and disappear.