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Frank Kafka

The Bucket Rider, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.


Coal all spent; the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing out
cold; the room freezing; the leaves outside the window rigid, covered with rime;
the sky a silver shield against anyone who looks for help from it. I must have
coal; I cannot freeze to death; behind me is the pitiless stove, before me the
pitiless sky, so I must ride out between them and on my journey seek aid from
the coal-dealer. But he has already grown deaf to ordinary appeals; I must prove
irrefutable to him that I have not a single grain of coal left, and that he
means to me the very sun in the firmament. I must approach like a beggar who,
with the death-rattle already in his throat, insists on dying on the doorstep,
and to whom the grand people's cook accordingly decides to give the dregs of the
coffee-pot; just so must the coal-dealer, filled with rage, but acknowledging
the command, "Thou shall not kill," fling a shovelful of coal into my bucket.
My mode of arrival must decide the matter; so I ride off on the bucket. Seated
on the bucket, my hands on the handle, the simplest kind of bridle, I propel
myself with difficulty down the stairs; but once down below my bucket ascends,
superbly, superbly; camels humbly squatting on the ground do not rise with more
dignity, shaking themselves under the sticks of their drivers. Through the hard
frozen streets we go at a regular canter; often I am upraised as high as the
first story of a house; never do I sink as low as the house doors. And at last I
float at an extraordinary height above the vaulted cellar of the dealer, whom I
see far below crouching over his table, where he is writing; he has opened the
door to let out the excessive heat.
"Coal-dealer!" I cry in a voice burned hollow by the frost and muffled in the
cloud made by my breath, "please, coal-dealer, give me a little coal. My bucket
is so light that I can ride on it. Be kind. When I can I'll pay you."
The dealer puts his hand to his ear. "Do I hear rightly?" He throws the question
over his shoulder to his wife. "Do I hear rightly? A customer."
"I hear nothing," says his wife, breathing in and out peacefully while she knits
on, her back pleasantly warmed by the heat.
"Oh, yes, you must hear," I cry. "It's me, an old customer; faithful and true;
only without means at the moment."
"Wife," says the dealer, "it's some one, it must be; my ears can't have deceived
me so much as that; it must be an old, a very old customer, that can move me so
deeply."
"What ails you, man?" says his wife, ceasing from her work for a moment and
pressing her knitting to her bosom. "It's nobody, the street is empty, all our
customers are provided for; we could close down the shop for several days and
take a rest."
"But I'm sitting up here on the bucket," I cry, and unfeeling frozen tears dim
my eyes, "please look up here, just once; you'll see me directly; I beg you,
just a shovelful; and if you give me more it'll make me so happy that I won't
know what to do. All the other customers are provided for. Oh, if I could only
hear the coal clattering into the bucket!"
"I'm coming," says the coal-dealer, and on his short leges he makes to climb the
stairs of the cellar, but his wife is already beside him, holds him back by the
arm and says: "You stay here; seeing you persist in your fancies I'll go myself.
Think of the bad fit of coughing you had during the night. But for a piece of
business, even if it's one you've only fancied in your head, you're prepared to
forget your wife and child and sacrifice your lungs. I'll go."
"Then be sure to tell him all the kinds of coal we have in stock; I'll shout out
the prices after you."
"Right," says his wife, climbing up to the street. Naturally she sees me at
once. "Frau Coal-dealer," I cry, "my humblest greetings; just one shovelful of
coal; here in my bucket; I'll carry it home myself. One shovelful of the worst
you have. I'll pay you in full for it, of course, but not just now, not just
now." What a knell-like sound the words "not just now" have, and how
bewilderingly they mingle with the evening chimes that fall from the church
steeple nearby!
"Well, what does he want?" shouts the dealer. "Nothing," his wife shouts back,
"there's nothing here; I see nothing, I hear nothing; only six striking, and now
we must shut up the shop. The cold is terrible; tomorrow we'll likely have lots
to do again."
She sees nothing and hears nothing; but all the same she loosens her
apron-strings and waves her apron to waft me away. She succeeds, unluckily. My
bucket has all the virtues of a good steed except powers of resistance, which it
has not; it is too light; a woman's apron can make it fly through the air.
"You bad woman!" I shout back, while she, turning into the shop,
half-contemptuous, half-reassured, flourishes her fist in the air. "You bad
woman! I begged you for a shovelful of the worst coal and you would not give me
it." And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost
forever.


One summer, I sat on a small hilltop with a long-haired girl  I had fallen in love with but who preferred my friend, Kimball.  'Last night, I read Kafka's The Bucket Rider.' 'Really,' she said. 'Yes, I lay on my bed, too hot to sleep, and read Kafka. It was like a symbol went clang in my head.' 'Do you mean cymbal?' she said. 'No, the other kind, that stands for something else.' 'Oh, I understand,' she said. 'We studied that last year in Lit 202.'