The Sons by Franz Kafka Read Free Book Online

perseverance, doesn’t it? I’m afraid I haven’t got that in me. Besides, I wasn’t a particularly good student; it really didn’t bother me to leave school. And maybe the schools here are even more difficult. I can hardly speak any English at all. Anyhow, people here have a prejudice against foreigners, I think.”—“So you’ve learned about that already, too, have you? Well, that’s all to the good. You’re the man for me, then. Listen here, this is a German ship we’re on, it belongs to the Hamburg-American Line; so why aren’t the crew all Germans, I ask you? Why is the Chief Engineer a Rumanian? A man called Schubal. It’s hard to believe it. A measly dog like that slave-driving us Germans on a German ship! You mustn’t think”—here he ran out of breath and he gesticulated with one hand—“that I’m complaining just for the sake of complaining. I know you have no influence and that you’re only a poor young kid yourself. But it’s too much!” And he slammed the table several times with his fist, never once taking his eyes from it. “I’ve served on so many ships already”—and he reeled off twenty names one after the other as if they were one word, it made Karl’s head spin—“and I’ve done great work on all of them, I’ve been praised, I’ve pleased every captain I ever had, actually stuck to the same cargo-boat for several years, I did”—he rose to his feet as if that had been the high point of his life—“and here on this tub, where everything’s done by rule and you don’t need any brains at all, here I’m no good, here I’m just inSchubal’s way, they say I’m a slacker who doesn’t begin to earn his pay and should be kicked out. Can you understand that? I can’t.”—“You shouldn’t put up with it!” said Karl excitedly. He had almost lost the feeling that he was on the uncertain boards of a ship, beside the coast of an unknown continent, so much at home did he feel here in the stoker’s bunk. “Have you seen the Captain about it? Have you asked him to give you your rights?”—“Oh, go on, get out of here, I don’t want you here. You don’t listen to what I say, and then you give me advice. How am I supposed to get to see the Captain?” Wearily the stoker sat down again and hid his face in his hands.
    “I can’t give him any better advice,” Karl told himself. And he realized that it would have been better all along for him to go and get his trunk instead of handing out advice that was only regarded as stupid. When his father had given him the trunk for good he had said in jest: “How long will you hang on to it?” and now that faithful trunk had perhaps really been lost after all. His only consolation was that his father could hardly learn of his present situation, even if he were to make inquiries. All that the shipping company could tell him was that he had safely reached New York. But Karl felt sorry to think that he had hardly begun to use the things in the trunk, although, to take just one example, he should long since have changed his shirt. So his economies had started at the wrong point, it seemed; now, at the very beginning of his career, when it would be essential to present himself in clean clothes, he would have to appear in a dirty shirt. Otherwise the loss of the trunk would not have been so serious, for the suit he was now wearing was actually better than the one still packed away, which was in fact merely an emergency suit that his mother had hastily mended just before he left. Then he remembered that in the trunk there was a piece of Verona salami that his mother had packed as an extra tid-bit, only he had not been able to eatmore than a bite of it, for during the voyage he had been quite without any appetite, and the soup that was dished out in steerage had been more than sufficient for him. But now he would have liked to have the salami on hand, so he could present it to the stoker. For such people were easily won over by the gift