Franz Kafka of Prague [antikvár]

The Marienschanze gunRaban looked at the clock on a fairly high tower, which seemed to be quite close, in a street farther down the hill; just for an instant a little flag fastened up there was waved against the clock face. A swarm of little birds flew down, forming an unstable but level plane. It was past five o'clock. Raban set down his suitcase, which was covered in black cloth, leaned his umbrella against a door stone, and set his pocket-watch, a lady's watch, which he wore on a narrow black ribbon round his neck, by the clock on the tower This provincially idyllic scene from Kafka's early fragment of a novel Wedding Preparations in the Country, is so precisely situated in Prague that it can be identified on a map of the city. At that time, in 1907 or thereabout, Prague had not yet been transformed into that somewhere and everywhere that was to become the synthetic landscape of the mature Kafka (though to Czech eyes the original contour-line ofthe genius loci still peeps through); and it was as a reassurance that astronomically (or rather astrologically) everything was - and still is - in order, that this flag was raised day after day, pointing in the direction of Hradschin, on the gallery of the Dienstenhof observatory in the Clementinum, where watch was kept on thestar of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raising the flag like this was the signal to fire given at midday every day by the official responsible for royal and imperial timekeeping to the royal and imperial artificer who served the gun. Clocks on towers all over the city were checked by it, olficials adjusted their watches, and even the ordinary citizens of Prague, like Raban, tried somehow instinctively, at any rate for the moment, to synchronise in the old traditional way their inwardly divergent time with that of these stone towers. It was as if their sense of insecurity could be overcome by this gesture, as if there were something permanent in time in general. For clock-tower time is an institution, it is (or was) something to take refuge in, and falling in with it meant sheltering in its ancient, blessed peacefulness. But clocks in Bohemia were already diverging. In the Jewish quarter they seemed from the outside actually to be going backwards; in the palaces ofthe Kleinseite, for that was where the clock-face of the ancient Roman Empire pointed to, they seemed to have stopped in 1806; and there seemed to be something wrong with the Czechs if they had watches and clocks at all and the Czech souls were not still oriented in peasant fashion, so far as time was concerned, to chickens and the sun. While the German chronometer seemed to be ticking ever more hecticaUy in its impatience to create some sort of order, to demand definite decisions, to start counting again from nought so as to be able to find out where you really were - as if nought did not offer a small but hardly ignorable opportunity to descend into the realm of negative numbers.No, time in Bohemia had been shaken, and only the gun acted as at least a formal corrective. For the boom died away and the startled pigeons went back to their pecking among the Prague cobblestones. All forms of coexistence and cooperation and of ruling and governing, and (let us call it) relation to