Kafka At The Black Sea

It was a wonder to behold, the world’s most isolated sea, connected to the brooding Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosphorus, Dardenalle and Gibraltar Straits.

In spite of the vast beauty to behold before his eyes, Kafka felt a migraine emerging. He had tried to counteract these miserable attacks through a regimen of naturopathic treatments: a strict vegetarian diet and consuming vast quantitities of unpasteurized milk. But still the spells and the tormenting pain persisted.

Kafka stretched an old checkerboard quilt over the moist soil and knelt into it among the tall reeds and sea grass without a care for the cold wetness seeping through the knees of his trousers. He appeared as a penitent before an altar, eyes cast in solemn and holy reflection upon the sea. He blindly fumbled in the picnic basket — the one that Helga had packed for him — and wrestled free a sandwich wrapped in the front page of that morning’s Prague Post. He bit into the sandwich that had been haphazardly constructed over two slices of arid and thick brown bread. Tart liverwurst. Lifeless lettuce with the distinct taste of mold.  A few scab-encrusted scrapings of hot mustard from the bottom of the jar he bought last year in Berlin. And there was pickled cucumber, also carefully encased in a page from the morning paper, the crisp vegetable dry and stripped of all vitality by the suffocating ink of the newsprint that brought a foul chemical smell to his red and inflamed nostrils.

Kafka closed his dry eyes, made a feeble attempt at meditating upon the waves as they embraced the shore, and bit into the sandwich with utmost caution. As his cavity-ravaged teeth chewed and gnawed at the repulsive item delivered for their mastication, forcing the contents down his dry throat and into his troubled stomach for no other reason than to sustain his life another intolerable day, a feeling of dread swept over him. A dark, creeping dread, the kind of primal fear that every quivering child acquires of The Thing most certainly lurking under the bed at night.

Someone, Kafka knew, was watching him. They were watching his every move.

And Helga was trying to poison him.

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