Why was Kafka’s The Trial never completed? Critic Michael Masiello has suggested that the master chronicler of bureaucracy “struggle[d] to give any beginning-middle-end narrative shape to what is essentially dead and undistinguished time—time spent waiting, vainly seeking answers from different-yet-the-same sources, time lost in futility and longing and empty hope,” adding that Kafka himself probably did not realize how eerily what he conjured would “come to life in our modern bureaucratic hellscapes.” In the following story that takes place in The Trial’s parallel universe, Thai author Phu Kradat skillfully stages an encounter between Josef K. and “you” to reflect Thailand’s political reality in the twenty-first century—one that is similarly pierced with fear and paranoia. By introducing a very local motif—the dangerous tiger hornet—Phu Kradat, who published the story in 2018 in response to the ongoing abuse of judicial power under military rule in Thailand, makes the story fully his own.
Josef K. hobbled his way through the valley to the cement brick cabin where you reside one afternoon, about an hour before a tiger hornet flew right in and precisely ten years after you started residing in this cabin here.
The sunlight scattering in through the breeze block wall that afternoon had exerted itself to the point of fatigue. The lazy coos of the pigeons who shared your roof. The sharp smell of their droppings jabbing at your nostrils. Three geckos lying flat on the wall in serenity. Cobwebs wrapped around corners and breeze blocks just like fishnets expertly set down in the shallows. The cold blast barreling on relentlessly with none of its reputed wind chill effect. You were waking up with a pang of hunger and thirst. With sticky, bleary eyes you sat around in a stupor for a long while. A bitter taste in your mouth lingered from the painkillers you’d consumed before flopping down for a siesta right around noon.
A knock on the door made you get on your feet and shake off your sluggishness. Today was your day off. Same as yesterday and the days before. You had to take a break from your job cutting grass on the eucalyptus plantation after having come down with the flu. You’d remained bedridden for days on end, until today when the fever subsided somewhat. As the door opened, you were taken aback by one small-framed scrawny creature. Popping rib cage. Disheveled hair. Old clothes torn to rags. Strong body odor. A step back to recompose. A silent stare at the visitor’s face. When finally your ability to process returned, enough of it anyway, you asked, “Who are you?”
The gaunt, small-framed man moved his trembling lips and out came in broken syllables:
“Ka . . . My . . . name . . . is . . . Josef . . . Ka . . .”
You stared hard and motionless. Little by little, a story the landowner used to tell you over and over took shape in your mind’s eye. Now filled with certainty you said, “Oh my . . . Ka, it’s you. It’s really you, Josef Ka. You’re still alive?”
In that instant, K. threw himself in your arms. You embraced him in return, still without any explanation from him to clear your suspicion.
After a while, K. slid from the embrace and collapsed in a heap on your feet despite your concerted effort to keep him upright. It was all in vain: there wasn’t enough energy in your limbs. So you dropped to your knees and embraced K. once more.
“Look how skinny you are now. Skin and bones, Ka. I can hardly recognize you.”
Josef K. could only nod with difficulty.
You fetched water for yourself and K. Vitality restored and hunger gone into hiding, you examined every nook and cranny of the man all over again. K. sat with his eyes closed a wingspan away from you in the middle of the stifling room stuffed with a day’s worth of sun rays. The pigeons no longer cooed, though their droppings continued to saturate your nostrils, leaving no hint of K.’s body odor.
Unbelievable. How does a bank accountant with a promising future end up like this? You can’t tell this one apart from a mangy stray dog.
You mused to yourself.
K. remained rooted in place, eyes closed, as his breathing became more regular. Thick sweat pooled on his pores. You wanted to know everything that had happened since that day, after the end of the story according to the landowner where K. got ambushed by two men, one of whom stabbed him with a dagger right through the heart and twisted it round and round. But you stopped yourself from broaching the subject right then. You waited as he caught his breath. Then, you raised the subject. That was before the tiger hornet made its appearance in the room, about ten or twenty minutes before. No more than that.
That hornet flew in through the wide open door, the very door that had welcomed Josef K. This was the first time in the ten years of living here that you encountered a tiger hornet in the flesh. Like the story about K., up until then tiger hornets had been just that: a story you heard from the landowner. And so you were terror-stricken when it materialized this afternoon. Same as K., even if it was just one of them darting in.
After Josef K. fully caught his breath and freshened up somewhat, you broached the subject you’d been wanting to know more of. You bombarded him with all your questions in quick succession, to the point where K. shivered in revulsion.
You asked: How come you’re alive? What led you all the way here to my cabin? What’s the state of your love affair with Miss Bürstner? And what about the trial? You won your case or lost or what?
Instead of tackling your questions right after you fell silent, Josef K. showed no sign of eagerness to tell you anything. Not even the slightest flicker of interest. He simply glanced your way out of the corner of his eye and sighed. You didn’t let it go. Scooted over to him. Pleaded with your eyes. Finally K. offered you a deal: tell him your story first and then he’d tell you his, and . . . “Give me another glass of water, will you?”
You tried to wriggle your way out of telling K. your story. Not that you didn’t want to talk about it; there was just too little of your story that you could remember, and none of it terribly interesting.
“It’s not worth anybody knowing about.”
You tried breathlessly in the following breaths to withhold your story. Still, K. was unmoved. So you were left with no choice but to tell it to K. first. And you began with a “You’ve been warned.”
“Just tell me already.”
K. glared at your face expectantly, unclasping his palms.
“Ten years ago, I woke up all of a sudden and found myself in this cabin. Before that point ten years back I have no memory of who I was or where I came from. I’ve been living in this cabin in the valley for ten years now. Ten years passing by in slow motion. So slow it feels to me like it’s been hundreds of years . . .”
“Sigh . . . There’s nobody here. I don’t know nobody except the landowner who drops by once in a blue moon. And he was the one who told me about you.”
“Is that so, uh? And what do you do up here?”
K. interjected.
“My job here, you say? Cutting grass. I’m tasked with cutting grass in this eucalyptus plantation, all four hundred plus acres of it. Cutting it flat. Cutting it every day, no day off. Unless I really can’t do it, like today. Been several days actually. I’ve got a fever, you see. From dawn to dusk there’s nothing but get up, sling the weed whacker over my shoulder, get out and cut it down, down, down, then come home and turn in when it gets dark. That is all there is to my life, that’s all.”
“Thanks for giving me a heads-up earlier.”
“Mmm.”
“Well it’s not a bad job, though not all that different from my old job at the bank.”
“It’s not that awful, to be sure. Anyway, do you know eucalyptus trees?”
“Of course I do. They grow well in the desert. Tough and tenacious. Lots of them in Australia. Why would you ask such a thing?”
“I mean, you know them. I don’t. I just know the name, the pungent leaves, the smoothness of the trunk. I just know they’ve been planted here in this valley. A valley with eight months of constant rain and four months of dryness. A valley with grass and weeds growing faster than facial hair after shaving. And I’ve got to keep cutting for the sake of them trees. I don’t know a thing about where they come from.”
“Why don’t you get out of here? Find another job, I mean. There’s no one supervising you, is there?”
“Shh, careful with that. There is no body supervising me, it’s true. But there are a million pairs of eyes around here, all over this eucalyptus plantation, staring at me. Keeping tabs on me. For that reason, even with nobody supervising me I still can’t get out anywhere. I’ve already tried.”
“Mmm . . .”
Josef K. asked for another glass of water after your story trailed off, leaving you two staring at each other for a beat. Then he got around to recounting what had happened to him since that day.
He miraculously made it out alive and groped his way back to his room without bothering to check in to the hospital, as if nothing had happened to him. No one knew he had been assaulted. Neither Mrs. Grubach nor Miss Bürstner nor anyone at his bank had a clue. He took a leave of absence, indefinitely, for as long as the case remained pending. Turns out he never returned to his job. The bank accountant with a future became a thing of the past. He was fired. To add insult to injury, he was also stripped of his share in the family’s inheritance. And Miss Bürstner, the one he pined for day and night, the one he hoped to wake up next to every morning, fled from him and shunned him.
Barely had Josef K. begun to touch on the progress of his trial when that one tiger hornet flew into the room. It homed in on you and K. the instant it got in, and suddenly with improbable vigor both you and K. flattened your faces against the floor, then slowly straightened out the entire body. The flapping wings overhead made a whirring sound. It flew in a circle and landed on your shirt one held breath later. You nearly pissed yourself. Carefully you regulated your breathing to be as soft as you could manage, your eyes fixed on K. He lay completely flat on the floor, trembling from head to toe. The tiger hornet crept on your shirt, loitering to and fro. It was then that the story the landowner told you about tiger hornets replayed in lucid detail.
Back in the day, way before you came to live in this cabin, in the time of the landowner’s old man, all over these parts were thick with nests of aggressive tiger hornets. Though nowadays you never saw such nests, not even one.
But you can’t let your guard down.
The landowner stressed it to you.
All those tiger hornets were wiped out in the wake of a grave incident back then, back in the age of the first pioneers. The story goes: the first waves of peons who tore down the jungle in order to plant eucalyptus trees died in droves not only from malaria and gunfire. Being stung by tiger hornets was yet another cause of death for those peons.
One time a swarm of tiger hornets closed in on twenty peons and stung them all to death. Unprovoked, at that. No one trespassed on their territory or their nest, yet they all came out of who knows where, rushed to the row of peons chop-chop macheteing away chop-chop at the thicket chop-chop and caught them unawares. Since their stingers weren’t carved inside the body like a honeybee’s they could sting again and again and release their venom as many times as they wished. As a result the peons collapsed flailing about and got stung to death, all twenty of them.
This story, lodged inside your body, never eased off. Regularly it tugged at your sanity.
The tiger hornet was still creeping on your shirt. Your nerves started to rattle. Your breathing picked up the tempo to match the beat of your racing heart. But then, barely a shooting star’s lifespan on the sky later, the tiger hornet took off from your body, and did so without having taken the liberty to sink its stinger into you. As if it were a kindhearted and harmless specimen of a hornet—the total opposite of what you’d heard from the landowner.
Both you and K. waited until the whirring of the wings died down before daring to sit up. K. was still trembling. You were panting, but trying to recompose all the while until you felt somewhat relieved, so you said, “That was a close call. Lucky us.”
“Indeed, how lucky we were,” K. echoed.
The tiger hornet rose and dashed to the three house geckos lying flat against the wall. You guided K.’s eyes with your hand. It rushed toward the geckos, which in their state of alertness swung their tails left and right. The two sides did not stop eyeing each other. Then the geckos collectively scurried to the nook between column and wall and hid under a tent of cobweb. The tiger hornet quickly followed, and got its wings caught in the cobweb. It struggled to escape, but the more it struggled the more wrapped up its body became, though not yet in its entirety. The two owners of the web crawled in its direction, but paused before the sight. The tiger hornet writhed and fluttered in a last bid to break free—to no avail. The geckos flicked their tongue, then made their way to the now immobilized tiger hornet.
The geckos did not charge at their opponent as would be expected. They simply remained at a distance, eyeing it, swinging their tails at it. You smiled. K. managed to crack a smile as well. Then the two of you turned to each other and smiled at each other. The terror had vanished. You rose, walked to the open door, glanced out, scanned as far and wide as the light in your eyes could reach, and said, “Hopefully this was the only one.”
The door slammed shut and bolted, you turned to pick up a broom resting nearby, leaving K. with nothing to do but sit on his butt and watch.
You struck the broom handle against the tiger hornet’s body as soon as the latter came into range. It fell to the floor. The geckos skittered away frightened. The spiders went into hiding in the nook. You kept striking at it numerous times until the body of the hornet splattered in bits and pieces stuck to the floor. Once you stopped, K. said, “Such a firm decision there, a brilliant act in fact. Hats off to you.”
“Thank you.”
You responded and laid the broom on top of the splattered remains of the tiger hornet. You walked toward K., still breathing heavily from the exertion, sat down beside him and said to him, “Didn’t need that interruption. Oh well. Let’s get on with your story.”
Josef K. did not ask for a glass of water this time.
He proceeded: after a week or so of rest in his room he made a full recovery. Once he’d made a full recovery he went to his lawyer to check on the progress of his appeal so it could be submitted to court.
“That old snake! Useless lawyer! Fucking schmuck of a lawyer!”
He blurted out, then elaborated, “That old bastard didn’t let me fire him, no matter how I pleaded my case. When my uncle caught wind of it he flew into a rage, and we fought like never before. And in the end my uncle cut all ties with me.”
“It’s insane! Pure, unadulterated insanity. My trial hasn’t progressed one bit. To this day I still don’t know why they arrested me. For what violation? On what charges? Goddamned imbeciles!”
“Tsk-tsk. You know what? As things stood, I had to go to court alone and write an appeal myself. I tried, but I couldn’t pull it off. My writing was garbage. You know why? Because I didn’t know what I was accused of—and still don’t! I looked for a new lawyer even if I hadn’t managed to fire the old one, but no lawyer took my case. It must be because of some trap laid by that old useless lawyer. Fuck that old idiot!”
“Even so I didn’t give up. I still showed up to court as usual, and it was business as usual for the guards at the courthouse entrance to grab and throw me out to the street. They never granted me entry inside the courthouse again, not even once. Tsk-tsk. May they die a violent death!”
“They grabbed and threw me out just like that, as if I were a mangy dog. This is a bank accountant with a promising future, mind you. Not some talentless good-for-nothing from the ghetto. But as things go, when you get slapped with a crime nothing stays the same, doesn’t matter who you are. Tsk-tsk. You might as well be a mangy dog.”
“And you know what? Even when I told them that I was there to stand trial, that I’d been arrested, that my case was pending consideration by this court—nothing registered in their pathetic excuses for ears. Fucking lowlife scum, those guards! Fucking spineless lackeys!”
“The last time I showed up to court, before I wandered off all the way here to your cabin, those lowlife guards threw me out to the street and beat me up in public right in front of passersby to the point I passed out. Once I regained consciousness, I had no idea where on the planet I was. Darkness in every direction, including inside my head. Forest everywhere. I kept trying to find a way out of the forest, and then I ran into your cabin. Fucking dogs, those lowlife lackeys!”
“So there’s been no progress at all in the trial?”
“Nope. My case is still pending. No judgment has been handed down. If things keep going in this fashion, my name won’t ever be cleared, and I will have this case strapped to me for good. It is truly pathetic.”
K. shot up on his feet, the veins popping out in his balled-up fists. His sad, thin figure trembled. You were so taken aback you almost fell backward, but regained your balance in time.
K. swore with conviction: “Fucking schmuck of a lawyer! Fucking scum courthouse guards! Fucking court ju . . .”
Josef K. clammed up mid-sentence. You were surprised and suspicious in equal measure. K. lowered his face and leaned toward you, then asked in whispers, “Is there a court office around here?”
“What about it?”
“Nothing, just that if I’m not discreet about swearing at the court, chances are they’ll come get me and I’m dead. Tell me, is there a court office around here?”
“Don’t know. But as I told you, round these parts a million pairs of eyes are on me all the time.”
“Damn it! Fucking imbeciles!”
Josef K. was fuming, nearly exploding. His body swung left and right with rage. But he couldn’t do anything beyond that. In that moment, your ears picked up on whirring sounds outside the cabin. Whirring so many times over it became one droning sound, making you spring to your feet and throw your arms around K.
Then you brought him flat against the floor, all while signaling for him to hush and listen to that sound coming from outside.
translated from the Thai by Peera Songkünnatham
Phu Kradat was born and raised in Northeast Thailand. He writes short stories and novels. His published works include: the 2013 poetry collection Invisible, the novels Exile and 24-7/1 (published in 2014 and 2020 respectively), and the short story collections Like a Body Without Organs and Hours Before a Military Parade (published in 2015 and 2016 respectively).
Peera Songkünnatham is a US-based writer and translator from Sisaket City, Thailand. Peera’s essay “Juan Rulfo in Northeastern Thailand: Translation and Solidarity” won the Thinking Against the Mainstream Prize from Cuba’s Ministry of Culture in 2016.
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