Amerika by Franz Kafka Page A

to relieve the teacher of this duty, especially since it was so easy to communicate with Mak in English. After some reflection his uncle also granted this request.
    It took a relatively long time for his uncle to decide to permit Karl even a quick look at his business, even though Karl had often requested one. It was a kind of consignment and shipping business, the likes of which—so far as Karl could recall—could perhaps not be found in Europe. The business involved intermediary trading, which rather than, say, conveying goods from producers to consumers or perhaps to merchants, handled the distribution of all goods and components and their transport to and fro between the large manufacturing cartels. So it was a business that not only encompassed the purchase, storage, transport and sale of goods on a massive scale but also had to maintain the most precise and uninterrupted telephone and telegraph connections with its clients. The telegraph hall was no smaller, in fact even larger, than the telegraph office in his native city, which Karl had once walked through arm in arm with a fellow pupil who was known there. Wherever one looked in the telephone room, the doors of the telephone cells were constantly opening and closing, and the ringing was stupefying. His uncle opened the nearest door, and in the spark ling electric light one could see an employee, oblivious to all the noise coming from the door, with his head tucked into a steel band that pressed the earpieces up against his ears. His right arm lay on a small table as if it were a heavy burden, and only the fingers holding a pencil twitched at a rapid and inhumanly regular pace. He spoke into the mouthpiece sparingly, and often one could even see that he wanted to object to something the speaker had said, but before he could do so, he heard further utterances that compelled him to lower his eyes and write. Besides, there was no need for him to speak, as Karl’s uncle explained in a low voice, for the same reports transcribed by this man were also transcribed by two other employees, then compared with one another, so that all errors could be eliminated insofar as possible. Just as the uncle and Karl were stepping out of the doorway, a trainee slipped in and emerged again holding a sheet of paper that already had writing on it. There was constant movement; people ran back and forth in the hall. No one said hello, such greetings having been dispensed with; each person followed in the steps of the person before him, either looking at the floor, which he wanted to cross as quickly as possible, or glancing at the papers in his hands and probably managing to catch only isolated words or numbers from the papers fluttering in his hand, as he ran along.
    â€œYou’ve really accomplished a great deal,” said Karl to his uncle during one of these tours through the business, which would take several days in their entirety even if one merely wanted to have a quick look at each department.
    â€œAnd I set all of this up thirty years ago by myself, I’d like you to know. Back then I had a small concern in the harbor district, and if five cases were unloaded on any given day, that was a lot, and I went home feeling all puffed up. Today I have the third-largest warehouse in the harbor, and the old shop serves as the dining room and tool shed for my sixty-fifth company of porters.”
    â€œWell, that’s almost miraculous,” said Karl.
    â€œEverything happens that quickly here,” his uncle said, breaking off the conversation.
    One day his uncle arrived just before dinner, which Karl had expected to eat alone as usual, and asked that he put on a black suit right away and accompany him to dinner, at which two business friends would join them. As Karl was changing next door, his uncle sat down at his desk, leafed through an English lesson that Karl had just finished, slapped his hand down on the table, and cried: “Truly excellent!” Though