The door opened and a tall man in a suit came in, followed by a woman dressed as a nurse. I asked the man if I could speak with a doctor, and he smiled and introduced himself as Professor Pick. He had a perfectly neat triangular beard and heavy-lidded eyes, like a country vicar or a school principal.
‘Professor Pick,’ I said, ‘there has been a mistake. To begin with, I am not Brod; my name is Kafka. Your administrative staff have made an error.’
I gestured behind me to the label on the bed. I waited for Professor Pick to respond, but he only dropped his heavy lids over his eyes and wearily raised them a few times before saying, ‘Mmm,’ which hung in the air ominously.
Something about the man disturbed me, and the skin on my scalp began to contract in fear. I went on, a little uncertainly now, ‘Secondly, I have not the slightest thing wrong with me.’ I pushed the bedclothes off and sat on the edge of the bed in order to demonstrate my healthfulness. ‘My body, I know, appears to be weak, but I am just coming now out of a long illness, but really I can manage perfectly well.’
I looked down and was suddenly ashamed of the exposure of my naked legs, which struck me as obscenely thin and white, to this well-dressed man. I twitched the edge of the nightgown down as far as it would go to cover them.
‘Herr Brod,’ Pick said, stepping closer to me and putting one spread hand in the middle of my chest.
I wondered if the man was deaf.
‘Kafka,’ I corrected him. ‘Kafka.’ I spoke loudly and slowly and indicated myself with my hand pointed to my face. Should I spell it for him?
He pressed me rudely back into the bed. ‘I assure you, Herr Brod, that the error is yours.’
He pulled a notebook from his pocket and scrawled something in it and then left the room, trailed by the nurse. They shut the door behind them and I could hear their footsteps echoing for a long time after they’d left.
My encounter with Pick left me feeling unsettled and in the strangely empty room this quickly mounted to panic. I needed to leave the hospital immediately. I made a more thorough search of the room for my clothes, but they had disappeared. There was not even a locked cupboard or box or wardrobe that might contain them. As I much I disliked the idea, I resigned myself to going out in my nightgown.
I had expected the door to the room to be locked, but I found that it opened easily. Outside was an empty corridor. I felt very self-conscious in my bare feet and legs and the draughty nightgown and my first intention was to locate my clothing. I knew that my identification papers were in my pocketbook in my jacket, and these would surely put an end to the whole farcical situation. The corridor was long and stretched away in either direction in a perfect mirror image of itself: just rows of closed doors and blank walls. I stood, hesitating. The wall opposite was set with long windows, which looked out onto a grassed area.
Being without my clothing made me feel like a fugitive and my heart soon began to race with anxiety. I turned left and ran lightly along the corridor, the skin of my bare feet making soft kisses on the floorboards. There was no clear exit, although I could see a closed door at the end of the corridor ahead of me, still quite far away. I tried to remind myself that I was not a prisoner and there was actually no reason to be running in such an undignified manner. With an effort, I forced myself to slow to a walk. I tried swinging my arms to give the appearance, if only to myself, of nonchalance. I would have liked to hum a tune, but I could not think of one.
At that moment the door ahead of me opened and two men dressed as orderlies came out into the corridor. I tensed, ready to bound away back down the corridor. I looked wildly about me and had the mad idea of opening one of the windows and jumping out of it and running away across the lawn, but I saw that the windows were overlaid with light grilles of metal. The men came silently on and my instincts told me that, as with facing an unknown dog, I should not show any fear. I stopped walking and raised my hand loosely in greeting.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you could direct me to the central administration area? There seems to be an error with my identity.’
They ignored my request and continued to walk towards me.
‘Or perhaps you could assist me in locating my clothing, or at least my pocketbook…’ My voice trailed off. The men still advanced as if I had not spoken. Had I in fact spoken aloud? Somehow I was not certain. They were both large men, broad and muscular, but at that moment this did not bother me as much as the fact that they were clothed and I was not. Their clothing transformed them into a different and far superior type of animal. The leather capsules of their shoes enclosed their feet and the hard soles tapped along the boards in a unified percussive beat, like hooves. Their clothing fit exactly around their limbs and torsos. I felt like an urchin with my flimsy gown flapping around my white legs and my feet spreading out their cold toes along the floor, sticking slightly to it with each step.
The men came one on each side of me, took me by the elbows and propelled me back down the corridor. As we dashed along, my questioning voice trailed away behind us like a fluttering ribbon. The faces of the men were as fixed and blank as the faces of the stone gargoyles that look out over the roofs of the city. When we arrived back in the room, the nurse who had accompanied Professor Pick earlier was waiting. The men pushed me towards the bed and stood side by side just inside the door, watching me.
Again I had the feeling of revulsion towards that bed. The bedclothes and mattress lay like a heap of rags and seemed to me to be diseased. My skin shrank from contact with the bed and the thought of climbing into it was now as repulsive being asked to enter the bed of a leper. I protested that the bed was not mine, and that the owner of the bed was a murderer; he had killed me in Berlin, or tried to kill me. I frowned. There was something wrong with the order of my thoughts, but I had no time to consider it. My words flew out of my mouth and circled the room, not finding the ears of anyone present. I repeated my name, shouting it, but it felt like I was swimming upriver in a strong current and making no headway.
The men began to advance towards me and I shuffled backwards until the edge of the mattress grazed the back of my naked knees. One of the men now stood in front of me with a tired expression on his flat face. He began to lean towards me, about to push me into the bed. I could see there was nothing that I could do, so I inched myself down onto the edge of the bed of my own accord rather than give in to the further humiliation of being pushed there by the silent man. I pulled the bedclothes over my legs, holding them with two fingers only, with my teeth clenched and my face screwed up in disgust.
The nurse came forward holding a small cup, which she offered to me. I struck it out of her hand, furious and afraid. The men came towards me and held me down, and the nurse, unperturbed, turned away and then turned back again with another, identical cup. I began thrashing around in the bed with all my strength, certain that the cup contained some poison. I thrust my head from left to right, until it was seized by one of the men. I clamped my lips shut, but they were forced open and the contents of the cup were poured into me. The men held me for a few moments more, until I ceased my struggle.