AMOS OZ
A Log in a Freshet: On the Beginning
of Kafka's "A Country Doctor"
Kafka's story "A Country Doctor" (1919) is the tale of a country doctor
who is summoned on a blustery, snowy night to the bedside of a serious–
ly ill patient. The doctor answers the call, overcomes several strange
obstacles, and manages to arrive at the patient's bedside, but is unable to
help him. In the end he finds himself "with an earthly vehicle, unearthly
horses, old man that I am, I wander astray." At the story's end the doctor
says, "Betrayed! Betrayed! A false alarm on the night bell once answered–
it cannot be made good, not ever." This closing sentence directs the reader
back to the story's beginning, in order to investigate exactly where the
doctor made the one and only mistake that can never be rectified. On the
face of it, the story's end contains a certain moral. Seemingly, if the doc–
tor had only known this moral early in the night, he would have been able
to avoid the fatal mistake al together.
But what in fact has the doctor, or the reader, learned by the end of
the story? What was the mistake, and what is the moral? What is the "false
alarm"? Could the doctor have chosen not to respond? Could he have
known from the beginning that it was a false alarm? Is there a way (in this
story, and perhaps beyond it) to distinguish between a false alarm and a
true one? Ultimately, did the doctor indeed respond to the call or was he,
after all, unwillingly catapulted on his way?
Actually, there is no alarm, no night bell at all in the beginning of the
story-not a false alarm, or any kind of alarm. On the other hand, there is,
at the beginning, a precise report of a factual, credible occurrence, in the
course of which a nightmarish twist of events takes place. The reader will
indeed have trouble locating a definite point at which this twist occurs. As
in many of Kafka's works, there is no sudden change of gears, but, rather,
a sort of intangible blurring of reality itself, a slippery, elusive distortion of
dimensions, a metamorphosis through which everything is gradually suf–
fused with the shades of a nightmare.
I was in great perplexity; I had to start on an urgent journey; a seri–
ously ill patient was waiting for me in a village ten miles off; a thick
blizzard of snow filled all the wide spaces between him and me; I had
