by Franz Kafka
I can’t understand it and can’t believe it. I live only here and there in a small word in whose vowel (‘thrust’ above, for instance) I lose my useless head for a moment. The first and last letters are the beginning and end of my fishlike emotion.
24 August. Sitting with acquaintances at a coffee-house table in the open air and looking at a woman at the next table who has just arrived, breathing heavily beneath her heavy breasts, and who, with a heated, brownish, shining face, sits down. She leans her head back, a heavy down becomes visible, she turns her eyes up, almost in the way in which she perhaps sometimes looks at her husband, who is now reading an illustrated paper beside her. If one could only persuade her that one may read at most a newspaper but never a magazine beside one’s wife in a coffee-house. After a moment she becomes aware of the fullness of her body and moves back from the table a little.
26 August. Tomorrow I am supposed to leave for Italy. Father has been unable to fall asleep these evenings because of excitement, since he has been completely caught up in his worries about the business and in his illness, which they have aggravated. A wet cloth on his heart, vomiting, suffocation, walking back and forth to the accompaniment of sighs. My mother in her anxiety finds new solace. He was always after all so energetic, he got over everything, and now … I say that all the misery over the business could after all last only another three months, then everything will have to be all right. He walks up and down, sighing and shaking his head. It is clear that from his point of view his worries will not be taken from his shoulders and will not even be made lighter by us, but even from our point of view they will not, even in our best intentions there is something of the sad conviction that he must provide for his family – By his frequent yawning or his poking into his nose (on the whole not disgusting) Father engenders a slight reassurance as to his condition, which scarcely enters his consciousness, despite the fact that when he is well he usually does not do this. Ottla confirmed this for me – Poor Mother will go to the landlord tomorrow to beg.13
It had already become a custom for the four friends, Robert, Samuel, Max, and Franz, to spend their short holidays every summer or autumn on a trip together. During the rest of the year their friendship consisted mostly of the fact that they all four liked to come together one evening every week, usually at Samuel’s, who, as the most well-to-do, had a rather large room, to tell each other various things and to accompany it by drinking a moderate amount of beer. They were never finished with the telling of things when they separated at midnight; since Robert was secretary of an association, Samuel an employee in a business office, Max a Civil Service official, and Franz an employee in a bank, almost everything that anyone had experienced in his work during the week was not only unknown to the other three and had to be told to them quickly, but it was also incomprehensible without rather lengthy explanations. But more than anything else the consequence of the difference of these professions was that each was compelled to describe his profession to the others again and again, since the descriptions (they were all only weak people, after all) were not thoroughly understood, and for that very reason and also out of friendship were demanded again and again.
Talk about women, on the other hand, was seldom engaged in, for even if Samuel for his part would have found it to his liking he was still careful not to demand that the conversation adapt itself to his requirements, in this regard the old maid who brought up the beer often appeared to him as an admonition. But they laughed so much during these evenings that Max said on the way home that this eternal laughing is really to be regretted, because of it one forgets all the serious concerns of which everyone, after all, really has enough. While one laughs one thinks there is still time enough for seriousness. That isn’t correct, however, for seriousness naturally makes greater demands on a person, and after all it is clear that one is also able to satisfy greater demands in the society of friends than alone. One should laugh in the office because there is nothing better to be accomplished there. This opinion was aimed at Robert, who worked hard in the art association he was putting new life into and at the same time observed in the old the most comical things with which he entertained his friends.
As soon as he began, the friends left their places, stood around him or sat down on the table, and laughed so self-obviously, especially Max and Franz, that Samuel carried all the glasses over to a side-table. If they tired of talking Max sat down at the piano with suddenly renewed strength and played, while Robert and Samuel sat beside him on the bench; Franz, on the other hand, who understood nothing of music, stood alone at the table and looked through Samuel’s collection of picture postcards or read the paper. When the evenings became warmer and the window could be left open, all four would perhaps come to the window and with their hands behind their backs look down into the street without letting themselves be diverted from their conversation by the light traffic outside Now and then one returned to the table to take a swallow of beer, or pointed to the curls of two girls who sat downstairs in front of their wine-shop, or to the moon that quietly surprised them, until finally Franz said it was getting cool, they ought to close the window.
In summer they sometimes met in a public garden, sat at a table off to one side where it was darker, drank to one another, and, their heads together in conversation, hardly noticed the distant brass band. Arm in arm and in step, they then walked home through the park. The two on the outside twirled their canes or struck at the shrubs, Robert called on them to sing, but then he sang alone, well enough for four, the other one in the middle felt himself made especially comfortable by this.
On one such evening, Franz, drawing his two neighbours more closely to him, said it was really so beautiful to be together that he couldn’t understand why they met only once a week when they could certainly arrange without difficulty to see each other, if not often, then at least twice a week. They all were in favour of it, even the fourth one on the end, who had heard Franz’s soft words only indistinctly. A pleasure of this sort would certainly be worth the slight effort which it would now and then cost one of them. It seemed to Franz as though he had a hollow voice as punishment for speaking uninvited for all of them. But he did not stop. And if sometimes one of them couldn’t come, that’s his loss and he can be consoled for it the next time, but do the others then have to give each other up, aren’t three enough for each other, even two, if it comes to that? Naturally, naturally, they all said. Samuel disengaged himself from the end of the line and stood close in front of the three others, because in this way they were closer to each other. But then it didn’t seem so, and he preferred to link up with the others again.
Robert made a proposal. ‘Let’s meet every week and study Italian. We are determined to learn Italian, last year already we saw in the little part of Italy where we were that our Italian was only sufficient to ask the way when we got lost, remember, among the vineyard walls of the Campagna. And even then it managed to do only thanks to the greatest efforts on the part of those we asked. We’ll have to study it if we want to go to Italy again this year. We simply have to. And so isn’t it best to study together?’
‘No,’ said Max, ‘we shall learn nothing together. I am as certain of that as you, Samuel, are certain that we ought to study together.’
‘Am I!’ Samuel said. ‘We shall certainly learn very well together, I always regret that we weren’t together even at school. Do you realize that we’ve known each other only two years?’ He bent forward to look at all three. They had slowed down their steps and let go their arms.
‘But we haven’t studied anything together yet,’ said Franz. ‘I like it very well that way, too. I don’t want to learn a thing. But if we have to learn Italian, then it is better for each one to learn it by himself.’
‘I don’t understand that,’ Samuel said. ‘First you want us to meet every week, then you don’t want it.’
‘Come now,’ Max said. ‘Franz and I, after all, just don’t want our being together to be disturbed by studying, or our stud
ying by being together, nothing else.’
‘Yes,’ said Franz.
‘And indeed there isn’t much time,’ said Max. ‘It is June now and in September we want to leave.’
‘That’s the very reason why I want us to study together,’ Robert said, and stared in surprise at the two who opposed him. His neck became especially flexible when someone contradicted him.14
One thinks that one describes him correctly, but it is only approximate and is corrected by the diary.
It probably lies in the essence of friendship and follows it like a shadow – one will welcome it, the second regret it, the third not notice it at all –
26 September. The artist Kubin recommends Regulin as a laxative, a powdered seaweed that swells up in the bowels, shakes them up, is thus effective mechanically in contrast to the unhealthy chemical effect of other laxatives which just tear through the excrement and leave it hanging on the walls of the bowels.
He met Hamsun at Langen. He (Hamsun) grins mockingly for no reason. During the conversation, without interrupting it, he put one foot on his neck, took a large pair of paper-shears from the table, and trimmed the frayed edges of his trousers. Shabbily dressed, with one or so rather expensive details, his tie, for example.
Stories about an artist’s pension in Munich where painters and veterinaries lived (the latters’ school was in the neighbourhood) and where they acted in such a debauched way that the windows of the house across the way, from which a good view could be had, were rented out. In order to satisfy these spectators, one of the residents in the pension would sometimes jump up on the window sill in the posture of a monkey and spoon his soup out of the pot.
A manufacturer of fraudulent antiques who got the worn effect by means of buckshot and who said of a table: ‘Now we must drink coffee on it three more times, then it can be shipped off to the Innsbruck Museum.’
Kubin himself: very strong, but somewhat monotonous facial expression, he describes the most varied things with the same movement of muscles. Looks different in age, size, and strength according to whether he is sitting, standing, wearing just a suit, or an overcoat.
27 September. Yesterday on the Wenzelsplatz met two girls, kept my eye too long on one while it was just the other, as it proved too late, who wore a plain, soft, brown, wrinkled, ample coat, open a little in front, had a delicate throat and delicate nose, her hair was beautiful in a way already forgotten – Old man with loosely hanging trousers on the Belvedere. He whistles; when I look at him he stops; if I look away he begins again; finally he whistles even when I look at him – The beautiful large button, beautifully set low oh the sleeve of a girl’s dress. The dress worn beautifully too, hovering over American boots. How seldom I succeed in creating something beautiful, and this unnoticed button and its ignorant seamstress succeeded – The woman talking on the way to the Belvedere, whose lively eyes, independent of the words of the moment, contentedly surveyed her story to its end – The powerful half-turn of the neck of a strong girl.
29 September. Goethe’s diaries. A person who keeps none is in a false position in the face of a diary. When for example he reads in Goethe’s diaries: ‘1/11/1797. All day at home busy with various affairs,’ then it seems to him that he himself had never done so little in one day.
Goethe’s observations on his travels different from today’s because made from a mail-coach, and with the slow changes of the region, develop more simply and can be followed much more easily even by one who does not know those parts of the country. A calm, so-to-speak pastoral form of thinking sets in. Since the country offers itself unscathed in its indigenous character to the passengers in a wagon, and since highways too divide the country much more naturally than the railway lines to which they perhaps stand in the same relationship as do rivers to canals, so too the observer need do no violence to the landscape and he can see systematically without great effort. Therefore there are few observations of the moment, mostly only indoors, where certain people suddenly and hugely bubble up before one’s eyes; for instance, Austrian officers in Heidelberg, on the other hand the passage about the men in Wiesenheim is closer to the landscape, ‘They wear blue coats and white vests ornamented with woven flowers’ (quoted from memory). Much written down about the falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, in the middle in larger letters: ‘Excited ideas.’
Cabaret Lucerna. Lucie König showing photographs with old hairstyles. Threadbare face. Sometimes, with her turned-up nose, with her arm held aloft and a turn of all her fingers, she succeeds in something. A milksop face – Longen15 (the painter Pittermann), mimic jokes. A production that is obviously without joy and yet cannot be considered so, for if it were, then it couldn’t be performed every evening, particularly since it was so unhappy a thing even at the moment it was created that no satisfactory pattern has resulted which would dispense with frequent appearances of the whole person. Pretty jump of a clown over a chair into the emptiness of the wings. The whole thing reminds one of a private production where, because of social necessity, one vigorously applauds a wretched, insignificant performance in order to get something smooth and rounded from the minus of the production by means of the plus of the applause.
The singer Vaschata. So bad that one loses oneself in his appearance. But because he is a powerful person he holds the attention of the audience with an animal force of which certainly I am consciously aware.
Grünbaum is effective with what is apparently only the seeming inconsolability of his existence.
Odys, dancer. Stiff hips. Real fleshlessness. Red knees only suit the ‘Moods of Spring’ dance.
30 September. The girl in the adjoining room yesterday. I lay on the sofa and, on the point of dozing off, heard her voice. She seemed to me in my mind to be overdressed not only because of the clothes she wore, but also because of the entire room; only her shapely, naked, round, strong, dark shoulders which I had seen in the bath prevailed against her clothes. For a moment she seemed to me to be steaming and to be filling the whole room with her vapours. Then she stood up in her ash-grey-coloured bodice that stood off from her body so far at the bottom that one could sit down on it and after a fashion ride along.
More on Kubin: The habit always of repeating in an approving tone someone else’s last words, even if it appears from his own words added on that he by no means agrees with the other person. Provoking – When you listen to his many stories it is easy to forget his importance. Suddenly you are reminded of this and become frightened. Someone said that a place we wanted to go to was dangerous; he said he wouldn’t go there, then; I asked him whether he was afraid to, and he answered (moreover, his arm was passed through mine): ‘Naturally, I am young and have a lot in front of me yet.’
All evening he spoke often and – in my opinion – entirely seriously about my constipation and his. Towards midnight, however, when I let my hand hang over the edge of the table, he saw part of my arm and cried: ‘But you are really sick.’ Treated me from then on even more indulgently and later also kept off the others who wanted to talk me into going to the brothel with them. When we had already said goodbye he called to me again from the distance: ‘Regulin!’
Tucholsky and Szafranski. The aspirated Berlin dialect in which the voice makes use of intervals consisting of ‘nich’. The former, an entirely consistent person of twenty-one. From the controlled and powerful swing of his walking-stick that gives a youthful lift to his shoulders to the deliberate delight in and contempt for his own literary works. Wants to be a defence lawyer, sees only a few obstacles and at the same time how they may be overcome: his clear voice that after the manly sound of the first half-hour of talk pretends to become revealingly girlish – doubt of his own capacity to pose, which, however, he hopes to get with more experience of the world – fear, finally, of changing into a melancholic, as he has seen happen in older Berlin Jews of his type, in any event for the time being he sees no sign of this. He will marry soon.
Szafranski, a disciple of Bernhardt’s, grimaces while he observ
es and draws in a way that resembles what is drawn. Reminds me that I too have a pronounced talent for metamorphosing myself, which no one notices. How often I must have imitated Max. Yesterday evening, on the way home, if I had observed myself from the outside I should have taken myself for Tucholsky. The alien being must be in me, then, as distinctly and invisibly as the hidden object in a picture-puzzle, where, too, one would never find anything if one did not know that it is there. When these metamorphoses take place, I should especially like to believe in a dimming of my own eyes.
1 October. The Altneu Synagogue yesterday. Kol Nidre.16 Suppressed murmur of the stock market. In the entry, boxes with the inscription: ‘Merciful gifts secretly left assuage the wrath of the bereft.’ Churchly inside. Three pious, apparently Eastern Jews. In socks. Bowed over their prayer books, their prayer shawls drawn over their heads, become as small as they possibly can. Two are crying, moved only by the holy day. One of them may only have sore eyes, perhaps, to which he fleetingly applies his still-folded handkerchief, at once to lower his face to the text again. The words are not really, or chiefly, sung, but behind them arabesque-like melodies are heard that spin out the words as fine as hairs. The little boy without the slightest conception of it all and without any possibility of understanding, who, with the clamour in his ears, pushes himself among the thronging people and is pushed. The clerk (apparently) who shakes himself rapidly while he prays, which is to be understood only as an attempt at putting the strongest possible – even if possibly incomprehensible – emphasis on each word, by means of which the voice, which in any case could not attain a large, clear emphasis in the clamour, is spared. The family of a brothel owner. I was stirred immeasurably more deeply by Judaism in the Pinkas Synagogue.