by Franz Kafka
In the Altneu Synagogue at the Mishnah services. Home with Dr Jeiteles.107 Greatly interested in certain controversial issues.
Self-pity, because it is cold, because of everything. Now, at half past nine at night, someone in the next apartment is hammering a nail into the wall between us.
21 November. Complete futility. Sunday. A more than ordinary sleepless night. In bed in the sunshine until a quarter past eleven. Walk. Lunch. Read the paper, leafed through some old catalogues. Walk, Hybernerstrasse, City Park, Wenzelsplatz, Ferdinandstrasse, then in the direction of Podol. Laboriously stretched out to two hours. Now and then felt severe pains in my head, once a really burning pain. Had supper. Now at home. Who on high could behold all this with open eyes from beginning to end?
25 December. Open the diary only in order to lull myself to sleep. But see what happens to be the last entry and could conceive of thousands of identical ones I might have entered over the past three or four years. I wear myself out to no purpose, should be happy if I could write, but don’t. Haven’t been able to get rid of my headaches lately. I have really wasted my strength away.
Yesterday spoke frankly to my boss; my decision to speak up and my vow not to shrink from it had made it possible for me to enjoy two – if restless – hours of sleep the night before last. Put four possibilities to him: (1) Let everything go on as it has been going this last tortured week, the worst I’ve undergone, and end up with brain fever, insanity, or something of the like; (2) out of some kind of sense of duty I don’t want to take a vacation, nor would it help; (3) I can’t give notice now because of my parents and the factory; (4) only military service remains. Answer: One week’s holiday and hematogen treatment, which my boss intends to take with me. He himself is apparently very sick. If I went too, the department would be deserted.
Relief to have spoken frankly. For the first time, almost caused an official convulsion in the atmosphere of the office with the word ‘notice’.
Nevertheless, hardly slept at all today.
Always this one principal anguish: If I had gone away in 1912, in full possession of all my forces, with a clear head, not eaten by the strain of keeping down living forces!
Kafka Sketch
With Langer: He will only be able to read Max’s book thirteen days from now. He could have read it on Christmas Day – according to an old custom you are not allowed to read Torah at Christmas (one rabbi made a practice of cutting up his year’s supply of toilet paper on that evening), but this year Christmas fell on Saturday. In thirteen days, however, the Russian Christmas will be here, he’ll read it then. According to a medieval tradition you may take an interest in belles-lettres and other worldly knowledge only after your seventieth year, according to a more liberal view only after your fortieth year. Medicine was the only science in which you were allowed to take an interest. Today not even in that, since it is now too closely joined with the other sciences – You are not allowed to think of the Torah in the toilet, and for this reason you may read worldly books there. A very pious man in Prague, a certain K., knew a great deal of the worldly sciences, he had studied them all in the toilet.
19 April. He attempted to open the door to the corridor, but it resisted. He looked up and down but could not discover what the obstacle was. Nor was the door locked; the key in the lock on the inside, if anyone had tried to lock it from the outside the key would have been pushed out. And after all, who could have locked it? He pushed against the door with his knee, the frosted glass rang, but the door stuck fast. How odd.
He went back into the room, stepped out on the balcony, and looked down into the street. But before he had given a thought to the usual afternoon activity below, he again returned to the door and once more attempted to open it. This time, however, it proved more than an attempt, the door immediately opened, hardly any pressure was needed, the draught blowing in from the balcony made it fly right open; he gained entry into the corridor as effortlessly as a child who is playfully allowed to touch the latch at the same time actually that an older person presses it down.
I shall have three weeks to myself. Do you call that inhuman treatment?
A short time ago this dream: We were living on the Graben near the Café Continental. A regiment turned in from Herrengasse on its way to the railway station. My father: ‘That’s something to look at as long as one can’; he swings himself up on the sill (in Felix’s brown bathrobe, the figure in the dream was a mixture of the two) and with outstretched arms sprawls outside on the broad, sharply sloping window ledge. I catch hold of him by the two little loops through which the cord of his bathrobe passes. Maliciously, he leans even farther out, I exert all my strength to hold him. I think how good it would be if I could fasten my feet by ropes to something solid so that my father could not pull me out. But to do that I should have to let go of my father, at least for a short time, and that’s impossible. Sleep – my sleep, especially – cannot withstand all this tension and I wake up.
20 April. The landlady came down the corridor towards him with a letter. He scrutinized the old lady’s face, not the letter, as he opened it. Then he read:
My dear Sir: For several days you have been living across the way from me. Your close resemblance to an old friend of mine attracted my attention. Do me the honour of paying me a visit this afternoon. With best regards, Louise Halka.
‘All right,’ he said, as much to the landlady, who had not budged, as to the letter. It was a welcome opportunity to make what might perhaps be a useful acquaintance in this city where he was still a complete stranger.
‘Do you know Mrs Halka?’ asked the landlady, as he reached for his hat.
‘No,’ he said, questioningly.
‘The girl who delivered the letter is her maid,’ the landlady said, as though in apology.
‘That may well be,’ he said, annoyed at her interest, and hurried to leave the house.
‘She is a widow,’ the landlady breathed after him from the threshold.
A dream: Two groups of men were fighting each other. The group to which I belonged had captured one of our opponents, a gigantic naked man. Five of us clung to him, one by the head, two on either side by his arms and legs. Unfortunately we had no knife with which to stab him, we hurriedly asked each other for a knife, no one had one. But since for some reason there was no time to lose and an oven stood near by whose extraordinarily large cast-iron door was red-hot, we dragged the man to it, held one of his feet close to the oven until the foot began to smoke, pulled it back again until it stopped smoking, then thrust it close to the door again. We monotonously kept this up until I awoke, not only in cold sweat but with my teeth actually chattering.
Hans and Amalia, the butcher’s two children, were playing marbles near the wall of the big warehouse – a large old fortress-like stone building with a double row of heavily barred windows – which extended a great distance along the riverbank. Hans took careful aim, intently regarding the marble, the path it must follow, and the hole, before he made his shot; Amalia squatted beside the hole, impatiently striking her little fists against the ground. But suddenly they both left off their play, slowly stood up, and looked at the nearest window of the warehouse. They heard a sound as if someone were trying to wipe the dirt off one of the many dim panes into which the window was divided; but the attempt failed and the pane was broken through, a thin face, smiling for no apparent reason, indistinctly appeared in the small rectangle; it seemed to be a man and he said, ‘Come in, children, come in. Have you ever seen a warehouse?’
The children shook their heads, Amalia looked up in excitement at the man, Hans glanced behind him to see if anyone were near by, but saw only a man with bent back pushing a heavily laden wheelbarrow along the railing of the wharf, oblivious to everything. ‘Then it will certainly be a surprise to you,’ the man said very eagerly, as though by his eagerness he might overcome the unfortunate circumstance of the wall, bars, and window that separated him from the children. ‘But come in now. It’s getting late.’<
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‘How shall we come in?’ asked Amalia.
‘I’ll show you the door,’ the man said. ‘Just follow me, I’m going to the right now and will knock on every window.’ Amalia nodded and ran to the next window, there was really a knock there and at all the others too. But while Amalia heeded the strange man and thoughtlessly ran after him as one might run after a hoop, Hans merely trailed slowly after her. He felt uneasy; the warehouse, which it had never before occurred to him to visit, was certainly very much worth seeing, but an invitation from any stranger you please by no means proved that you were really allowed inside it. It was unlikely, rather, for were it permissible, his father would surely have taken him there already, wouldn’t he? – his father not only lived close by but even knew all the people a great distance round about, who bade him good day and treated him with respect. And it now occurred to Hans that this might also be the case with the stranger; he ran after Amalia to confirm this, catching up with her just as she, and the man with her, stopped at a small, low, galvanized-iron door level with the ground. It looked like a large oven door.
Again the man broke out a small pane in the last window and said, ‘Here is the door. Wait a moment, I’ll open the inner doors.’
‘Do you know our father?’ Hans at once asked, but the face had already disappeared and Hans had to wait with his question. Now they in fact heard the inner doors opening. At first the grating of the key in the lock was hardly audible, but it grew louder and louder as each successive door was opened. The aperture in the thick masonry at this point seemed to be filled by a great number of doors, one set closely behind the other. The last door finally opened inward, the children lay down on the ground to peer inside, and there in the gloom was the man’s face. ‘The doors are open, come along! Be quick though, quick!’ With his arm he pushed all the doors against the wall.
As if the pause outside the door had made her recollect somewhat, Amalia now slipped behind Hans, not wanting to go first, but at the same time she pushed him forward in her eagerness to go with him into the warehouse. Hans was very close to the doorway, he felt the chill air that came through it; he had no desire to go inside, not inside to that strange man, behind all those doors which could be clapped together after him, not inside the huge, cold old building. He asked, only because he already lay in front of the opening: ‘Do you know our father?’
‘No,’ the man replied, ‘but come on in, will you? I am not allowed to leave the doors open so long.’
‘He doesn’t know our father,’ Hans said to Amalia, and stood up; he felt relieved, now he would certainly not go in.
‘But of course I know him,’ said the man, poking his head farther forward in the aperture; ‘naturally I know him, the butcher, the big butcher near the bridge, I sometimes get meat there myself; do you think I should let you into the warehouse if I didn’t know your family?’
‘Then why did you first say that you didn’t know him?’ asked Hans, who, with his hands in his pockets, had already turned his back on the warehouse.
‘Because here, in this position, I don’t want to carry on any long discussions. First come inside, then we can talk everything over. Besides, boy, you don’t have to come in at all; on the contrary, with your bad manners I should prefer you to stay outside. But your sister now, she’s more reasonable, she shall come in and is entirely welcome.’ And he held out his hand to Amalia.
‘Hans,’ Amalia said, reaching out her hand to the stranger’s – without taking it, however – ‘why don’t you want to go in?’
Hans, who after the man’s last reply could give no definite reason for his disinclination, merely said softly to Amalia, ‘He hisses so.’ The stranger in fact did hiss, not only when he spoke but even when he was silent.
‘Why do you hiss?’ asked Amalia, who wished to intercede between Hans and the stranger.
‘I will answer you, Amalia,’ the stranger said. ‘My breathing is heavy, it is the result of having been here in this damp warehouse for so long; and I shouldn’t advise you to stay here too long either, though for a little while it’s quite extraordinarily interesting.’
‘I’m going,’ Amalia said with a laugh, she was now won over completely; ‘but,’ she then added, more slowly again, ‘Hans must come too.’
‘Of course,’ the stranger said and, lunging forward with the upper part of his body, grabbed Hans, who was taken completely unawares, by the hands so that he tumbled down at once, and with all his strength the man pulled him into the hole. ‘This way in, my dear Hans,’ he said, and dragged the struggling, screaming boy inside, heedless of the fact that one of Hans’s sleeves was being torn to shreds on the sharp edges of the doors.
‘Mali,’ Hans suddenly cried out – his feet had already vanished within the hole, it went so quickly despite all the resistance he put up – ‘Mali, get Father, get Father, I can’t get out, he’s pulling me so hard!’
But Mali, completely disconcerted by the stranger’s rude onslaught – and with some feeling of guilt besides, for to a certain extent she had provoked the offence, though in the final analysis also quite curious, as she had been from the very beginning – did not run away but held on to Hans’s feet and let –
It soon became known, of course, that the rabbi was working on a clay figure. Every door of every room in his house stood open night and day, it contained nothing whose presence was not immediately known to everybody. There were always a few disciples, or neighbours, or strangers wandering up and down the stairs of the house, looking into all the rooms and – unless they happened to encounter the rabbi himself – going anywhere they pleased. And once, in a washtub, they found a large lump of reddish clay.
The liberty the rabbi allowed everyone in his house had spoiled people to such a degree that they did not hesitate to touch the clay. It was hard, even when one pressed it one’s fingers were hardly stained by it, its taste – the curious even had to touch their tongue to it – was bitter. Why the rabbi kept it in the washtub they could not understand.
Bitter, bitter, that is the most important word. How do I intend to solder fragments together into a story that will sweep one along?
A faint greyish-white smoke was lightly and continuously wafted from the chimney.
The rabbi, his sleeves rolled up like a washerwoman, stood in front of the tub kneading the clay which already bore the crude outline of a human form. The rabbi kept constantly before him the shape of the whole even while he worked on the smallest detail, the joint of a finger, perhaps. Though the figure obviously seemed to be acquiring a human likeness, the rabbi behaved like a madman – time and again he thrust out his lower jaw, unceasingly passed one lip over the other, and when he wet his hands in the bucket of water beside him, thrust them in so violently that the water splashed to the ceiling of the bare vault.
11 May. And so gave the letter to the Director. The day before yesterday. Asked either for a long leave later on, without pay of course, in the event of the war ending by autumn; or, if the war goes on, for my exemption to be cancelled. It was a complete lie. It would have been half a lie if I had asked for a long leave at once, and, if it were refused, for my dismissal. It would have been the truth if I had given notice. I dared neither, hence the complete lie.
Pointless discussion today. The Director thought I wanted to extort the usual three weeks’ holiday, which in my exempted status I am not entitled to, offered me them accordingly without further ado, claimed he had decided on it even before the letter. He said nothing at all of the army, as though there had been nothing in my letter about it. When I mentioned it he didn’t hear me. He seemed to find a long leave without pay funny, cautiously referred to it in that tone. Urged me to take the three weeks’ holiday at once. Made incidental remarks in the role of a lay psychiatrist, as does everyone. After all, I don’t have to bear the responsibilities he does, a position like his could really make one ill. And how hard he had had to work even before, when he was preparing for his bar examination and at the same time working
in the Institute. Eleven hours a day for nine months. And then the chief difference – have I ever in any way had to be afraid of losing my job? But he had had to worry about that. He had had enemies in the Institute who had tried everything possible, even, as he had said, to deprive him of his means of livelihood, to throw him on the junk heap.
Remarkably enough, he did not speak of my writing.
I was weak, though I knew that it was almost a life-and-death matter for me. But insisted that I wanted to join the army and that three weeks were not enough. Whereupon he put off the rest of the discussion. If he were only not so friendly, and concerned!
I will stick to the following: I want to join the army, to give in to a wish I’ve suppressed for two years; I should prefer to have a long leave for various reasons that have nothing to do with me personally. But because of office as well as military considerations, it is probably impossible. By a long leave I understand – the official is ashamed to say it, the invalid is not – a half or an entire year. I want no pay because it is not a matter of an organic illness that can be established beyond a doubt.
All this is a continuation of the lie; but if I am consistent in it, approximates the truth in its effect.
2 June. What a muddle I’ve been in with girls, in spite of all my headaches, insomnia, grey hair, despair. Let me count them: there have been at least six since the summer. I can’t resist, my tongue is fairly torn from my mouth if I don’t give in and admire anyone who is admirable and love her until admiration is exhausted. With all six my guilt is almost wholly inward, though one of the six did complain of me to someone.
From Das Werden des Gottesglaubens by N. Söderblom, Archbishop of Upsala; quite scientific, without his being personally or religiously involved.
The primordial divinity of the Mesai: how he lowered the first cattle down from heaven on a leather strap to the first kraal.