The Diaries of Franz Kafka (33 page)

As it turned out, part of the hotel staff, unemployed because of the fire, was living in these ruins. A gentleman in a black frock-coat and a bright red tie at once came running out when Liman’s carriage stopped,
told Liman, who sulkily listened to him, the story of the fire, meanwhile twisting the ends of his long, thin beard around his finger and interrupting this only to point out to Liman where the fire started, how it spread, and how finally everything collapsed. Liman, who had hardly raised his eyes from the ground throughout this whole story and had not let go the handle of the carriage door, was just about to call out to the driver the name of another hotel to which he could drive him when the man in the frock-coat, with arms raised, implored him not to go to any other hotel, but to remain loyal to this hotel, where, after all, he had always received satisfaction. Despite the fact that this was only meaningless talk and no one could remember Liman, just as Liman recognized hardly a single one of the male and female employees he saw in the door and windows, he still asked, as a man to whom his habits were dear, how, then, at the moment, he was to remain loyal to the burned-down hotel. Now he learned – and involuntarily had to smile at the idea – that beautiful rooms in private homes were available for former guests of this hotel, but only for them, Liman need but say the word and he would be taken to one at once, it was quite near, there would be no time lost and the rate – they wished to oblige and the room was of course only a substitute – was unusually low, even though the food, Viennese cooking, was, if possible, even better and the service even more attentive than in the former Hotel Kingston, which had really been inadequate in some respects.

‘Thank you,’ said Liman, and got into the carriage. ‘I shall be in Constantinople only five days, I really can’t set myself up in a private home for this short space of time, no, I’m going to a hotel. Next year, however, when I return and your hotel has been rebuilt, I’ll certainly stop only with you. Excuse me!’ And Liman tried to close the carriage door, the handle of which the representative of the hotel was now holding. ‘Sir,’ the latter said pleadingly, and looked up at Liman.

‘Let go!’ shouted Liman, shook the door and directed the driver: ‘To the Hotel Royal.’ But whether it was because the driver did not understand him, whether it was because he was waiting for the door to be closed, in any event he sat on his box like a statue. In no case, however, did the representative of the hotel let go of the door, he even beckoned eagerly to a colleague to rouse himself and come to his aid. There was some girl he particularly hoped could do something, and he
kept calling, ‘Fini! Hey, Fini! Where’s Fini?’ The people at the windows and the door had turned towards the inside of the house, they shouted in confusion, one saw them running past the windows, everyone was looking for Fini.

The man who was keeping Liman from driving off and whom obviously only hunger gave the courage to behave like this, could have been easily pushed away from the door. He realized this and did not dare even to look at Liman; but Liman had already had too many unfortunate experiences on his travels not to know how important it is in a foreign country to avoid doing anything that attracts attention, no matter how very much in the right one might be. He therefore quietly got out of the carriage again, for the time being paid no attention to the man who was holding the door in a convulsive grip, went up to the driver, repeated his instructions, expressly added that he was to drive away from here as fast as he could, then walked up to the man at the door of the carriage, took hold of his hand with an apparently ordinary grip, but secretly squeezed the knuckles so hard that the man almost jumped and was forced to remove his hand from the door handle, shrieking ‘Fini!’ which was at once a command and an outburst of pain.

‘Here she comes! Here she comes!’ shouts now came from all the windows, and a laughing girl, her hands still held to her hair, which had just been dressed, her head half bowed, came running out of the house towards the carriage. ‘Quick! Into the carriage! It’s pouring,’ she cried, grasping Liman by the shoulders and holding her face very close to his. ‘I am Fini,’ she then said softly, and let her hands move caressingly along his shoulders.

They really don’t mean so badly by me, Liman said to himself, smiling at the girl, too bad that I’m no longer a young fellow and don’t permit myself risky adventures.

‘There must be some mistake, Miss,’ he said, and turned towards his carriage; ‘I neither asked them to call you nor do I intend to drive off with you.’ From inside the carriage he added, ‘Don’t trouble yourself any further.’

But Fini had already set one foot on the step and said, her arms crossed over her breast, ‘Now why won’t you let me recommend a place for you to stay?’

Tired of the annoyances to which he had already been subjected, Liman leaned out to her and said, ‘Please don’t delay me any longer with useless questions! I am going to a hotel and that’s all. Take your foot off the step, otherwise you may be hurt. Go ahead, driver!’

‘Stop!’ the girl shouted, however, and now in earnest tried to swing herself into the carriage. Liman, shaking his head, stood up and blocked all of the door with his stout body. The girl tried to push him away, using her head and knees in the attempt, the carriage began to rock on its wretched springs, Liman had no real grip.

‘And why won’t you take me with you? And why won’t you take me with you?’ the girl kept repeating.

Certainly Liman would have been able to push away the girl without exerting any special force, even though she was strong, if the man in the frock-coat, who had remained silent until now as though he had been relieved by Fini, had not now, when he saw Fini waver, hurried over with a bound, supported Fini from behind and tried to push the girl into the carriage by exerting all his strength against Liman’s still restrained efforts at defence. Sensing that he was holding back, she actually forced her way into the carriage, pulled at the door which at the same time was slammed shut from the outside, said, as though to herself, ‘Well, now,’ first hastily straightened her blouse and then, more deliberately, her hair. ‘This is unheard of,’ said Liman, who had fallen back into his seat, to the girl who was sitting opposite him.

2 May. It has become very necessary to keep a diary again. The uncertainty of my thoughts, F., the ruin in the office, the physical impossibility of writing and the inner need for it.

Valli walks out through our door behind my brother-in-law who tomorrow will leave for Czortkov for manoeuvres. Remarkable, how much is implied in this following-after of a recognition of marriage as an institution which one has become thoroughly used to.

The story of the gardener’s daughter who interrupted my work the day before yesterday. I, who want to cure my neurasthenia through my work, am obliged to hear that the young lady’s brother, his name was
Jan and he was the actual gardener and presumed successor of old Dvorsky, already even the owner of the flower garden, had poisoned himself because of melancholia two months ago at the age of twenty-eight. During the summer he felt relatively well despite his solitary nature, since at least he had to have contact with the customers, but during the winter he was entirely withdrawn. His sweetheart was a clerk –
uřednice
– a girl as melancholy as he. They often went to the cemetery together.

The gigantic Menasse at the Yiddish performance. Something magical that seized hold of me at his movements in harmony with the music. I have forgotten what.

My stupid laughter today when I told my mother that I am going to Berlin
⁵⁴
at Whitsuntide. ‘Why are you laughing?’ said my mother (among several other remarks, one of which was, ‘Look before you leap,’ all of which, however, I warded off with remarks like, ‘It’s nothing,’ etc.). ‘Because of embarrassment,’ I said, and was happy for once to have said something true in this matter.

Yesterday met B.
⁵⁵
Her calmness, contentedness, clarity, and lack of embarrassment, even though in the last two years she has become an old woman, her plumpness – even at that time a burden to her – that will soon have reached the extreme of sterile fatness, her walk has become a sort of rolling or shuffle with the belly thrust, or rather carried, to the fore, and on her chin – at a quick glance only on her chin – hairs now curling out of what used to be down.

3 May. The terrible uncertainty of my inner existence.

How I unbutton my vest to show Mr B. my rash. How I beckon him into another room.

The leper and his wife. The way her behind – she is lying in bed on her belly – keeps rising up with all its ulcers again and again although a guest is present. The way her husband keeps shouting at her to keep covered.

The husband has been struck from behind by a stake – no one knows where it came from – knocked down and pierced. Lying on the ground with his head raised and his arms stretched out, he laments. Later he is able to stand up unsteadily for a moment. He can talk about nothing except how he was struck, and points to the approximate direction from which in his opinion the stake came. This talk, always the same, is by now tiresome to the wife, particularly since the man is always pointing in another direction.

4 May. Always the image of a pork butcher’s broad knife that quickly and with mechanical regularity chops into me from the side and cuts off very thin slices which fly off almost like shavings because of the speed of the action.

Early one morning, the streets were still empty up and down their length and breadth, a man, he was in his bare feet and wore only a nightshirt and trousers, opened the door of a large tenement on the main street. He seized the two sections of the door and took a deep breath. ‘Misery, oh, damned misery,’ he said and looked, apparently calmly, first along the street and then at some houses.

Despair from this direction too. Nowhere a welcome.

1. Digestion. 2. Neurasthenia. 3. Rash. 4. Inner insecurity.

24 May. Walk with Pick.
⁵⁶
In high spirits because I consider ‘The Stoker’ so good. This evening I read it to my parents, there is no better critic than I when I read to my father, who listens with the most extreme reluctance. Many shallow passages followed by unfathomable depths.

5 June. The inner advantages that mediocre literary works derive from the fact that their authors are still alive and present behind them. The real sense of growing old.

Löwy, story about crossing the frontier.

21 June. The anxiety I suffer from all sides. The examination by the doctor, the way he presses forward against me, I virtually empty myself
out and he makes his empty speeches into me, despised and unrefuted.

The tremendous world I have in my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.

On a cold spring morning about five o’clock a tall man in a cloak that reached to his feet knocked with his fist against the door of a small hut which stood in a bare, hilly region. The moon was still white and bright in the sky. After each blow of his fist he listened, within the hut there was silence.

1 July. The wish for an unthinking, reckless solitude. To be face to face only with myself. Perhaps I shall have it in Riva.

Day before yesterday with Weiss,
⁵⁷
author of
Die Galeere
. Jewish physician, Jew of the kind that is closest to the type of the Western European Jew and to whom one therefore immediately feels close. The tremendous advantage of Christians who always have and enjoy such feelings of closeness in general intercourse, for instance a Christian Czech among Christian Czechs.

The honeymoon couple that came out of the Hotel de Saxe. In the afternoon. Dropping the card in the mailbox. Wrinkled clothing, lazy pace, dreary, tepid afternoon. Faces scarcely individualized at first sight.

The picture of the celebration of the Romanov tercentenary in Yaroslavl on the Volga. The Tsar, the annoyed princesses standing in the sun, only one – delicate, elderly, indolent, leaning on her parasol – is looking straight ahead. The heir to the throne on the arm of the huge, bareheaded Cossack. In another picture, men who had long since passed by are saluting in the distance.

The millionaire in the motion picture
Slaves of Gold
. Mustn’t forget him. The calmness, the slow movement, conscious of its goal, a faster
step when necessary, a shrug of the shoulder. Rich, spoiled, lulled to sleep, but how he springs up like a servant and searches the room into which he was locked in the forest tavern.

2 July. Wept over the report of the trial of twenty-three-year-old Marie Abraham who, because of poverty and hunger, strangled her not quite nine-month-old child, Barbara, with a man’s tie that she used as a garter. Very routine story.

The fire with which, in the bathroom, I described to my sister a funny motion picture. Why can I never do that in the presence of strangers?

I would never have married a girl with whom I had lived in the same city for a year.

3 July. The broadening and heightening of existence through marriage. Sermon text. But I almost sense it.

When I say something it immediately and finally loses its importance, when I write it down it loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.

A band of little golden beads around a tanned throat.

19 July. Out of a house there stepped four armed men. Each held a halberd upright before him. Now and then one of them looked to the rear to see whether he was coming on whose account they were standing here. It was early in the morning, the street was entirely empty.

So what do you want? Come! – We do not want to. Leave us!–

All the inner effort just for this! That is why the music from the coffee-house rings so in one’s ear. The stone’s throw about which Elsa B. spoke becomes visible.

[
A woman is sitting at the distaff. A man pushes the door open with a sword which is sheathed in its scabbard
(
he is holding it loosely in his hand
).]