The Diaries of Franz Kafka (53 page)

6 November. View of the antlike movements of the crowd in front of and in the trench.
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At the home of Oskar Pollak’s
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mother. His sister made a good impression on me. Is there anyone, by the way, to whom I don’t bow down? Take Grünberg,
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for instance, who in my opinion is a very remarkable person and almost universally depreciated for reasons which are beyond me – if it were a question, let’s say, of which of the two of us should have to die immediately (no great improbability in his case, for they say he is in an advanced stage of tuberculosis), and the decision lay with me as to which it should be, then I should find the question a preposterous one, so long as it was looked at merely theoretically; for as a matter of course Grünberg, a far more valuable person than I, should have been spared. Grünberg too would agree with me. But in the final desperate moment I should, as everyone else would have done long before, invent arguments in my favour, arguments that at any other time, because of their crudity, nakedness, and falsity, would have made me vomit. And these final moments I am surely undergoing now, though no one is forcing a choice upon me; they are those moments when I put off all external distracting influences and try really to look into myself.

‘Silently the “black ones” sit around the fire. The light of the flames flickers on their sombre, fanatic faces.’

19 November. Days passed in futility, powers wasting away in waiting, and, in spite of all this idleness, throbbing, gnawing pains in my head.

Letter from Werfel. Reply.

At Mrs M-T.’s, my defencelessness against everything. My malicious remarks at Max’s. Disgusted by them the next morning.
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With Miss F. R. and Esther.

In the Altneu Synagogue at the Mishnah services. Home with Dr Jeiteles.
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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.’

‘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?’