The Diaries of Franz Kafka (66 page)

5 September. Banca Commerciale on Scala Square. Letters from home – Card to my boss – Our astonishment when we entered the Cathedral – Wanted to make an architectural sketch of it; the Cathedral interior was purely architectural, there were no benches for the most part, few statues on the pillars, a few dim pictures on the distant walls; the individual visitors on the Cathedral floor provided a measure of its height, and their walking about provided a measure of its extent. Sublime, but recalled the Galleria too directly.

Inexcusable to travel – or even live – without taking notes. The deathly feeling of the monotonous passing of the days is made impossible.

Climbed to the roof of the Cathedral. A young Italian in front made the climb easier for us by humming a tune, trying to take off his coat, looking through cracks through which only sunlight could be seen, and continually tapping at the numerals that showed the number of steps – View from the roof: something was wrong with the tram-cars down below, they moved so slowly, only the curve of the rails carried them along. A conductor, distorted and foreshortened from where we stood, hurried to his tram and jumped in. A fountain shaped like a man, spinal column and brain removed to make a passage for the rainwater – Each of the great stained-glass windows was dominated by the colour of some one piece of clothing that recurred over and over again in the individual panes.

Max: Toy railway station in the display of a toy store, rails that formed a circle and led nowhere; is and will remain his strongest impression of Milan. An attempt to show the variety of the stock could account for placing the railway station and Cathedral side by side in the display – From the back portal of the Cathedral you looked right into the face of a large clock on a roof – Teatro Fossati – Trip to Stresa. The people turning in their sleep in the crowded compartment The two lovers – Afternoon in Stresa.

Thursday, 7 September. Bath, letters, departure – Sleeping in public –

Friday, 8 September. Trip [to Paris]. Italian couple. Clergyman. American. The two little Frenchwomen with their fat behinds. Montreux. Your legs parted company on the broad Parisian streets –
Japanese lanterns in the garden restaurants – The Place de la Concorde is arranged so that its sights are off in the distance, where one’s eye can easily find them out, but only if it looks for them.

École Florentine (fifteenth century), apple scene – Tintoretto:
Suzanne
– Simone Martini: (1285, école de Sienne)
Jésus Christ marchant au Calvaire
– Mantegna:
La Sagesse victorieuse des Vices
1431–1506, école Vénétienne – Titian:
Le Concile de Trente
1477–1576 – Raphael:
Apollo and Marsyas
– Velázquez:
Portrait de Philippe IV roi d’Espagne
1599–1600. Jacob Jordaens 1593–1678:
Le Concert après le repas
– Rubens:
Kermesse.
¹⁴¹

Confiserie de l’enfant gâté
, rue des Petits Champs. Washerwoman in morning undress – rue des Petits Champs so narrow it was entirely in the shade.
Le sou du soldat, société anonyme
. Capital one mill., avenue de l’Opéra – Robert, Samuel.
Ambassadeur
: a roll of the drums followed by brasses (the double
s
), with the
eur
the drumsticks are lifted up in the midst of their flourish and are silent – Gare de Lyon. The construction workers’ substitute for braces is a coloured sash worn round the waist; here, where sashes have an official meaning, it gives it a democratic effect.

I didn’t know whether I was sleepy or not, and the question bothered me all morning on the train. Don’t mistake the nursemaids for French governesses of German children.

Prise de Salins
, 17 May 1668, par M. Lafarge. In the background a man dressed in red on a white horse and a man in dark clothes on a dark horse catch their breath after the siege of a city by going for a ride while a storm approaches –
Voyage de Louis XVI à Cherbourg
, 23 juin 1786 –
Bivouak de Napoléon sur le champ de bataille de Wagram, nuit de 5 au 6 juillet 1809.
¹⁴²
Napoleon is sitting alone, one leg propped on a low table. Behind him a smoking campfire. The shadows of his right leg and of the legs of the table and camp stool lie in the foreground like rays about him. Peaceful moon. The generals, in a distant semi-circle, look into the fire or at him.

How easy it is for a grenadine and seltzer to get into your nose when you laugh (bar in front of the Opéra Comique).

Platform tickets – that vulgar intrusion on family life – are unknown.

Alone [in Erlenbach]
¹⁴³
in the reading-room with a lady who was hard of hearing; while she looked elsewhere, I vainly introduced myself to her; she considered the rain I pointed to outside as a continuing humidity. She was telling fortunes by cards according to the instructions given in a book beside her, into which she intently peered with her head propped against her fist. There must have been a hundred little miniature cards printed on both sides in her fist that she hadn’t used yet. Near by, his back to me, an old gentleman dressed in black was reading the
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
. A pouring rain. Travelled with a Jewish goldsmith. He was from Cracow, a little more than twenty years old, had been in America two and a half years, had been living in Paris for two months, and had had only fourteen days’ work. Badly paid (only ten francs a day), no place to do business. When you’ve just come to a city you don’t know what your work is worth. Fine life in Amsterdam. Full of people from Cracow. Every day you knew what was new in Cracow, for someone was always going there or coming back. There were entire streets where only Polish was spoken. Made a lot of money in New York because the girls earn a lot there and can deck themselves out. Paris wouldn’t compare with it, the minute you stepped into the boulevards you could see that. Left New York because his people live here, after all, and because they wrote him: We’re here in Cracow and still make a living too; how long are you going to stay in America? Quite right. Enthusiastic over the way the Swiss live. Living out in the country as they do and raising cattle, they must get to be as strong as giants. And the rivers. But the most important thing is, bathe in running water after you get up – He had long, curly hair, only occasionally ran his fingers through it, very bright eyes, a gently curving nose, hollows in his cheeks, a suit of American cut, a frayed shirt, falling socks. His bag was small, but when he got off he carried it as if it had been a heavy burden. His German was disturbed by an English pronunciation and English expressions; his English was so strong that his Yiddish was given a rest. Full of animation after a night spent in travelling. ‘You’re an Austrian, aren’t you? You have one of those rain-capes too. All the Austrians have them.’ By showing him the sleeves I proved that it was not a cape but a coat. He still maintained that every Austrian had a cape. This was how they threw it on. He turned to a third person and showed
him how they did it. He pretended to fasten something behind on his shirt collar, bent his body to see whether it held, then pulled this something first over his right then over his left arm, until he was entirely enveloped in it and nice and warm, as you could see. Although he was sitting down, the movements of his legs showed how easily and unconcernedly an Austrian wearing a cape like that could walk. There was almost no mockery in all this, rather it was done as if by someone who had travelled around a bit and seen something of the world. There was a little child-like touch to it all.

My walk in the dark little garden in front of the sanatorium.

Morning setting-up exercises accompanied by the singing of a song from
Wunderhorn
which someone played on the cornet.

The secretary who went for walking trips every winter, to Budapest, southern France, Italy. Barefoot, ate raw food only (whole-wheat bread, fish, dates), lived two weeks with two other people in the region around Nice, mostly naked, in a deserted house.

Fat little girl who was always picking her nose, clever but not especially pretty, had a nose with no expectations, was called Waltraute and, according to a young woman, there was something radiant about her.

I dreaded the pillars of the dining-room in advance, because of the pictures (tall, shining, solid marble) I had seen in the prospectus, and cursed myself during the trip across on the little steamer. But they turned out to be made of very unpretentious brick painted in bad imitation of marble, and unusually low.

Lively conversation between a man in the pear tree opposite my window and a girl on the ground floor whom I couldn’t see.

A pleasant feeling when the doctor listened over and over again to my heart, kept asking me to change my position, and couldn’t make up his mind. He tapped the area around my heart for an especially long time; it lasted so long he seemed almost absent-minded.

The quarrel at night between the two women in the compartment, the lamp of which they had covered over. The Frenchwoman lying down screamed out of the darkness, and the elderly woman whom her feet were pressing against the wall and who spoke French badly didn’t know what to do. According to the Frenchwoman she should have left the seat, carried all her luggage over to the other side, the back seat, and permitted her to stretch out. The Greek doctor in my compartment
said she was definitely in the wrong, in bad, clear French that was apparently based on German. I fetched the conductor, who settled matters between them.

Again encountered the lady, who is a fanatical writer too. She carried with her a portfolio full of stationery, cards, pens, and pencils, all of which was an incitement to me.

This place looks like a family group now. Outside it is raining, the mother has her fortune-telling cards in front of her and the son is writing. Otherwise the room is empty. Since she is hard of hearing, I could also call her mother.

In spite of my great dislike for the word ‘type’, I think it is true that nature-healing and everything associated with it is producing a new human type-represented in a person such as Mr Fellenberg (of course, I only know him superficially). People with thin skins, rather small heads, looking exaggeratedly clean, with one or two incongruous little details (in the case of Mr F., some missing teeth, the beginning of a paunch), a greater spareness than would seem appropriate to the structure of their bodies, that is, every trace of fattiness is suppressed, they treat their health as if it were a malady, or at least something they had acquired by their own merit (I’m not reproaching them), with all the other consequences of an artificially cultivated feeling of good health.

In the balcony at the Opéra Comique. In the front row a man in a frock coat and top hat; in one of the rear rows, a man in his shirt sleeves (with his shirt even turned in in front in order to leave his chest free), all prepared to go to bed.

National quarrels in Switzerland. Biel, a wholly German city a few years ago, is in danger of becoming gallicized because of the heavy immigration of French watchmakers. Ticino, the only Italian canton, wants to secede from Switzerland. An irredenta exists. The reason is that the Italians have no representation in the Federal Council (it has seven members); with their small number (perhaps 180,000) it would need a council of nine members to give them representation. But they don’t want to change the number. The St Gotthard railway was a private German enterprise, had German officials who founded a German school in Bellinzona; now that it has been taken over by the
state the Italians want Italian officials and the suppression of the German school. And education is actually a matter in which only the government of the canton is authorized to make decisions. Total population: two thirds German, one third French and Italian.

The ailing Greek doctor who drove me out of the compartment with his coughing during the night can only – so he said – digest mutton. Since he had to spend the night in Vienna, he asked me to write the German word down for him.

Though it was raining and later on I was left completely to myself, though my misery is always present to me, though group games were going on in the dining-hall in which I took no part because of my lack of skill, and even though in the end everything I wrote was bad, I still had no feeling for either what was ugly or degrading, sad or painful in this lonely state of mine, a loneliness, moreover, that is organic with me – as though I consisted only of bones. At the same time I was happy to think that I had detected the trace of an appetite in the region above my clogged intestines. The old lady, who had gone to fetch some milk for herself in a tin pot, returned, and before losing herself in her cards again asked me: ‘What are you writing? Notes? A diary?’ And since she knew she would not understand my answer, she went right on with her questions: ‘Are you a student?’ Without thinking of her deafness, I replied: ‘No, but I was one’; and while she was already laying out her cards again, I was left alone with my sentence, the weight of which compelled me to go on looking at her for a while.

We are two men sitting at a table with six or seven Swiss women. When my plate is half empty, or when I stare in boredom round me in the dining-hall, I see plates rise up far off in the distance, rapidly draw near me in the hands of women (sometimes I call them Mrs, sometimes Miss), and slowly go back the way they came when I say, ‘No, thank you.’

Le Siège de Paris
par Francisque Sarcey: 19 July 1870, declaration of war. Those who were famous for a few days – Changing character
of the book as it describes the changing character of Paris – Praise and blame for the same things. The calm of Paris after the surrender is sometimes French frivolity, sometimes French ability to resist – 4 September, after Sedan, the Republic – workers and national guardsmen on ladders hammer the
N
off the public buildings – eight days after the Republic was proclaimed the enthusiasm still ran so high that they could get no one to work on the fortifications – The Germans are advancing.

Parisian jokes: MacMahon was captured at Sedan, Bazaine surrendered Metz, the two armies have at last established contact – The destruction of the suburbs ordered – no news for three months – Paris never had such an appetite as at the beginning of the siege. Gambetta organized the rising of the provinces. Once, by good fortune, a letter from him arrived. But instead of giving the exact dates everyone was on fire to know, he wrote only
que la résistance de Paris faisait l’admiration de l’univers
– Insane club meetings. A meeting of women in the Triat school. ‘How should the women defend their honour against the enemy?’ With the
doigt de Dieu
, or rather
le doigt prussique. Il consiste en une sorte de dé en caoutchouc que les femmes se mettent au doigt. Au bout de ce dé est un petit tube contenant de l’acide prussique
. If a German soldier comes along, he is extended a hand, his skin is pricked, and the acid is injected – The Institute sends a scholar out by balloon to study the eclipse of the sun in Algeria – They ate last year’s chestnuts and the animals of the Jardin des Plantes – There were a few restaurants where everything was to be had up to the last day – Sergeant Hoff, who was so famous for murdering a Prussian to avenge his father, disappeared and was considered a spy – State of the army: several of the outposts have a friendly drink with the Germans – Louis Blanc compares the Germans to Mohicans who have studied technology – On 5 January the bombardment begins. Doesn’t amount to much. People were told to throw themselves on the ground when they heard the shelling. Street boys, grown-ups too, stood in the mud and from time to time shouted
gare l’obus
– For a while General Chauzy was the hope of Paris, but met defeat like all the others; even at that time there was no reason for his renown, nevertheless, so great was the enthusiasm in Paris that Sarcey, even when writing his book, feels a vague, unfounded admiration for Chauzy.