The Diaries of Franz Kafka (56 page)

When you are here, sitting at my parents’ table, my vulnerability to what is hostile to me in my father and mother is of course much greater. My connexion with the whole family seems to them to have grown much stronger (but it hasn’t and shouldn’t); I seem to them part of the chain one link of which is the bedroom near by (but I am not); they hope to have found an accomplice in you against my opposition (they haven’t found one); and they appear more ugly and contemptible in my eyes in the degree that I expect more from them under such circumstances.

If all this is as I say, then why don’t I rejoice at your remark? Because I confront my family unceasingly flailing about me in a circle
with knives, as it were, in order simultaneously to injure and defend them. Let me be entirely your representative in this, without your representing me in the same sense to your family. Is this too great a sacrifice for you, darling? It is a tremendous one, I know, and will be made easier for you only by the knowledge that my nature is such that I must take it from you by force if you do not voluntarily make me it. But if you do make it, then you have done a great deal for me. I will purposely refrain from writing to you for a day or two so that you can think it over undisturbed by me and give me your reply. A single word – so great is my confidence in you – will serve as answer.

20 October. Two gentlemen in the paddock were discussing a horse whose hindquarters a stable boy was rubbing down. ‘I haven’t,’ said the white-haired elder man, squinting one eye somewhat as he gently gnawed his lower lip, ‘I haven’t seen Atro for a week now, one’s memory for horses is an uncertain thing no matter how much practice one has had. I miss qualities in Atro, now, that I distinctly remember him to have had. It is the total impression I speak of – the details, I am sure, are correct, though I do notice a flabbiness of his muscles here and there. Look here and here.’ His lowered head moved from side to side in scrutiny and his hands groped in the air.
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6 April. Today, in the tiny harbour where save for fishing boats only two ocean-going passenger steamers used to call, a strange boat lay at anchor. A clumsy old craft, rather low and very broad, filthy, as if bilge water had been poured over it, it still seemed to be dripping down the yellowish sides; the masts disproportionately tall, the upper third of the mainmast split; wrinkled, coarse, yellowish-brown sails stretched anyhow between the yards, patched, too weak to stand against the slightest gust of wind.

I gazed in astonishment at it for a time, waited for someone to show himself on deck; no one appeared. A workman sat down beside me on the harbour wall. ‘Whose ship is that?’ I asked; ‘this is the first time I’ve seen it.’

‘It puts in every two or three years,’ the man said, ‘and belongs to the Hunter Gracchus.’

29 July. Court yester. Essay on court jesters.

The great days of the court jesters are probably gone never to return. Everything points in another direction, it cannot be denied. I at least have thoroughly delighted in the institution, even if it should now be lost to mankind.

My place was always far in the rear of the shop, completely in the dark, often you had to guess what it was that you held in your hand; in spite of this every bad stitch brought you a blow from the master.

Our King made no display of pomp; anyone who did not know him from his pictures would never have recognized him as the King. His clothes were badly made, not in our shop, however, of a skimpy material, his coat forever unbuttoned, flapping, and wrinkled, his hat crumpled, clumsy, heavy boots, broad, careless movements of his arms, a strong face with a large, straight, masculine nose, a short moustache, dark, somewhat too sharp eyes, a powerful, well-shaped neck. Once he stopped in passing in the doorway of our shop, put his right hand up against the lintel of the door, and asked, ‘Is Franz here?’ He knew everyone by name. I came out of my dark corner and made my way through the journeymen. ‘Come along,’ he said, after briefly glancing at me. ‘He’s moving into the castle,’ he said to the master.

30 July. Miss K. Coquetry that ill suits the kind of person she is. She spreads, points, pouts her lips as if her fingers were invisibly shaping them. Makes sudden, probably nervous, though controlled movements which always take one by surprise – the way she arranges her skirt over her knees, for instance, or changes her seat. Her conversation contains a minimum of words and ideas, is unassisted by other people, is chiefly produced by turns of her head, gesticulations, various pauses, lively glances; if necessary, by clenching her little fists.

He disengaged himself from their midst. Mist blew about him. A round clearing in the woods. The phoenix in the underbrush. A hand continually making the sign of the cross on an invisible face. A cool, perpetual rain, a changing song, as if from a heaving breast.

A useless person. A friend? If I attempt to summon to mind what those attributes are which he possesses, what remains, even after the most charitable verdict, is only his voice, somewhat deeper than mine. If I cry out, ‘Saved!’ – I mean if I were Robinson Crusoe and cried out, ‘Saved!’ – he would echo it in his deeper voice. If I were Korah and cried out, ‘Lost!’ he would promptly be there with his deeper voice to echo it. One eventually grows weary of perpetually leading this bass fiddler around with one. He himself by no means does this cheerfully, he echoes me only because he must and can do nothing else. Occasionally, during a holiday, when for once I have time to turn my attention to such personal matters, I consult with him, in the garden perhaps, as to how I might get rid of him.

31 July. Sit in a train, forget the fact, and live as if you were at home; but suddenly recollect where you are, feel the onward-rushing power of the train, change into a traveller, take a cap out of your bag, meet your fellow travellers with a more sovereign freedom, with more insistence, let yourself be carried towards your destination by no effort of your own, enjoy it like a child, become a darling of the women, feel the perpetual attraction of the window, always have at least one hand extended on the window sill. Same situation, more precisely stated: Forget that you forgot, change in an instant into a child travelling by itself on an express train around whom the speeding, trembling car materializes in its every fascinating detail as if out of a magician’s hand.

1 August. Dr O.’s stories at the swimming-pool of old Prague. The wild speeches Friederich Adler
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made against the rich during his student days, which everyone laughed at so; later he made a wealthy match and spoke no more – When Dr O. was a little boy and came from Amschelberg to attend the Gymnasium at Prague, he lived with a Jewish scholar whose wife was a saleswoman in a second-hand clothing store. Meals were brought in from a tavern. At half past five every day, O. was awakened for prayers – He provided for the education of all his younger brothers and sisters; it caused him a great deal of labour but gave him confidence and satisfaction. A certain Dr A., who later became a treasury official and has long been retired (a great egoist);
once advised him at that time to go away, hide, simply run away from his family, for otherwise they would be the ruin of him.

I tighten the reins.

2 August. Usually the one whom you are looking for lives next door. This isn’t easy to explain, you must simply accept it as a fact. It is so deeply founded that there is nothing you can do about it, even if you should make an effort to. The reason is that you know nothing of this neighbour you are looking for. That is, you know neither that you are looking for him nor that he lives next door, in which case he very certainly lives next door. You may of course know this as a general fact in your experience; only such knowledge doesn’t matter in the least, even if you expressly keep it forever in mind. I’ll tell you of one such case –

Pascal arranges everything very tidily before God makes his appearance, but there must be a deeper, uneasier scepticism than that of a man cutting himself to bits with – indeed – wonderful knives, but still, with the calm of a butcher. Whence this calm? this confidence with which the knife is wielded? Is God a theatrical triumphal chariot that (granted the toil and despair of the stage-hands) is hauled on to the stage from afar by ropes?

3 August. Once more I screamed at the top of my voice into the world. Then they shoved a gag into my mouth, tied my hands and feet, and blindfolded me. I was rolled back and forth a number of times, I was set upright and knocked down again, this too several times, they jerked at my legs so that I jumped with pain; they let me lie quietly for a moment, but then, taking me by surprise, stabbed deep into me with something sharp, here and there, at random.

For years I have been sitting at the great intersection, but tomorrow, because the new Emperor is arriving, I intend to leave my post. As much on principle as from disinclination, I meddle in nothing that goes on around me. For a long time now I have even stopped begging; old passers-by give me something out of habit, out of loyalty, out of
friendship, and the newcomers follow their example. I have a little basket beside me, and everybody tosses as much as he thinks proper into it. But for that very reason, because I bother with no one and in the tumult and absurdity of the street preserve the calmness of my outlook and the calmness of my soul, I understand better than anyone else everything that concerns me, my position, and what is rightfully my due. There can be no dispute about these questions, here only my opinion is of consequence. And therefore when a policeman, who naturally knows me very well but whom I just as naturally never noticed, halted beside me this morning and said, ‘Tomorrow the Emperor will arrive; see to it that you’re not here tomorrow,’ I replied by asking him, ‘How old are you?’

The term ‘literature’, when uttered in reproach, is a conversational catch-all for so much, that – there was probably some such intention in its usage from the very first – it has gradually become a catch-all for ideas as well; the term deprives one of right perspective and causes the reproach to fall short and wide of its mark.

The alarm trumpets of the void.

5 August. The afternoon in Radešovicz with Oskar. Sad, weak, made frequent efforts to keep track of the main question.

6 August.