The Diaries of Franz Kafka (70 page)

But as one year follows the next and they continue to hope and wait and wish, they must for the present be content to extend the gleaming bumper across woods and plains, frontiers and boundaries, to the lucky city on the Ilm, begging their honoured fellow townsman the favour of clinlking glasses with him and singing:

1757 ‘Sublime Grossmama!…’

Jerusalem to Kestner: ‘Might I make so bold as humbly to ask to borrow Your Excellency’s pistols for a journey I intend?’

Song of Mignon, without a single change.

Went for the photographs. Took them there. Waited around to no avail, delivered only three of the six photographs. And just the worst ones, in the hope that the custodian, to vindicate himself, would again take photographs. Not a chance.

Swim. Straight from there to Erfurter Strasse. Max for lunch. She came with two friends. I drew her aside. Yes, she had to leave ten minutes earlier yesterday, she just now learned from her friends that I had waited yesterday. She also had some difficulty with her dancing lessons. She certainly doesn’t love me, but does respect me a little. I gave her the box of chocolates with the little heart and chain twined about it, and walked on with her a short distance. A few words between us about a meeting. Tomorrow at eleven, in front of the Goethehaus. It can only be an excuse, she has to do the cooking, I’m sure, and then – in front of the Goethehaus! Nevertheless I agreed to it. Sad agreement. Went into the hotel, sat a little while with Max, who was lying in bed.

In the afternoon, an excursion to Belvedere. Hiller and his mother. Beautiful ride in the carriage along the single alley. The castle’s surprising plan, which consists of a main section and four small buildings disposed along its sides, everything low and in muted colours. A low fountain in the middle. The front faces in the direction of Weimar. The Grand Duke hadn’t been there for a number of years now. He hunts, and there is no hunting to be had here. Placid footman with clean-shaven, angular face who came to meet us. Sad, as perhaps all people who move among masters. The sadness of domestic animals. Maria Pavlovna, daughter-in-law of the Grand Duke Karl August, daughter of Maria Fedorovna and of Tsar Paul who was strangled. Many Russian things. Cloisonné, copper vessels with wires hammered on between which the enamel is poured. The bedrooms with their domed sky-painted ceilings. Photographs in the still habitable rooms were the only modern touch. How they too fell unnoticed into their proper places! Goethe’s room, a corner room on the ground floor. Several ceiling paintings by Oeser, restored past all recognition. Many Chinese things. The ‘dark Kammerfrauenzimmer’. Open-air theatre with two rows of seats. The carriage with benches placed back to back,
dos à dos
, in which the ladies sat while their cavaliers rode in attendance beside them. The heavy carriage drawn by three teams of horses in which Maria Pavlovna and her husband drove from Petersburg to Weimar in twenty-six days on their wedding journey. Open-air theatre and park were laid out by Goethe.

In the evening to Paul Ernst. (On the street asked two girls for the
house of the writer, P. E. First they looked at us reflectively, then one nudged the other as if she wanted to remind her of a name she couldn’t at the moment recall. Do you mean Wildenbruch? the other then asked us.) Moustache falling over his mouth and a pointed beard. Clasped his chair or his knees, and even when he had been angered (by his critics) wouldn’t let go. Lives on the Horn. A villa, seemed to be entirely filled with his family. A dish of strong-smelling fish that they were about to carry upstairs was taken back into the kitchen when we appeared – Father Expeditus Schmidt, whom I had already met once before on the steps of the hotel, came in. Is working in the Library on an edition of Otto Ludwig. Wanted to bring narghiles into the Archives. Reviled a newspaper as a ‘pious snake in the grass’ because it attacked his
Heiligenlegenden
.

Saturday, 6 July. To Johannes Schlaf’s.
¹⁴⁷
An elderly sister who looked like him received us. He wasn’t in. We will return in the evening.

Walked for an hour with Grete. It would seem that she came with her mother’s consent, whom she continued speaking to through the window even from the street. Pink dress, my little heart. Restless because of the big ball in the evening. Had nothing in common with her. Conversation broke off and kept resuming again. Our pace now very fast, now very slow. Straining at any cost to conceal the fact that there was not the slightest thread of a relation between us. What was it that drove us through the park together? Only my obstinacy?

Towards evening at Schlaf’s. A visit to Grete before that. She was standing in front of the partly opened kitchen door in the ball dress whose praises she had already sung and which wasn’t at all as beautiful as her usual dress. Eyes red from weeping, apparently because of her dancing partner, who had already caused her great distress. I said good-bye forever. She didn’t know it, nor would it have mattered to her had she known. A woman bringing roses disturbed even this little farewell. Men and women from the dancing school everywhere on the streets.

Schlaf. Doesn’t precisely live in a garret, as Ernst, who has fallen out with him, tried to persuade us. A man of great animation, his stout chest enclosed in a tightly buttoned jacket. His eyes only had a
sick and nervous twitch. Talked mostly of astronomy and his geocentric system. Everything else, literature, criticism, painting, still clung to him only because he hadn’t thrown it off. Besides, everything will be decided by Christmas. He hadn’t the slightest doubt of his victory. Max said his position in relation to the astronomers was similar to Goethe’s position in relation to the opticists. ‘Similar,’ he replied, continually taking hold of the table with his hand, ‘but much more favourable, for I have incontestable facts on my side.’ His small telescope for four hundred marks. He hadn’t needed it to make his discovery, or mathematics either. He is entirely happy. The sphere of his activity is infinite, for his discovery, once recognized, will have great consequences in every field (religion, ethics, aesthetics, etc.) and he will naturally be the first to be called upon to reinterpret them. When we arrived he had just been pasting notices published on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday into a large book. ‘On such occasions they go easy on one.’

Before that, a walk with Paul Ernst in the Webicht. His contempt for the present, for Hauptmann, Wassermann, Thomas Mann. In a little subordinate clause which you only caught long after it was said, with no regard for what our opinion might be, he called Hauptmann a scribbler. Otherwise vague utterances on the Jews, Zionism, races, etc., in all of which he showed himself remarkable only as being a man who had energetically used his time to good purpose – Dry, automatic ‘yes, yes’ at short intervals when someone else was speaking. Once he repeated it so often that I no longer believed my ears.

7 July. Twenty-seven, number of the porter in Halle – Now at half past six drop down on a long-sought bench near the Gleim Memorial. If I were a child, I should have to be carried, my legs ache so. No feeling of loneliness long after saying good-bye to you. And then fell into such an apathy again that it still wasn’t loneliness.

Halle, a little Leipzig. These pairs of church towers here and in Halle which are connected by small wooden bridges in the sky. Even my feeling that you won’t read these things right away, but only later, makes me so uncertain – The cyclists’ club meeting on the market place in Halle for an excursion. How difficult it is to go sight-seeing in a city, or even along a single street, by oneself.

A good vegetarian lunch. Unlike other innkeepers, it is just the
vegetarian innkeepers with whom the vegetarian diet doesn’t agree. Timid people who approach from the side.

Trip from Halle with four Jews from Prague: two pleasant, cheerful, robust elderly men, one resembling Dr K., one my father, but much shorter; then a weak-looking young married man, exhausted by the heat, and his dreadful, stoutly built young wife whose face was somehow derived from the X family. She was reading a three-mark Ullstein novel by Ida Boy-Ed with a gem of a title that Ullstein had probably thought up:
One Moment in Paradise
. Her husband asked her how she liked it. She had only begun it. ‘Can’t say just yet.’ A nice German with dry skin and a whitish-blond beard beautifully parted over his cheeks and chin took a noticeably friendly interest in everything that went on among the four.

Railway hotel [in Jungborn], room down on the street with a little garden in front. Went off into the city. A thoroughly ancient city. Timber framework seems to be the type of construction calculated to last the longest. The beams warp everywhere, the panelling sinks in or buckles out, but the whole keeps together; at most it shrinks a little with time and becomes even more solid. I have never seen people leaning so beautifully in windows. The centre posts of most of the windows were immovable. People propped their shoulders against them, children swung from them. Sturdy girls were sitting on the bottom steps of the broad, landing of a staircase, the skirts of their Sunday dresses spread out around them. Drachenweg Katzenplan. In the park on a bench with some little girls; we called it a girls’ bench and defended it against some boys. Polish Jews. The children called them Itzig and didn’t want to sit down on the bench right after them.

Jewish hotel N.N. with a Hebrew inscription. It is a neglected, castlelike building with a wide flight of stairs in front that stands out in the narrow streets. I walked behind a Jew who came out of the hotel and spoke to him. After nine. I wanted to know something about the community. Learned nothing. Looked too suspicious to him. He kept looking at my feet. But after all, I’m a Jew too. Then I can put up at N.N. – No, I already have a place to stay – So – Suddenly he moved close to me. Whether I wasn’t in Schöppenstedt a week ago. We said good-bye in front of the gate of his house, he was happy to be rid of me; without my even asking about it, he told me how to get to the synagogue.

People in bathrobes on the doorsteps. Old, meaningless inscriptions. Pondered the possibilities offered me, on these streets, squares, garden benches, and brooksides, of feeling thoroughly unhappy. Whoever can cry should come here on Sunday. In the evening, after walking around for five hours, on the terrace of my hotel in front of a little garden. At the table near by the landlord’s family with a young, lively woman who looked like a widow. Unnecessarily thin cheeks. Hair parted and fluffed out.

8 July. My house is called ‘Ruth’. Practically arranged. Four dormers, four windows, one door. Fairly quiet. Only in the distance they are playing football, the birds are loudly singing, several naked people are lying motionless in front of my door. All except me without swimming trunks. Wonderful freedom. In the park, reading room, etc., there are pretty, fat little feet to be seen.

9 July. Slept well in the cabin, which is open on three sides. I can lean against my door like a householder. Woke up at all hours of the night and kept hearing rats or birds gurgling or flitting in the grass around the hut. The man who was freckled like a leopard. Yesterday evening lecture on clothing. The feet of Chinese women are crippled in order to give them big buttocks.

The doctor, an ex-officer; affected, insane, tearful, jovial laughter. Buoyant walk. A follower of Mazdaznan. A face created to be serious. Clean-shaven, lips made to be compressed. He steps out of his examination room, you go past him to enter. ‘Please step in!’ he laughs after you. Forbade me to eat fruit, with the proviso that I needn’t obey him. I’m an educated man, I should listen to his lectures, they have even been published, should study the question, draw my own conclusions, and then act accordingly.

From his lecture yesterday: ‘Though your toes may be completely crippled, if you tug at one of them and breathe deeply at the same time, after a while it will straighten out.’ A certain exercise will make the sexual organs grow. One of his health rules: ‘Atmospheric baths at night are highly recommended’ – (whenever it suits me, I simply slip out of bed and go out into the meadow in front of my cabin) – ‘but you shouldn’t expose yourself too much to the moonlight, it has an
injurious effect.’ It is impossible to clean the kind of clothes we wear today!

This morning: washing, setting-up exercises, group gymnastics (I am called the man in the swimming trunks), some hymn singing, ball playing in a big circle. Two handsome Swedish boys with long legs. Concert by a military band from Goslar. Pitched hay in the afternoon. In the evening my stomach so upset that out of irritation I refused to walk a step. An old Swede was playing tag with several little girls and was so caught up in the game that once, while running, he shouted: ‘Wait, I’ll block these Dardanelles for you.’ Meant the passage between two clumps of bushes. When an old, unattractive nursemaid went by: That’s something you could really tap on (her back, in the black dress with white polka dots). Constant, senseless need to confide in someone. Looks at each person to see whether there is a possibility there, and whether an opportunity will present itself.

10 July. Sprained my ankle. Pain. Loaded new hay. In the afternoon walked to Ilsenburg with a very young Gymnasium professor from Nauheim; he may go to Wickersdorf
¹⁴⁸
next year. Co-education, nature cure, Cohen, Freud. Story about the group of boys and girls he took on an excursion. Storm, everyone soaked through, had to strip completely in a room in the nearest inn.

A fever during the night because of my swollen ankle. The noise the rabbits made running past. When I got up during the night three of these rabbits were sitting in the meadow in front of my door. I dreamt that I heard Goethe reciting, with infinite freedom and arbitrariness.

11 July. Talked to a Dr Friedrich Sch., a municipal official of Breslau, had been in Paris for a long time to study municipal institutions. Lived in a hotel with a view into the court of the Palais Royal. Before that in a hotel near the Observatoire. One night there were two lovers in the next room. The girl shamelessly screamed with joy. Only when he spoke through the wall and offered to call a doctor did she grow quiet, and he was able to sleep.