by Franz Kafka
Budapest. Very contradictory reports about connexions with Nagy Mihály; I didn’t believe the unfavourable ones, which then turned out to be true. At the railway station the hussar in the laced fur jacket danced and shifted his feet like a show horse. Was bidding good-bye to a lady going away. Chatted easily and uninterruptedly with her, if not by words then by dancing motions and manipulations of the hilt of his sabre. Once or twice, in fear lest the train be about to leave, escorted her up the steps to the car, his hand almost under her shoulder. He was of medium height, large, strong, healthy teeth, the cut and accentuated waistline of his fur jacket gave his appearance a somewhat feminine quality. He smiled a great deal in every direction, a really unwitting, meaningless smile, mere proof of the matter-of-fact, complete, and eternal harmony of his being which his honour as an officer almost demanded.
The old couple weeping as they said good-bye. Innumerable kisses senselessly repeated, just as when one despairs, one keeps picking up a cigarette over and over again without being aware of it. They behaved as if at home, without paying any attention to their surroundings. So it is in every bedroom. I couldn’t make out her features at all, a homely old woman; if you looked at her face more closely, if you attempted to look at it more closely, it dissolved, so to speak, and only a faint recollection of some sort of homely little ugliness remained, the red nose or several pockmarks, perhaps. He had a grey moustache, a large nose, and real pockmarks. Cycling coat and cane. Had himself well under control, though he was deeply moved. In sorrowful jest chucked the old woman under the chin. What magic there is in chucking an old woman under the chin. Finally they looked tearfully into each other’s eyes. They didn’t mean this, but it could be interpreted to mean: Even this wretched little happiness, the union of us two old people, is destroyed by the war.
The huge German officer, hung with every kind of accoutrement, marched first through the railway station, then through the train. His height and military bearing made him stiff; it was almost surprising that he could move; the firmness of his waist, the breadth of his shoulders, the slimness of his body made one’s eyes open in surprise in order to be able to take it all in at once.
Two Hungarian Jewesses in the compartment, mother and daughter. They resembled each other, and yet the mother was decent-looking, the daughter a miserable if self-conscious remnant. Mother – well-proportioned face, a fuzzy beard on her chin. The daughter was shorter; pointed face, bad complexion, blue dress, a white jabot over her pathetic bosom.
Red Cross nurse. Very certain and determined. Travelled as if she were a whole family sufficient to itself. She smoked cigarettes and walked up and down the corridor like a father; like a boy she jumped up on the seat to get something out of her knapsack; like a mother she carefully sliced the meat, the bread, the orange; like a flirtatious girl – what she really was – she showed off her pretty little feet, her yellow boots, and the yellow stockings on her trim legs against the opposite seat. She would have had no objections to being spoken to, and in fact began herself to ask about the mountains one could see in the distance, gave me her guidebook so that I could find the mountains on the map. Dejectedly I lay in my corner, a reluctance to ask her questions, as she expected me to, grew stronger, in spite of the fact that I rather liked her. Strong brown face of uncertain age, coarse skin, arched lower lip, travelling clothes with the nurse’s uniform under them, soft peaked hat crushed carelessly over her tightly twisted hair. Since no one asked her a question, she herself started telling fragments of stories. My sister, who, as I learned later, didn’t like her at all, helped her out a bit. She was going to Satvralja Ujhel, where she was to learn her ultimate destination; she preferred being where there was most to do because the time passed more quickly (my sister concluded from this that she was unhappy; I, however, didn’t think so). You have all sorts of things happen to you; one man, for example, was snoring insufferably, they woke him, asked him to have some consideration for the other patients, he promised, but hardly had his head touched the pillow again when there was the horrible snoring again. It was very funny. The other patients threw their slippers at him, his bed stood in the corner of the room and he was a target impossible to miss. You have to be strict with sick people, otherwise you get nowhere, yes is yes, no is no, just don’t be an easy mark.
At this point I made a stupid remark, but one very characteristic of me – servile, sly, irrelevant, impersonal, unsympathetic, untrue, fetched from far off, from some ultimate diseased tendency, influenced in addition by the Strindberg performance of the night before – to the effect that it must do a woman good to be able to treat men in that way. She did not hear the remark, or ignored it. My sister naturally understood it quite in the sense in which I made it, and by laughing made it her own. More-stories of a tetanus case who simply wouldn’t die. The Hungarian station master who got on later with his little boy. The nurse offered the boy an orange. He took it. Then she offered him a piece of marzipan, touched it to his lips, but he hesitated. I said: He can’t believe it. The nurse repeated this word for word. Very pleasant.
Outside the window Theiss and Bodrog with their huge spring floods. Lake views. Wild ducks. Mountains with Tokay vines. Suddenly, near Budapest, among ploughed fields, a semicircular fortified position. Barbed-wire entanglements, carefully sand-bagged shelters with benches, looked like models. The expression that was a riddle to me: ‘adapted to the terrain’. To know the terrain requires the instinct of a quadruped.
Filthy hotel in Ujhel. Everything in the room threadbare. The cigar ashes left by the previous occupant of the bed still on the night table. The beds freshly made only in appearance. Attempted to get permission to travel on a military train, first from the squad headquarters, then from the rear headquarters. Each located in a pleasant room, especially the latter. Contrast between the military and the bureaucracy. Proper estimate of paper work: a table with inkwell and pen. The door to the balcony and the window open. Comfortable sofa. In a curtained compartment on the balcony facing the yard, the clatter of dishes. Lunch was being served. Someone – the first lieutenant, as it later turned out – raised the curtain to see who was waiting. With the words, ‘After all, you have to earn your salary,’ he interrupted his lunch and approached me. I got nowhere, in spite of the fact that I had to go back to the hotel to fetch my other identification card. All I had written on my identification card was military permission to use the next day’s mail train, permission that was entirely superfluous.
The neighbourhood around the railway station like a village, neglected Ringplatz (Kossuth memorial; coffee-houses with gipsy music; pastry shop; an elegant shoe store; newsboys crying the Az Est, a one-armed soldier proudly walking around with exaggerated movements; whenever, in the court of the last twenty-four hours, I passed by a crude coloured poster announcing a German victory, there was a crowd gathered closely scrutinizing it; met P.), the suburbs cleaner. Evening in the coffee-house; only civilians from Ujhel, simple people and yet strange, partly suspect, suspect not because there was a war on but because no one could make them out. An army chaplain sitting by himself was reading newspapers. In the morning the handsome young German soldier in the tavern. Had a great quantity of food served him, smoked a fat cigar, then wrote. Sharp, stern, but youthful eyes, clear, regular, clean-shaven face. Then pulled on his knapsack. Saw him again later saluting someone, but don’t remember where.
3 May. Completely indifferent and apathetic. A well gone dry, water at an unattainable depth and no certainty it is there. Nothing, nothing. Don’t understand the life in Strindberg’s Separated; what he calls beautiful, when I relate it to myself, disgusts me. A letter to F., all wrong, impossible to mail it. What is there to tie me to a past or a future? The present is a phantom state for me; I don’t sit at the table but hover round it. Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom, merely emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness. Yesterday in Dobřichovice.96
4 May. In a better state because I read Strindberg (Separated). I don’t read him
to read him, but rather to lie on his breast. He holds me on his left arm like a child. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I almost slip off, but at the eleventh attempt I sit there firmly, feel secure, and have a wide view.
Reflection on other people’s relationship to me. Insignificant as I may be, nevertheless there is no one here who understands me in my entirety. To have someone possessed of such understanding, a wife perhaps, would mean to have support from every side, to have God. Ottla understands many things, even a great many; Max, Felix, many things; others, like E., understand only details, but with dreadful intensity; F. in all likelihood understands nothing, which, because of our undeniable inner relationship, places her in a very special position. Sometimes I thought she understood me without realizing it; for instance, the time she waited for me at the U-Bahn station – I had been longing for her unbearably, and in my passion to reach her as quickly as possible almost ran past her, thinking she would be at the top of the stairs, and she took me quietly by the hand.
5 May. Nothing, dull slight headache. Chotek Park in the afternoon, read Strindberg, who sustains me.
The long-legged, black-eyed, yellow-skinned, childlike girl, merry, pert, and lively. Saw a friend who was carrying her hat in her hand. ‘Do you have two heads?’ Her friend immediately understood the joke, in itself a rather feeble one, but alive with the voice and all of the little personality that had been put into it. Laughing, she repeated it to another friend whom she met a few steps farther on: ‘She asked me whether I have two heads!’
Met Miss R.97 in the morning. Really an abysmal ugliness, a man could never change so. Clumsy body, limp as if still asleep; the old jacket that I knew; what she was wearing under the jacket was as indeterminable as it was suspect, probably only her slip; and apparently she was disturbed by being discovered in this state, but she did the wrong thing – instead of concealing what it was that had given rise to her embarrassment, she reached as if guiltily inside the neck of her jacket and jerked it into place. Heavy down on her upper lip, but only in one spot; an exquisitely ugly impression. In spite of it all, I like her very much, even in all her undoubted ugliness; the beauty of her smile hasn’t changed, the beauty of her eyes has suffered from the falling-off of the whole. As for the rest, we are continents apart, I certainly don’t understand her; she on the other hand was satisfied with the first superficial impression she got of me. In all innocence she asked me for a bread card.
Read a chapter of The New Christians98 in the evening.
Old father and his elderly daughter. He reasonable, slightly stooped, with a pointed beard, a little cane held behind his back. She broad-nosed, with a strong lower jaw, round, distended face; turned clumsily on her broad hips. ‘They say I don’t look well. But I do look well.’
14 May. Lost all regularity in writing. In the open a great deal. Walk to Troja with Miss St., to Dobřichovice, Častalice with Miss R., her sister, Felix, his wife and Ottla. As though on the rack. Church services on Teingasse today, then Tuckmachergasse, then the soup kitchen. Read old portions of ‘The Stoker’ today. A strength that seems unattainable (is already unattainable) today. Afraid I am unfit because of a bad heart.
27 May. A great deal of unhappiness in the last entry. Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.
13 September. Eve of Father’s birthday, new diary. I don’t need it as much as I used to, I mustn’t upset myself, I’m upset enough, but to what purpose, when will it come, how can one heart, one heart not entirely sound, bear so much discontent and the incessant tugging of so much desire?
Distractedness, weak memory, stupidity!
14 September. With Max and Langer99 at the wonder-rabbi’s on Saturday. Žižkov,100 Harantova street. A lot of children on the pavement and stairs. An inn. Completely dark upstairs, groped blindly along with my hands for a few steps. A pale, dim room, whitish-grey walls, several small women and girls standing around, white kerchiefs on their heads, pale faces, slight movements. An impression of lifelessness. Next room. Quite dark, full of men and young people. Loud praying. We squeezed into a corner. We had barely looked round a bit when the prayer was over, the room emptied. A corner room, windows on both sides, two windows each. We were pushed toward a table on the rabbi’s right. We held back. ‘You’re Jews too, aren’t you?’ A nature as strongly paternal as possible makes a rabbi. All rabbis look like savages, Langer said. This one was in a silk caftan, trousers visible under it. Hair on the bridge of his nose. Furred cap which he kept tugging back and forth. Dirty and pure, a characteristic of people who think intensely. Scratched in his beard, blew his nose through his fingers, reached into the food with his fingers; but when his hand rested on the table for a moment you saw the whiteness of his skin, a whiteness such as you remembered having seen before only in your childhood imaginings – when one’s parents too were pure.
16 September. Humiliation at X.’s. Wrote the first line of a letter to him because a dignified letter had taken shape in my head. None the less gave up after the first line. In the past I was different. Besides, how lightly I bore the humiliation, how easily I forgot it, how little impression even his indifference made on me. I could have floated unperturbed down a thousand corridors, through a thousand offices, past a thousand former friends now grown indifferent, without lowering my eyes. Imperturbable but also unawakeable. And in one office Y. could have been sitting, in another Z., etc.
A new headache of a kind unknown so far. Short, painful stab above and to the right of my eye. This morning for the first time, more frequently since.
The Polish Jews going to Kol Nidre. The little boy with prayer shawls under both arms, running along at his father’s side. Suicidal not to go to temple.
Opened the Bible. The unjust Judges. Confirmed in my own opinion, or at least in an opinion that I have already encountered in myself. But otherwise there is no significance to this, I am never visibly guided in such things, the pages of the Bible don’t flutter in my presence.
Between throat and chin would seem to be the most rewarding place to stab. Lift the chin and stick the knife into the tensed muscles. But this spot is probably rewarding only in one’s imagination. You expect to see a magnificent gush of blood and a network of sinews and little bones like you find in the leg of a roast turkey.
Read Förster Fleck in Russland. Napoleon’s return to the battlefield of Borodino. The cloister there. It was blown up.
28 September. Completely idle. Memoirs of General Marcellin de Marbot, and Holzhausen, Leiden der Deutschen 1812.
Pointless to complain. Stabbing pains in my head by way of reply.
A little boy lay in the bathtub. It was his first bath at which – as he had so long wished – neither his mother nor the maid was present. In obedience to the command now and then called out to him from the next room by his mother, he hastily passed the sponge over his body; then he stretched out and enjoyed his immobility in the warm water. The gas flame steadily hummed and in the stove the dying fire crackled. It had long been quiet now in the next room, perhaps his mother had already gone away.
Why is it meaningless to ask questions? To complain means to put a question and wait for the answer. But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered. No distance divides the interrogator from the one who answers him. There is no distance to overcome. Hence meaningless to ask and wait.
29 September. All sorts of vague resolves. That much I can do successfully. By chance caught sight on Ferdinandstrasse of a picture not entirely unconnected with them. A poor sketch of a fresco. Under it a Czech proverb, something like: Though dazzled you desert the wine-cup for the maid, you shall soon come back the wiser.
Slept badly, miserably, tormenting headaches in the morning, but a free day.
Many dreams. A combination of Marschner the director and Pimisker the servant appeared. Firm red cheeks, waxed black beard, thick unruly hair.
At one time I used to think: Nothing will destroy
you, not this tough, clear, really empty head; you will never, either unwittingly or in pain, screw up your eyes, wrinkle your brow, twitch your hands, you will never be able to do more than act such a role.
How could Fortinbras say that Hamlet had prov’d most royally?
In the afternoon I couldn’t keep myself from reading what I had written yesterday, ‘yesterday’s filth’; didn’t do any harm, though.
30 September. Saw to it that Felix didn’t disturb Max. Then at Felix’s.
Rossman and K., the innocent and the guilty, both executed without distinction in the end, the guilty one with a gentler hand, more pushed aside than struck down.101
1 October. Volume III, Memoirs of General Marcellin de Marbot. Polotsk–Beresina–Leipzig–Waterloo.
Mistakes Napoleon made:
1. Decision to wage the war. What did he wish to achieve by that? Strict enforcement of the Continental Blockade in Russia. That was impossible. Alexander I could not comply without endangering his own position. His father, Paul I, had in fact been assassinated because of the alliance with France and the war with England, which had injured Russia’s trade immeasurably. Yet Napoleon hoped Alexander would comply. He intended to march to the Niemen only in order to extort Alexander’s compliance.
