The Diaries of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka Read Free Book Online

oneself and towards society. 9
    20 February. Mella Mars in the Cabaret Lucerna. A witty tragedienne who, so to speak, appears on a stage turned wrong side out in the way tragediennes sometimes show themselves behind the scenes. When she makes her appearance she has a tired, indeed even flat, empty, old face, which constitutes for all famous actors a natural beginning. She speaks very sharply, her movements are sharp too, beginning with the thumb bent backwards, which instead of bone seems to be made of stiff fibre. Unusual changeability of her nose through the shifting highlights and hollows of the playing muscles around it. Despite the eternal flashing of her movements and words she makes her points delicately.
    Small cities also have small places to stroll about in.
    The young, clean, well-dressed youths near me on the promenade reminded me of my youth and therefore made an unappetizing impression on me.
    Kleist’s early letters, twenty-two years old. Gives up soldiering. They ask him at home: Well, how are you going to earn a living, for that was something they considered a matter of course. You have a choice of jurisprudence or political economy. But then do you have connexions at court? ‘I denied it at first in some embarrassment, but then declared so much the more proudly that I, even if I had connexions, should be ashamed, with my present ideas, to count on them. They smiled, I felt that I had been too hasty. One must be wary of expressing such truths.’
    21 February. My life here is just as if I were quite certain of a second life, in the same way, for example, I got over the pain of my unsuccessful visit to Paris with the thought that I would try to go there again very soon. With this, the sight of the sharply divided light and shadows on the pavement of the street. 10
    For the length of a moment I felt myself clad in steel.
    How far from me are – for example – my arm muscles.
    Marc Henry – Delvard. The tragic feeling bred in the audience by the empty hall increases the effect of the serious songs, detracts fromthat of the merry ones. Henry does the prologue, while Delvard, behind a curtain that she doesn’t know is translucent, fixes her hair. At poorly attended performances, W., the producer, seems to wear his Assyrian beard – which is otherwise deep black – streaked with grey. Good to have oneself blown upon by such a temperament, it lasts for twenty-four hours, no, not so long. Much display of costumes, Breton costumes, the undermost petticoat is the longest, so that one can count the wealth from a distance – Because they want to save an accompanist, Delvard does the accompaniment first, in a very low-cut green dress, and freezes – Parisian street cries. Newsboys are omitted – Someone speaks to me; before I draw a breath I have been dismissed – Delvard is ridiculous, she has the smile of an old maid, an old maid of the German cabaret. With a red shawl that she fetches from behind the curtain, she plays revolution. Poems by Dauthendey in the same tough, unbreakable voice. She was charming only at the start, when she sat in a feminine way at the piano. At the song ‘À Batignolles’ I felt Paris in my throat. Batignolles is supposed to live on its annuities, even its Apaches. Bruant wrote a song for every section of the city.
THE URBAN WORLD
    Oscar M., an older student – if one looked at him closely one was frightened by his eyes – stopped short in the middle of a snowstorm on an empty square one winter afternoon, in his winter clothes with his winter coat, over it a shawl around his neck and a fur cap on his head. His eyes blinked reflectively. He was so lost in thought that once he took off his cap and stroked his face with its curly fur. Finally he seemed to have come to a conclusion and turned with a dancing movement on to his homeward path.
    When he opened the door to his parental living-room he saw his father, a smooth-shaven man with a heavy, fleshy face, seated at an empty table