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

facing the door.
    ‘At last,’ said the latter, when Oscar had barely set foot in the room. ‘Please stay by the door, I am so furious with you that I don’t know what I might do.’
    ‘But father,’ said Oscar, and became aware only when he spoke how he had been running.
    ‘Silence,’ shouted the father and stood up, blocking a window. ‘Silence, I say. And keep your “buts” to yourself, do you understand?’ At the same time he took the table in both hands and carried it a step nearer to Oscar. ‘I simply won’t put up with your good-for-nothing existence any longer. I’m an old man. I hoped you would be the comfort of my old age, instead you are worse than all my illnesses. Shame on such a son, who through laziness, extravagance, wickedness, and – why shouldn’t I say so to your face – stupidity, drives his old father to his grave!’ Here the father fell silent, but moved his face as though he were still speaking.
    ‘Dear Father,’ said Oscar, and cautiously approached the table, ‘calm yourself, everything will be all right. Today I have had an idea that will make an industrious person out of me, beyond all your expectations.’
    ‘How is that?’ the father asked, and gazed towards a corner of the room.
    ‘Just trust me, I’ll explain everything to you at supper. Inwardly I was always a good son, but the fact that I could not show it outwardly embittered me so, that I preferred to vex you if I couldn’t make you happy. But now let me go for another short walk so that my thoughts may unfold more clearly.’
    The father, who, becoming attentive at first, had sat down on the edge of the table, stood up. ‘I do not believe that what you just said makes much sense, I consider it only idle talk. But after all you are my son. Come back early, we will have supper at home and you can tell me all about this matter then.’
    ‘This small confidence is enough for me, I am grateful to you from my heart for it. But isn’t it evident in my very appearance that I am completely occupied with a serious matter?’
    ‘At the moment, no, I can’t see a thing,’ said the father. ‘But that could be my fault too, for I have got out of the habit of looking at you at all.’ With this, as was his custom, he called attention to the passage of time by regularly tapping on the surface of the table. ‘The chief thing, however, is that I no longer have any confidence at all in you, Oscar. If I sometimes yell at you – when you came in I really did yell at you, didn’t I? – then I do it not in the hope that it will improve you, I do it only for the sake of your poor, good mother who perhapsdoesn’t yet feel any immediate sorrow on your account, but is already slowly going to pieces under the strain of keep off such sorrow, for she thinks she can help you in some way by this. But after all, these are really things which you know very well, and out of consideration for myself alone I should not have mentioned them again if you had not provoked me into it by your promises.’
    During these last words the maid entered to look after the fire in the stove. She had barely left the room when Oscar cried out, ‘But Father! I would never have expected that. If in the past I had had only one little idea, an idea for my dissertation, let’s say, which has been lying in my trunk now for ten years and needs ideas like salt, then it is possible, even if not probable, that, as happened today, I would have come running from my walk and said: “Father, by good fortune I have such-and-such an idea.” If with your venerable voice you had then thrown into my face the reproaches you did, my idea would simply have been blown away and I should have had to march off at once with some sort of apology or without one. Now just the contrary! Everything you say against me helps my ideas, they do not stop, becoming stronger, they fill my head. I’ll go, because only when I am alone can I bring them into order.’ He gulped his breath in