Free The Diaries of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka Page B

wanted to go to was dangerous; he said he wouldn’t go there, then; I asked him whether he was afraid to, and he answered (moreover, his arm was passed through mine): ‘Naturally, I am young and have a lot in front of me yet.’
    All evening he spoke often and – in my opinion – entirely seriously about my constipation and his. Towards midnight, however, when I let my hand hang over the edge of the table, he saw part of my arm and cried: ‘But you are really sick.’ Treated me from then on even more indulgently and later also kept off the others who wanted to talk me into going to the brothel with them. When we had already said goodbye he called to me again from the distance: ‘Regulin!’
    Tucholsky and Szafranski. The aspirated Berlin dialect in which the voice makes use of intervals consisting of ‘
nich
’. The former, an entirely consistent person of twenty-one. From the controlled and powerful swing of his walking-stick that gives a youthful lift to his shoulders to the deliberate delight in and contempt for his own literary works. Wants to be a defence lawyer, sees only a few obstacles and at the same time how they may be overcome: his clear voice that after the manly sound of the first half-hour of talk pretends to become revealingly girlish – doubt of his own capacity to pose, which, however, he hopes to get with more experience of the world – fear, finally, of changing into a melancholic, as he has seen happen in older Berlin Jews of his type, in any event for the time being he sees no sign of this. He will marry soon.
    Szafranski, a disciple of Bernhardt’s, grimaces while he observes and draws in a way that resembles what is drawn. Reminds me that I too have a pronounced talent for metamorphosing myself, which no one notices. How often I must have imitated Max. Yesterday evening, on the way home, if I had observed myself from the outside I should have taken myself for Tucholsky. The alien being must be in me, then, as distinctly and invisibly as the hidden object in a picture-puzzle, where, too, one would never find anything if one did not know that it is there. When these metamorphoses take place, I should especially like to believe in a dimming of my own eyes.
    1 October. The Altneu Synagogue yesterday. Kol Nidre. 16 Suppressed murmur of the stock market. In the entry, boxes with the inscription: ‘Merciful gifts secretly left assuage the wrath of the bereft.’ Churchly inside. Three pious, apparently Eastern Jews. In socks. Bowed over their prayer books, their prayer shawls drawn over their heads, become as small as they possibly can. Two are crying, moved only by the holy day. One of them may only have sore eyes, perhaps, to which he fleetingly applies his still-folded handkerchief, at once to lower his face to the text again. The words are not really, or chiefly, sung, but behind them arabesque-like melodies are heard that spin out the words as fine as hairs. The little boy without the slightest conception of it all and without any possibility of understanding, who, with the clamour in his ears, pushes himself among the thronging people and is pushed. The clerk (apparently) who shakes himself rapidly while he prays, which is to be understood only as an attempt at putting the strongest possible – even if possibly incomprehensible – emphasis on each word, by means of which the voice, which in any case could not attain a large, clear emphasis in the clamour, is spared. The family of a brothel owner. I was stirred immeasurably more deeply by Judaism in the Pinkas Synagogue.
    The day before the day before yesterday. The one, a Jewish girl with a narrow face – better, that tapers down to a narrow chin, but is loosened by a broad, wavy hair-do. The three small doors that lead from the inside of the building into the salon. The guests as though in a police station on the stage, drinks on the table are scarcely touched.
    Several girls here dressed like the marionettes for children’s theatres