stairway into my room, opened and a young man with a bowed head and searching eyes entered. He walked, as far as this was possible in the narrow room, in a curve
around the sofa and stopped in the darkness of the corner near the window. I wanted to see what kind of apparition this was, went over, and grasped the man by the
arm. He was a living person. He looked up—a little shorter than I—at me with a smile, the very carelessness with which he nodded and said “Just try me” should have
convinced me. Despite that, I seized him in from by the waistcoat and at the back by the jacket and shook him. His beautiful, strong, gold watch-chain attracted my
attention, I grabbed it and pulled down on it so that the buttonhole to which it was fastened tore. He put up with this, simply looked down at the damage, tried in vain to
keep the waistcoat button in the torn buttonhole. “What are you doing?” he said finally, and showed me the waistcoat. “Just be quiet!” I said threateningly.
I began to run round the room, from a walk I passed into a trot, from a trot into a gallop, every time I passed the man I raised my fist to him. He did not even look at me
but worked on his vest. I felt very free, even my breathing was extraordinary, my breast felt that only my clothes prevented it from heaving gigantically.
For many months Wilhelm Menz, a bookkeeper, had been intending to accost a girl whom he used regularly to meet on the way to the office in the morning on a very
long street, sometimes at one point, sometimes at another. He had already become reconciled to the fact that this would remain an intention—he was not very bold in
the presence of women and, besides, the morning was not a propitious time to speak to a girl who was in a hurry—when it happened that one evening, about Christmas
time, he saw the girl walking right in front of him. “Miss,” he said. She turned, recognized the man whom she always encountered in the morning, without stopping let
her eye rest on him for a moment, and since Menz said nothing further, turned away again. They were in a brightly lit street in the midst of a great crowd of people and
Menz was able, without attracting attention, to step up quite close to her. In this moment of decision Menz could think of nothing to say, but he was resolved to remain a
stranger to the girl no longer, for he definitely intended to carry farther something begun so seriously, and so he made bold enough to tug at the bottom of the girl’s
jacket. The girl suffered it as though nothing had happened.
6 November. Whence the sudden confidence? If it would only remain! If I could go in and out of every door in this way, a passably erect person. Only I don’t know
whether I want that.
We didn’t want to tell our parents anything about it, but every evening after nine o’clock we met, I and two cousins, near the cemetery fence at a place where a little rise
in the ground provided a good view.
The iron fence of the cemetery leaves a large, grass-grown place free on the left.
17 November. Dream: On a rising way, beginning at the left when seen from below, there lay, about at the middle of the slope and mostly in the road, a pile of rubbish
or solidly packed clay that had crumbled lower and lower on the right while on the left it stood up as tall as the palings of a fence. I walked on the right where the way
was almost clear and saw a man on a tricycle coming towards me from below and apparently riding straight at the obstacle. He was a man who seemed to have no
eyes, at least his eyes looked like holes that had been effaced. The tricycle was rickety and went along in an uncertain and shaky fashion, but nevertheless without a
sound, with almost exaggerated quietness and ease. I seized the man at the last moment, held him as though he were the handle-bars of his vehicle, and guided the latter