2 May. It has become very necessary to keep a diary again. The uncertainty of my thoughts, F., the ruin in the office, the physical impossibility of writing and the inner
need for it.
Valli walks out through our door behind my brother-in-law who tomorrow will leave for Czortkov for maneuvers. Remarkable, how much is implied in this
following-after of a recognition of marriage as an institution which one has become thoroughly used to.
The story of the gardener’s daughter who interrupted my work the day before yesterday. I, who want to cure my neurasthenia through my work, am obliged to hear that
the young lady’s brother, his name was Jan and he was the actual gardener and presumed successor of old Dvorsky, already even the owner of the flower garden, had
poisoned himself because of melancholia two months ago at the age of twenty-eight. During the summer he felt relatively well despite his solitary nature, since at least
he had to have contact with the customers, but during the winter he was entirely withdrawn. His sweetheart was a clerk—urednice—a girl as melancholy as he. They
often went to the cemetery together.
The gigantic Menasse at the Yiddish performance. Something magical that seized hold of me at his movements in harmony with the music. I have forgotten what.
My stupid laughter today when I told my mother that I am going to Berlin at Whitsuntide. “Why are you laughing?” said my mother (among several other remarks, one
of which was, “Look before you leap,” all of which, however, I warded off with remarks like, “It’s nothing,” etc.). “Because of embarrassment,” I said, and was happy
for once to have said something true in this matter.
Yesterday met B [his old governess]. Her calmness, contentedness, clarity, and lack of embarrassment, even though in the last two years she has become an old
woman, her plumpness—even at that time a burden to her—that will soon have reached the extreme of sterile fatness, her walk has become a sort of rolling or shuffle
with the belly thrust, or rather carried, to the fore, and on her chin—at a quick glance only on her chin—hairs now curling out of what used to be down.
3 May. The terrible uncertainty of my inner existence.
How I unbutton my vest to show Mr. B. my rash. How I beckon him into another room.
The leper and his wife. The way her behind—she is lying in bed on her belly—keeps rising up with all its ulcers again and again although a guest is present. The way
her husband keeps shouting at her to keep covered.
The husband has been struck from behind by a stake—no one knows where it came from—knocked down and pierced. Lying on the ground with his head raised and
his arms stretched out, he laments. Later he is able to stand up unsteadily for a moment. He can talk about nothing except how he was struck, and points to the
approximate direction from which in his opinion the stake came. This talk, always the same, is by now tiresome to the wife, particularly since the man is always pointing
in another direction.
4 May. Always the image of a pork butcher’s broad knife that quickly and with mechanical regularity chops into me from the side and cuts off very thin slices which fly
off almost like shavings because of the speed of the action.
Early one morning, the streets were still empty up and down their length and breadth, a man, he was in his bare feet and wore only a nightshirt and trousers, opened the
door of a large tenement on the main street. He seized the two sections of the door and took a deep breath. “Misery, oh, damned misery,” he said and looked,
apparently calmly, first along the street and then at some houses.
Despair from this direction too. Nowhere a welcome.
1. Digestion. 2. Neurasthenia. 3. Rash. 4. Inner insecurity.
24 May. Walk with Picker. In high spirits because I consider “The Stoker” so good. This evening I read it to my parents, there is no better critic than I when I read to
my father, who listens with the most extreme reluctance. Many shallow passages followed by unfathomable depths.