The woman dressed in white in the center of the Kinsky Palace courtyard. Distinct shadow under the high arch of her bosom in spite of the distance. Stiffly seated.
11 June.
TEMPTATION IN THE VILLAGE
One summer, towards evening, I arrived in a village where I had never been before. It struck me how broad and open were the paths. Everywhere one saw tall old
trees in front of the farmhouses. It had been raining, the air was fresh, everything pleased me. I tried to indicate this by the manner in which I greeted the people
standing in front of the gates; their replies were friendly even if somewhat aloof. I thought it would be nice to spend the night here if I could find an inn.
I was just walking past the high ivy-covered wall of a farm when a small door opened in the wall, three faces peered out, vanished, and the door closed again.
“Strange,” I said aloud, turning to one side as if I had someone with me. And, as if to embarrass me, there in fact stood a tall man next to me with neither hat nor coat,
wearing a black knitted vest and smoking a pipe. I quickly recovered myself and said, as though I had already known that he was there: “The door! Did you see the
way that little door opened?”
“Yes,” the man said, “but what’s strange in that? It was the tenant farmer’s children. They heard your footsteps and looked out to see who was walking by here so late
in the evening.”
“The explanation is a simple one, of course,” I said with a smile. “It’s easy for things to seem queer to a stranger. Thank you.” And I went on.
But the man followed me. I wasn’t really surprised by that, the man could be going the same way; yet there was no reason for us to walk one behind the other and not
side by side. I turned and said, “Is this the right way to the inn?”
The man stopped and said, “We don’t have an inn, or rather we have one but it can’t be lived in. It belongs to the community and, years ago now, after no one had
applied for the management of it, it was turned over to an old cripple whom the community already had to provide for. With his wife he now manages the inn, but in
such a way that you can hardly pass by the door, the smell coming out of it is so strong. The floor of the parlor is slippery with dirt. A wretched way of doing things, a
disgrace to the village, a disgrace to the community.”
I wanted to contradict the man; his appearance provoked me to it, this thin face with yellowish, leathery, bony cheeks and black wrinkles spreading over all of it at every
movement of his jaws. “Well,” I said, expressing no further surprise at this state of affairs, and then went on: “I’ll stop there anyway, since I have made up my mind to
spend the night here.”
“Very well,” the man quickly said, “but this is the path you must take to reach the inn,” and he pointed in the direction I had come from. “Walk to the next corner and
then turn right. You’ll see the inn sign at once. That’s it.”
I thanked him for the information and now walked past him again while he regarded me very closely. I had no way of guarding against the possibility that he had given
me wrong directions, but was determined not to be put out of countenance either by his forcing me to march past him now, or by the fact that he had with such
remarkable abruptness abandoned his attempts to warn me against the inn. Somebody else could direct me to the inn as well, and if it were dirty, why then for once I
would simply sleep in dirt, if only to satisfy my stubbornness. Moreover, I did not have much of a choice; it was already dark, the roads were muddy from the rain, and it
was a long way to the next village.
By now the man was behind me and I intended not to trouble myself with him any further when I heard a woman’s voice speak to him. I turned. Out of the darkness