some sort of law at work, had known that this last effort of mine would be successful, saw all the men reeling back with raised arms, realized that in a moment they
would all throw themselves on me together, turned towards the house entrance—I was standing only a short distance from it—lifted the latch (it sprang open of itself, as
it were, with extraordinary rapidity), and escaped up the dark stairs.
On the top floor stood my old mother in the open doorway of our apartment, a candle in her hand. “Look out! look out!” I cried while still on the floor below, “they are
coming after me!”
“Who? Who?” my mother asked. “Who could be coming after you, son?” my mother asked.
“Six men,” I said breathlessly.
“Do you know them?” my mother asked.
“No, strangers,” I said.
“What do they look like?”
“I barely caught a glimpse of them. One has a black full beard, one a large ring on his finger, one has a red belt, one has his trousers torn at the knee, one has only one
eye open, and the last bares his teeth.”
“Don’t think about it any more,” my mother said. “Go to your room, go to sleep, I’ve made the bed.”
My mother! This old woman already proof against the assaults of life, with a crafty wrinkle round her mouth, mouth that unwittingly repeated eighty-year-old follies.
“Sleep now?” I cried-—
12 June. Kubin. Yellowish face, sparse hair lying flat on his skull, from time to time a heightened sparkle in his eyes.
W., half blind, detached retina; has to be careful not to fall or be pushed, for the lens might fall out and then it would be all over with. Has to hold the book close to his
eyes when he reads and try to catch the letters through the corners of his eyes. Was in India with Melchior Lechter, fell ill with dysentery; eats everything, every piece
of fruit he finds lying in the dust of the street.
P. sawed a silver chastity belt off a skeleton; pushed aside the workers who had dug it up somewhere in Romania, reassured them by saying that he saw in the belt a
valuable trifle which he wanted as a souvenir, sawed it open and pulled it off. If he finds a valuable Bible or picture or page that he wants in a village church, he tears
what he wants out of the book, off the wall, from the altar, puts a two-heller piece down as compensation, and his conscience is clear—Loves fat women. Every
woman he has had has been photographed. The bundle of photographs that he shows every visitor. Sits at one end of the sofa, his visitor, at a considerable distance
from him, at the other. P. hardly looks across and yet always knows which picture is on top and supplies the necessary explanations: This was an old widow; these
were the two Hungarian maids; etc.—Of Kubin: “Yes, Master Kubin, you are indeed on the way up; in ten or twenty years, if this keeps on, you may come to occupy a
position like that of Bayros.”
Dostoyevsky’s letter to a woman painter.
The life of society moves in a circle. Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other. Thanks to their affliction they constitute a circle and provide
each other mutual support. They glide along the inner borders of their circle, make way for or jostle one another gently in the crowd. Each encourages the other in the
hope that it will react upon himself, or—and then it is done passionately—in the immediate enjoyment of this reaction. Each has only that experience which his affliction
grants him; nevertheless one hears such comrades exchanging immensely varying experiences. “This is how you are,” one says to the other; “instead of complaining,
thank God that this is how you are, for if this were not how you are, you would have this or that misfortune, this or that shame.” How does this man know that? After
all, he belongs—his statement betrays it—to the same circle as does the one to whom he spoke; he stands in the same need of comfort. In the same circle, however,