saying goodbye, as she was kissing me with moist lips in the doorway of the building, she begged me not to be angry with her, that it was only those clouds which had so depressed her, and she promised she’d write me a letter.
I’ve always wanted to get a letter from which I could see that I was being loved, and indeed she sent me one written on a rainy evening, or maybe late at night when the wind had dispersed the clouds.
My darling, my dearest, at this moment I’d leave everything, I wouldn’t take anything with me, and if you said: Come! I’d go wherever you commanded. I realise that one pays for this, but this is right because one should pay for it. But even if I were to die, even if I were to go out of my mind, which to me seems worse still, I’d go . . .
I was alarmed by these promises and resolutions, but at the same time I was flooded with a happiness, like the warmth of sunbathing.
She also wrote to me that she loved me to the point of feeling anguish and pain, that she experienced a terrible pain because I was not with her at this moment, just now when everything that was good in her was crying out to me.
That’s how she called me to her, and I knew that I had always longed for just such a woman. It gave me so much happiness that the reality of her pain and despair did not impinge on me. Or else I was too old to share her hopes without fear. Was I afraid we would end up like all those whose longing dies away and who can then scarcely bear to lie down by the side of each other night after night? Or was I not so much afraid as simply unable to brush my wife out of my life, my wife of whom I was still fond and who, after all, was supposed to belong to me to the end of my or her days?
If there were a devil, she chose a suitable quotation for me, it wouldn’t be he who decided against God, but he who didn’t find eternity long enough to come to a decision.
How can a person win love if he can’t come to a decision?
My wife suspects nothing, she trusts me. But she has tormented dreams. She is walking with her class across a snow-covered mountain plain, suddenly all of them increase their pace and she can’t keep up with them. She remains alone in the wind and frost, looking in vain for the way. Fog descends. She realises she won’t ever find her way out again. At other times she climbs a rock with her friends, and when she is at the steepest point they all disappear. Rigid with vertigo she presses herself to the rockface. She can’t move up or down, she calls for help, but no one responds.
She tells me her dreams and searches for an interpretation. She goes all the way back to her childhood, when she used to be on her own, unable to be close to anybody.
I know that she is wrong in the interpretation of her dreams, but I keep silent, I leave her at the mercy of her anguished visions.
But how can a man still believe in love if he has no compassion?
The foreman finished his second beer and unbuttoned himself. I realised that he was not so much worried by the change in atmospheric pressure as by the fact that he might lose his bonus. He ordered a third beer and announced that he’d made up his mind: he’d finally teach that Franta a lesson!
Franta is that young idiot with the tic in his face, the one I don’t understand a word of when he speaks. To my amazement he is also a foreman, he even drives a car and it looks as if he is checking on our work, not by official authority but so he can grass on us. Everyone hates him. Whether because he’s a cripple or because he’s a grass I can’t judge.
Mrs Venus told me that he’d recently had an operation. They’d taken his manhood from him. Franta did indeed have big breasts and his incomprehensible talk was in a falsetto. Last week, the foreman was now telling us angrily, that cripple had grassed on him, that he’d gone to have a beer when he’d claimed he was seeing the doctor. ‘I saw that shit at the final stop of the number 19 yesterday,
I’ve always wanted to get a letter from which I could see that I was being loved, and indeed she sent me one written on a rainy evening, or maybe late at night when the wind had dispersed the clouds.
My darling, my dearest, at this moment I’d leave everything, I wouldn’t take anything with me, and if you said: Come! I’d go wherever you commanded. I realise that one pays for this, but this is right because one should pay for it. But even if I were to die, even if I were to go out of my mind, which to me seems worse still, I’d go . . .
I was alarmed by these promises and resolutions, but at the same time I was flooded with a happiness, like the warmth of sunbathing.
She also wrote to me that she loved me to the point of feeling anguish and pain, that she experienced a terrible pain because I was not with her at this moment, just now when everything that was good in her was crying out to me.
That’s how she called me to her, and I knew that I had always longed for just such a woman. It gave me so much happiness that the reality of her pain and despair did not impinge on me. Or else I was too old to share her hopes without fear. Was I afraid we would end up like all those whose longing dies away and who can then scarcely bear to lie down by the side of each other night after night? Or was I not so much afraid as simply unable to brush my wife out of my life, my wife of whom I was still fond and who, after all, was supposed to belong to me to the end of my or her days?
If there were a devil, she chose a suitable quotation for me, it wouldn’t be he who decided against God, but he who didn’t find eternity long enough to come to a decision.
How can a person win love if he can’t come to a decision?
My wife suspects nothing, she trusts me. But she has tormented dreams. She is walking with her class across a snow-covered mountain plain, suddenly all of them increase their pace and she can’t keep up with them. She remains alone in the wind and frost, looking in vain for the way. Fog descends. She realises she won’t ever find her way out again. At other times she climbs a rock with her friends, and when she is at the steepest point they all disappear. Rigid with vertigo she presses herself to the rockface. She can’t move up or down, she calls for help, but no one responds.
She tells me her dreams and searches for an interpretation. She goes all the way back to her childhood, when she used to be on her own, unable to be close to anybody.
I know that she is wrong in the interpretation of her dreams, but I keep silent, I leave her at the mercy of her anguished visions.
But how can a man still believe in love if he has no compassion?
The foreman finished his second beer and unbuttoned himself. I realised that he was not so much worried by the change in atmospheric pressure as by the fact that he might lose his bonus. He ordered a third beer and announced that he’d made up his mind: he’d finally teach that Franta a lesson!
Franta is that young idiot with the tic in his face, the one I don’t understand a word of when he speaks. To my amazement he is also a foreman, he even drives a car and it looks as if he is checking on our work, not by official authority but so he can grass on us. Everyone hates him. Whether because he’s a cripple or because he’s a grass I can’t judge.
Mrs Venus told me that he’d recently had an operation. They’d taken his manhood from him. Franta did indeed have big breasts and his incomprehensible talk was in a falsetto. Last week, the foreman was now telling us angrily, that cripple had grassed on him, that he’d gone to have a beer when he’d claimed he was seeing the doctor. ‘I saw that shit at the final stop of the number 19 yesterday,
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