Information about the book
Dog and Me
An ant can look up at you, too, and even threaten you with
its arms. Of course, my dog does not know I am human,
he sees me as dog, though I do not leap up at a fence. I am
a strong dog. But I do not leave my mouth hanging open
when I walk along. Even on a hot day, I do not leave my
tongue hanging out. But I bark at him: “No! No!”
Enlightened
I don’t know if I can remain friends with her. I’ve thought
and thought about it—she’ll never know how much. I gave
it one last try. I called her, after a year. But I didn’t like the
way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not
very enlightened. Or I should say, she is not enlightened
enough for me. She is nearly fifty years old and no more
enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I first knew her
twenty years ago, when we talked mainly about men. I did
not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because
I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more
enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she
is, although I know it’s not very enlightened to say that.
But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being
more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like
that about a friend.
The Good Taste Contest
The husband and wife were competing in a Good Taste
Contest judged by a jury of their peers, men and women of
good taste, including a fabric designer, a rare- book dealer,
a pastry cook, and a librarian. The wife was judged to have
better taste in furniture, especially antique furniture. The
husband was judged to have overall poor taste in lighting
fixtures, tableware, and glassware. The wife was judged to
have indifferent taste in window treatments, but the husband and wife both were judged to have good taste in floor
coverings, bed linen, bath linen, large appliances, and small
appliances. The husband was felt to have good taste in carpets, but only fair taste in upholstery fabrics. The husband
was felt to have very good taste in both food and alcoholic
beverages, while the wife had inconsistently good to poor
taste in food. The husband had better taste in clothes than
the wife though inconsistent taste in perfumes and colognes. While both husband and wife were judged to have
no more than fair taste in garden design, they were judged
to have good taste in number and variety of evergreens.
The husband was felt to have excellent taste in roses but
poor taste in bulbs. The wife was felt to have better taste in
bulbs and generally good taste in shade plantings with the
exception of hostas. The husband’s taste was felt to be
good in garden furniture but only fair in ornamental
planters. The wife’s taste was judged consistently poor in
garden statuary. After a brief discussion, the judges gave
the decision to the husband for his higher overall points
score.
Collaboration with Fly
I put that word on the page,
but he added the apostrophe.
Kafka Cooks Dinner
I am filled with despair as the day approaches when my
dear Milena will come. I have hardly begun to decide what
to offer her. I have hardly confronted the thought yet, only
flown around it the way a fly circles a lamp, burning my
head over it.
I am so afraid I will be left with no other idea but
potato salad, and it’s no surprise to her anymore. I mustn’t.
The thought of this dinner has been with me constantly
all week, weighing on me in the same way that in the deep
sea there is no place that is not under the greatest pressure.
Now and then I summon all my energy and work at the
menu as if I were being forced to hammer a nail into a
stone, as if I were both the one hammering and also the
nail. But at other times, I sit here reading in the afternoon,
a myrtle in my buttonhole, and there are such beautiful
passages in the book that I think I have become beautiful
myself.
I might as well be sitting in the garden of the insane
asylum staring into space like an idiot. And yet I know I
will eventually settle on a menu, buy the food, and prepare
the meal. In this, I suppose I am like a butterfly: its zigzagging flight is so irregular, it flutters so much it is painful to
watch, it flies in what is the very opposite of a straight line,
and yet it successfully covers miles and miles to reach its
final destination, so it must be more efficient or at least
more determined than it seems.
To torture myself is pathetic, too, of course. After all,
Alexander didn’t torture the Gordian knot when it
wouldn’t come untied. I feel I am being buried alive under
all these thoughts, though at the same time I feel compelled to lie still, since perhaps I am actually dead after all.
This morning, for instance, shortly before waking up,
which was also shortly after falling asleep, I had a dream
that has not left me yet: I had caught a mole and carried it
into the hops field, where it dove into the earth as though
into water and disappeared. When I contemplate this dinner, I would like to disappear into the earth like that mole.
I would like to stuff myself into the drawer of the laundry
chest, and open the drawer from time to time to see if I
have suffocated yet. It’s so much more surprising that one
gets up every morning at all.
I know beet salad would be better. I could give her beets
and potatoes both, and a slice of beef, if I include meat. Yet
a good slice of beef does not require any side dish, it is best
tasted alone, so the side dish could come before, in which
case it would not be a side dish but an appetizer. Whatever
I do, perhaps she will not think very highly of my effort, or
perhaps she will be feeling a little ill to begin with and not
stimulated by the sight of those beets. In the case of the
first, I would be dreadfully ashamed, and in the case of the
second, I would have no advice—how could I?—but just a
simple question: would she want me to remove all the food
from the table?
Not that this dinner alarms me, exactly. I do after all
have some imagination and energy, so perhaps I will be
able to make a dinner that she will like. There have been
other, passable dinners since the meal I cooked for Felice
that was so unfortunate—though perhaps more good than
bad came of that one.
It was last week that I invited Milena. She was with a
friend. We met by accident on the street and I spoke impulsively. The man with her had a kind, friendly, fat face—a
very correct face, as only Germans have. After making the
invitation, for a long time I walked through the city as
though it were a cemetery, I was so at peace.
Then I began to torment myself, like a flower in a
flower box that is thrashed by the wind but loses not a single petal.
Like a letter covered with corrective pencil marks, I
have my defects. After all, I am not strong to begin with,
and I believe even Hercules fainted once. I attempt all day,
at work, not to think about what lies ahead, but this costs
me so much effort that there is nothing left for my work.
I handle telephone calls so badly that after a while the
switchboard operator refuses to connect me. So I had better say to myself, Go ahead and polish the silverware beautifully, then lay it out ready on the sideboard and be done
with it. Because I polish it in my mind all day long—this is
what torments me (and doesn’t clean the silver).
I love German potato salad made with good, old potatoes and vinegar, even though it is so heavy, so coercive,
almost, that I feel a little nauseated even before I taste it—
I might be embracing an oppressive and alien culture. If I
offer this to Milena I may be exposing a gross part of
myself to her that I should spare her above all, a part of
myself that she has not yet encountered. A French dish,
however, even if more agreeable, would be less true to
myself, and perhaps this would be an unpardonable
betrayal.
I am full of good intentions and yet inactive, just as I
was that day last summer when I sat on my balcony watching a beetle on its back waving its legs in the air, unable to
right itself. I felt great sympathy for it, yet I would not
leave my chair to help it. It stopped moving and was still
for so long I thought it had died. Then a lizard walked over
it, slid off it, and tipped it upright, and it ran up the wall as
though nothing had happened.
I bought the tablecloth on the street yesterday from a
man with a cart. The man was small, almost tiny, weak, and
bearded, with one eye. I borrowed the candlesticks from a
neighbor, or I should say, she lent them to me.
I will offer her espresso after dinner. As I plan this meal I
feel a little the way Napoleon would have felt while designing the Russian campaign, if he had known exactly what
the outcome would be.
I long to be with Milena, not just now but all the time.
Why am I a human being? I ask myself—what an extremely
vague condition! Why can’t I be the happy wardrobe in her
room?
Before I knew my dear Milena, I thought life itself was
unbearable. Then she came into my life and showed me
that that was not so. True, our first meeting was not auspicious, for her mother answered the door, and what a strong
forehead the woman had, with an inscription on it that
read: “I am dead, and I despise anyone who is not.” Milena
seemed pleased that I had come, but much more pleased
when I left. That day, I happened to look at a map of the
city. For a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that
anyone would build a whole city when all that was needed
was a room for her.
Perhaps, in the end, the simplest thing would be to make
for her exactly what I made for Felice, but with more care,
so that nothing goes wrong, and without the snails or the
mushrooms. I could even include the sauerbraten, though
when I cooked it for Felice, I was still eating meat. At that
time I was not bothered by the thought that an animal, too,
has a right to a good life and perhaps even more important
a good death. Now I can’t even eat snails. My father’s father
was a butcher and I vowed that the same quantity of meat
he butchered in his lifetime was the quantity I would not
eat in my own lifetime. For a long time now I have not
tasted meat, though I eat milk and butter, but for Milena, I
would make sauerbraten again.
My own appetite is never large. I am thinner than I
should be, but I have been thin for a long time. Some years
ago, for instance, I often went rowing on the Moldau in a
small boat. I would row upriver and then lie on my back in
the bottom of the boat and drift back down with the current. A friend once happened to be crossing a bridge
and saw me floating along under it. He said it was as if
Judgment Day had arrived and my coffin had been opened.
But then he himself had grown almost fat by then, massive, and knew little about thin people except that they
were thin. At least this weight on my feet is really my own
property.
She may not even want to come anymore, not because she
is fickle, but because she is exhausted, which is understandable. If she does not come it would be wrong to say I will
miss her, because she is always so present in my imagination. Yet she will be at a different address and I will be sitting at the kitchen table with my face in my hands.
If she comes, I will smile and smile, I have inherited this
from an old aunt of mine who also used to smile incessantly, but both of us out of embarrassment rather than
good humor or compassion. I won’t be able to speak, I
won’t even be happy, because after the preparation of the
meal I won’t have the strength. And if, with my sorry
excuse for a first course resting in a bowl in my hands, I
hesitate to leave the kitchen and enter the dining room,
and if she, at the same time, feeling my embarrassment,
hesitates to leave the living room and enter the dining
room from the other side, then for that long interval the
beautiful room will be empty.
Ah, well—one man fights at Marathon, the other in the
kitchen.
Still, I have decided on nearly all the menu now and I
have begun to prepare it by imagining our dinner, every
detail of it, from beginning to end. I repeat this sentence to
myself senselessly, my teeth chattering: “Then we’ll run into
the forest.” Senselessly, because there is no forest here, and
there would be no question of running in any case.
I have faith that she will come, though along with my
faith is the same fear that always accompanies my faith, the
fear that has been inherent in all faith, anyway, since the
beginning of time.
Felice and I were not engaged at the time of that unfortunate dinner, though we had been engaged three years
before and were to be engaged again one week later—
surely not as a result of the dinner, unless Felice’s compassion for me was further aroused by the futility of my efforts
to make a good kasha varnishke, potato pancakes, and sauerbraten. Our eventual breakup, on the other hand, probably has more explanations than it really needs—this is
ridiculous, but certain experts maintain that even the air
here in this city may encourage inconstancy.
I was excited as one always is by something new. I was
naturally somewhat frightened as well. I thought a traditional German or Czech meal might be best, even if rather
heavy for July. I remained for some time undecided even in
my dreams. At one point I simply gave up and contemplated leaving the city. Then I decided to stay, although
simply lying around on the balcony may not really deserve
to be called a decision. At these times I appear to be paralyzed with indecision while my thoughts are beating furiously within my head, just as a dragonfly appears to hang
motionless in midair while its wings are beating furiously
against the steady breeze. At last I jumped up like a
stranger pulling another stranger out of bed.
The fact that I planned the meal carefully was probably
insignificant. I wanted to prepare something wholesome,
since she needed to build up her strength. I remember
gathering the mushrooms in the early morning, creeping
among the trees in plain sight of two elderly sisters—who
appeared to disapprove deeply of me or my basket. Or perhaps of the fact that I was wearing a good suit in the forest.
But their approval would have been more or less the same
thing.
As the hour approached, I was afraid, for a little while,
that she would not come, instead of being afraid, as I
should have been, that she would in fact come. At first she
had said she might not come. It was strange of her to do
that. I was like an errand boy who could no longer run
errands but still hoped for some kind of employment.
Just as a very small animal in the woods makes a disproportionate amount of noise and disturbance among the
leaves and twigs on the ground when it is frightened and
rushes to its hole, or even when it is not frightened but
merely hunting for nuts, so that one thinks a bear is about
to burst into the clearing, whereas it is only a mouse—this
is what my emotion was like, so small and yet so noisy. I
asked her please not to come to dinner, but then I asked
her please not to listen to me but to come anyway. Our
words are so often those of some unknown, alien being. I
don’t believe any speeches anymore. Even the most beautiful speech contains a worm.
Once, when we ate together in a restaurant, I was as
ashamed of the dinner as though I had made it myself. The
very first thing they brought to the table ruined our
appetite for the rest, even if it had been any good: fat white
Leberknödeln floating in a thin broth whose surface was
dotted with oil. The dish was clearly German, rather than
Czech. But why should anything be more complicated
between us than if we were to sit quietly in a park and
watch a hummingbird fly up from the petunias to rest at
the top of a birch tree?
The night of our dinner, I told myself that if she did not
come, I would enjoy the empty apartment, for if being
alone in a room is necessary for life itself, being alone in an
apartment is necessary if one is to be happy. I had borrowed the apartment for the occasion. But I had not been
enjoying the happiness of the empty apartment. Or perhaps
it wasn’t the empty apartment that should have made me
happy, but having two apartments. She did come, but she
was late. She told me she had been delayed because she had
had to wait to speak to a man who had himself been waiting, impatiently, for the outcome of a discussion concerning the opening of a new cabaret. I did not believe her.
When she walked in the door I was almost disappointed. She would have been so much happier dining with
another man. She was going to bring me a flower, but
appeared without it. Yet I was filled with such elation just
to be with her, because of her love, and her kindness, as
bright as the buzzing of a fly on a lime twig.
Despite our discomfort we proceeded with our dinner.
As I gazed at the finished dish I lamented my waning
strength, I lamented being born, I lamented the light of
the sun. We ate something that unfortunately would not
disappear from our plates unless we swallowed it. I was
both moved and ashamed, happy and sad, that she ate with
apparent enjoyment—ashamed and sad only that I did not
have something better to offer her, moved and happy that
it appeared to be enough, at least on this one occasion. It
was only the grace with which she ate each part of the meal
and the delicacy of her compliments that gave it any
value—it was abysmally bad. She really deserved, instead,
something like a baked sole or a breast of pheasant, with
water ice and fruit from Spain. Couldn’t I have provided
this, somehow?
And when her compliments faltered, the language itself
became pliant just for her, and more beautiful than one had
any right to expect. If an uninformed stranger had heard
Felice he would have thought, What a man! He must have
moved mountains!—whereas I did almost nothing but mix
the kasha as instructed by Ottla. I hoped that after she
went away she would find a cool place like a garden in
which to lie down on a deck chair and rest. As for myself,
this pitcher was broken long before it went to the well.
There was the accident, too. I realized I was kneeling only
when I saw her feet directly in front of my eyes. Snails were
everywhere on the carpet, and the smell of garlic.
Perhaps, even so, once the meal was behind us, we did
arithmetic tricks at the table, I don’t remember, short
sums, and then long sums while I gazed out the window at
the building opposite. Perhaps we would have played music
together instead, but I am not musical.
Our conversation was halting and awkward. I kept
digressing senselessly, out of nervousness. Finally I told her
I was losing my way, but it didn’t matter because if she had
come that far with me then we were both lost. There were
so many misunderstandings, even when I did stay on the
subject. And yet she shouldn’t have been afraid that I was
angry at her, but the opposite, that I wasn’t.
She thought I had an Aunt Klara. It is true that I have
an Aunt Klara, every Jew has an Aunt Klara. But mine died
long ago. She said her own was quite peculiar, and inclined
to make pronouncements, such as that one should stamp
one’s letters properly and not throw things out the window, both of which are true, of course, but not easy. We
talked about the Germans. She hates the Germans so
much, but I told her she shouldn’t, because the Germans
are wonderful. Perhaps my mistake was to boast that I had
recently chopped wood for over an hour. I thought she
should be grateful to me—after all, I was overcoming the
temptation to say something unkind.
One more misunderstanding and she was ready to
leave. We tried different ways of saying what we meant, but
we weren’t really lovers at that moment, just grammarians.
Even animals, when they’re quarreling, lose all caution:
squirrels race back and forth across a lawn or a road and
forget that there may be predators watching. I told her that
if she were to leave, the only thing I would like about it
would be the kiss before she left. She assured me that
although we were parting in anger, it would not be long
before we saw each other again, but to my mind “sooner”
rather than “never” was still just “never.” Then she left.
With that loss I was more in the situation of Robinson
Crusoe even than Robinson Crusoe himself—he at least
still had the island, Friday, his supplies, his goats, the ship
that took him away, his name. But as for me, I imagined
some doctor with carbolic fingers taking my head between
his knees and stuffing meat into my mouth and down my
throat until I choked.
The evening was over. A goddess had walked out of the
movie theater and a small porter was left standing by the
tracks—and that was our dinner? I am so filthy—this is why
I am always screaming about purity. No one sings as purely
as those who inhabit the deepest hell—you think you’re
hearing the song of angels but it is that other song. Yet I
decided to keep on living a little while longer, at least
through the night.
After all, I am not graceful. Someone once said that I
swim like a swan, but it was not a compliment.
Tropical Storm
Like a tropical storm,
I, too, may one day become “better organized.”
