"Franz_Kafka_-_Conversation_With_The_Supplicant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kafka Franz)

"No," I cried, against the noise of a passing train, "I won't let you go. This is the kind of encounter I like. You're a lucky catch for me. I congratulate
myself."

The he said, "Oh God, your heart is alive but your head is a block of wood. You call me a lucky catch, what good luck you must be sure of! For my
bad luck is like a seesaw teetering on a very fine point, and it will fall on anyone's head who lays a questioning finger upon it. Good night, sir."

"Right," said I, and held his right hand fast, "if you don't give me an answer I'll begin to yell here in the street. And all the shop girls that are coming out
now and all their sweethearts waiting for them so happily will come running up, for they'll think a carriage horse has fallen down or some accident has
happened. And then I'll point you out to the people.

At that he tearfully kissed my hands, one after the other. "I'll tell you what you want to know, but please let us rather go into the side street over there.
I nodded, and we crossed to it.

But it was not enough for him to be in the dusk of the little street where only a few yellow lamps hung at wide intervals, he drew me into the low
hallway of an old house underneath a tiny lamp that hung dripping before a wooden stair. There he took out his handkerchief gravely and spread it on a
step saying, "Do sit down my dear sir, and you will be better able to ask questions, while I stand here, for so I'll be better able to answer them. Only
don't torment me."

So I sat down and said, looking up at him with narrowed eyes, "You're an utter lunatic, that's what you are! Look at the way you carry on in the church!
How irritating it is and how unpleasant for onlookers! How can anyone compose himself to worship if he has to look at you?"

He kept his body pressed against the wall, only his head could move freely to and fro. "Don't be angry- why should you be angry about things that
don't concern you? I get angry when I behave badly; but if someone else does the wrong thing I am delighted. So don't be angry if I tell you that it is
the aim of my life to get people to look at me."

"What a thing to say," I cried, much too loudly for the low-roofed hallway, but I was afraid to let my voice die away again, "truly, what a thing to say. Of
course I can guess, of course I guessed the first time I saw you, what kind of state you are in. I've had some experience, and I don't mean it as a joke
when I tell you it's like being seasick on dry land. It's a condition in which you can't remember the real names of things and so in a great hurry you fling
temporary names at them. You do it as fast as you can. But you've hardly turned your back on them before you've forgotten what you called them. A
poplar in the fields which you called 'the tower of Babel,' since you either didn't or wouldn't know what it was a poplar, stands wavering anonymously
again, and so you have to call it 'Noah is his cups.'"

I was somewhat disconcerted when he said, "I'm thankful to say that I don't understand what you've been talking about."

With annoyance I answered quickly. "Your saying that you're thankful shows that you do know what I was talking about."

"Of course it shows that, my dear sir, but what you said was rather peculiar, too."

I laid my hands on a step above me, leaned right back and in this almost untacklable position, which is the last resource of a wrestler, asked him,
"Haven't you a comic way of wriggling out of things, projecting your own state of mind like that on other people?"

That made him pluck up courage. He clasps his hands together to give his body unity, and put up some resistance, saying, "No, I don't to that with
anyone, not even with you, for instance, because I can't. But I should be glad if I could, for then I wouldn't need to make people look at me in church.
Do you know why I need to?"

This question rather dished me. Of course I didn't know, and I believed I didn't want to know. I never wanted to come here, I said to myself, but the
creature forced me to give such a hearing. So all I had to do was to shake my head, to convey that I didn't know, yet I found myself unable to move my
head at all.

The young man standing opposite me smiled. The he dropped on his knees and with a dreamy look on his face told me, "There has never been a time