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

made his knees buckle.
"Yes, of course I've been playing a comedy! A comedy! That's the perfect word for it! What other consolation was left for your poor old widowed father? Tell
me--and while you're answering me may you still be my loving son--what else was left to me, in my back room, plagued by a disloyal staff, old to the very marrow of my
bones? And my son strutting through the world, closing deals that I had prepared for him, turning somersaults in his glee, and striding away from his father with the
composed face of a man of honor! Do you think I didn't love you, I, from whose loins you sprang?"
Now he's going to lean forward, thought Georg; if only he would topple over and smash to pieces! These words went hissing through his brain.
His father leaned forward but did not topple. Since Georg didn't come any closer, as he had expected, he straightened himself up again.
"Stay where you are, then, I don't need you! You think you have the strength to get yourself over here and that you're only hanging back because you want to?
Don't be too sure! I am still much the stronger. All by myself I might have had to give in, but your mother has given me her strength, I have established a fine
connection with your friend, and your customers in my pocket!"
"He has pockets even in his undershirt!" said Georg to himself, and thought that with this observation he could expose him for a fool for all the world to see. He
was able to cling to that thought for no more than a moment, for in his distraction he kept on forgetting everything.
"Just try linking arms with your bride and getting in my way! I'll sweep her from your side, you don't know how!"
Georg grimaced in disbelief. His father only nodded in the direction of Georg's corner, affirming the truth of his words.
"How you amused me today, coming in here to ask if you should tell your friend about your engagement. He knows all about it already, you stupid boy, he knows
it all! I've been writing to him, since you forgot to take my writing things from me. That's why he hasn't been here for years, he knows everything a hundred times
better than you do yourself, with his left hand he crumples up your letters unopenes while with his right he holds mine and reads them through!"
In his exhilaration he waved his arm over his head. "He knows everything a thousand times better!" he cried.
"Ten thousand times!" said Georg, to make fun of his father, but in his very mouth the words turned deadly earnest.
"For years I've been waiting for you to come with this question! Do you think I've concerned myself with anything else? Do you think I've been reading my
newspapers? Look!" and he threw Georg a page from a newspaper that had somehow found its way into the bed with him. An old newspaper, with a name entirely
unknown to Georg.
"How long it's taken you to grow up! Your mother had to die--she couldn't live to see the happy day--your friend is going to pieces in Russia, even three years ago
he was yellow enough to be thrown away, and as for me, you can see what condition I'm in! You have eyes in your head for that!"
"So you've been lying in wait for me!" cried Georg.
His father said pityingly, in an offhand manner, "I suppose you wanted to say that earlier. But now it is no longer appropriate."
And in a louder voice: "So now you know there is more in the world than just you. Till now you've known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you
were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!--And therefore take note: I sentence you to death by drowning!"
Georg felt himself driven from the room, the crash with which his father collapsed onto the bed behind him still rang in his ears as he fled. On the staircase, which
he rushed down as if its steps were an inclind plane, he ran into the cleaning woman on her way up to do the morning tidying of the apartment. "Jesus!" she cried, and
covered her face with her apron, but he was already gone. Out the front door he bolted, across the roadway, driven toward the water. Already he was clutching the
railing as a starving man clutches for food. He swung himself over, like the accomplished gymnast he had been in his youth, to his parents' pride. With weakening grip
he was still holding on when he spied between the railings an approaching bus that would easily cover the sound of his fall, called out in a faint voice, "Dear parents, I
have always loved you," and let himself drop.
At that moment an almost endless line of traffic streamed over the bridge.





23 September [1912]. This story, "The Judgment," I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I
was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were
advancing over water. Several times during the night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies,
there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge. At two
I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the ante-room for the first time I wrote the last sentence. Turning out the light and the light of day.
The slight pains around my heart. The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters' room. Reading aloud. Before that,
stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, "I've been writing until now." The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The
conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a
complete opening out of the body and the soul. Morning in bed. The always clear eyes. Many emotions carried along in the writing, joy, for example, that I shall have
something beautiful for Max's Arkadia, thoughts about Freud, of course; in one passage, of Arnold Beer; in another, of Wasserman; in one, of Werfel's giantess; of