We trembled violently.

The Family

The family all come together once every month. The women with the children meet in the afternoon.

Coffee is drunk. The children are sent away. The should play. They must not hear everything.

But the women whisper. Their faces show concern. They are speaking of someone who is very sick.

At twilight they tell stories about ghosts and miraculous cures. They become frightened. They call the children. They press the children to their breasts.

Then fruit is eaten.

The men come. Conversations about hair styles, about business. And so on. The conversation moves haltingly. Suddenly stops, like a defective clock. Fear that it will stop entirely. A young girl blushes-But at one point everything is still. It feels suffocating. It feels unsafe, like in a swing, helpless, like in a slide... it feels ridiculous. One hears something like the wind sweeping across the roofs. Rain beats against the grey windows.

Still silence.

There-Is it really so bad... with him--how should it turn out... People avoid each other's eyes.

Leopold Lehmann

I am an employee of a bank. Because I have no patron, and I am not especially hard-working, I am not getting ahead. For more than 30 years I have been shifting the same kind of papers around in the same department. For this reason I am considered conscientious.

For the last six months I have had a new assistant. His name is Leopold Lehmann. He knows everything better than I. He is the nephew of the deputy director. He calls himself a trainee. He likes to hear himself talk. Most of all he likes to talk about himself. As a result, I know the story of his life.

Leopold Lehmann, as he emphasizes, was drawn in a clumsy manner from the womb with a forceps. His head is misshapen, like a noodle. His nose also. He has gone through the usual illnesses. He enjoys a complicated form of syphillis. It has eaten holes the size of fists in Lehmann's body.

Leopold Lehmann wishes to give up his duties in the bank, to study theology. I believe that he has already given notice.

Lehmann associates exclusively with theologians and with me. And with the deputy director.

He has sclerosis of the spinal cord.

Conversation about Legs

When I was sitting in the coupé, the gentleman opposite me said:

"Nobody can step on your toes."

I said: "How so?"

The gentleman said: "You have no legs."

I said: "Is it noticeable?"

The gentleman said: "Of course."

I took my legs out of my backpack. I had wrapped them in tissue paper. And taken them with me as a memento.

The gentleman said: "What is that?"

I said: "my legs."

The gentleman said: "You have a leg up and yet get nowhere."

I said: "Unfortunately."

After a pause the gentleman said: "What do you think you’re really going to do without legs?"

I said: "I haven’t racked my brain much about that yet."

The gentleman said: "Without legs even committing suicide is difficult."

I said: "Yet that’s a bad joke."

The gentleman said: "Not at all. If you want to hang yourself, first you’ve got to get up on the window sill. And who will open the gas jet for you if you want to poison yourself? You could only buy a revolver secretly through a servant. But suppose the shot misses? To drown yourself you’ve got to take an automobile and have yourself carried down to the river on a stretcher by two attendants who have to haul you to the far bank."

I said: "That’s for me to worry about."

The gentleman said: "You’re wrong, I’ve been thinking since you’ve been siting here how one might get rid of you. Do you think that a man without legs makes a sympathetic picture? Has the right to live? On the contrary, you create a terrible disturbance for the aesthetic feelings of your fellow human beings."

I said: "I am a full professor of ethics and aesthetics at the university. May I introduce myself?"

The gentleman said: "How are you going to do that? Clearly you cannot imagine how impossible you are, in your condition."

I looked sadly at my stumps.

II

Soon the lady opposite me said:

"To have no legs must be a very odd feeling."

I said: "Yes."

The lady said: "I would not like to touch a man who had no legs."

I said: "I am very clean."

The lady said: "I must overcome a great erotic disgust to speak with you, not to mention looking at you."

I said: "Really..."

The lady said: "I don’t believe that you are a criminal. You might be a wise and, in your original condition, nice person. But I could not, with the best will in the world, have relations with you, because you have no legs."

I said: "One gets used to everything."

The lady said: "That a man has no legs causes a naturally sensitive woman to feel an inexplicable, profound terror. As though you had committed a disgusting sin."

I said: "But I am innocent. I lost one leg in the excitement of assuming my professorial chair for the first time, the other I lost when, sunk in thought, I found that important aesthetic law which led to basic changes in our discipline."

The lady said: "What is the name of that law?"

I said: "The law says: everything depends on the structure of the soul and the mind. If soul and mind are noble, a body must be considered beautiful, no matter how humped and misshapen it may be."

The lady ostentatiously lifted her dress and revealed, right up to the top of her thigh, sheathed sumptuously in silk, wonderful legs, that towered, like branches, from her ripe body.

At the same time the lady finally said: "You may be right, although one might as easily argue the opposite. In any case, a person with legs is totally different from one without them."

Then, striding proudly away, she left me sitting there.

Savior of the theater

Theaters should stop competing with the cinema. By doing so, they are thereby achieving –--rejoice, friends of the theater – the opposite of what they want: they are perishing.

The best way for these theaters to maintain themselves is to make concessions to the cinema; they make neither concessions in the selection of plays, nor in scope. This can be explained. What movies – giving in to the instincts of the crowd – offer can never be produced in the same dimensions and amount by theater, bound as it is by its limits. Shaking its head, the public notices the helpless