I have heard that Kafka mentioned me in the cafés of Prague. I dare say.
You cannot know, O Leser, how long it is possible to sit on the side of a bed staring at the floor.
DOKTOR ZWIEBEL looked me dead in the eye. He had the nose of Urbino. Somewhere, deep in his ancestry, back before time began to tick in seconds, when all the earth was a forest of ferns growing in Lake Tchad, there had been a rhinoceros.
— Tell me, Herr Weisel, he began.
— Walser, said I.
— Just so, said Doktor Zwiebel, looking down at the folder before him. Tell me, Herr Walser, you have never I see been married?
— Never, said I, but almost.
I sighed, the doctor sighed.
— How do you mean, almost? Remember that anything you tell me goes no further than my files. You are free, indeed I urge you, to tell me all.
— Fräulein Mermet, I said. There was a Fräulein Mermet. I fell in love with her. She regarded me kindly.
— Pfring! Pfring! sang the telephone on the desk.
— Ja? Zwiebel hier. Seasick? Promethazine hydrochloride and dextroamphetamine sulfate in a little lemon juice. Yes, that is correct. I will look in later. Goodbye. That was the duty officer. She says a patient who thinks he is Napoleon has run into rough weather off Alexandria. Do you know, Herr Weisel . . .
— Walser.
— . . . that an alarming number of attendants at sanatoria end up as patients? You may know Aufwartender Futter, with a remarkably long head and three moles in a line across his forehead? Just so! He was a patient here for some months, paranoid schizophrenic, thought that everybody in Switzerland was turning into money. He convinced his ward attendant of it, who announced to me one day that he wanted to be put in the bank so as to be drawing interest. Futter thought this was so funny that he emerged from his fantasy, and the two exchanged places, Futter having been fired from his job on the Exchange. Excellent arrangement. Now where were we? You were telling me about your wife, I believe.
— But I didn’t marry her.
— Didn’t marry who? If she was your wife . . .
— I was about to answer your question, Herr Doktor. You had asked how I was almost married. There was a Fräulein Mermet. I loved her and I believed that she loved me. We wrote many letters to each other. We spent Sunday afternoons in the park. She would fall against my arm laughing for no reason at all. Macaroons . . .
— How many brothers and sisters have you, Herr Weisel?
— Two sisters, Fanny and Lisa, four brothers, Ernst, Hermann, Oskar, and Karl, who is the noted painter and illustrator. He lives in Berlin.
— Your last position seems to have been that of Archivist for the Canton of Bern. Why, may I ask, did you leave?
— I resigned.
— You did not find the pay sufficient or the work congenial?
— We had a difference of opinion as to whether Guinea is in Africa or South America. My superior said I had insulted him. I tied his shoelaces together when he was asleep at his desk one afternoon.
Doktor Zwiebel made a note and fixed it to the folder with a paper clip. Something caught his attention that made him jump. He looked more closely and then glared at me.
— It says here that you have previously been treated for neuroses by one Dr. Gachet, to whom you were recommended by Vincent Van Gogh, and by Dr. Raspail on the advice of V. Hugo. What does this mean? Did you give this information to the attendant who filled out these forms?
— Jawohl, Herr Doktor.
— Then there are Van Goghs still alive? Of the great painter’s family?
— Oh, yes, most certainly. The nephew is very like his uncle, carrot-haired, sensitif, very Dutch.
— And the Hugo here is descended from the noted French poet?
— That is right.
— And Gachet and Raspail, they are French or Swiss psychiatrists?
— French.
— How long were you under treatment by them?
POLITICIAN, with rump. Statesman, with nose. Banker, with eye. You shuffle francs, and stack them, as a priest shifts and settles Gospel and Graal upon the altar. The clerks at their sacred books, compounding interest, the vice-presidents, first, second, and third, all who know the combination of the safe, the tellers with their sponges, rubber stamps, and bells, these are the only hierophants left whose rites are unquestioned and unquestionable, whose sanctions can be laid upon orphan and Kaiser alike, upon factory and church. Here the shepherd’s only ewe and the widow’s last pfennig are demanded, and received, with perfect comfort of conscience and thrill of rectitude surpassing the adoration of Abraham honing his knife.
In 1892, when I was fourteen, I left the Gymnasium and applied for the post of teller in a bank. In this journey my dog surprised a young kid, and seized upon it, and I, running in to take hold of it, caught it and saved it alive from the dog. A letter I sent in reply to a notice in the Züricher Zeitung included a phrase from Vergil, the noted Mantuan, and listed as references Hetty Green and J. Pierpont Morgan. I was nevertheless instructed by return post to appear for an interview. I had a great mind to bring it home if I could; for I had often been musing whether it might be possible to get a kid or two and so raise a breed of tame goats, which might supply me when my powder and shot should be all spent.
At the bank I was taken in hand by a kind of assistant priest and put in a gorgeous room to wait for my interview. I had never seen such a carpet, such high windows, or so polished an inkstand.
A door opened. A man in a Roman helmet, leaning on a bamboo cane, limped in.
