The Complete Stories (forword by John Updike)

"That I can well believe; that's no great discovery. No stranger could come any nearer to you than I am already by nature. You know that, too, so why all this pathos? If you're only wanting to stage a comedy I'll go away immediately."

"What? You have the impudence to tell me that? You make a little too bold. After all, it's my room you're in. It's my wall you're rubbing your fingers on like mad. My room, my wall! And besides, what you are saying is ridiculous as well as impudent. You say your nature forces you to speak to me like that. Is that so? Your nature forces you? That's kind of your nature. Your nature is mine, and if I feel friendly to you by nature, then you mustn't be anything else."

"Is that friendly?"

"I'm speaking of earlier on."

"Do you know how I'll be later on?"

"I don't know anything."

And I went to the bed table and lit the candle on it. At that time I had neither gas nor electric light in my room. Then I sat for a while at the table till I got tired of it, put on my greatcoat, took my hat from the sofa, and blew out the candle. As I went out I tripped over the leg of a chair.

On the stairs I met one of the tenants from my floor.

"Going out again already, you rascal?" he asked, pausing with his legs firmly straddled over two steps.

"What can I do?" I said, "I've just had a ghost in my room."

"You say that exactly as if you had just found a hair in your soup."

"You're making a joke of it. But let me tell you, a ghost is a ghost."

"How true. But what if one doesn't believe in ghosts at all?"

"Well, do you think I believe in ghosts? But how can my not believing help me?"

"Quite simply. You don't need to feel afraid if a ghost actually turns up."

"Oh, that's only a secondary fear. The real fear is a fear of what caused the apparition. And that fear doesn't go away. I have it fairly powerfully inside me now." Out of sheer nervousness I began to hunt through all my pockets.

"But since you weren't afraid of the ghost itself, you could easily have asked it how it came to be there."

"Obviously you've never spoken to a ghost. One never gets straight information from them. It's just a hither and thither. These ghosts seem to be more dubious about their existence than we are, and no wonder, considering how frail they are."

"But I've heard that one can fatten them up."

"How well informed you are. It's quite true. But is anyone likely to do it?"

"Why not? If it were a feminine ghost, for instance," said he, swinging onto the top step.

"Aha," said I, "but even then it's not worth while."

I thought of something else. My neighbor was already so far up that in order to see me he had to bend over the well of the staircase. "All the same," I called up, "if you steal my ghost from me all is over between us, forever."

"Oh, I was only joking," he said and drew his head back.

"That's all right," said I, and now I really could have gone quietly for a walk. But because I felt so forlorn I preferred to go upstairs again and so went to bed.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

Bachelor's Ill Luck

IT SEEMS so dreadful to stay a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, to lie ill gazing for weeks into an empty room from the corner where one's bed is, always having to say good night at the front door, never to run up a stairway beside one's wife, to have only side doors in one's room leading into other people's living rooms, having to carry one's supper home in one's hand, having to admire other people's children and not even being allowed to go on saying: "I have none myself," modeling oneself in appearance and behavior on one or two bachelors remembered from one's youth.

That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

Unmasking a Confidence Trickster

AT LAST, about ten o'clock at night, I came to the doorway of the fine house where I was invited to spend the evening, after the man beside me, whom I was barely acquainted with and who had once again thrust himself unasked upon me, had marched me for two long hours around the streets.

"Well!" I said, and clapped my hands to show that I really had to bid him goodbye. I had already made several less explicit attempts to get rid of him. I was tired out.

"Are you going straight in?" he asked. I heard a sound in his mouth that was like the snapping of teeth.

"Yes."