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larder, and came back with bacon and schnapps. Laid the table. We ate and drank with the distiller. Each time we finished something, he would say: “Bacon,” or “Bread,” or “Schnapps,” and the two girls would run down to the larder. We stayed there for two hours. Then we got up, and the distiller said, “Well,” when we were standing by the door, and he locked up again. We were back at the inn for supper.
    “Listen,” said the painter suddenly, after our walk, “listen to the dogs barking!” We stopped. “You never see those dogs, but you hear them. I’m afraid of them. Afraid maybe isn’t the right word: they kill people. Those dogs will kill anything. Their howling! Their yelping! Their whimpering! Listen!” he said. “This is a dog’s world.”

Sixth Day
    “In the summer you have to deal with millions of mosquitoes all the time. It’s the swamps. Before long, they drive you crazy, and you hide out in the middle of the forest, but evenin sleep they pursue you, the mosquitoes, the swarms of them. You start to run, but of course that’s no use either. Every time, my body is covered with stings. You have to imagine my sister’s torments, because of her sweet-smelling blood they almost eat her up. After the first few stings, you’re tossing and turning in bed, making your condition worse … By morning you feel you’ve aged by several years. Your body is feverish from all the mosquito poisons coursing through it … and out of that terrible affliction you awaken and you realize: it’s mosquito season once more. Don’t imagine I’m exaggerating. As you’ve already observed, I’m not at all inclined to exaggerate. But you should take care not to travel here during the mosquito season … You won’t be back.… All during that time, people will greet you with profound irritation; it’s not possible to speak to them. I myself, as already said, wander around, looking for refuge. And then on top of that there’s the heat, everything is deserted. The skies are black with mosquitoes. Probably caused by the rivers that have hardly any water left in them,” he said, “the swamp.” He was wearing a red jacket that day, a red velvet jacket, his “artist’s jacket.” For the first time, he was going around looking like you’d imagine a painter would look: mad! He appeared outside the window and pressed his face against the glass, while I was sitting in the breakfast room. Got my attention by rapping on the window frame. A large, increasingly yellow stain. He had walked out at half past four in the morning, intending “to catch the spirits of the dead.”
    “Horrific,” he said, as he came in. The landlady had drawn the bolts for him very early, “in return for a five-schilling piece,” which she then hadn’t accepted. He said: “I could hearthe river from up there. No machinery. Nothing. No bird-song, of course. Nothing. As if everything had been locked under a sheet of ice.” He had found himself in “a roughly similar condition.” Had scattered malformations of ice and snow with his stick. Spread his arms and legs and dropped onto patches of white virgin snow. “Like a kid.” Had remained lying there for so long he thought he would freeze. “The frost is all-powerful,” he said. He sat down. Said: “Nothing is more incredible to me than the fact that I’m taking breakfast.” Early risers were in a position to admire an implacably majestic frost, if they went out betimes. “The discovery that frost owns everything is nothing terrifying, after all.” To early risers, the world revealed itself with wonderful clarity and distinctness. The “pitiless world of frost” contradicted them, and forced them to their knees. Well-rested early risers had a sense of the world as “safe from insanity.” He was now going to take off his artist’s jacket again, he said, he had only put it on “to give himself a morning torment.” “Naturally, in the world’s eyes, it was an