The Walk Read Free Page B

resemble skirts, to trample around before our very eyes. Knickerbockers! There’s something Asiatic about them, something Turkish, something, I must confess, without charm. Turks’ trousers and Turks’ turbans possess little charm for me. But still I think we may have in store for us a flowering and perfection of trousers. Trousers are still not quite trousers enough. The way they now are, they signify mere silliness. They are essentially too reticent, too embarrassed. O womenfolk, listen, you must: If you really want to impress us men, be more saucy, brazen, and complete in your trouserish, trouserly, and trouserful demands! Sweet ladies! Surely on the streets and in the city squares they will trouser around one day quite differently.
    To resume: it is a shame that skirts should now propose to disappear, and that our cultural feelings should be outraged. What’s this? one asks. Has Paris run out of midriff ideas? As regards ideas, Paris seems to have become poverty-stricken. It’s a terrible shame, the demise of that wondrous Paris of the Senses and of the Dreams. Paris is no more. For that is the whole point. The trouser fashion knows nothing of the midriff. If ever there was something about a woman that was beautiful and captivating to the senses, it was the midriff, uniquely; and precisely this most delicious feature is now absent. To trousers, unconditionally, a midriff must appertain.Something must go through me like a knife, and what’s more, it must expand upward and downward. There must be tension in it. At present, women no longer have backs. The wonderful, tumescent, as it were smoothed, back of woman has vanished. This is deplorable. Form! Women no longer have a healthy will to form; they no longer desire to display anything, and the desistence of this desire is the plainest proof that they are in rebellion, that they despise us lords and masters. Anybody whom I try and strive to please is felt by me to be my master. It is too obvious. Of such and similar matters consists the secret of the trouser-skirt: rebellion, dissent, compromise, and insistence on a position to be held. Oh, deplorable, a pitiful situation. Men, men, what a disgraceful defeat you have suffered.
    Yet – just a whisper in your ear: into that defeat the woman is also dragged, the trouseress, and this great umbrageous defeat of both sexes means – a lessening of mutual attraction! The women want to make themselves miserable by compelling men to see them as comrades, as trouser-buddies. That’s how it is, and it is very sad, the heart informs us. What’s more, trouser-dom impinges closely upon the problem of the political activation of women. In trousers the poor dears can stride much more comfortably to the voting booth. They are deceived, ah, the poor dears, if only they knew how heartrendingly boring it is to have the vote. They want to assassinate themselves. So be it. For a chivalrous man there’s nothing left to do but bury his head desperately in his hands and wish that the blow might fall upon him. This is the quintessence and the consequence of trousers. Frightful!
    1911

Two Strange Stories
The Man with the Pumpkin Head
    Once there was a man and on his shoulders he had, instead of a head, a hollow pumpkin. This was no great help to him. Yet he still wanted to be Number One. That’s the sort of person he was. For a tongue he had an oak leaf hanging from his mouth, and his teeth were cut out with a knife. Instead of eyes, he had just two round holes. Back of the holes, two candle stumps flickered. Those were his eyes. They didn’t help him see far. And yet he said his eyes were better than anyone’s, the braggart. On his pumpkin head he wore a tall hat; used to take it off when anyone spoke to him, he was so polite. Once this man went for a walk. But the wind blew so hard that his eyes went out. He wanted to light them up again, but he had no matches. He started to cry with his candle