Eduardova

This is one of the entries from the Diary of Kafka, about a dancer, Eduardova.

The dancer Eduardova is not so pretty outdoors as on the stage. Her pallid color, those cheekbones stretching her skin so taut that there is scarcely any movement in her face, her large nose—rising as if from a deep hollow—which can’t be made into a joke, like examining the hardness of its tip or grabbing it lightly by the bridge and pulling her this way and that, saying, “Well, come along now!”, her broad figure with its high waist in far too pleated skirts—who could like that?—she almost looks like one of my aunts, an elderly lady; many people’s older aunts look like that. In fact there is no compensation at all for these disadvantages in the dancer Eduardova outdoors; aside from her quite good feet, there is really nothing that might command rapture, or amazement, or even respect. And so I have very often seen Eduardova treated with an indifference that even gentlemen who were otherwise very elegant and well-mannered could not hide, although they naturally made great efforts to do so for the sake of such a well-known dancer, which, after all, Eduardova was.