Robert Walser - A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

On a narrow stone jetty that keenly impressed itself upon his memory and that led out a short way into the lake, Hans liked to strip down on warm and of course sometimes too on raw windy days, with a west no less than an east or mountain wind blowing, in sunny no less than rainy weather, to go swimming, which was flat-out unspeakably nice for him. One time, he wrote to a friend:

“Since I have a nice and charming and comfortable place to go swimming that doesn’t cost me one red cent, I may perhaps be justified in saying that I have the same entertainments at my disposal as a baron, or in other words that no prince has it better than I do.”

On the many glorious hours he spent swimming he thought back in the course of his later life with always the same great pleasure. The lake lay before him celestially blue, often entirely white, as ravishingly bright as a jewel, and the mountain cabin amid the towering forest soared up on the opposite shore in a wonderful, gentle motion.

One time, when Hans was swimming or had already been swimming, a boy who seemed to be spending (or to have already been spending) his time fishing walked up to him out on the jetty, giving rise thereby to a pleasant little chitchat, equivalently amusing to them both.

“So, you’ve been fishing,” Hans said to the boy. “Did you catch anything?”

“No, not today,” came the answer in a cheerful voice. “But it looks like you’ve been swimming here.”

“That’s right,” said Hans.

After a while the boy asked, “You are who and you are doing what?”

“You want to know?” came the smiling reply from Hans. He found the question from this boy, who probably lived in a nearby village, extraordinarily funny.

The day was of a wonderful, bluish gentleness. The weather seemed good, like an extremely well brought up adorable little child. Life, which is so often anything but gentle, resembled in this moment a happy, carefree smile. A soft, dreamy morning breeze wafted and stroked caressingly from the west across the trees, whose leaves began to move, producing a lisping tinkle. The lake was like a swan enraptured by its own beauty. A few silent boats lay floating on the shimmering white surface of the water. A steamship hurried across the middle of the large lake.

“To tell you who and what I am and what I am doing is actually rather difficult. From the manner and fashion in which I have been swimming and dreaming away the morning here you can tell that at present I am lazier than I am hardworking. Perhaps I look like an absolute layabout, no? And yet there have been times when I felt compelled to create, felt driven to do things, felt as though it were imperative to do the work of four or six. And it certainly seemed to me that this made me unbelievably happy. To achieve, to solve, everything that goes along and together with that is truly a joy, and I believe that such a stern, demanding period will surely return for me someday. I feel full well that I am meant to create, to move with the power and speed of lightning, and to enjoy fatiguing activity. And yet I tell myself that a person has to take things as they come. When you are faced with a happiness that is not forbidden, you must seize and enjoy it. We convince ourselves that there are sorrows as well as joys in this world and that when unavoidable difficulties are hurled upon us and harsh realities hurtle toward us, we have to endure them and patiently let them afflict us. In the meantime, it does me good down to the depths of my soul to sit here and look out at the water in the knowledge that it is divinely beautiful to be permitted to pass such hours in so doing. But while I have been telling you these things, which you probably barely understand, the time will have come to leave.”

With a smile the boy said, “I have to go home too. Farewell.” And with that, they parted.

Yes, along with many other happy harmless hours in the bosom of nature, this was a lovely hour for Hans. The summer passed like a dream. Then came fall. The green turned to brown, yellow, and red. The green summer forest was transformed into a many-colored Indian woods. A fantastic fog crept through the gardens, parks, forests, and buildings in the mornings and evenings. In the fall, too, he experienced beautiful day after beautiful day. Time passed amiably. The weather stayed mild deep into November. On December 20th, the first snow fell. Hans thought he would have to start heating his room soon, otherwise it would be unpleasant to live there.

The winter was beautiful too. The middle of the cold season is a magnificent time to think about summer warmth. Hans did so with great pleasure. Warming thoughts of summer stayed vital and alive within him through the whole winter. Gradually spring returned again, after which came the summer, resembling the previous year’s practically down to a hair’s breadth. Groves and forests once more took on their delicious, darling green color. In August the war broke out.

Now things got serious for Hans.

The Executive Federal Council ordered a general mobilization. There were anxiously talking and listening people in all the streets. Every segment of the population was seized with the gravest consternation. Women and men went around in a state of excitement, looking each other in the eye with earnest questioning gazes. What everyone would have liked to think was impossible was suddenly naked, hard, shocking reality. Everywhere it looked like something was lurking; the otherwise so gentle air resounded with what was like the roaring of tigers.

All at once there rose up before Hans a tall and imperious figure: Duty. Up until that point he had known no obligations. It had hitherto barely ever occurred to him to think about military service. Now, though, he knew what he had to do. He made the decision quickly, since there was nothing to take into consideration. All his previous thoughts fell away. What had just a moment before seemed essential trickled away at once into vanishing unessentiality.

The general’s name was in everyone’s mouth.

Hans went to the woods one more time, to say goodbye.

“Am I now supposed to leave behind all good, beloved, and beautiful dreams?” he said, “and cast aside ineluctably everything that was once precious to me? Is what was valuable to me now to be valueless, what was intimately familiar and closely related to be alien and strange, the significant utterly insignificant, the known unknown, the important unimportant, and everything I used to keenly observe from now on invisible? Must beauty fade and everything that was once recognizable be henceforth entirely unrecognizable? Can for that which is worthy of yearning never again be yearned and that which is desirable never again be desired? Shall all this be as though it had never been noticed at all?

“Well, so be it. Onwards, then, to do one’s duty as a brave soldier, to salute the flag I already see fluttering in the wind. Now let the land among whose sons I number be served and my soul be a soul that loves its fatherland.”

He took the train to Bern to enlist.

1920

ROBERT WALSER (1878–1956) was born into a German-speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while writing his poems, novels, and vast numbers of the “prose pieces” that became his hallmark. In 1933 he was confined to a sanatorium, which marked the end of his writing career. Among Walser’s works available in English are Berlin Stories and Jakob von Gunten (both available as NYRB classics), Thirty Poems, The Walk, The Tanners, Microscripts, The Assistant, The Robber, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932.

DAMION SEARLS has translated many classic twentieth-century writers, including Proust, Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Hans Keilson, and Hermann Hesse. For NYRB Classics, he edited Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861, translated Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories, and will retranslate André Gide’s Marshlands. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cullman Center fellowships and is currently writing a book about Hermann Rorschach and the cultural history of the Rorschach test.