Robert Walser - The Tanners

She began to cry. Then Kaspar came up to her: “What’s the matter, Klara?”

“Nothing! What could be the matter? After all, here you are. I missed you. I’m happy, but I can’t stand being happy all alone, without you. That’s why I was crying. Come here, come,” and she pressed him to her, hard.

Simon was beginning to find his torpid, wastrel’s life unbearable. He felt he’d soon have to return to the world of work and day-labor: “After all, there’s something appealing about living like most people. It’s starting to annoy me to be so idle, such an oddity. Food has stopped tasting good to me, going for walks just makes me tired, and what’s so uplifting and grand about letting yourself be stung all over by wasps and gadflies on hot country roads, striding through villages, jumping down steep walls, perching atop erratic blocks, propping your head in your hands, starting to read a book and being unable to finish it, then taking a dip in a lake that is lovely but remote, getting dressed again and setting off for home and then at home finding Kaspar so lethargic he no longer knows what leg to stand on or what nose to think with or what finger to lay beside which of his noses. With such a lifestyle, it’s easy to acquire a large number of noses and the desire to spend all day long laying all ten fingers beside all ten noses to reflect. Meanwhile all your noses are laughing and thumbing their noses at you. Well, and what’s so divine about watching your ten or more noses thumb their noses at you? By this I mean only to illustrate the fact that all this lying-about makes you a dunce. No, I’m starting to feel something like pricks of conscience and believe that merely feeling such pricks is not enough: I must undertake something. Running about in the sunshine cannot, in the long term, be viewed as an activity, and only a simpleton sits around reading books, for a simpleton is what you are if all you ever do is read. Labor in the company of others is, in the end, the single thing that educates us. So what should I do? Write some poems perhaps? To wish to try something of the sort on such a hot summer day, I’d have to be named Sebastian, and then maybe I would want to. That’s what he’s doing, I’m convinced of it. Sebastian’s the kind of person who first goes on an outing — studying lakes, forests, mountains, streams, puddles and sunshine, possibly taking some notes — and then goes home and writes an essay about his outing that gets printed in newspapers of world-historical significance. Perhaps this sort of thing could be suitable for me? Probably, if I could manage it, but I’m such a dilettante. I’d best go back to scraping out letters, erasing calculations, squandering ink — yes, that’s what I must do, though there isn’t much honor in starting all over from scratch in a field I quit. But it must be done. In such a case it doesn’t do to think of honor but of what is necessary and irremediable. I’m twenty years old now. How could it be that I am twenty already? How discouraged some other person might be — twenty years old and having to start again from scratch, from where you stood just leaving school. But, since it can’t be helped, I’ll display as much good humor as possible, and in any case, I have no wish to get ahead in life, I just want to live in a way that counts for something. Nothing more. And really, all I want is to make it till winter comes again, and then, when it’s snowing and wintertime, I’ll know how to go on, it’ll come to me how I should best go on living. It gives me great pleasure, dividing my life into small, simple, easily solvable equations like this — sums there’s no need to rack my brains over, they solve themselves. During the winter, by the way, I’m always more clever and enterprising than in the summer. With all that warmth, all that blossoming and fragrance, there’s no getting anything done, but cold and frost spur you on. So before winter comes, let me put myself in funds, and then enjoy the lovely wintertime spending the money sensibly. I wouldn’t insist on studying languages all winter long for days on end in unheated rooms until my fingers froze off, but all the same summer is for the sort of people who are given vacations, the ones who spend time at summer resorts and find enjoyment in leaping barefoot if not naked though warm meadows, sometimes with a leather apron bound about their loins like John the Baptist, who incidentally is said to have eaten grasshoppers. So now upon the bed of daily toil let me lie down to sleep and not wake up again until snow is flying across the earth and the mountains turn white and howling northern storms come up to freeze your ears and melt them in the flames of frost and ice. The cold is like a blaze to me, awe-inspiring, beyond description! So it shall be or my name is not Simon. In the winter, Klara will be wrapped up in thick soft furs, and I shall accompany her in the streets and it will snow upon us, so quietly, secretly, soundless and warm. Oh, when it is snowing in the black streets, going out to do the shopping, and the shops all lit up with lamps. To walk into a shop beside Klara or a few steps behind her person and say: My lady wishes to purchase this or that. Klara, fragrant in her furs, and her face — how beautiful it will be when we then go back out into the street. Perhaps when it is winter she’ll be working in some elegant establishment, just like me, and I will be able to come collect her every night — unless she should one day instruct me not to collect her. Perhaps Agappaia will send his wife packing, and then she will be forced to take up some employment or other, which will be easy for her, given what an imposing person she is. That’s as far ahead as I wish to think. Thinking further than that is something done perhaps by Herr Spielhagen of the Corporation for Electrical Illumination but not by me, for, occupying no such position, I don’t accrue so many obligations in this world that I am compelled to think any further ahead. Ah, wintertime! If only it would come soon—”

The very next day found him working at a large machine-producing factory that employed a number of young people to take inventory. He spent his evenings reading by the window, or else supplemented his trip home from the factory to Klara’s house with a lengthy detour around the entire mountain, passing through the dark verdant forested ravines that cut into the broad mountain. He would always stop at a spring he passed to quench his prodigious thirst, then would lie down in a secluded forest meadow until night arrived, reminding him to go home. He loved watching the summer evening give way to summer night, this slow rosy subsiding of the forest’s hues into the blackness of deep night. He was in the habit then of dreaming without words or thought, setting aside all self-reproach and surrendering to a delicious exhaustion. Often it seemed to him that a large fiery-red ball went whistling up into the air from the dark bushes beside him, from the sleeping earth, and when he looked, it was the moon dancing up into the sky, floating ponderously against its backdrop, the universe. How his eye then clung to the pale weightless shape of this loveliest of heavenly bodies. That this far-distant world appeared to be tucked away just behind the bushes seemed so strange to him, close enough to be fingered and grasped. Everything appeared to him near at hand. What was the concept of distance in the face of such withdrawal and drawing near. The infinite suddenly appeared to him infinitely close. When he returned, passing amid all the heavy, singing, fragrant nocturnal verdure, Simon perceived it as a mysterious, dear gesture when Klara walked to meet him, as she did every evening, and welcomed him home. Her eyes always appeared to have been weeping when she walked toward him like this or waited. Then the two of them would sit together until deep into the night on the small balcony, which had been transformed into a little mid-air summer-house, playing a game with tiny cards, or else she would sing some melody or have him tell her a story. When at last she bid him goodnight, he would sleep so soundly it might have been a magic spell, this “good night” of hers, giving her the power to shackle him to an exceptionally beautiful, deep slumber. In the morning, silver dew would glitter in the bushes, on the blades of grass and leaves as he walked to his place of employment to get to work writing and helping with the inventory. One Sunday he returned from a walk to find Klara sleeping on the divan in his bedroom. From outdoors the sound of an accordion could be heard coming from one of the squalid huts built into the foothills, where poor workers lived, at the edge of town. The shutters had been drawn and the room held a hot green light. He sat down at the foot of the divan beside the sleeper, and she touched him lightly with her feet. Overjoyed at the sensation of her feet pressing against him, he gazed intently at the face of the slumbering woman. How beautiful she was when she slept. She was one of those women who are most beautiful when their faces are immobile, at rest. Klara was breathing in peaceful waves; her chest, half-exposed, rose and sank gently; a book had fallen from the hands now dangling at her side. The idea arose in Simon that he might kneel beside her and quietly kiss these lovely hands, but he refrained. He might have done so had she been lying there awake, but sleeping? No. Secret, surreptitious, furtive expressions of tenderness are not for me, he thought. Her mouth was smiling, as though she were just casually sleeping, fully aware she was asleep. This smile upon the sleeper’s lips barred all uninnocent thoughts, but it forced one to gaze at this mouth, this face, this hair and these elongated cheeks. Still sleeping, Klara suddenly pressed her feet more urgently against Simon, then she woke up and looked about her questioningly, and for a long time remained looking into Simon’s eyes as though there were something she failed to grasp. Then she said: “Simon! I have something to tell you.”