Robert Walser - The Tanners

Kaspar and I had a friend in common, the son of a member of the Cantonal parliament and respected merchant, whom we dearly loved on account of his submissiveness and his willingness to take part in any plan we hatched. We often went to visit him in his parental, parliamentary home where we were always given a friendly welcome by an exquisite lady, his mother. We would play for hours with our friend’s building blocks and tin soldiers and amuse ourselves splendidly. Kaspar excelled at building fortresses and palaces and sketching out battle plans. Our friend was very attached to us; to Kaspar, I thought, even more than me; and he often visited us at home as well, though things at our house were admittedly less refined. Hedwig was very fond of him. His mother was completely different from ours, the rooms gleamed more than at our house, and the tone was different; I mean, the tone of the conversations; but at our house, all in all, things were more lively. At the time, there was a wealthy lady in our town living all alone in a magnificent garden, in a house of course, but the house was invisible thanks to all the ivy and trees and fountains that concealed it. This lady had three daughters, beautiful, pale girls who were said to have a new dress to put on every two weeks. They didn’t keep these dresses in their cupboards, but rather sent special messengers to sell them to the townsfolk. At one point Hedwig owned a silk dress and pair of shoes that had belonged to one of these girls, and these second-hand items inspired in me, when I looked at and touched them, a secret repulsion combined with the greatest interest and a concern that often made me the butt of jokes. The lady was always sitting at home; at most she might put in an appearance at the theater, where she looked alarmingly white in her dark red box. The middle girl was probably the most beautiful of the three. I always imagined her seated on horseback; she had a face that looked as if made to gaze down from the back of a prancing horse upon a gaping crowd of people, causing them all to cast down their eyes. All three girls have no doubt long since married. — Once we had a conflagration, not in the town itself, but in a neighboring village. The entire sky all around was reddened by the flames, it was an icy winter night. People ran upon the frozen, crunching snow, including Kaspar and me; for our mother had sent us to find out where the fire was. We reached the flames, but it bored us to spend so long gazing into the burning beams, besides which we were freezing, and so we soon ran back home again, where Mother received us with all the severity of one who’s been made to worry. My mother was already unwell in those days. Not long afterward, Kaspar left school, where he was no longer prospering. I still had one more year ahead of me, but a certain melancholy took hold of me and bid me look with bitterness upon all things scholastic. I saw the end approaching and the imminent start of something new. What it would be — on this subject I could muster only the most foolish thoughts. I saw my brother often, laden down with packages, in his life of employment, and thought about why he looked so downcast as he worked, with his face drooping toward the ground: It couldn’t be so nice after all, this new thing, if you weren’t allowed to raise your eyes. But Kaspar had already begun to plan his career, he always seemed to be dreaming, and had such a curious calmness about him, which didn’t please our father at all. We were now living on the edge of town in humble lodgings the sight of which was enough to chill you through. This dwelling did not suit Mother. In general she had a most peculiar illness: She always felt wounded by her surroundings. She liked to go on about elegant little houses set in gardens. What do I know. She was a very unhappy woman. When for example we were all sitting at the dinner table, keeping fairly silent as was our custom, she would suddenly seize a fork or knife and hurl it away from her, right off the table, making all of us turn our heads to one side; if you tried to calm her, she would feel insulted, and if you reproached her, she would feel even more insulted. Father had his hands full with her. We children recalled with melancholy and pain the days when she’d been a woman who was received everywhere with an admixture of affection and esteem, when if she called you to her with her ringing voice, you happily rushed to her side. All the ladies in town paid her compliments which she brushed aside with grace and modesty; this bygone time appeared to me even then like a magical fairy tale filled with wonderful fragrances and images. And so I learned quite early to devote myself passionately to beautiful memories. Once more I saw the tall building where my parents ran a delightful costume jewelry shop, where people were always coming in to buy things, where we children had a bright, large nursery which the sun seemed particularly to enjoy filling up with light. Right beside our tall building crouched a short, crooked, squashed, ancient one beneath a pointed gable roof; a widow lived there. She had a hat shop, a son and a female relative, along with a dog, I believe, if memory serves. When you walked into her shop, she would greet you in such a friendly way that merely to stand in front of this woman would be a goodly pleasure. She would then press various hats upon your head and lead you to the mirror with a smile. Her hats all smelled so wonderful that you couldn’t help standing there transfixed. She was a good friend of my mother. Right next door, that is, right next door to the hat shop, a snow-white pastry shop glittered temptingly, a confectionery. The confectioner’s wife appeared to us to be an angel, not a woman. She had the most delicate oval face you could imagine; kindness and purity appeared to have given this face its shape. A smile that turned anyone it touched into an enchanted pious child sweetened her already sweet features. The entire woman appeared to have been made to sell sweets, delicacies and dainties that could only be touched by the very tips of one’s fingers, to preserve their exquisite flavors. She too was a friend of my mother. Mother had many friends—

Simon stopped writing. He went over to a photograph of his mother that hung on the dirty wall of his room, and, rising up on tiptoe, pressed a kiss upon it. Then he tore up what he’d written, neither out of pique nor with much premeditation; simply because it no longer held any value for him. Then he went to visit Rosa out in the suburbs and said to her: “Soon I shall find employment, perhaps in a small rural town, which at the moment I’d find the most beautiful thing imaginable. After all, small towns are delightful. In such a place, you have your old comfortable room, for which you pay curiously little rent. Returning to this room from your place of work is easily accomplished with just a few steps. All the people say hello to you on the street, wondering who this young gentleman might be. The women with daughters are already, in thought, granting you their daughter’s hand — the youngest daughter, no doubt, the one with curly ringlets and dangling, heavy earrings on her tiny ears. At work you’ll soon have made yourself indispensable, and the boss would be happy to have made such an acquisition. After returning home in the evening, you’d sit in a heated room, and the pictures on the walls would be gazed at, one of which might perhaps represent lovely Empress Eugenie and the other a revolution. The daughter of the house would perhaps come in and bring me flowers, why ever not? Are all these things not possible in a small town where people welcome one another so affectionately? One day, however, during my warm bright lunch break, this very same girl would knock shyly at my door — a door dating, by the way, from the Rococo period — would open it, come into the room and say to me, tilting her head to one side in an infinitely delicate gesture, ‘How quiet you always are, Simon. You are so modest and make no demands at all. You never say: I need this or that. You take everything as it comes. I fear you are dissatisfied.’ I would laugh and reassure her. Then suddenly, as if the oddest feelings had come over her, it might occur to her to say: ‘How quiet and beautiful the flowers are on the table there. They look as if they have eyes, and it seems to me as if they’re smiling.’ I would be astonished to hear words of this sort on the lips of a small-town girl. Then I would suddenly find it quite natural to go walking with slow steps toward the one standing there hesitantly, place my arm about her figure and kiss her. She would permit this, but not in such a way that one might be tempted to indulge in unlovely thoughts. She would cast her eyes down before her, and I would hear the pounding of her heart, the rising and falling of her beautiful, round breast. I would ask her to show me her eyes, and she would open them, allowing me to gaze into the heaven of her open, questioning eyes. A long asking and gazing would follow. First there would be an imploring look from her, then I would be moved to look at her in just the same way, and then of course I would be unable to suppress a laugh, and she would nonetheless trust me. How wonderful that can be, in a small town where people say so much with their glances alone. I would once more kiss her oddly curved and bowed mouth and flatter her in such a way that she would have no choice but to believe all my compliments and then it wouldn’t be flattery at all, and I would tell her I considered her my wife, whereupon she, once more tilting her head to one side in that marvelous way, would say yes. After all, how else could she respond with me pressing her mouth shut as one does a child’s, if I covered her with kisses, this magnificent girl now incapable of suppressing a smile of high spirits and victorious pride? Indeed, the victor would be she and I her victim, this would be apparent quite soon, for I would become her husband and thus would sacrifice and present to her my entire life, my freedom and all my desires to see the world. Now I would always be observing her, finding her ever more beautiful. Until the nuptials, I would be like a rogue chasing after all the charms she might let drop behind her. I would watch to see her kneel down on the floor in the evening to make a fire in the stove. I would laugh a great deal, like a lunatic, to avoid always resorting to overly delicate expressions of affection, and perhaps I would often treat her roughly as well just to catch a glimpse of pain in her face. After behavior like this, I wouldn’t hesitate to kneel down beside her bed, secretly, in her absence, and to pray to her with a flaming heart. I might even go so far as to take her shoe, even if it were covered with blacking, and press it to my lips; for an object in which she has placed her little white foot would easily suffice to produce in me a feeling of worship; after all, it doesn’t take much to pray. I would often climb the high, rocky mountains that lay nearby, casually hoisting myself up by the little saplings, passing along precipices, and when I reached the top, just above a rockfall, I would lie down in a yellow pasture and reflect on where I was and ask myself whether in fact a life like this, sharing close quarters with a wife who was dear to me but nonetheless really quite demanding would satisfy me. I would merely shake my head over such questions and with splendidly healthy senses go on sending daydreams down into the valley where this little town lay spread. Perhaps I would weep for half an hour, why not, in order to appease my longings and then would lie there peaceful and happy again until the sun sank, whereupon I would go back down and squeeze my maiden’s hand. Everything would be decided on and bolted shut behind me — but my heart would rejoice in this firm, commanding conclusiveness. Then I would celebrate my marriage and in this way give my life new life. My old life would sink like a beautiful sun, and I wouldn’t cast so much as a glance after it, for I would consider that dangerous and weak. Time would pass and now we would be bending — to give an illustration for our affection — not over flowers but over children and would feel delight at their smiles and countless questions. Our love for our children and the thousand cares they would demand of us would make our own love gentler and all the greater but also quieter. It would never occur to me to wonder whether my wife still pleased me, nor would it cross my mind to tell myself I was living a small paltry life. I would have experienced everything life has to offer by way of experiences, and willingly would renounce all thoughts holding out and dangling before me all the elegant adventures I was missing out on. ‘What can still be called missing out here?’ I would ask myself calmly, with a superior air. I would have become a solid individual, this would be all and would remain all until the death of my wife, who might possibly have been fated to die before me. But I don’t wish to think any further, for all these things lie too far distant in the darkness of the beautiful future. What do you say to all this? I’m always such a dreamer, but you must at least admit my dreams these days possess a certain uprightness and reflect my desire to become a better person than I am at present.”