Robert Walser - The Tanners

“Oh, I don’t know what there is to forgive. I should be asking forgiveness instead for obliging you to reproach one of your serving girls. In fact I’m quite happy to be sitting here unnoticed, for in all honesty I can’t give the serving girl much by way of an order—”

“Eat and drink as much as you like. You don’t have to pay for anything,” the lady said.

“Is that just for me, or for everyone here?”

“Just for you, of course, and only because I shall give orders that no one is to ask anything of you.”

She sat down beside him at the small brown table:

“I’ve got a moment’s time to chat with you and don’t see why I shouldn’t. You appear to be a lonely young man, your eyes are telling me so, and they’re also saying quite clearly that the person to whom they belong feels a desire to come into contact with other people. I’m not sure why I can’t help taking you for a well-educated person. When I saw you sitting here, I at once felt an urge to speak with you. If I’d bothered to observe you with my keen lorgnette, I’d perhaps have discovered that you look somewhat tattered, but who would wish to learn to recognize people only with the help of glasses? As the director of this establishment, I have an interest in learning as accurately as possible who my guests are. I’ve made it my habit to judge people not by a shabby fedora but by the way they move, which explicates their characters better than good or poor items of clothing, and in the course of time I’ve found this to be the right path to follow. May God preserve me, if he means at all well by me, from becoming snobby or supercilious. A businesswoman who isn’t a good observer of human nature will in time come to make bad business decisions, and what does our ever-increasing knowledge of human nature teach us? The simplest thing in the world: To be kind and friendly to all! Are not all of us who live upon this lone lost planet brothers and sisters? Siblings! The brothers of sisters, sisters of sisters, and sisters of brothers? This can all be quite affectionate, and indeed it must always be so: above all in one’s thoughts! But then it must also burgeon and come to fruition. If an uncouth man or a female simpleton comes before me, what can I do? Must I immediately feel deterred and put off? Oh, not at all, not at all! I then think to myself: No, this person is certainly not so agreeable to me, I find him repulsive, he’s uncultured and presumptuous, but there’s no cause to make either him or myself all too conscious of this fact. I must dissemble a little, and then perhaps he will do so as well, if only out of indolence or stupidity. How nice it is to be considerate. I secretly carry a sacred, ardent conviction that this is true, and that’s all I can say on the subject. Or perhaps just this one thing more: A brother need not necessarily be one of the finest and most select individuals, and yet he can — perhaps, let us say, at a certain appropriate distance — be a brother. I’ve made this my own personal law, and it’s stood me in good stead. Many people come to like me whose first glimpse of me made them shrug their shoulders and grimace. Why should I not, with regard to so charming a principle as exercising an affectionate observant patience, be a tiny bit Christian? All of us perhaps have more need of Christianity now than ever before; but I’m speaking foolishly. You smiled, and I know perfectly well what you’re smiling about. You’re right, why do I have to bring up Christianity when it’s merely a question of simple sensible amicability? Do you know what? Sometimes I think to myself: Christian duty has in our lifetimes been quietly, almost imperceptibly giving way to human duty, which is far simpler and more easily put into practice. But now I must go. They’re calling me. Stay where you are, I’ll be back—”

With this, she went off.

Several minutes later she returned and, still at a distance of several paces, resumed the conversation by exclaiming: “How encompassed by novelty everything here is! Just look around: Everything is fresh, novel, newborn. Not a single memory of anything old! Usually every house, every family possesses some old piece of furniture, a whiff of olden times, a concrete souvenir that we still love and honor because we find it beautiful, just as we find a scene of parting or a melancholy sunset beautiful. Do you see anything of the sort here, even the faintest hint of memory? It seems to me like a dizzying, curved, light bridge leading into the as yet inexplicable future. Oh, to gaze into the future is more beautiful than dreaming about the past. It’s also a sort of dreaming when you imagine a future. Isn’t there something marvelous about this? Wouldn’t it be cleverer for persons of fine sensibilities to devote their warmth and inklings to the days yet to come rather than those that lie in the past? Times yet to come are like children to us and need more attention than the graves of the departed, which we adorn perhaps with somewhat too exaggerated a love: these bygone days! A painter will do well now to sketch costumes for distant people who will possess the grace to wear them in decorum and freedom; let the poet dream up virtues for strong individuals not gnawed at by longing, and the architect design as best he can forms that will charmingly give life to the stone and to building itself, let him go to the forest and there take note of how tall and noble the firs shoot up from the ground, let him take them as a model for the buildings of the future; and let man in general, in anticipation of things to come, cast off much that is common, ignoble and unserviceable, and whisper his thoughts into the ear of his wife as clearly as he can when she offers him her lips for a kiss, and the woman will smile. We women understand how to spur you men on to perform deeds with our smiles, and we fancy we’ve done our duty when we’ve succeeded in vividly, delightfully filling your senses with your own duties, just by virtue of a smile. The things you achieve make us happier than our own accomplishments. We read the books you write and think: If only they were willing to do a bit more and write a bit less. In general we don’t know what would bring much more profit than subordinating ourselves to you. What else can we do! And how willingly we do so. But now of course I’ve forgotten to speak of the future, this bold arch across dark waters, this forest full of trees, this child with gleaming eyes, this unspeakable entity that always tempts one to catch it in words as if in a snare. No, I believe the present is the future. Doesn’t everything around us seem to radiate presentness?”

“Yes,” Simon said.

“Outside the winter’s so horribly severe now, and here indoors it’s so warm, so perfect for having conversations and for my sitting here beside you, a quite young and apparently somewhat down-at-the-heels person, and any minute now I’ll be neglecting my duties. Your comportment has something fascinating about it, do you realize this? One can’t help wanting to box your ears straight off, out of a secret fury at the way you sit here so foolishly and yet have such a strange capacity to seduce a person into wasting her precious time with you, a random guest. Do you know what: Why don’t you go on sitting there a while longer. Surely you’re not in so much of a hurry. I’ll come back later to have another crack at your ears. For the moment, duty calls—”

And she was gone.

In the lady’s absence, Simon observed his surroundings. The lamps gave off a bright warm light. People were chatting unrestrainedly with one another. A few of them, now that night had fallen, were leaving because they still had to go back down the mountain to return to town. Two old men sitting cozily at a table struck him because of the tranquil way they sat there. Both of them had white beards and rather fresh faces and were smoking pipes, which gave them a patriarchal air. They didn’t speak to one another, apparently considering that superfluous. Now and then their respective pairs of eyes would meet, and then there was a shrugging of pipes and the corners of mouths, but this all occurred quite tranquilly and no doubt as a matter of habit. They appeared to be idlers, but calculating, premeditated, superior idlers — idle out of prosperity. Surely the two of them had taken up with one another only because they shared these same habits: smoking their pipes, taking little walks, a fondness for wind, weather and nature, good health, preferring silence to chatter, and finally age itself with all its special perquisites. To Simon the two of them appeared not lacking in dignity. One couldn’t help smiling a little at the appealing cordoned-off spectacle they presented, but this spectacle did not exclude reverence, which age itself demands as its right. A sense of purpose was expressed in their tranquil visages; they possessed a completeness that could in no way be disputed any longer. These old men were most certainly beyond entertaining uncertainties as to the path they’d chosen, even if it had been chosen in error. But then what did it mean to be in error? If a person picked an error as his lodestar at the age of sixty or seventy, this was a sacrosanct matter to which a young man must respond with reverence. These two old codgers — for there was certainly something codger-like about them — must have had some sort of procedure or a system according to which they’d sworn to one another to go on living until the end of their days; that’s how they looked, like two people who’d found something that worked and made it possible for them to await their end with equanimity. “The two of us have found it out, that secret”—this is what their expressions and bearing seemed to say. It was amusing and touching and no doubt worth pondering to observe them and attempt to guess their thoughts. Among other things, one quickly guessed that these two would always only be seen as a pair and never any other way, never singly, always together! Always! This was the main thought you felt emanating from their white heads. Side by side through life, maybe even side by side down into the abyss of death: This appeared to be their guiding principle. And indeed, they even looked like a couple of living, old, but nonetheless still jolly and good-humored principles. When summer came again, the two of them would be seen sitting outside on the shady terrace, but they’d still keep filling their pipes with a mysterious air and prefer silence to speech. When they left, it would always be the two of them leaving, not first one and then the other: This seemed unthinkable. Yes, they looked cozy, this much Simon had to give them: cozy and hardheaded, he thought, looking away from them to gaze at something else.