Robert Walser - Selected Stories

Robert Walser

I SIT down somewhat reluctantly at my desk to play my piano, that is to say, to begin to discourse on the potato famine which long ago struck a village on a hill that stood about two hundred meters high. Painfully I wrest from my wits a tale that tells of nothing of more account than a country girl. The longer she labored, the less she was able to do for herself.

The stars were twinkling in the sky. The parson of the village where what is here told occurred was out of doors elucidating for his young protégés the planetary system. A writer was working in a lamplit room at his rapidly waxing work when, vexed by visions, the girl rose up from her bed intending to rush into the pond, which she did with almost laughable alacrity.

When she was found the next morning in a condition which made it plain to all that she had ceased to live, the question rose among these countryfolk: Should she be buried or not. Not a soul was ready to lay a hand on the finished article that lay quite motionless there. Tribal displeasure asserted itself.

The bailiff approached the group, which intrigued him primarily from the viewpoint of painting, for in his leisure hours he would paint, government burdening him with no excessive duties. He urged the country people forthwith to be sensible, but his expostulations had no success; at no price would they inter the girl, as if they believed it might harm them to do so.

The sheriff strode into his office with its three large windows through which streamed the most dazzling light, and he wrote a report on the incident which he dispatched to the city authorities.

But what feelings assail me when I consider the famine whose waves rose higher and higher! The populace grew unspeakably thin. How they longed for food!

The very same day a laborer of superlative efficiency took his gun from its nail and shot, with authentic popular wrath, his rival who was crossing the street below, yodeling in all innocence, clear proof of how happy his days were. In fact the rival was just returning from a successful encounter with the young lady, who seemed to be a somewhat indecisive person, for ogling both she offered prospects to both of heaven.

Never in all my years as a writer have I written a tale in which a person, struck by a bullet, falls down. This is the first time in my work that a person has croaked.

Understandably, they lifted him up and carried him into the next-best cottage. Houses, in the present comfortable sense of the word, did not at that time exist in the country; there were only indigent dwellings, whose roofs of straw reached almost to the ground, as one may still observe, at one’s leisure, in a few surviving examples.

When the young lady, a country belle with swaying hips and a taut, tall body, heard what had occurred on her account, she simply stood there, bolt upright, pondering deeply perhaps her peculiar nature.

Her mother besought her to speak, but all in vain; it seemed she had been changed into a statue.

A stork flew through the azure air high over the village drama, bearing in its beak a baby. Wafted by a slight wind, the leaves whispered. Like an etching it all looked, anything but natural.

[1927]

A PERSON who wishes to voice a conviction in an appropriate fashion pronounces a vigorous, martial “Naturaleh!” “With martial greetings I remain your most obedient servant”—thus did I close a letter to someone who avowed to me that my martialism had taken him aback. “All of a sudden he heard somebody beside him exclaim: ‘That’s impossible!’” Couldn’t such an ordinary event as this occur in a novel that reflects its times and speaks of matters that are perhaps largely marginal issues? If I now exclaim in a booming voice “Naturaleh!”—I have in mind the artist of aviation who, with an energy to be wondered at, flew across the ocean; and of course I number myself among the innumerable people who revere this happy dominator of difficulties. A person who has no doubts at all about anything is prone to asseverate: “It’s clear as day!” That the aviator mounting his vehicle seemed to himself tiny in proportion to the magnitude of his task is clear as day to me, and perhaps I might be permitted to believe that in this significant moment he was lulling himself into the conceivably very artful illusion of being, in comparison with the universe, a babe in arms, and his flying machine was his crib, where the most decisive thing for him to do was to lie low, quietly watching. In my opinion, during the truly fabulous unwinding of his journey he thought most animatedly of his mother. Of this I am convinced, and now I come face to face with the question: Should one view the oceanist, the hero of the day, as a descendant of those mariners vanished long since from their sphere of influence, and furthermore did he, before he flew off, make it his precept to consider his enterprise as something that would, so to speak, be merely a schooling for him, an education? Especially a poet does well, among other things, to fly at a modest velocity on his winged steed, Pegasus by name, because ill chance may strike the most special person no less easily than the least consequential member of any human interest group or sphere. Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.

As regards this appellation, which disconcertingly took wing from my otherwise so choice vocabulary, it seems I should explain that it denotes a low-down sort of character. By lummox, one should understand a fusion of every conceivable ineptitude in the person of a particular social fellow being. With a splendid, because moderate, velocity I strode today, as it happens, into a shoe solery to ask what steps had been taken, what progress made, toward finishing work in which I knew I had an interest. Instead of saying “lummox,” in a country that delights in its reputation for hospitality and where, besides which, I too am permitted to live, some folks make use of the designation dummer Cheib, or fathead. Neither the latter nor the former manner of speaking sounds polite; both shed a certain uncultivated dimness upon persons who put them to use. Like a bird of paradise he flew across the far-flung and not by any means entirely bland and composed carpet of meadows historically called the sea, the fool or lummox, who may be called a lummox insofar as he was gambling, so audaciously as to be well-nigh presumptuous, with the indisputable treasure of his life, on which apparently, since he was thus exposing it to all vicissitudes, he placed little value, in a manner which was, well now, how should one put it, almost indiscreet; for surely one may be right to think that a person who commits himself to the discharge of a duty, a general human concern, and thereby shows little or no regard for his own person, is in equal proportions a tall and broad, perhaps even towering, lummox or fathead? On the other hand, I can see in him someone who empowers himself to inhale and exhale the glory and delight of life, for when enjoyment, meaning the principle of healthy egoism, is set aside, then precisely does the richer and purer source of what is initially disdained begin. The careless or selfless person, it is my conviction, does persistently care for himself, although I am ready at any moment to admit the contradictoriness here apparent, which, in itself, is of great significance for me.

When, for instance, someone becomes self-important, it is popularly said that he has “a bee in his bonnet.” A person can be just as important as he pleases, in fact; but to appear so is not always pleasant for others.

In the finer sense, as in the one just indicated, I launch toward you, somewhat like a bee, the present essay.