Robert Walser: Berlin Stories

Frau Scheer possessed a by no means unattractive if slightly stout figure. At times she displayed a quite winsome, graceful bearing. Dressed in her Sunday best, she looked every bit the grand, elegant lady. But on several occasions I saw her on the street coming back from her buildings, and each time I was shocked at her downcast, crestfallen appearance. Her weary, dragging gait said with sorrowful plainness: “I shall die soon.” As she walked like this, she gazed up at the sky. One often sees women casting their eyes up to heaven in this way. Sometimes her eyes were filled with dreadful entreaties for a bit of love. When she smiled in gay spirits, there was something profoundly captivating about her. In her youth she must have been loveliness itself. She herself once smilingly confessed that as a child she’d been the family darling. On the inside, perhaps, she had remained a dreamy small-town girl. Poor little thing! Poor deceived dreamer! Frau Scheer had very delicate, tiny feet. In her kitchen, on the kitchen floor, I often saw her charming, snug little booties, which interested me greatly because they looked as if they wished to relate the life story of their mistress. The fanatical love of money that resided within her and the strange, passionate pleasure she took in acquiring it seemed to me genuine small-town idiosyncrasies. In her youngest years she had once traveled with her husband to Switzerland, and even as an old woman she spoke with the most charming enthusiasm of this country’s beauties. She had seen Lucerne and ascended to the top of the Rigi. A remark she made in passing revealed that she had been a devoted cyclist. Admittedly these are trifles, but these trifles mean a great deal to me, and I am incapable of coldly passing over these trivialities. Besides which, I don’t really consider anything trivial. Frau Scheer was kind enough to encourage me to walk around in her apartment without ceremony as though the apartment belonged to me, and of course I was glad to take advantage of such agreeable freedom. The apartment contained nothing else of particular note. In the woman’s study, there were always piles of business papers lying about waiting to be dealt with. The kitchen was visibly unclean, the salon teeming with disorder and dust. Frau Scheer was utterly devoid of domesticity despite the fact that she owned fifteen buildings. How often she sighed. Sometimes it seemed to me when I saw her like this that I was about to witness her collapsing beneath the burden of her work.

I recall that the two of us stood one night conversing at the door to my room. It was the first time in quite a while that I had spoken with her at length in such a friendly way. She listened to me with a silent, lovely, very tender attentiveness. My loquaciousness seemed to be giving her the greatest pleasure. She too spoke. Frau Scheer always spoke with admirable lightness. “How cold, stiff, and reserved you’ve been,” she said, “even though we’ve lived so long together under a single roof. That has often hurt me, but now I am all the happier to hear you speak to me in such an agreeably friendly, familiar way. You’ve always kept to yourself, scarcely bothering to greet or even look at me, this caused me pain. And yet, as I now see and hear, you can be so very kind. Sometimes I thought, because you once said to me that you love solitary walks and often go into the woods, that you might be contemplating doing yourself harm, or else that something unfortunate might befall you there in the forest. Fortunately, though, I see you standing before me in good health, and I am glad.” “Forgive me if I’ve ever been discourteous,” I said. She replied with obvious kindness: “It doesn’t matter.” She stood there with such a touchingly beautiful, youthfully fresh lightness, and I secretly reproached myself for my earlier behavior. I held out my hand to indicate to her that I did indeed value the friendliness and confidingness of this moment as something humanly beautiful, and she pressed my hand with marked pleasure. This was a peculiar hour filled with simple, strong warmth; I shall remember it forever.

Since I frequently found myself idle for lack of regular employment, while Frau Scheer was overburdened, I offered my services to her when the opportunity presented itself so that I might assist her with her many business dealings, and she did not for a moment hesitate to acquiesce to my proposal. How lovely it is, and how good it feels to lend a hand to a person in need of help. It makes me deeply happy today, when all of this lies far in the past, that I did manage, while there was still time, to set aside my indifference, coldness, and lack of sympathy and enter into a good relationship with this woman in which sympathy played an important role. It seemed to me as if this were making me much younger again. I wrote letters, ran this and that errand, received covetous and pressing visitors in Frau Scheer’s absence, took delivery of payments, for which I issued receipts with my nicest and warmest thanks, prepared contracts, ran and strolled about as a delegate and private secretary, as messenger and commissioner and confidant, stopping by all sorts of institutes and buildings, a task in which my sound knowledge of the area, acquired earlier in the course of many pleasurable walks, stood me in good stead. As a punctual and trusty Scheer employee, I inspected newly constructed buildings, during which it pleased me to assume the most severe, unrelenting office and business expression when dealing with craftsmen and handymen in order to assure myself of being highly respected by people who are not so fond of showing respect; my head was filled with parcels of land, leases, mortgages, properties, and buildings, and I was the consummate surveyor, inspector, and administrator. I often found myself walking and ambling through heavily populated streets and alleyways carrying ready cash to the tune of twenty or thirty thousand, and many a cautious bank official at first hesitated a little before paying out to me these high, alarming sums, no doubt wondering how a wealthy woman could dare place such great trust in such a one as me. When I returned home, I always received a touchingly beautiful and grateful smile as a reward for my assiduous, honest, and upright services. Lord knows it’s true that service of this sort always gave and gives me great and joyful pleasure.

Frau Scheer in her turn was in no way lacking in attentiveness toward me insofar as she took no rent from me at all. And so I lived there free of charge; she also took pleasure in cooking for me in her spare time. This is a matter in which, as you can imagine, I was happy to let her have her way. First off, my own affairs were, as I have already emphasized, in a sorry state, and secondly I saw with my own eyes and smelled with my nose and in general quite clearly noticed with what genuine womanly pleasure this woman ran down to the market to purchase greens and other foodstuffs, ever conscious of her role as industrious housewife caring for her charge. If I didn’t eat much, she was insulted, and it would have made her deathly unhappy if I had refused to eat at all. In my opinion, a person must at times submit to accepting kindness and generosity — after all, there are times one must submit to their opposite. When I rejected, rather brusquely, all the other good things Frau Scheer was prepared to give me, she would say, “What a wicked man you are,” and was dissatisfied with me. The poor woman, she was dreaming! She forgot who she was. She forgot her sad, unlovely existence, her frailty and her melancholy age. She forgot the world’s unrelentingness, and if something or other reminded her of this again, her eyes would instantly fill with tears. She rhapsodized like a girl of twenty, and when she was then reminded of her age and all the evil in this world, her face involuntarily assumed an evil aspect: the face of evil, greedy Frau Scheer. After all, her life was coming to an end, and let no one try to tell me that battlefields and other horrors are any more terrifying and horrific than the end of any human existence. All endings are cruel, and every human life is a heroic life, and dying — everywhere, and under no matter what circumstances — is equally bleak, cruel, and sad, and every human being must prepare himself for the poorest and worst exigencies, and every room in which a dead person is laid out is a tragic room, and there was never a human life that lacked tragedy of the most sublime sort.