The Assistant

by Robert Walser

  Joseph lit himself a cheroot.

  “Quite a pleasant spot in fact, this technical office. To be sure, most aspects of the business practices employed here still mystify me. I have always had trouble comprehending new and unfamiliar things. I’m aware of this, oh yes. Generally people take me for smarter than I am, but sometimes not. How peculiar everything is!”

  He took up a sheet of paper, crossed out the letterhead with two strokes of the pen and quickly wrote the following:

  Dear Frau Weiss!

  In point of fact you are the very first person I am writing to from up here. Thoughts of you are the first and easiest and most natural of all the many thoughts presently buzzing around in my head. No doubt you were often surprised at my behavior when I was your tenant. Do you still remember how you often had to shake me out of my dull, hermit-like existence and all my wicked habits? You are such a dear, good, simple woman, and perhaps you will permit me to adore you. How often—indeed, every four weeks or nearly—I came to see you in your room with the succinct request that you be patient with regard to my monthly rent. Never did you humiliate me, or rather, you did, but only with your kindness. How grateful I am to you and how glad I am to be able to say these words. What are your esteemed daughters now doing and how are they living? The bigger one will no doubt be getting married soon. And Fräulein Hedwig, is she still employed at the life insurance company? So many questions! Are these not utterly foolish questions, given that it’s been only two days now since I parted from you? It seems to me, dear, revered Frau Weiss, as if I’d lived beside you for years and years and years, that’s how lovely, long and peaceful the thought of having been with you feels. Can a person make your acquaintance without also being compelled to love you? You always told me I should be ashamed to be so young and yet so lacking in enterprise, for you always saw me sitting and lying in my dark room. Your face, your voice, your laughter were always a comfort to me. You are twice as old as me, and have twelve times as many worries and yet appear so young, even more so now than when I was still living with you. How could I always have been so tight-lipped in your presence? Incidentally, I still owe you money, don’t I, and I’m almost glad of this. Exterior ties can preserve the life of inner bonds. Never doubt my respect for you. How foolishly I am speaking. I am living here in a lovely villa, and in the afternoons, when the weather is fine, I enjoy the privilege of drinking coffee in the summer house. My boss has stepped out for the moment. The house stands upon what one might call a green hill, and the train tracks run beside the road at the bottom, quite close to the lake. My lodgings are most agreeably situated in an, it appears to me, rather regal high tower. My master seems to be an honest man, if somewhat pompous. Possibly there will be scuffles of a personal nature between us one day. I do not wish for this to happen. Really I don’t, I would prefer to live in peace. Farewell, Frau Weiss. The image I retain of you is beautiful and precious; it can’t be put in a frame, but neither can it be forgotten.

  Joseph folded up the sheet of paper and placed it in an envelope. He was smiling. The memory of this Frau Weiss had something so friendly about it, he didn’t quite know why. And now he had written to a woman who, based on the impression he had given her of his person, would hardly be expecting so swift and affectionate a letter and would certainly not be prepared for it. Had this happenstance acquaintance had so great an influence on him? Or did he love to surprise and bewitch people? But the letter, once he had glanced over and inspected it, appeared appropriate to him, and he set off for the post office, as it was in any case time for this.

  In the middle of the village, a young man covered in soot from head to toe suddenly stopped short before Joseph, gazing at him in laughter, and held out his hand. Joseph made a show of astonishment, for he really could not remember where and when in his previous existence he might have encountered this black figure. “So you’re here, too, Marti?” the man cried out, and now Joseph recognized him: this man had been his comrade during the military training he had only just completed. He greeted him, but then pretended he was on a pressing errand and took his leave.

  “Ah, the military,” he thought, proceeding on his way, “how it forces people from all imaginable walks of life to join together in a single shared sentiment. In the entire country, there is no elegantly brought up young man, provided he is healthy, who will not one day suffer the fate of being compelled to leave his exclusive environment behind and make common cause with a random assortment of equally young common laborers, farmers, chimney-sweeps, clerks and even ne’er-do-wells. And what common cause it is! The air in the barracks is the same for everyone—it is deemed good enough for the baron’s son and fitting for the humblest farmhand. All distinctions in rank and education tumble mercilessly into a large and to this day still unexplored chasm, that is, into camaraderie. Camaraderie rules the day, for it is what ties all these various things together. No one thinks of his comrade’s hand as dirty, how could he possibly? The tyrant Equality is often unendurable or at least can seem so, but what an educator it is, what a teacher. Fraternity can be distrustful and petty with regard to trifles, but it can be great as well, and indeed it is great, for it possesses all the opinions, the feelings, the strength and drives of everybody. When a nation is able to guide the minds of its young people into this chasm—which is large enough to contain the earth and thus easily has room for a single country—it has then succeeded in barricading itself off in all directions, on all four borders, with fortresses that are impenetrable, for they are living fortresses equipped with feet, memories, eyes, hands, heads and hearts. Young people truly are in need of rigorous training …”

  Here the clerk interrupted his train of thought.

  Verily, he was speaking and thinking just like a general, he thought, laughing. Soon thereafter he was home again.

  Joseph had been working at an elastic factory when he was called up. Now he thought back on this pre-military time. Before his eyes, an old elongated building appeared, a black gravel path, a narrow room, and the severe, bespectacled face of the supervisor. Joseph had been engaged there, as they say, provisionally, on a non-permanent basis. He and his entire person appeared to constitute merely a sort of frill, an ephemeral appendage, a knot tied for the nonce. When he took up this position, he already vividly saw before him the moment when he would leave it again. The apprentice learning the elastic trade was “above” him in every way. Joseph was constantly having to seek the advice of this person, who wasn’t even fully grown yet. But in fact that didn’t bother him at all. Oh, he had already gotten used to so very many things. He performed his work absent-mindedly, that is, he had to confess that he appeared to have lost track of many absolutely essential bits of knowledge. Certain things that other people were able to assimilate at astonishing speed took so strangely long to sink into his skull. What could he have done to change this? His main consolation, a thought constantly on his mind, was the “non-permanence” of his position. He lodged at the home of an elderly, pointy-nosed and pointy-mouthed spinster who occupied a most peculiar room, which was painted light green. An étagère held several old and modern books. The spinster was, it appeared, an idealist—not one of the fiery sort, but rather one who was frozen stiff. Joseph quickly learned that she maintained an assiduous amorous correspondence with—as he was able to ascertain from a lengthy epistle carelessly left lying upon the round table one day—either a book printer or architectural draftsman, he could no longer quite remember which, who had emigrated to the canton of Graubünden. He quickly read the letter, sensing as he did so that the injustice he was thereby committing was only a slight one. The letter, incidentally, was hardly worth being read on the sly, one might just as well have pinned up copies all over the city, so few secrets did it contain, so very little that an outsider might have been puzzled over. It was modeled on the most ordinary sorts of books, it contained travel descriptions sketched in broad strokes and adorned with crosshatching. How splendid the world was, he read in this letter, when one too
k the trouble to ramble through it on foot. It then went on to describe the sky, the clouds, the grassy slopes, the nanny goats, cows, cowbells and the mountains. How significant all these things were. Joseph occupied a tiny room at the rear of the building, where he read books. Any time he set foot in his little chamber, bookish pursuits began flapping wildly about his head. He was reading one of those huge novels you can keep reading for months. He took his meals at a pension filled with pupils from a technical school as well as apprentices in the mercantile trades. It cost him great effort to converse with these young people, and so he remained largely taciturn at meals. How mortifying it all was. In this, too, he was hanging by a thread, just a button that no one took the trouble to sew back on again, as the jacket itself no longer had much wear in it. Yes, his existence was nothing more than a hand-me-down jacket, a suit that didn’t quite fit. Just outside the city lay a round hill of moderate height covered with vineyards and topped with a crest of forest. Well, that was certainly a charming spot for taking walks. Joseph regularly spent his Sunday mornings up here, recreation that invariably found him entangled in far-off, almost pathologically lovely reveries. Down at the factory, things were decidedly less agreeable, despite the incipient spring that was beginning to unfurl its tiny fragrant wonders on all the bushes and trees. One day the boss gave Joseph a proper dressing-down, indeed, in reprimanding him, he even went so far as to call him an imposter, and for what reason? Oh, it was just another instance of mental indolence. Empty heads, to be sure, can do considerable harm to a business venture, either by failing to perform the mathematical operations properly or else—and this is worse by far—neglecting to perform them at all. Joseph had found it so difficult to verify a calculation of interest that had been made in English pounds. He was lacking certain skills necessary to complete this task, and rather than admitting this openly to the supervisor, which he was ashamed to do, he placed his mendacious confirmation at the bottom of the page without having truly checked the calculations. He penciled in an M beside the final figure, which signified the firm and stable fact of its having been confirmed. But one day, a suspicious question on the part of the supervisor revealed that Joseph’s verification had been faked and that he was in fact incapable of solving equations of this sort. After all, the currency in question was the English pound, and Joseph had no idea how to handle it. He deserved, his superior declared, to be thrown out in disgrace. If there was something he didn’t understand, there was nothing dishonorable about that, but if he feigned understanding where there was none, that was outright theft. There was no other name for it, the supervisor said, and Joseph should be thoroughly ashamed of himself. Oh then, what a thunderous heart-pounding he had felt. It was as if a black wave were devouring his entire being. His own soul, which had always appeared to him anything but wicked, was now constricting him on all sides. He was trembling so violently that the numbers he was writing came out looking monstrously unfamiliar, distorted and huge. But an hour later he was again in such good spirits. He strolled to the post office, it was lovely weather, and walking along like that, he had the sudden impression that everything was kissing him. The small, sweet leaves all seemed to be fluttering toward him in a caressing, colorful drove. The people walking by, all of them perfectly ordinary, looked so beautiful he would have liked to fling his arms around them. He peered contentedly into all the gardens, and up at the open sky. The fresh white clouds were so beautiful and pure. And then the lush, sweet blue. Joseph hadn’t forgotten the unpleasantness that had just transpired, he carried it with him, still with a sense of shame, but it had been transformed into something both carefree and wretched, both unchanging and touched by fate. He was still trembling a little and thought: “Must I be drubbed with humiliations before I can take true pleasure in God’s world?” At the end of the workday, he stepped casually into a cigar shop he knew quite well. This shop was home to a woman who was possibly, well, probably, and in point of fact beyond all doubt, a whore. Joseph was in the habit of sitting down on a chair in her shop evening after evening, smoking a cigar and chatting with the owner. She’d taken a liking to him, that was plain to see. “If I please this woman,” he thought, “then I am doing her a good turn by sitting beside her on a regular basis,” and he acted accordingly. She told him the entire story of her youth and various lovely and unlovely things about her life. She was already growing old, and her face was rather hideously painted, but good eyes shone out of it, and as for her mouth: “How often it must have wept,” Joseph thought. He always behaved nicely and politely in her presence, as if the appropriateness of this conduct went without saying. Once he stroked her cheek and noticed the joy she felt at this caress; she blushed and her mouth trembled as if she wished to say: “Too late, my friend.” In earlier days, she had waited tables for a while, but what does any of this matter, seeing as the entire ephemeral frill was detached just a few weeks later. The boss gave Joseph a bonus as a farewell present despite the incident with the English pound, and wished him luck in the barracks. Now comes a railway journey through the vernally enchanted countryside, and then there is nothing left to know, from then on a person is nothing but a number—you are given a uniform, an ammunition pouch, a sidearm, an actual rifle, a cap and heavy marching shoes. You no longer belong to yourself; you are no longer anything more than a quantity of obedience and a quantity of drills. You sleep, eat, do calisthenics, shoot, march and allow yourself periods of rest, but all these things take place according to the rules. Even feelings are scrupulously monitored. At the outset, you feel as if your bones will break, but bit by bit the body steels itself, the flexible kneecaps become iron hinges, the head empties of thoughts, arms and hands become accustomed to the gun that accompanies the soldiers and recruits everywhere. In his dreams, Joseph heard orders being shouted and the staccato din of gunfire. For eight weeks things continued in this way; an eternity it wasn’t, but sometimes it felt like one.

  But what does any of this matter now that he is living in the home of Herr Tobler.

  *

  Two or three days is not such a terribly long time. It’s not long enough to familiarize oneself completely with a room, let alone with an in fact rather imposing house. Joseph was in any case a slow learner, at least that’s what he imagined, and what we imagine is never entirely lacking in underlying justifications. The Tobler house, moreover, consisted of two separate parts: it was both a residence and a place of business, and it was Joseph’s duty and obligation to acquaint himself with both aspects. When family and business are situated in such immediate proximity that there is, as it were, physical contact, it isn’t possible to become well-versed in one while overlooking the other. The responsibilities of an employee in such a household do not lie explicitly in one realm or explicitly in the other—they are dispersed. Even the hours for the discharge of duties are not precisely calibrated, but rather may at times extend deep into the night, or occasionally cease abruptly in the middle of the day for a while. He who enjoys the privilege of drinking afternoon coffee out in a summer house in the company of a woman who is certainly not half bad has no cause to become cross when he is called on to complete some urgent task after eight in the evening. He who enjoys such delicious lunches as Joseph must attempt to repay this kindness with redoubled effort. He who is permitted to smoke cheroots during business hours needn’t grumble if the lady of the house asks him to take on some quick household chore or familial task, even when the tone of voice in which the request is made should happen to sound more imperious than timidly supplicant. Who is able to enjoy only pleasant and flattering things all the time? Who would be so presumptuous vis-à-vis the world as to expect from it nothing but pillows to recline upon—never stopping to consider that these velvet and silken pillows, filled and stuffed with the finest down, cost money? But Joseph never expected any such thing. It is important to remember that Joseph had never had much cash in his possession.

  Frau Tobler found there was something curious about him, something as it were out of t
he ordinary; she did not, however, form a good opinion of him, even approximately. He struck her as rather ridiculous in his worn-out, faded suit, which had been dyed a dark green color, but even in his behavior she thought she could discern something odd, an opinion which, in certain respects, was quite correct. His irresolute demeanor was odd, as was his obvious lack of self-confidence, and his manners were odd as well. On the other hand, it must be observed that Frau Tobler, a bourgeoise of highly authentic lineage, was quick to find many things odd if they appeared even only the slightest bit alien to her world-view. This being the case, however, let’s not allow ourselves to get too worked up over such a woman finding such a young man odd, but rather report on their conversation. We shall return to the little summer house and to the hour of five o’clock:

  “What a magnificent day it is,” Frau Tobler said.

  “Oh yes,” the assistant responded, “it really is splendid.” Still seated at the table, he half turned to gaze off into the blue distance. The lake was a pale, pale blue. A steamer dispersing musical sounds was gliding past. One could just make out the handkerchiefs being waved about by the people enjoying this excursion. The smoke from the steamer flew toward the back of the boat where it was absorbed into the air. The mountains on the distant shore were scarcely discernable through the haze that this utterly perfect day had spread across the lake. The peaks appeared to have been woven out of silk. Indeed, the entire round vista was blue; even the nearby greenery and the red of the rooftops had a bluish tinge to them. You could hear a single droning sound, as if all the air, all that transparent space, were quietly singing. Even this droning and buzzing sounded and looked blue, or nearly! How tasty the coffee was again today. “Why does it make me think of home, of my childhood, when I drink this peculiar coffee?” Joseph thought.