The Assistant

by Robert Walser

  Tobler’s voice was still trembling darkly long after he had become cheerful and merry again, as if the agitation went on burning inside him. The three of them sat up until all hours playing cards. Joseph had to learn this card game too, they insisted; a man wasn’t a man if he didn’t know this game.

  The next morning, as agreed, a telephone call was made. Tobler threw himself into the railway carriage with such optimism in his face! In the evening, his face was dejected, wrathful and sad. A bargain had not been struck. In the place of liquid assets, there was a new bitter scene played out in the nocturnal summer house. Tobler sat there like the very image of a suppressed cloudburst and indulged in unlovely and blasphemous curses. For instance, he said that as far as he was concerned, the entire earth could sink into a quagmire, it would make absolutely no difference; he was already wading through an endless morass!

  When he went so far as to cry out that both he himself and everything around him should go straight to hell, Frau Tobler ordered him to control himself. He, however, turned on her so savagely that she collapsed face down upon the table, but she immediately then rose up to her full height and withdrew somewhat primly.

  “What you just said hurt your wife,” Joseph made so bold as to remark, suddenly feeling a sense of gentlemanly chivalrousness.

  “Hurt her—what rubbish! It’s a tiny world being injured there,” Tobler replied.

  Then the two of them sketched out a new advertisement to be placed in the international dailies. Their draft contained phrases like “Glorious enterprise” and “Maximal profit at absolutely no risk.” They resolved to send it along to the advertising agency the very next day.

  *

  Sunday arrived once more, and once more Joseph was given five marks pocket money. Once more he enjoyed the privilege of being able to report for work in the office at his own discretion. This in particular had something decidedly poetical about it. There would be an excellent meal again today, perhaps roast veal, deliciously golden-brown, with cauliflower from the garden, followed perhaps by applesauce, which tasted so splendid up here. Also he would be handed one of the better cigars. What a way Tobler had of laughing and looking down at one mockingly as soon as it was time to hand out cigars. Just as if Joseph were a handyman to whom one might say: “Here, have one—you must enjoy smoking a good cigar now and again.” As if Joseph had just finished painting a trellis or repairing a lock, or as if he had just pruned a tree. That was the way one rewarded an industrious gardener with a cigar. Was not Joseph Herr Tobler’s “right-hand man,” and was a right-hand man in fact sufficiently rewarded if given something nice to smoke on Sundays?

  He stayed in bed somewhat longer than usual, he opened the windows and, lying there, allowed himself to be shone upon and blinded by the white early-morning sun, for this sunshine was demanding to be savored, along with other things as well, for example the thought of breakfast. How sunny and Sunday-like it all was. Sunny days and Sundays would appear to have been joined in brotherhood since time immemorial, and even the cozy thought of a peaceful breakfast appeared to have been woven of something sunny and Sunday-ish, this was clear. How could it have been possible to be feeling, let’s say, crabby on a day such as this, much less ill-humored, much less melancholy. There was a sense of mystery in everything, in every thought, in one’s own legs, in the clothes lying on the chair, in the wardrobe, between the blindingly white bleached curtains, in the wash-stand, but this mystery was not unsettling, on the contrary, it radiated calm and peace and smiles. In fact, there were no thoughts in one’s head at all, though one didn’t quite know why—somehow it seemed essential that this be the case. So much sunshine was collecting in and around this absence of thought, and wherever it was, the sunshine recalled to Joseph’s mind the vision of opulently laden breakfast tables. Yes, this silly but almost sweet Sunday feeling began with a simple thought.

  He got out of bed, dressed himself more painstakingly than usual, and went out onto the rectangular platform that was at his disposal. From here one could see into the crowns of the trees in the orchard next door. How peacefully and blindingly sunny it all looked. Pauline, the maid, was just setting the breakfast table out in the open air. This was a sight the assistant could no longer resist; he raced downstairs in the direction of coffee, bread, butter and preserves.

  Later he went downstairs to the office. There wasn’t much to be done, but he sat down all the same—drawn by the almost pleasurable force of habit—at his desk, which resembled a kitchen table, and began his correspondence. Ah, how light-heartedly he seemed to be flirting today with the usually so solemn pen. The words “telephonic communication” appeared to be clothed in Sunday finery, just like the weather and the world outside. The turn of phrase “and I shall take the liberty” was as blue as the lake that lay at the feet of the Villa Tobler, and the “most sincerely” closing the letter seemed fragrant of coffee, sunshine and cherry jam.

  He went out the office door into the garden. What a Sunday feeling this was, to be able simply to interrupt one’s work at will to go have a quick look at the garden. How fragrant it all was, how warm it was already, despite the early morning hour. In half an hour or so, one might go for a swim, it “wouldn’t really make much difference.” Yes, today one might say these words calmly to Tobler’s face, and he would be of quite the same opinion as Joseph. The not making much difference, after all, was the whole difference between Sunday and a workday. The entire garden appeared enchanted, bewitched by the heat, by the buzzing of bees and the perfume of the flowers. This evening, the garden would have to be given a proper watering.

  What a perfect clerk he was to have had such a thought. Joseph now carried the glass ball outside.

  Then Tobler came up to him dressed in a truly elegant new suit and announced that he would be going on an outing today with his wife and children. After all, there was no point staying home all the time, and his wife deserved to have a little pleasure now and then. As for Joseph, Herr Tobler continued, he would no doubt want to go to the city to visit his friends there.

  “Why don’t you just let that be my business,” Joseph silently responded to his master, “whether I visit any friends.” But aloud he said, No, he would stay home today, that suited him better.

  “You can do whatever you like as far as I’m concerned,” Herr Tobler replied. Approximately half an hour later, the entire party—consisting of Herr and Frau Tobler, the two boys, the young lady from the neighborhood, and little Dora—had assembled before the house, prepared to depart; they would be traveling to a distant town to spend half a day at a cantonal singing festival. Frau Tobler had on a black silk dress that made her look fairly imposing. She instructed Pauline to keep watch over the house, and to Joseph she said casually that he might as well keep an eye on things too, since, as she’d been told, he was planning to stay home.

  Finally they departed, accompanied by the howls of the chained dog, which seemed distraught at being left behind. Beside Joseph, Silvi, Dora’s little sister, crouched on the ground. The girl appeared not in the least aggrieved at the injustice being done her. That she alone out of the four children was being left at home appeared to her an ordinary state of affairs. In fact she was accustomed to a variety of affronts and had lost all sensitivity to slights of this sort.

  “Have a nice time at home, Marti!” Tobler had said to Joseph in parting.

  “Yes, a nice time. Why don’t you worry about your own nice time, Herr Carl Tobler, engineer,” Joseph thought somewhat bitterly once he had made himself comfortable, book in hand, upon the turned-down bed in his pleasure chamber:

  “Off they go, these curious employers of mine, along with that caustic angel from the parquet factory, off for a pleasant day of traveling and song, and little Silvi is left behind like a malodorous mound of refuse. This Silvi, it seems, is nothing more than a little trollop on whom this lovely Sunday weather would be wasted. Beautiful Frau Tobler cannot stand the girl, she finds her hideous, and so Silvi must stay at home. An
d then our most estimable entrepreneur! Just three days ago, his rage and disappointment were shaking him from side to side and around in circles, a pitiable sight, and today here he is telling me he hopes I have a nice time and that I should go visit my acquaintances and friends in the city. He’s just afraid I’ll get too friendly with Pauline, that’s all.”

  He confessed to himself that he was being too bitter and forced himself to read his book. But as he was unsuccessful in this attempt, he laid the book to one side, went over to the table, picked up his own personal pen and a sheet of paper and wrote the following upon it:

  Memoirs

  I was just on the point of entertaining spiteful thoughts, but I shan’t allow it! Then I tried to read, but I was incapable of this, the contents of the book failed to take hold of me, and so I laid the book aside, for it is impossible for me to read without feeling enthusiasm about what I am reading. So now I am sitting at this table with the intention of occupying myself with my own person, for there is no one in the world who is eager to receive news of me. How long has it been now since I have written a heartfelt letter? My letter to Frau Weiss clearly demonstrates to me how I have been knocked and jolted out of the realm of close, intimate human contact, and how utterly I am lacking in people naturally justified to expect me to keep them up to date as to my comings and goings. The sentiment behind that letter was a fictitious one, a feeling I dreamed up. The letter is true, but at the same time it was an invention, produced by a mind that was horrified to find itself entirely deprived of relationships of a simpler and more self-evident sort. Am I calm now? Yes. And it is to this noonday stillness that I am addressing these words. I am ringed about by Sunday tranquility—what a shame that I cannot disclose this circumstance to some person of consequence: it would make the loveliest opening for a letter. But now I should like to describe my own nature a little.

  Joseph paused for a moment and then continued to write:

  I come from a good family, but believe that my upbringing was rather too cursory. By no means do I wish to criticize my father or mother with these words, Heaven forbid; I merely wish to do my best to shed some light on the question of what is going on with my person and with the particular zone of the world charged with the task of enduring my presence. The circumstances under which a child grows up certainly play a large role in its upbringing. The whole region and community take part in raising it. To be sure, parental dictums and school are the main thing, but what am I doing occupying myself with my own exalted person like this? I’d rather go for a dip.

  The assistant who was so poorly suited to diary writing laid aside his pen, tore up what he had written and left the room.

  After his swim, there was lunch with Pauline and Silvi. The maid—a person of rather coarse sensibilities—was just attempting, amid constant laughter that presupposed Joseph’s approval of her conduct, to instruct the child in manners, something in which the maid herself was notably lacking. This vain and heartless endeavor culminated in the demonstration and drill, repeated several times over, in the proper handling of knife and fork, whereby it was in no way expected that the lesson should be successful: in fact its success was not even desirable, since then the amusement provided by this harsh and entertaining exercise would have come to an end. The child sat there gazing with wide and, in point of fact, stupid eyes now at her taskmaster, now at Joseph, who was observing these proceedings calmly, and spilling her food in a rather unsightly manner, which caused Pauline to erupt in a renewed, exaggerated torrent of indignation calculated to appear serious to Silvi and comical to Joseph—as if satisfying two diametrically opposed worldviews with a single blow. Silvi was so sloppy that the housemaid, who had been given nearly absolute authority over the small creature by the child’s mother, found it appropriate or considered it necessary to box the troublemaker’s ears and shake her by the hair until Silvi began to scream, perhaps not so much because of the physical pain, though this was surely by no means insignificant, as on account of a last little stub of pride, of insulted humiliated childish pride, at having to submit to such abuse at the hands of an outsider, which is what Pauline was. Joseph kept his silence. Confronted with the child’s fury and pain, the maid herself suddenly began to act gravely offended and insulted; this was because Joseph had refused to laugh, which she found utterly incomprehensible, and also because Silvi had not submitted to being misused without protest, which the maid, in her thoughtlessness and coarseness, had taken for granted. “I’ll teach you to scream, you filthy little thing!” she cried or rather cawed, and seized the child, who had run away from her chair, thrusting her back into her seat so hard the child’s body was slammed against the chairback. Once more Silvi was forced to take up fork and knife in her little hands, and properly at that, as her teacher and instructress commanded her with a severe and sharp cry, so as to finish, under duress, this melancholy and unappetizing meal. Her tear-stained eyes made her appear to Pauline even more stupid and lopsided than before, which prompted this pedagogical mastermind to burst into laughter. The sight of Silvi eating dejectedly appeared to exert a drastic effect on Pauline’s laugh muscles. So humor had returned to the scene. A shameless set of jaws is quite an asset, and so Pauline of the broad forehead—upon which narrow-minded clodhopper astonishment was clearly depicted—inquired of Joseph, who was quietly looking on, whether he was angry or what else could be making him so tight-lipped. The audacity and pig-headedness of this flippant question produced such a feeling of revulsion in the one sitting there that he violently blushed. He would have had to attack the person sitting across from him physically if he had wished to convince her of the feelings he was experiencing. As it was, he merely murmured a few words and got up from the table, which only strengthened the maid’s belief in her instincts which were telling her that Joseph was, all in all, difficult to get along with, an unfriendly person who had no doubt intentionally set about insulting her and spoiling her mood. This new venomous sentiment was soon taken out on Silvi, who received orders to clear the table, a labor that in truth ought to have been performed by Pauline herself. In her earnest attempt to carry out the orders of this oppressive tyrant, the child had to rise to the toes of her small feet each time she removed something from the table, using both hands to grip a bowl, a plate or a few pieces of cutlery, and in this way she carried everything, piece by piece, meekly and with caution, keeping her eyes on the kitchen virago, out to the place where the washing-up would be done. She did this as though she were carrying in her little arms and hands a small, thorny, damp crown, the crown of irrevocable childhood sorrow that she had cried shimmering wet with her own tears.

  Joseph went up into the woods. The path that brought him here was very pretty and very quiet. Naturally he was occupied as he walked by thoughts of small, wizened, ill-used Silvi. Pauline appeared to him like a gluttonous bird of prey and Silvi like the mouse cowering beneath the talons of the cruel beast. How could Frau Tobler abandon her delicate little daughter to this dragon of a maidservant? But was Silvi really so delicate, and was the maid so fearsome a dragon? Perhaps things were not nearly so dire. It would be easy to fall prey to exaggeration if one insisted on always seeing on one side all the deviltry in the world, and on the other, all the sweetness and goodness. Silvi—the “filthy little thing”—was, it must be admitted, a tiny bit filthy, but Pauline was Pauline. Joseph found himself incapable of testifying on Pauline’s behalf in his thoughts; the most favorable thing he could say of her was that her father was an honest signalman and farmer. But what did the household of a signalman have to do with the brutal pleasures of mistreating children? Certainly it might be that Pauline’s father himself was capable of being half a raging bull—as far as anyone knew, it was quite possible! But this refined, nearly aristocratic Tobler lady, this mother, this woman descended from genuine bourgeois circles who had imbibed a delicate sensibility along with her mother’s milk, this clever and in many respects even beautiful woman—what of her? What cause did she have to spurn and ill-us
e her own child? Joseph smiled over this quaint expression, “ill-use,” it seemed so fully to represent the curious phenomenon it was describing. The word “spurn” made him think of something in a fairy tale, but one could “ill-use” poor, defenseless little children just as well today as many hundreds of years ago. Such a thing could even be accomplished in a Villa Tobler, the place where, as Tobler himself was in the habit of saying, two fairies so liked to disport themselves: decorum (I insist on decent behavior in my house) and cleanliness (devil take it, keep things tidy, do you hear). Could two such charming fairies tolerate something so unclean and, indeed, indecent as the on-going humiliation of a childish spirit in their presence, was this possible? It appeared to be! In fact, all sorts of things were, in the end, possible in this world when one took the trouble and love to reflect on this a bit while out for a walk through the meadows.

  Joseph encountered almost no one at all. Two farmers were standing beside the path. Lush meadows extended to either side of it, covered with hundreds of fruit trees. Everything appeared so close together, and yet also so broad and green. Soon he came to the forest and after wandering about for a while discovered a small, narrow, wooded ravine with a stream running through it and made himself comfortable in the moss by simply allowing himself to plop down on the soft ground. The brook was murmuring so nicely, the sun was flashing through the leaves of the tall beech trees, so familiar, and so cozy, and succulent green enveloped the ravine as if with sweet delicate veils. This would have been a lovely, appropriate setting for a romantic tale. From somewhere or other on the plateaus surrounding him came the sounds of rifle fire, there must have been a shooting range somewhere nearby. As for the rest, how still it all was! Not a breath of air could slip into this green hidden world. The trees would have had to fall down first, but they were all tall old trees that could withstand a storm, ten storms even, and today there was no sign of wind or rough weather above the ravine. Some young lady from the age of chivalry, dressed in a velvet skirt and leather gloves, might come walking through the ravine just now, leading her white steed by the reins and wearing her full, golden hair hanging loose about her, Joseph would not have been terribly surprised by this pageant. That’s what the place looked like, the perfect scene for chivalrous and womanly encounters. But what beautiful and chivalrous things might be found in the vicinity of the Villa Tobler? Pauline, for example, or else Tobler himself, the adventurous entrepreneur dressed for feats of derring-do? Enterprises there were, to be sure, any number of them, but what sorts of ventures were these? What did technical enterprises have in common with green wooded ravines, white steeds, noble dear female figures and courageous exploits? Did the knights and entrepreneurs of centuries past ride about on mounts resembling the “Advertising Clock” or the “Marksman’s Vending Machine”? Did there already exist in those days “ill-used” children of the Silvi variety? Oh yes, but in those days such children were said to be “cast out” or “spurned,” whereas today a certain individual, who was lying amid the most splendid greenery upon the moss, took it into his head to proclaim them “ill-used.”