The Assistant

by Robert Walser

  Carl Tobler.

  P.S.: Even today I am firmly convinced of the success of my enterprises. The Advertising Clock will prove its worth, you can count on it. And one more thing: My assistant will leave me if his outstanding salary is not paid out to him now.

  The same.

  While Tobler was composing this letter at his desk, the clerk seated at his writing table was leveling the muzzle of his epistolary musket at a brother of Tobler’s, a widely respected contractor in government service who was living in a remote region of the country, calling his attention, as his superior had instructed him, to the piteous conditions prevailing at the Evening Star and pointing out that it was high time that …, etc.

  “Have you written it? Show me. Let me sign it, or, wait, no—the letter ought to be composed in such a way as if you yourself had written it of your own accord, out of concern for your employer. Write it the other way and then sign it yourself. Do it as if you were writing without my knowledge, do you understand? I am not on good terms with my brother; you, however, are a perfect stranger to him. Hurry up, I’ve got to read what you’re putting down there. And then I’ve got a train to catch.”

  Tobler laughed and said:

  “These are tricks, my dear Marti, but for the love of God, one has to know how to help oneself. And go ahead and write that other thing to my esteemed brother, the thing about your overdue salary. And then we’ll both just have to wait and see where these tactics get us. My mother will no doubt have to comply. If she doesn’t … and don’t forget to write out a nice clean copy of the whole Advertising Clock business in a tidy hand. Have a smoke! At least we still have some cheroots in the house. Now either the devil is going to come for us, or we’ll have a breakthrough.”

  “How caught up he is in all these hopes and ‘tricks,’ ” Joseph thought.

  After a few days, Frau Tobler was able to get up again. A good thing, too, for Pauline did in fact require supervision. She was becoming neglectful. The lady of the house appeared once more in the living room, loosely draped in a dark blue house-dress, and quietly began to attend once more to the business and cares of the household. Her manner was quiet and lovely, and she appeared to be smiling silently with her entire being. Her voice had become thinner, her gestures more fleeting and timorous, and her eyes darted about like the inquisitive eyes of children. Her infirmity had cast a beautiful mildness over her entire conduct, she looked as if from now on she would never again be able to fly into a passion, to take sides. She behaved in a more natural way toward her Dora, no longer speaking to her in such a sugary voice—the confectionary shop was no longer doing such brisk business—and she was able now to look at Silvi without her face filling with obvious anger, which had almost always been the case before. In general, she appeared to have cast off certain emotional complexities, she made a nobler, more straightforward impression, you felt this when you looked at her, and she herself felt she had to perceive herself this way, too. Her face expressed sorrow, but also warmth and composure and something almost majestically maternal. “I am more or less healthy again, thank God!” all her smallest gestures appeared to be saying, and the language they spoke had to be a profound and true one, for gestures and manner are not good liars. Her mouth was still a bit feverish, as if the agitated tremor of unlovely past excitations had not yet left it, but in her large peaceful eyes the clear message lay gleaming: “I have become a bit better, more superior and refined. Look at me. It shows, doesn’t it?” Her hands reached out cautiously to pick up her needlework or some chinaware or a book, it was as if these hands had been given the gift of thought. They appeared to have lips, which were saying: “We have begun to think about so many, many things far more peacefully and openly. We have become more tender.” Yes, all of Frau Tobler had become somewhat more tender, but also paler.

  How pleasant she found it in the living room. The room had been thoroughly heated. She looked out through the windowpanes. Outside, everything lay beneath an opaque fog. How beautiful it was that one couldn’t see anything at all. How cozy it was inside here. For just an instant, an image of summer fluttered before her contented eyes, in her thoughts she gazed at it peacefully with a “well then!” before it vanished once more. Then she thought of her new dress and of the seamstress in the city, Frau Bertha Gindroz, and she couldn’t help laughing softly. She wiped a bit of dust from the furniture, but in fact what she was doing was more just touching the furniture as if she wished to caress it and to say hello. How dear and new everything appeared to her. These few days! And these few days, this one short week, had given everything an exotic, agreeable novelty in her eyes. Everything lay beneath a peculiar shimmer that made all it touched smaller and more delicate; she felt a bit dizzy and sat down.

  The dog now spent most of his time indoors. It had long since become too cold for him out in the doghouse. Only at night did he have to lie there.

  Up in the tower room, too—which could not be heated—it began to be unpleasantly cold, and Joseph spent his evenings and sometimes half the night down in the living room, most of the time alone with the woman, who scarcely received visitors any longer. The parquet factory women, the old lady and the young one, had quarreled with the Toblers over a legal question. The cause was a tiny bit of land that abutted the property of both neighbors and which both claimed as their own. The matter was too trivial to be taken to court, but it made for bad blood and led to insults and words of abuse, and the old friendly-neighborly interactions had come to an end. Tobler had declared that he didn’t want to see that clucking old hen coming over his garden hedge and into his house ever again. And with this, the friendship was cancelled. To be sure, was there anyone of whom Tobler had not said something similar? In the case of most of his acquaintances, or nearly most, Tobler’s position was: just let them dare set foot once more upon Tobler terrain, they’ll see what sort of welcome they get!

  And so the family spent the long evenings alone. Mostly the lamp illuminated two heads, the woman’s and that of the assistant, who was keeping her company, along with a card game or book that lay open on the dining table.

  Several days passed. Not one hour went by unnoticed. These days were counted, they were tallied up, for it was not a matter of indifference whether they passed swiftly or slowly—after all, the existence of the Tobler household was now merely a matter of days. The family got out of the habit of thinking in months or years, or else they compressed these thought-months and thought-years and forced their memories to grasp them more quickly, and so they went on living, waiting for whatever signs the day might bring. Any rustling sound was important, for it might be the postman delivering some new, worrisome unpleasantness in the form of a letter or a demand for payment. Ringing sounds were important, for it might be the sound of the doorbell announcing the arrival of some person with distressing intentions. A shout was important, for it might be significant: “Hey there, Herr and Frau Tobler,” this voice might cry out, “hurry up, it’s time for you to leave behind this loveliest and most familiar of all human habitations. Come now, get a move on. You’ve been living high on the hog long enough.” Any shout they heard might well contain hideous words like these. But colors, too, were important—the day’s visage, the features and gestures of these, as it appeared, final days—for they spoke of final hopes and final exertions and the things one must do in order to continue to be filled with hope. How soft-spoken they were, these days. The days were by no means angry with the Tobler household, far from it! Rather, they seemed to wish to shelter it from high up and far away, in the form of clouds and spirits, to smile at and console it. These days almost resembled Frau Tobler a little. Like her, the days appeared to have been ill, and now the days had just as pale and soft a countenance as the woman around whom they were giving way to one another in irreversible succession.

  But Frau Tobler was little by little becoming the old Frau Tobler once more. The more she recovered, the more she resembled herself. Well, it would have been exceedingly peculiar, wouldn’
t it, if she had become another person instead! No, a living human creature is not so quick to leap out of its own nature. Provisions are in place to ensure that a thing like that will never come to pass. If the woman made a gentler impression, it was only because she was still feeling weak.

  One evening around this time, the two of them, the woman and the assistant, were sitting beside the lamp in the living room. Her husband was on the road. When wasn’t he on the road these days? Upon the table, beside each of the two persons sitting there, stood a half-full glass of red wine. They were playing cards. Frau Tobler was winning, therefore her expression was gay. She was in the habit of laughing whenever she was winning at cards, and this is what she was doing now. She allowed naively gleeful laughter to leap out of her mouth, laughter that might at some other time have annoyed her partner. But Joseph just took a sip of wine to accompany his loss, and the two of them went on with their game; Frau Tobler shuffled the cards. After approximately one hour, she said she would like to read a little in the book the assistant had brought her from the village that day. The game was interrupted, the woman at once began to read, while Joseph, feeling no desire to pick up a newspaper or book himself, sat down on the daybed and began to observe the reading woman. She appeared to have immersed herself completely in the story contained in the book she was reading. From time to time she passed one hand carefully across her apparently highly pensive brow, while her mouth began to move silently but uneasily, as if it wished to comment on the events she was reading about. Once she even gave a faint but mournful sigh, her audible breaths making her breast fly up and down. How strange this was to silently observe! Joseph became more and more immersed in his observation of the reading woman, and it seemed to him as if he, too, were reading a large, mysteriously suspenseful book, indeed, it seemed as if he were reading virtually the very same book as Frau Tobler, whose brow, which he was diligently watching, seemed in an odd way to be communicating the book’s contents and explaining them to him.

  “How quietly she is reading,” he thought, still gazing at her. Suddenly she looked up from the book, glancing over at the assistant with a look of surprise, as if she and her thought-eyes had been off in some far-distant realm and her eyes were now having difficulty making sense of what they saw. She said:

  “It seems you have been looking at me the entire time I was reading, and I didn’t even notice. Do you enjoy this? Aren’t you bored?”

  “No, not at all,” he replied.

  “How a book can draw you in,” she said and went on reading.

  After a while she seemed to have grown tired. Perhaps her eyes were hurting a little. In any case, she stopped reading, but did not yet shut the book, as if she were still considering whether or not to continue.

  “Frau Tobler!” Joseph said softly.

  “What?” she asked.

  She shut her book and looked over at the clerk, who, it appeared, had something special to say to her. But an entire minute of silence passed. Finally Joseph said hesitantly that he was being incautious. He had wished to say something quite specific. He had noticed that she appeared to have just finished reading, and that, as he even now beheld, the expression on her face was good-natured. Suddenly it had occurred to him that he might seize this opportunity, which he had been awaiting for such a long time, and speak to her, and now he found himself once more lacking the courage to speak those words he’d been intending to utter. Now he himself realized something that Frau Tobler had already said to him many weeks ago, namely that he was a peculiar individual. What he had wanted to say was foolish and not even worthy of being heard. She should permit him to hold his tongue.

  The woman furrowed her brow and asked the assistant to come sit closer beside her and speak. She wished to know what it was he’d wished to tell her. One couldn’t just start talking to people and make them curious about things that then did not come. Such behavior was cowardly, or thoughtless. She was listening.

  Joseph had taken a seat at the table as she’d instructed him and said that what he had to report concerned Silvi.

  The woman was silent and looked down. He continued:

  “Allow me, Frau Tobler, to tell you frankly how repugnant I find the treatment reserved for this child. You say nothing. Very well, I will take this to mean that your kindness is bidding me continue. You are doing this tiny creature a huge injustice. What is to become of her some day? Will she ever have the courage and the requisite desire to display any sort of human behavior to others? After all, she will remember, and be compelled to remember, that in her own youth she was raised in a most inhuman fashion. What sort of child-rearing is this, delivering a child into the hands of a coarse and stupid maidservant, a hussy, a Pauline? Cleverness must forbid such a thing, even if lovelessness allows it. I am speaking in such a way because this has been occupying me, because on many a day I have witnessed things that have quite honestly caused me pain, and because I feel within me the urge to serve you, Frau Tobler, in every way I can. I’m being rude, aren’t I. Well, that’s the way peculiar persons behave at times. But no. I would like to speak to you quite differently. This is not appropriate. I have already said too much, and not a single word more shall cross my lips today.”

  For several minutes silence prevailed; finally Frau Tobler said that the thought had long since crossed her mind that they had cause to reproach themselves on Silvi’s account. All of this, by the way, appeared terribly strange to her. But the assistant need not be afraid, she forgave him for the words he had just spoken, she could see he meant well. Once more she was silent. A bit later she said, “The thing is, I don’t love her.”

  “Why not?” Joseph asked.

  Why not? This question appeared to her foolish, ill-considered. She simply did not love Silvi and in fact couldn’t abide her. Could one force oneself to feel love and goodwill? What sort of feeling would this be that one forced and gagged out of oneself? Could she help it if she felt she was being driven away from Silvi with iron blows and hammers the moment she laid eyes on her even at a distance? Why was it that Dora appeared so sweet to her? This she didn’t know and had no desire to understand. Even if she wished to learn these things: would the fitting answers to these, as it appeared to her, superfluous and hopeless questions ever be hers to know? How difficult it all was. Yes, she knew quite well that she was in the wrong. Even when Silvi was a tiny child she had, strangely enough, begun to hate her. Yes, hate, that was the right word, it perfectly described the feeling she associated with this child. She would make an effort in the next few days to see whether it was possible for her to cultivate an attachment to the child once more, but she had no high hopes for such experiments, love could not be learned: one either had and felt love, or one did not. Not having it meant, she believed, that one would never have it. But she would try, and now she wished to go to bed, she felt quite tired.

  She got up and went to the door. At the threshold she turned around and said:

  “I almost forgot—good night, Joseph. How distracted I am. Put out the lamp before you go up to your room. It will be quite some time yet before Tobler returns. You have made my heart a little heavier this evening, but I am not angry with you.”

  “I wish I had kept my peace,” Joseph said.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  With these words, she went upstairs.

  The assistant remained standing in the middle of the room. A short while later, Tobler appeared. The other said:

  “Good evening, Herr Tobler, hmm, what I wanted to take the liberty of saying is that half an hour ago I committed the incautiousness of saying rude things to your wife yet again. I wish to confess this to you in advance. Frau Tobler will no doubt be inclined to complain about me. I assure you it was nothing but foolish trifles, things of absolutely no importance or weight. I would ask you most politely not to look at me with such big eyes, I believe that neither are your eyes a mouth nor am I some edible object—there is nothing about my person that can be eaten. As for the tone of this speech, i
t can be explained by the fact that it is being dictated by a mind filled with ravings. Would it not be better if you were now finally to drive your most peculiar clerk out of the house? Your wife mistreats Silvi all year round undisturbed. Have you no eyes in your head? Are you a father or merely an entrepreneur? Good night, good night, I suppose there is no longer any need for me to wait and hear what you might have to say in response to this strange performance. I shall assume I am being relieved of my duties.”