The Assistant

by Robert Walser

  Pauline now had a brutal task before her: restoring a certain degree of order to the devastated and disfigured office. When Joseph came downstairs at eight o’clock, things still looked utterly awful there, and so he decided to go down to the post office right away. Everything lay in a muddle: chairs, drawings, writing and drawing utensils, glasses and corks, and ink had been spilled, both red and black. There was wine on the floor. One of the bottles had been broken off at the neck. It looked as if it had been bears and not just Bärenswilers wreaking their havoc in the room, which was filled with such a stench that it seemed they would have to leave the windows wide open for a good ten days if the room was ever to be clean, cozy and habitable again.

  At the post office, Joseph mailed the letter to the head of the employment bureau. “Just in case,” he thought.

  The next day, four thousand marks were transferred to the accounts of the Tobler household as part of Herr Tobler’s inheritance. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something, and it was just barely enough to satisfy the most impatient and importunate dunners. Joseph had long since assembled a list of creditors, and so now the most aggressively fragrant blossoms were selected from this colorful meadow to have their odor blotted out at least for the time being. Among these furious, eye-dazzling plants were, among others, the gardener who had declared he would not rest until he had seen Tobler’s worldly goods impounded and the man himself cast out of the village; the electric company that had so scornfully shrugged its shoulders and turned off the pretty electric lights; the metalsmith who lived nearby—that “thankless cur,” as Tobler called him—who, it had been decided, would have the money “hurled at his feet”; and the butcher—but from now on “not one more bite of meat from that butcher shop!” The bookbinder, “that old saphead,” who should consider himself lucky etc.; the clock manufacturers, “who can’t really be blamed for insisting on payment”; the metal goods manufacturer who had built and sent a bill for the copper tower; and a few others who “no doubt deserved” their money.

  Half a day sufficed to stop up the mouths of these loudest and most importunate demands, but afterwards the money was gone. What do four thousand matks mean to a household that is up to its ears in debt? A small fraction of this sum was earmarked for household expenses, and an even smaller portion was given to Joseph as an installment of his salary.

  It had been a sunny, snowy morning with blue skies and winds and the earth wet with snow when the assistant went from door to door, making payments. He even stopped by the Bureau for the Recovery of Claims. And he could note the speed with which the money was vanishing by his coat pocket, which was becoming ever lighter.

  Towards afternoon, a letter arrived from the lawyer Bintsch in which this latter declared that nothing more was to be expected from Tobler’s mother. He had done everything in his power to convince her; but, as he was most sorry to report, his efforts had met with no success. Therefore his advice to Tobler was to resign himself to this fruitlessness and its consequences.

  As Tobler was reading this letter, his face contorted into a grimace that was painful to look at. He seemed to be struggling to master a nameless fury. Then it broke loose and flung him down upon a chair as if a force many hundredweights in strength had crashed down on him. His strong chest was wheezing and threatened to burst, like a bow stretched too tautly. His face looked up from below as if it had been pressed down from above by heavy fists. His neck appeared burdened with weights that were furiously rocking and whizzing about and pressing down upon him, living weights. His face had turned a bright red color. All around him, the air appeared to have become thick and stony, and an invisible-visible figure now appeared to be rising up close beside him to pat him familiarly but coldly upon his convulsing shoulder. Iron necessity itself seemed to have whispered in his ear: “You there! Give it one last try!”

  With leaden motions, Tobler opened his American roll-top desk and, groaning and shifting his back as though he were in pain, took out a pen and sheet of paper to write his mother a letter. But the characters he was setting down danced before his eyes. The desk flew up in the air past his sentiments, which were swirling about madly, the office was spinning, and he was forced to desist. With a rattle in his voice, he said to Joseph:

  “Call up Bintsch and ask him to tell you when he can be prepared for a meeting with me. Tell him it is a matter of the utmost urgency.”

  Joseph immediately set about obeying this order. He was agitated, was perhaps speaking not entirely clearly, it was possible that what he was saying was misunderstood; in short, it was quite some time before he was able to speak with Dr. Bintsch. Tobler had come up the stairs after him and now was standing right behind the assistant, who was made even more disoriented by the presence of his so pathologically incensed lord and master, with the result that when the desired connection had finally been established, he found himself struggling in a stammered conversation with the lawyer, unable to make himself understood.

  This was too much for Tobler. With a hideous-sounding cry of rage, he threw the inept speaker to one side so violently he was thrust against the doorframe of the living room, and seized the telephone’s handset himself to complete the derailed conversation and acquire the information he required.

  His rage had subsided, but his entire body was violently shaking. He developed a fever and had to lie down on the daybed, the same spot that not long before had been occupied by Dora. “Is Father sick?” his little daughter now asked. Frau Tobler, who stood with a worried expression beside the man lying there moaning, said to the girl: “Yes, child, Father is sick. Joseph made him angry,” whereupon she flashed a look of surprise and contempt in the assistant’s direction that caused him to retreat back down to the office. When he reached his desk, he attempted to go back to work as if nothing had happened, but what he was doing there wasn’t work, it was merely a tapping and fumbling about with trembling distracted fingers, an attempt at equanimity, an inability, a something-else, a nothing, something black. His heart was beating as if it might explode.

  Later he was called up to coffee. Tobler had meanwhile gone upstairs to his bedroom. After all, the consultation with the lawyer could not possibly take place until the following day, and until then there was evidently and apparently nothing left in all the wide world for the engineer to do. What exertion at this point could have some realistic goal? What plans had not become ridiculous? And sick! It felt so soothing to this harried man to think that he could lie in bed and go on doing so undisturbed until the next morning. He sent word to Joseph that if he went down to the post office he should bring him home a couple of good cigars. “And some oranges for Dora, Joseph,” Frau Tobler added. Joseph carried out these commissions.

  After the evening meal—the children had already been put to bed—the assistant said to Frau Tobler that he was finding it difficult to remain any longer in a place in which the head of the house was now taking the liberty, after he had insulted Joseph often enough with mere words, to assault him physically as well. This was too much for him, and he thought it would be the best thing if he went up to Tobler’s room at once to say to this man how coarse and stupid his behavior was. He was no longer capable of working, this he felt distinctly. A person who was shoved this way and that and thrown against doorframes was surely no longer in a position to bring any profit. Such a person must be a blockhead and good-for-nothing, otherwise it certainly wouldn’t be possible for him to be treated in such a way as Joseph had just experienced. The very thought of it was suffocating. In his opinion, even if all he had done in all the time he’d spent up here was squander Tobler’s resources, even that would not justify the physical disgrace and dishonor, but was that what he’d done? Hadn’t he always made a little bit of an effort? He at least knew that he had now and then devoted himself to his work with all his heart and all the strength he could muster, even if this strength was not always, as he would readily admit, enough to satisfy the righteous demands being made on him. But was this an appropriate way
of responding to his efforts to remain efficient and honest?

  He was weeping.

  Frau Tobler said coldly: “My husband is ill, as you know, and a disturbance will not exactly please him. But if it suits your fancy and if you believe you can suddenly no longer endure remaining here among us any longer, then do not hesitate to go upstairs and tell him what’s on your mind. I think you will receive the short and sweet reply that you and your conduct deserve.”

  The assistant remained seated. Then he got up and said, “I’ll just run down to the post office.”

  “So you aren’t going upstairs to see my husband?”

  “No,” Joseph replied. Herr Tobler was ill, it wouldn’t be right to disturb him. Besides, he felt like going out for a little walk.

  Outside he was received by a clear cold world. A lofty, vaulty sort of world. It had turned cold. He kept striking his feet against stones and chunks of ice. An ice-cold wind was blowing through the trees. Through their branches, stars were shimmering. His heart was full, he ran as if possessed. No, he didn’t want to leave. He was afraid Frau Tobler might have gone and told her husband everything. As a result of this thought, he hastened and hurried his steps. Moreover, he still hadn’t received the final installment of his salary. In short, the main thing was to remain in the household at all costs. “How improper it was to complain in such a manner,” he cried out into the wintry night. He resolved to fall on his knees before Frau Tobler and kiss her hands.

  She was still sitting in the living room when he returned. Still standing at the door—which, however, he carefully shut behind him—he at once began to speak:

  “I must tell you, Frau Tobler—how good it is that you are still sitting here—that I feel I am utterly in the wrong for having voiced complaints about my superior. I was too hasty, and I beg you to forgive me. My behavior was harebrained, and Herr Tobler was filled with agitation because of that lawyer’s accursed letter. Have you spoken with your husband yet? Have you told him everything?”

  “No, I haven’t said anything to him yet,” the woman replied.

  “How glad I am to hear it!” the assistant said, sitting down. He went on: “And I raced to get here, filled with terror at the thought that you might already have told him. I am sorry for everything I said. In the tumult of one’s feelings, madam, one can say so many things that ought to go unuttered. I’m so glad you haven’t yet said anything.”

  Frau Tobler remarked how sensible his words were.

  “I have resolved to throw myself at your feet and apologize on my knees,” the assistant stammered.

  “How unnecessary, faugh!” she replied.

  For a while the two were silent. The assistant found it so lovely to be sitting there in that room. This was something that resembled a home. And how often, in former times, he had walked the city’s lively and deserted streets, his heart filled with the cold, wicked, crushing sensation of having been abandoned. How old he had been in his youth. How the consciousness of not being at home anywhere had paralyzed him, strangled him from within. How beautiful it was to belong to someone, whether in hatred or impatience, displeasure or devotion, melancholy or love. The human magic that resided in a home like this—how dolefully enchanted Joseph had always been when he saw it reflected in some window that had been left standing open, making it visible down where he was standing on the cold street all alone, tossed from one place to another, without a home. How Easter, Christmas or Pentecost or New Year’s came streaming fragrantly down from such windows, and how poor he felt when he thought of how he was allowed to enjoy only the paltry, almost imperceptible reflection of this golden, ancient glory. This beautiful privilege of the upper classes. The kindness in their faces. This peaceful doing, the living, and letting live! He said:

  “How idiotic it is to be so swift to find oneself insulted.”

  It was quite right of him to say so, the woman opined, peacefully continuing to knit or crochet an undervest for Dora. She added:

  “And am not I, his wife, compelled to endure and acquiesce to all sorts of things? He is the head of the house, that’s all there is to it, a position of responsibility which demands forbearance and respect from the other occupants and members of the household. Certainly he ought not to insult others, but is he always in a position to rein himself in? Can he say to his rage: do be reasonable? Rage and bad temper are simply not reasonable entities. And we others, who enjoy the quite obvious advantage of being permitted to obey the orders that cost him so much effort to conceive and plan and to follow his suggestions, the wisdom of which is almost always clear to us—should we not, in times of uneasiness and resentment, simply make it our business to keep out of his way a little? We ought by now to have learned how to treat him, for even a lord and ruler needs to be treated in a quite particular manner. We ought to be skillful and pliant at moments when he is no longer conscious—as he usually is—of his composure and his reliable strengths, at moments when we perceive him to be incapable of restraining himself, as he once could. And when we have been inept and at least comparatively full of error, we needn’t feel too terribly piqued when his voice and the enormous burden of his worries and torments come thundering down upon us. Marti! Please believe me, I too have often been filled with fury at this very same man who wronged you today, who supposedly insulted you and subjected you to indignities. Well, under circumstances such as these, one need only temper one’s own dignity a little and forgive—for one has an obligation to forgive one’s master and superior. What would become of enterprises, households and businesses of all sorts, what would become of homes, indeed, what would become of the world itself if suddenly its laws were no longer allowed to pinch and shove and wound one a little? Has one enjoyed the benefits of obeying and imitating all year round only so that one might, one day or evening, come and puff oneself up and say: Do not insult me!? No, to be sure, a person doesn’t exist for the purpose of being insulted, but neither is it his purpose to give cause for anger. If confusion is unable to prevent itself from behaving in a foolish fashion, why should fury be held accountable for its blustering and ranting? And it is always a question of where one is and who one is. I am satisfied with you now, Joseph. Give me your hand. One can talk with you, and now it’s time for sleep.”

  Christmas was approaching. Even in the Tobler household this festive time of year could not help arriving, the holiday season: it was inescapable, traveling on the swiftest wings, a thought that communicated itself to all people and suffused all sensibilities, and so why should this thought make a detour around the Evening Star Villa? Could this even have been possible? When a house was standing there in the world, standing there so prettily and strikingly as that of the Toblers, there was after all no reasonable or natural cause why it should be spared anything that formed part of this so respectable, fragrant world. And then, too, there was the question: would the Toblers have wished to be spared?

  On the contrary, they were looking forward to the holiday. Tobler said that even if things were going poorly for him, that was still no reason to let Christmas pass by and through his house uncelebrated. That would really have been the last straw.

  The entire surrounding countryside appeared to be looking forward to the lovely festivities in its own way. It peacefully and languorously allowed itself to be covered with thickly falling snow, calmly holding out, as it were, its large, broad, old and wide hand to catch everything that was tumbling down so industriously out of the sky, so that all who saw this nearly said: “Just look, everything’s turning white, it will be a white, white world. Quite proper, too—just the thing for Christmas.”

  Soon the whole lake and mountain landscape lay beneath a thick, firm veil of snow. Heads that were swift to imagine things could already hear the jingling of swiftly advancing sleighs, though there were not yet any sleighs on the roads. The tables soon to be covered with Christmas gifts had already been set out, for the entire countryside resembled a beautifully adorned table beneath a neat white cloth. And the silence
and mutedness and warmth of such a landscape! All the sounds could only be half heard, as though the metalworkers had wrapped their hammers, and the carpenters their beams, and the turbines their blades, and the locomotives their shrill whistles in cotton-wool or woolen cloths. You could see only what lay near at hand, what could be measured out at ten paces, for the distance was comprised of impenetrable snow flurries, everything was being vigorously painted over in gray and white. Even the human beings stomping up to you were all white, and among any five persons there was always one who was just shaking the snow from his clothes. There was such peacefulness everywhere that you couldn’t help perceiving all worldly affairs as settled and contented and at peace.