The Assistant

by Robert Walser

  And now Tobler was having to make a journey through all this snowy magic, traveling by train to the city to have a conversation with the lawyer Bintsch. But at his side, at least, he had his wife, who was making the trip along with him so as to buy a few presents at the capital’s large department store for the rapidly approaching holiday.

  That evening there was again a train-station scene, but this time it was a snowy and therefore somewhat gayer one. Pauline’s laughter and Leo’s gleeful barking made dark sound-stains upon the snow, though ordinarily laughter and barking tend to make things brighter, but what could compete in brightness and luster with the snow’s own glittering whiteness? This time, too, packages were received, and a lady in furs who had alighted from the train stood there looking like the veritable wealthy and benevolent Mother Christmas herself, and yet it was only Frau Tobler, the wife of a businessman, and a ruined one at that. But she was smiling, and a smile like that can turn even the poorest and most harried woman into half a princess, for a smile always calls to mind something worthy of reverence and respect.

  The snow remained on the ground until the day itself—clean and firm, for there were cold nights that made the white blanket freeze to a crust. On Christmas Day, Joseph took a walk up the mountain he knew so well just as evening was approaching. The small paths went snaking pale and yellow through the shimmering white meadows, the limbs of the thousand trees were glittering with frost: such an utterly sweet spectacle! The farmhouses stood there amid all this delicate white branching splendor, like decorative or ornamental houses created only to be looked at and for the innocent understanding of a child. The whole region appeared to be awaiting some regal princess, that’s how delicately and neatly it was dressed. It appeared to be a girl, a shy and somewhat sickly girl, one of infinitely delicate leanings. Joseph strode further uphill, and then all at once the gray veils enclosing the earth lower down frayed and were lifted, pierced through by the most fiery sky-blue, and a sun, just as warm as in summertime, made the walker believe it all just a fairy tale. Tall fir trees stood there with a proud, powerful bearing, laden with snow that was melting in the sun and tumbling down from their large branches.

  When Joseph came home, arriving just at nightfall, the Christmas tree had already been lit in the guest room, a corner room that was generally never used. Frau Tobler now led the children into the room and showed them their presents. Even Pauline was given a gift, and Joseph received a little crate of cigars with the remark that the gift was not lavish but came from the heart. Tobler was striving to create a cozy, tavern-like atmosphere for this celebration, smoking his familiar pipe and squinting at the fir tree that was filling the room with the loveliest radiance. Frau Tobler smiled and said a few appropriate words, for example, how beautiful such a little tree was. But she was having a hard time getting the words out. In general, it all felt a bit stumbling, and the mood surrounding this handful of people was one not of joyous contemplation but of melancholy. Besides which, it was cold in the guest room, and a place meant to be filled with Christmas cheer ought not to be cold. For this reason, everyone went back into the living room to warm up a little, and then returned to the tree. Every Christmas tree is beautiful and cannot fail to touch those who behold it. Even the Tobler tree was beautiful, it’s just that the people standing around it were unable to bring themselves to feel any sustained, profound sentiment or joy.

  “You ought to have seen last year, that was a Christmas! Come with me, have a glass of wine,” Tobler said to the assistant and made him return to the living room where it was warm. Joseph was looking slightly out of sorts—as if the cigars had displeased him—a circumstance of which he himself was unaware. This year, the woman said, sighing, they just weren’t in the right mood to celebrate. Hesitantly, she suggested a round of Jass. Since they’d played this game all year long, they might as well turn to their cards on Christmas as well, perhaps it would lift their spirits a little. And so they all took refuge in their game.

  Meanwhile the tree had lost its radiance and lights. The children were allowed to spend another half hour occupied with their presents and then they were sent off to bed. Little by little, the air in the Christmas living room was transformed into that of a pub. The laughter and behavior of the three lonely people sitting there drinking wine, in part smoking cigars, in part eating bonbons as they played cards, lost all signs of that telltale shyness and singularity that might have called to mind the holiday spirit. It was the most ordinary behavior and the most unfestive sort of laughter. The mood that had taken hold of these players, moreover, was not even their usual sense of casual familiarity, for after all it was Christmas, and the more delicate and lovely thoughts that might now and again occur to one or the other reminded them in passing of the sin they were committing by corrupting and invalidating the holiday and its meaning in this way.

  Yes, these three people were lonely, and loneliest among them was the assistant, because he felt, as the new arrival in the household, that he had become part of a home that was gradually ceasing to be one at all; because unlike Herr Tobler he could not say he had the right to do and forbid or avoid anything he pleased between his own four walls, as the house did not belong to him; because he had so wanted to experience and celebrate Christmas now that he was for once part of such a household and bourgeois family; because it had seemed to him in recent years that he was missing a great deal by being unable to experience all these things; and because of all the three card-players he was the one in the worst spirits, which he couldn’t help finding unjust.

  “So is this really Christmas?” he thought.

  The woman suddenly remarked, among other things, that it really wasn’t right to play cards on Christmas. At home in her parents’ house, such a thing would never have occurred. It really wasn’t proper the way they were reverting to tavern life tonight.

  Thrust into a foul humor by these words, Tobler replied: “Well then, let’s stop!”

  Throwing his cards on the table, he cried out:

  “Most certainly it is not proper to do such a thing on Christmas. But what sort of circle is this here? What are we? The wind might sweep us from this house tomorrow morning. Where there’s money, people can be in a mood to celebrate holidays, even the holiest ones. Yes, where there is prosperity, where there is happiness, success and the general pleasures of domestic life. When a person has had to spend three or four months slaving unnaturally to prevent the failure of his life’s work, and this without success, is he supposed to then be able suddenly to enter into festive and celebratory spirits? Is such a thing even thinkable? Am I right or not, eh Marti?”

  “Not entirely, Herr Tobler,” the assistant said.

  There was a protracted silence which, the longer it lasted, no one dared to interrupt. Tobler wanted to say something about the Advertising Clock, the woman something about Dora, and Joseph something about Christmas, but each of them suppressed his thoughts. It was as if all their mouths had been sewn shut. Suddenly Tobler shouted:

  “So open up your gobs and say something! This is such a bore, a person would do better to just go to the inn.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Joseph said and took his leave. The others, too, soon went upstairs, and Christmas was over.

  The week leading up to New Year’s passed quietly and with a curious intensity of feeling; the business was in a shambles, and there was little to do apart from receiving a strange person in the office from time to time, the inventor of a power machine. This crackpot, who had a half peasant-like, half worldly air about him, visited the Tobler household almost daily during this week, attempting to persuade the boss to represent the interests of this work of genius whose plans he left behind in the office. They laughed about this man, whose project could not be taken seriously, but once Tobler said to the others over lunch: “Don’t laugh like that. The man isn’t stupid.”

  The enthusiasm with which the creator of this power apparatus was defending the child of his imagination, elevating it to nearly sky
-high significance, gave them a good deal to talk about and was quite useful in providing the entertainment for a week otherwise filled only with quiet and lethargy. The strange person possessed no precise, elegant education, he spoke on the one hand like a young dreamer and bumpkin, and on the other one might have taken him for a trickster or sideshow impresario, for one day he proposed to Herr Tobler that his perpetual motion machine be exhibited publicly, by paid admission, in cities and metropolises, in places where a great many people were known to gather—an idea over which everyone in the household laughed themselves silly.

  And so Tobler was once more in the position of helping an apparently quite talented individual get on his feet so he wouldn’t have to suffocate and deteriorate intellectually in some mechanical workshop—but what about him, Tobler, how were things in fact going for him, and where were the helpful people ready to lend him their assistance?

  “They all come running to him,” Frau Tobler said, “they all think of him when they are in search of someone to lend a hand, they are all eager to exploit him and his sociable personality, and he helps every one of them. That’s how he is.”

  During this week, the assistant undertook various shortish and longish walks through cold but lovely winter landscapes and tableaus. There were ruts left in the road from carts that had passed there, it was easy to catch your foot in them. There were frozen-stiff meadows running up hillsides, and cold red hands that you held before your mouth to blow into them. Joseph encountered people bundled in coats, and sometimes nightfall surprised him in unfamiliar regions. Or there might be a skating rink upon what had once been a splendid park-encircled pond, covered with skating and falling-down persons of every age and both sexes, along with the sounds that typically characterize and express a place like this. And then suddenly he was standing once more before the Tobler house, gazing up at it from below, and saw how enchanted it appeared in the cold moonlight with the chiaroscuro clouds flying about it like huge mournful but lovely women, apparently intending to draw it upward into the sky where it might beautifully dissolve.

  Then at home everything was so weirdly silent, even Silvi could not be heard. The virtues and vices of the Tobler household appeared to have settled their scores and wordlessly forged a bond of friendship. In the living room, Frau Tobler would be sitting in the rocking chair, working or reading, or else she held Dora on her lap and was doing nothing at all.

  “How you pushed me in the swing out in the garden last summer, Marti!” she said once. She was pining for the garden, she went on, more than she even knew. How long ago these days now appeared to her. Joseph had been there for half a year already, and to her it felt as if he’d been near her so much longer. A thing like that could enter so vividly into a person’s feelings.

  She gazed at the lamp. The look in her eyes as she did so appeared to be sighing. She said:

  “You, Marti, are in fact quite well off, far better off than my husband and I—but I don’t wish to speak of myself. You can go away from here, you can simply pack up your few belongings, get on the train and go wherever you like. You can find employment anywhere, you are young, and when one looks at you, one has the impression that you are a capable individual, and in fact that’s just what you are. You needn’t take anyone in the world into consideration, no one’s needs and idiosyncrasies, and no one is keeping you from wandering off into the unknown distance. Perhaps this often feels bitter, but how beautiful and free it can be as well. When it suits you, and when the few surely not so troublesome circumstances of your life allow, you can go marching off, and when you feel the time for this has come, you can rest again at some given point and location, and who would want and what would want or be able to prevent you? You are perhaps sometimes unhappy, but who isn’t? You may sometimes be filled with despair, but whose soul is spared all tribulations? You are bound to nothing permanent, trapped by nothing that might hinder you, chained and fettered by no surfeit of affection. Surely the most ebullient and frolicsome moods must occasionally take hold of you, given the freedom you enjoy to move about at will. And on top of everything else, you are in good health, and your heart is no doubt in the right place—I assume it is, though I have so often seen you behaving uncourageously. Perhaps I am ungrateful. I have been able to converse with you agreeably, peacefully and at length for all this time, and it was perhaps quite a fortunate coincidence that you happened to come flying into this household, and yet often I have treated you badly…”

  “Frau Tobler!” Joseph protested. She cut him off and went on speaking:

  “Do not interrupt me. Let me take this opportunity to caution you that one day, when you are gone from us—”

  “But I’m not going anywhere!”

  She went on:

  “—when you are gone and the fancy strikes you to go into business on your own, be sure to go about it in a different way than my husband, a quite different way. Above all else, be more cunning.”

  “I am not cunning,” the assistant said.

  “Do you wish to spend your entire life as a clerk?”

  He replied that he did not know. He never gave much thought to questions of the future. Once more she began to speak:

  “In any case, you’ve been able to see and absorb this and that up here, and surely you learned a few things if you considered it worth the effort to keep your eyes open, and knowing you a little as I do, I would assume you did. You have grown a little richer in experience, knowledge and laws, and these are all things you will quite possibly be able to put to use some day. Certainly it’s true that you’ve been taken to task many a time here, and that you have borne and endured many things. You had to! When I think of … oh, to put it bluntly, I have the feeling, Joseph, that you will soon be leaving us, very soon. No, don’t say anything. Please don’t say a word. Surely we shall still be together a few days longer, won’t we? What do you say?”

  “Yes,” he said. It was impossible for him to say anything more than that.

  The next day he mailed the crate of cigars he had received as a Christmas present to his father, enclosing the following letter:

  Dear Father, here is a small New Year’s gift for you. These cigars were given to me as a Christmas present by my current employer. I’m sure you will enjoy smoking them, they are good cigars, I tried two of them, as you’ll see: two of them are missing. The way my thoughts are jumping about today, if I compare these two missing cigars with two flaws pertaining to my character, then I am struck by the realization, firstly, that I never write to you, and secondly, that I am poor, so poor that I am never able to send you any money—two failings that would make me weep if I were able to permit myself to do so. How have you been? I am convinced that I am a bad son, but I am equally overwhelmed by the certain knowledge that I would be the most outstanding of sons if there were any point to writing letters with nothing joyful to report. Life, with which a person honestly believes he must struggle, has to this day not yet permitted me to please you. Goodbye, dear Father. Remain healthy, may your meals always taste good to you, and may you begin the new year well. I shall try to do the same.

  Your son Joseph

  “He is an old man and still goes to work every day,” he thought.

  Tobler’s personal negotiations with his legal counsel resulted in the latter composing a vigorously worded letter to Mother Tobler, to which, however, the old lady, utterly unruffled, responded that the remainder of the funds to which her son was entitled had long since been exhausted, indeed, that she herself, who was after all an elderly woman, was finding it difficult enough to make ends meet, and that any further payments to Carl Tobler were absolutely out of the question. The only option remaining to this same man—her son, as she almost regretted having to say—was to bear the inevitable consequences of his incautious and ill-considered actions. In the sort of business ventures into which he had chosen to throw his inheritance, she could see nothing that offered any justified promise of a profit or livelihood. The Evening Star, quite simply, should be s
old, as it was high time that Tobler learned to accept his fate and adjust to more modest life circumstances, which would force him to do honest work, just as others were compelled to do. The best thing one could do for him was to leave him in the difficult circumstances he had brought upon himself, so that he might learn something from the indignities he was being forced to suffer. From her, his mother, he would receive nothing more.

  Tobler, who had received a copy of his mother’s letter from the lawyer, flew into a rage when he read it. He behaved like a wild animal, muttering unnatural curses that he addressed to his mother as though she were standing there beside him and then, as had already happened once before, he collapsed in exhaustion.

  This took place on the final day of the year, in the technical office that had so often now had to serve as the backdrop for unseemly and unrestrained scenes. Joseph too was once more having to see and hear all this vulgarity and indecorousness. At this moment he would have liked best to flee, but then he thought: “Why hasten something that will come soon enough of its own accord?” He pitied Tobler, he felt contempt for him, and at the same time he feared him. These were three unlovely sentiments, each as natural as the others, but unfair as well. What was prompting him to continue on as this man’s employee? The salary outstanding? Yes, among other things. But there was something quite different as well, something more important: he loved this man with all his heart. The pure hue of this one sentiment made the stains of the three others vanish. And it was because of this sentiment that the other three had always been there as well, almost from the very beginning, and with such intensity. For it was inevitable that something a person was fond of, something he felt bound and conjoined to, would cause him distress as well: he would have to struggle with it, there would be much about it that displeased him, and at times he would even hate it because he had always felt so powerfully drawn to it.