The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Kaspar replied.

  The two of them then strolled through the little town, looking at everything, which didn’t take long, and yet, considering the seriousness with which they regarded it all, did in fact take quite some time. They passed the mailman, who handed Kaspar a letter, making a face as he did so. The letter was from Klara. The church was admired, as was the majesty of the town’s towers and the defiant protective walls, which however had often been breached, the vintners’ huts and gazebos set into the mountainside, places where life had died out long ago. The fir trees gazed down solemnly at the small old town, and at the same time the sky was so sweet above the houses which appeared defiant and sullen in their thickness and breadth. The meadows were shimmering and the hills with their golden beech forests beckoned the viewer up to their distant heights. In the afternoon the young men went into the forest. They were no longer speaking much. Kaspar had fallen silent, his brother sensed what he was thinking of and preferred not to rouse him, for it seemed to him more important for things to be thought over than spoken about. They sat down on a bench. “She won’t let go of me,” Kaspar said, “she’s unhappy.” Simon said nothing, but he felt a certain joy on his brother’s behalf, that the woman was unhappy over him. He thought: “How lovely I find it that she is unhappy.” This love enchanted him. Soon, however, the two took leave of one another; it was time for Simon to return, by train this time.

  –7–

  Winter arrived. Simon, left up to his own devices, sat dressed in a coat, writing at the table in his small room. He didn’t know what to do with all the time on his hands, and since his profession had accustomed him to writing, he now sat and wrote offhandedly, without forethought, on small strips of paper he’d cut to size with scissors. Outside the weather was damp, and the coat Simon had wrapped himself in was serving the function of a heating stove. This sitting at home in his room seemed so cozy to him, while out of doors violent winds were raging, promising snow. He felt so comfortable sitting like that, engaged in his activity and embracing the notion that he’d been utterly forgotten. He thought back on his childhood, which wasn’t yet so terribly far behind him but nonetheless appeared as distant as a dream, and wrote:

  I wish to recall to my mind my childhood, as my current circumstances make this a fascinating and instructive task. I was a boy who liked to lean back against warm heating stoves. Doing this made me fancy myself both important and sad, and I would wear a simultaneously self-satisfied and melancholy expression. What’s more, I donned felt slippers whenever possible for indoor wear—changing shoes, exchanging wet ones for dry, gave me the greatest pleasure. A warm room always struck me as ravishing. I was never ill, and always envied people who could fall ill, as they were then cared for and had somewhat more delicate words addressed to them. For this reason I often imagined myself falling ill and was touched when I heard, in my fantasy, my parents speaking tender words to me. I had a need to be treated with affection, but this never happened. My mother frightened me because she uttered affectionate words so infrequently. I had a reputation for being a scallywag—not without cause, as I recall—but it was nonetheless sometimes hurtful always to be reminded of that. I would so have loved to be coddled; but when I saw it was out of the question that attentions of this sort would be shown me, I became a ruffian and made a point of provoking the children who enjoyed the advantage of being well-mannered and loved—my sister Hedwig and my brother Klaus. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than when they boxed my ears, for this demonstrated that I’d been skillful enough to arouse their ire. I don’t have many memories of school, but I know I found it a sort of compensation for the minor affronts I suffered in my parents’ home: I was able to excel. I took great satisfaction in bringing home good grades. School frightened me, and so I always behaved well there; whenever I was at school my conduct was diffident and restrained. The teachers’ weaknesses didn’t remain hidden from me for long, but I found them more terrifying than ridiculous. One of the teachers, a cloddish, monstrous person, had a real drunkard’s face; it nonetheless never occurred to me to suspect him of drinking, and yet a mysterious rumor was circulating in the world of the school about another teacher, saying drink had been his downfall. The expression of suffering on this man’s face is something I shall never forget. I considered Jews more refined than Christians, for there were several enchantingly beautiful Jewish girls who set me trembling when I met them on the street. Often my father would send me on errands to one of the elegant Jewish homes; it always smelled of milk in this house, and the lady who would open the door to me there would have on wide white dresses and would bring with her a warm spicy scent that at first I found distasteful, but later I came to love. I think I can’t have worn such nice clothes as a child, in any case I would gaze with malicious admiration at a few of the other boys who wore beautiful high-topped shoes, smooth stockings and well-tailored suits. One boy in particular made a deep impression on me because of how delicate his face and hands were, and the softness of his movements and the voice that came from his lips. He was exactly like a girl, dressed always in soft fabrics, and with the teachers he enjoyed a respect that bewildered me. I felt a pathological longing to have him deign to speak to me, and was overjoyed when one day he suddenly addressed me before the window of a stationery store. He flattered me, saying I wrote so beautifully, and that he wished his own handwriting were that beautiful. How it delighted me to be superior in at least this one respect to this young god of a boy, and I fended off his compliments blissfully blushing. That smile! I can still remember how he smiled. For a long time his mother was my dream. I overvalued her to the detriment of my own mother. How unjust! This boy was attacked by several pranksters in our class who put their heads together and declared him to be a girl, a real one just dressed up in boy’s clothes. Naturally this was pure nonsense, but the claim struck me like a thunderbolt, and for a long time I imagined I ought to be worshiping this boy as a girl in disguise. His overripe figure provided ample fodder for my high-strung romantic sentiments. Naturally I was too shy and proud to declare how fond I was of him, and so he considered me one of his enemies. What elegant aloofness he could convey. How curious to be thinking of this just now!—In religion class I once delighted one of my teachers by finding just the right word for a certain feeling; this too I shall never forget. In various subjects I was indeed quite good, but it always felt shameful to me to stand out as a model pupil, and I often practically made an effort to get bad marks. My instincts told me that the students I surpassed might hate me, and I liked being popular. I found the thought that my schoolmates might hate me rather frightening—a calamity. It had become fashionable in our class to detest all swots, and therefore it often happened that clever, intelligent pupils would try to look stupid as a precaution. This conduct, when it was recognized, counted among us as exemplary behavior, and indeed, there was no doubt something heroic about it, even if only in a misunderstood sense. To be singled out for praise by teachers therefore carried with it the danger of being held in low regard. What a curious world: school. One of my earliest years at school, I had a classmate, a little squirt of a thing with blotches on his pointy face, whose father was a basket weaver and swillpot known to all and sundry. The little fellow was constantly being made to pronounce the word “schnapps” before the entire mocking classroom, which he couldn’t do—he always said “snaps” instead of “schnapps” because of some miserable speech impediment. How we howled with
laughter. And when I now think back on it: How crude this was. Another boy, a certain Bill, a jovial little fellow, was always late for school because his parents lived in a remote, rugged mountain region far from town. The latecomer would always be forced to hold out his hand as punishment for his tardiness, whereupon he would receive a biting, sharply painful blow of the cane. Every time, the pain would force tears from the lad’s eyes. How intently we witnessed this castigation. Let me emphasize, by the way, that I have no wish to make accusations about anyone—the teacher in question, say—as one might easily suspect, but am simply reporting what I recall from those days.—Up on the mountain, in the forest above the town, all sorts of rough unemployed derelicts—then even more than now, I would assume—were in the habit of gathering to drink from schnapps bottles in the thickets, play cards or court the womenfolk who were present, recognizable as women by the scraps of clothes they wore, their faces home to misery and affliction. These people were known as vagrants. One Sunday evening we—Hedwig, Kaspar and I—were out walking with a girl we called Anna, who was fond of us all, on a narrow path that led over this mountain, and as we stepped out into a forest clearing full of rocks, we saw a man seize one of these rocks in his fist and smash it audibly into the face of another man, his opponent, so that blood came spurting out and the man who had been struck fell at once to the ground. This fight, whose end we didn’t witness, as we immediately fled, appeared to have started because of a woman; at any rate I can still see clearly before me the dusky tall figure of a woman who at the time was standing by, nonchalant, observing the fight with a wicked expression. This encounter filled me with a profound distress and terror that kept me from eating and made me avoid that part of the forest for a long time. There was something horrifyingly primitive, even primeval about the sight of those men doing battle—

  Kaspar and I had a friend in common, the son of a member of the Cantonal parliament and respected merchant, whom we dearly loved on account of his submissiveness and his willingness to take part in any plan we hatched. We often went to visit him in his parental, parliamentary home where we were always given a friendly welcome by an exquisite lady, his mother. We would play for hours with our friend’s building blocks and tin soldiers and amuse ourselves splendidly. Kaspar excelled at building fortresses and palaces and sketching out battle plans. Our friend was very attached to us; to Kaspar, I thought, even more than me; and he often visited us at home as well, though things at our house were admittedly less refined. Hedwig was very fond of him. His mother was completely different from ours, the rooms gleamed more than at our house, and the tone was different; I mean, the tone of the conversations; but at our house, all in all, things were more lively. At the time, there was a wealthy lady in our town living all alone in a magnificent garden, in a house of course, but the house was invisible thanks to all the ivy and trees and fountains that concealed it. This lady had three daughters, beautiful, pale girls who were said to have a new dress to put on every two weeks. They didn’t keep these dresses in their cupboards, but rather sent special messengers to sell them to the townsfolk. At one point Hedwig owned a silk dress and pair of shoes that had belonged to one of these girls, and these second-hand items inspired in me, when I looked at and touched them, a secret repulsion combined with the greatest interest and a concern that often made me the butt of jokes. The lady was always sitting at home; at most she might put in an appearance at the theater, where she looked alarmingly white in her dark red box. The middle girl was probably the most beautiful of the three. I always imagined her seated on horseback; she had a face that looked as if made to gaze down from the back of a prancing horse upon a gaping crowd of people, causing them all to cast down their eyes. All three girls have no doubt long since married.—Once we had a conflagration, not in the town itself, but in a neighboring village. The entire sky all around was reddened by the flames, it was an icy winter night. People ran upon the frozen, crunching snow, including Kaspar and me; for our mother had sent us to find out where the fire was. We reached the flames, but it bored us to spend so long gazing into the burning beams, besides which we were freezing, and so we soon ran back home again, where Mother received us with all the severity of one who’s been made to worry. My mother was already unwell in those days. Not long afterward, Kaspar left school, where he was no longer prospering. I still had one more year ahead of me, but a certain melancholy took hold of me and bid me look with bitterness upon all things scholastic. I saw the end approaching and the imminent start of something new. What it would be—on this subject I could muster only the most foolish thoughts. I saw my brother often, laden down with packages, in his life of employment, and thought about why he looked so downcast as he worked, with his face drooping toward the ground: It couldn’t be so nice after all, this new thing, if you weren’t allowed to raise your eyes. But Kaspar had already begun to plan his career, he always seemed to be dreaming, and had such a curious calmness about him, which didn’t please our father at all. We were now living on the edge of town in humble lodgings the sight of which was enough to chill you through. This dwelling did not suit Mother. In general she had a most peculiar illness: She always felt wounded by her surroundings. She liked to go on about elegant little houses set in gardens. What do I know. She was a very unhappy woman. When for example we were all sitting at the dinner table, keeping fairly silent as was our custom, she would suddenly seize a fork or knife and hurl it away from her, right off the table, making all of us turn our heads to one side; if you tried to calm her, she would feel insulted, and if you reproached her, she would feel even more insulted. Father had his hands full with her. We children recalled with melancholy and pain the days when she’d been a woman who was received everywhere with an admixture of affection and esteem, when if she called you to her with her ringing voice, you happily rushed to her side. All the ladies in town paid her compliments which she brushed aside with grace and modesty; this bygone time appeared to me even then like a magical fairy tale filled with wonderful fragrances and images. And so I learned quite early to devote myself passionately to beautiful memories. Once more I saw the tall building where my parents ran a delightful costume jewelry shop, where people were always coming in to buy things, where we children had a bright, large nursery which the sun seemed particularly to enjoy filling up with light. Right beside our tall building crouched a short, crooked, squashed, ancient one beneath a pointed gable roof; a widow lived there. She had a hat shop, a son and a female relative, along with a dog, I believe, if memory serves. When you walked into her shop, she would greet you in such a friendly way that merely to stand in front of this woman would be a goodly pleasure. She would then press various hats upon your head and lead you to the mirror with a smile. Her hats all smelled so wonderful that you couldn’t help standing there transfixed. She was a good friend of my mother. Right next door, that is, right next door to the hat shop, a snow-white pastry shop glittered temptingly, a confectionery. The confectioner’s wife appeared to us to be an angel, not a woman. She had the most delicate oval face you could imagine; kindness and purity appeared to have given this face its shape. A smile that turned anyone it touched into an enchanted pious child sweetened her already sweet features. The entire woman appeared to have been made to sell sweets, delicacies and dainties that could only be touched by the very tips of one’s fingers, to preserve their exquisite flavors. She too was a friend of my mother. Mother had many friends—