Simon began to make himself at home in the country. His suitcases were delivered by mail, whereupon he unpacked all his things. He no longer had many possessions: a few old books he hadn’t wanted to sell or give away, linens, a black suit and a bundle of small items like twine, scraps of silk, neckties, shoelaces, candle stumps, buttons and bits of thread. The teacher at the next school over agreed to loan out an old iron bedframe and a straw mattress to go along with it: This was sufficient for sleeping in the country. The bedstead was transported from the neighboring village on a wide sled in the middle of the night. Hedwig and Simon sat down upon this strange vehicle; the son of the teacher who was Hedwig’s friend, a strapping lad who’d just finished his military service, guided the sled downhill into the hollow in which the schoolhouse was located. There was much laughter. The bed was set up in the second room and furnished with the necessary bedding and thus made ready for a sleeper who had no exaggerated demands to make of a bed, which of course Simon did not. At first Hedwig thought for a while: “Well, he’s coming to me now because he doesn’t have anywhere else to live in all the wide world. That’s what I’m good for. If he’d had somewhere else to sleep and eat, he wouldn’t have remembered his sister.” But she quickly dismissed this thought, which had arisen in a moment of defiant pride and had been pursued only because of the manner of its arrival, not because it was agreeable. Simon in his turn felt a little ashamed to be making claims on his sister’s kindness in such a way, but this feeling didn’t last long either; for habit soon swallowed it up, he quite simply grew used to all of this! He really didn’t have any money left, but right away, just a day or two after his arrival, he sent around a letter to all the notary publics in the region asking them to send him work, as he was a skilled copyist with a lovely hand. And why did one need money in the country! Not much was needed. Gradually all the fragile walls separating the two schoolhouse inhabitants fell away, and they lived as if they’d always lived together, joyfully sharing both deprivations and amusements.
It was early spring. Already you could leave windows standing open with less hesitation, and the stoves scarcely needed stoking. The children brought Hedwig entire bouquets of snowdrops, so that soon they were at a loss what to do with them all, as there weren’t enough small containers in the schoolroom. The air in the village was heady with the first fragrant hints of spring. People were already taking walks in the sunshine. Imperceptibly, as if in passing, Simon had become known among these simple folk, no one asked many questions about who he was, people said he was one of the teacher’s brothers, and this was enough here to gain him respect. He’d be staying a little while, as a visitor, they thought. Simon walked around looking fairly tattered, but with a certain offhand elegance that became him and attractively concealed the squalor of the fabrics he wore. His torn shoes didn’t attract much notice. Simon found it enchanting to walk about the countryside in faulty shoes; he felt this to be one of the greatest advantages of country living. If he were to get some money, he might begin to consider whether to have his footwear set to rights, but these would be only the faintest, most unhurried deliberations. Perhaps he’d hesitate for a fortnight first; for what is a fortnight in the country? Back in the city you always had to do everything right away, but here you had the lovely obligation to defer everything from one day to the next, indeed, things deferred themselves of their own accord; for the days arrived so softly, and before you could even think about it, it would be evening already, followed by a fervent night, a veritable slumber of a night, which was then quietly woken again by the day, woken gently and with tenderness. Simon also loved the more often than not muddy village roads, the narrow ones that led you over hillocks of debris, and the wide ones where you sank into the muck if you didn’t watch your step. But that was what he liked about it! Walking on these roads gave you the opportunity to watch your step, you could show off as a city slicker who was accustomed to picking his way with great attentiveness and a slightly trumped-up look of horror when presented with mud. The old farmwives could then think to themselves what a tidy, cautious young man he was, and the girls could laugh at the great leaps Simon executed to avoid the moats and puddles. The sky was frequently encircled with clouds, dark puffy fat clouds, and delightful storms were often blowing, agitating the forest and hurtling across the moss where people were at work cutting sod, their horses patiently standing by. Oftentimes too the sky would be smiling so that all who saw it were instantly compelled to smile as well. Hedwig’s face would take on a joyous expression, and the teacher who lived on the upper floor would poke his glasses inquisitively out the window, in his way enjoying the exquisite treat of this balmy sky. Simon had gone into a little shop to buy himself an inexpensive pipe and some tobacco. It appeared to him beautiful and fitting to smoke only pipes in the country, for a pipe could be filled, and filling the pipe was a gesture that accorded well with the open fields and the forest where he spent almost the entire livelong day. In the warm midday sun, he would lie in the pale yellow grass beneath the splendidly gentle sky, stretched out on the riverbank, and was not merely allowed to dream, he was compelled to. But he didn’t dream of far-off, distant, beauteous things but rather contented himself with contemplations and daydreams pertaining to his immediate surroundings; for he knew nothing more beautiful. Hedwig, the one closest to him, was the object of his dreams. He had forgotten the entire rest of the world, and the pipe tobacco he was smoking only served to bring him back to the village, the schoolhouse, Hedwig. Of her he imagined:
“She is sitting in a boat with a man who’s abducted her. The lake is no larger than a pond in a park. She keeps peering into the large black brooding eyes of the man sitting utterly motionless in the boat beside her and thinks: ‘How his eyes gaze into the water. At me he does not look. But the entire huge surface of the water is gazing at me with his eyes!’ The man has a shaggy beard of the sort robbers are in the habit of wearing. He can be gallant like none other. He is capable of taking gallantry to the point of losing his life without blinking an eyelash and most certainly without placing his hand on his heart to boast of his deeds. This man is no boaster. He has a warm, wonderfully masculine voice, but he never uses it to pay a compliment. Never does flattery of any sort cross his proud lips, and he ruins his voice intentionally to make it sound harsh and heartless. But the girl knows he has a boundlessly good heart: Nonetheless she doesn’t dare appeal to his heart with a request. A string resounds across the water in long sound waves. Hedwig thinks she might die in this resounding air. The sky above the water looks exactly like this weightless, water-hued sky currently floating above me: a floating hovering lake high above me, that fits perfectly and the trees in the picture correspond to the region’s tall, swaying trees—there is something manorial, park-like about them. But in the picture everything is cramped and condensed, and now I am strolling through this scene once more, giving no more thought to its correlation with myself and this region: The man now seizes the oar and gives the boat a cavalier thrust. Hedwig senses he might be doing this to offset his own warmth and love—to him, feeling love and tenderness is an affront, and he punishes himself mercilessly for having allowed himself to harbor such affectionate sentiments in his breast. He’s so unnaturally proud; not a man at all, just a cross between a boy and a giant. It doesn’t hurt a man to find himself overwhelmed by sentiment, but it hurts a boy who wants to be more than a man with honest feelings, a boy who wants to be a giant, wants to be only strong and not at times also weak. A boy has chivalric virtues
that a man whose thoughts are sensible and mature will always thrust aside, seeing them as superfluous in the festival of love. A boy is less cowardly than a man since he is less mature, for maturity can easily make one dastardly and selfish. You need only observe the hard, cruel lips of a boy: this outspoken defiance and the exemplified insistence on a promise he’s secretly given himself. A boy keeps his word, a man might find it more appropriate to break it. The boy finds beauty in the severity of this word-keeping (as in the Middle Ages) and the man finds beauty in replacing one promise he’s uttered with another, which he promises like a man to keep. He is the promiser, and the boy is the enforcer of the promised word. Curls dance about his youthful forehead, a defiance unto death upon his curved lips. Eyes like daggers. Hedwig trembles. The park’s trees are so soft, they are dissolving in the light blue air. There beneath the trees sits the man she despises. This man who sits beside her, loveless—him she must love, though he promises nothing. He hasn’t yet opened his mouth to make a promise, he’s had the gall to abduct her without, in compensation, whispering even a single sweet nothing in her ear. Whispering is the business of that other one; this man doesn’t know the first thing about it. Even if he did, he wouldn’t do so, or he’d do so on some occasion where others wouldn’t dream of uttering anything at all. But she is giving herself to him, without knowing why. She has nothing to gain from this, has nothing to hope for, as women are so fond of doing, she has only inconsiderate treatment in store for her, the violent moods a master freely inflicts upon his property. But she feels happy when he speaks to her in a curt, heedless voice, as though she were already his. And she is his, after all, and the man knows this. He pays no more heed to what is his already. Her hair has come undone, splendid hair that plunges down her narrow, red cheeks like liquid cloth. ‘Tie it back,’ he commands, and she struggles to obey. She is in raptures as she obeys, and of course he’d see this even with his eyes shut; for then he would hear a moan cross her lips such as only those who are happy can give voice to, those hastily performing a task that is perhaps burdensome to their hands but a joy to their hearts. They get out of the boat and go ashore. The earth is soft and gives way slightly beneath their steps, like a carpet, or like several carpets placed one atop the other. The grass is the sparse yellowed grass from the year before, just like the grass here where I am smoking my pipe. Then suddenly a girl appears on the scene, a quite small, pale, gloomy-eyed girl. She appears to be a princess; for her garments are magnificent and puff out at the sides in a heavy arc from which her breast protrudes like a small burgeoning bud. The garments are a deep red, the hue of dried-out blood. Her face has a transparent pallor, it’s the shade of a wintry evening sky in the mountains. ‘You know me!’ With these words she addresses herself to the dumbfounded man, who stands there paralyzed. ‘You still dare to look upon me? Go, kill yourself. I command you!’ This is how she speaks to him. The man looks as though he means to obey her. How does he look? Well, the way one looks when there is something irrevocable to be done. In such cases a grimace is customary. The face trembles, and one must bite and knead it into submission with the full force of one’s will. It wants to break apart. A piece of nose is about to fall off. At any rate, this is the sort of thing to expect on such occasions. But I don’t wish to go on sharing this madman’s intentions to kill myself; for this must be done with a long knife, and I believe I have only a tobacco pipe, not a knife. I was liking my dream at the beginning, but now I see it’s starting to degenerate, and this doesn’t suit Hedwig at all; for Hedwig is gentle, and when she suffers, she suffers in a more beautiful, silent way. She’d no doubt just laugh at my man there in his shaggy beard if he attempted such insolence. The landscape I sketched out was quite nice all the same, but only because it was mostly borrowed from the countryside that surrounds me. One should never lose the natural ground beneath one’s feet while dreaming, especially about people, for otherwise one soon arrives at the point of making one’s characters utter words like: ‘Go, kill yourself.’ And then one of them will have to wear a facial expression that is ridiculous and well-suited to spoil even the loveliest dream!—”
Simon went home. He’d made it his habit to amble homeward each day at a certain hour when evening was approaching, usually with his gaze lowered to the brown dark earth, to make the tea at home, in the preparation of which he’d developed a skill that always struck the right balance, for it was a matter of using not too little and not too much of this noble fragrant plant, keeping the crockery meticulously clean and placing it in an appetizing, graceful way upon the table, preventing the water from boiling away on its spirit burner, and then combining it with the tea in the prescribed manner. For Hedwig it provided some modicum of relief that all she had to do to have tea was pop out of the classroom for a moment before rushing back to work. In the morning when he got up, Simon would put his bed to rights, then go to the kitchen to make the cocoa, which, to Hedwig’s pleasure, came out quite tasty; for with this task, too, he was always in hot pursuit of the best way to give an undertaking, modest as it might be, the required perfection. He also took it upon himself as a matter of course, without previous study or particular exertion, to light the fire in the heating stove and keep it burning, and to clean Hedwig’s room, whereby his skill in manipulating the long broom very much came in handy. He would open the windows to allow fresh air to enter the room, but he closed them again promptly when he thought it was time, in order to achieve a room that was both warm and nice-smelling. Everywhere in the room, in little pots, flowers that had been snatched from their natural environment went on blooming, distributing their fragrance between these four narrow walls. The windows had simple but charming curtains, which added considerably to the brightness and friendliness of the room. On the floor lay warm rugs that Hedwig had had made from gathered-up scraps of cloth by unfortunates serving prison terms, who carried out tasks of this sort exceptionally well. A bed stood in one corner, in the other a piano, and between them was an old sofa with a flowered cloth slipcover, an adequately large table before it, chairs on either side; and then there was a washstand in the room, a small writing table with a blotting pad and a bookshelf filled with books; and a small inverted crate on the floor that, covered with a soft cloth, served for sitting and reading, as reading sometimes made one feel the need to be close to the floor and fancy oneself an Oriental; further, a little sewing table with a sewing basket containing all those fantastical items indispensable to a girl who sets any store in housekeeping; a round, odd stone bearing a postmark and stamp, a bird, a stack of letters and postcards; and on the wall a horn for blowing into, a cup to drink from, a walking stick with a large crook, a backpack with a canteen, and the tail-feather of a falcon. Also hanging on the walls were Kaspar’s paintings—a crepuscular landscape with a forest; a rooftop seen from a window; a foggy gray city (to Hedwig particularly lovely); a bit of river in voluptuous evening hues; a field in summer; a Don Quixote; and a house nestled against a hill in such a way that one could borrow the words of a poet to declare: “O’er yonder stands a house.” Upon the piano, whose top was covered with a silken scarf, stood a bust of Beethoven in a greenish shade of bronze, several photographs and a small, dainty empty jewelry box, a keepsake from their mother. A curtain that looked like a theater curtain separated the two rooms and the two sleepers. In the evening, the teacher’s room appeared particularly cozy when the lamp was lit and the shutters closed; and in the morning, the sunlight would awaken a sleeper who was anything but eager to emerge from her bed bu
t in the end had no choice.
The notaries left Simon in the lurch, not a single one contacted him. As a result, he found himself compelled to earn money in other ways, since he hoped to demonstrate to his sister his good intentions when it came to sharing household expenses. He took up a sheet of paper and wrote:
COUNTRY LIFE
I arrived here in a house in the country along with the snow, and although I am not the master of this house, nor harbor any ambition to become master, I can nonetheless feel myself to be at home here and am perhaps in this way happier than the owner of the stateliest dwelling. Not even the room I’m living in belongs to me; it belongs to a gentle, dear teacher who has taken me in and feeds me when I am hungry. It pleases me to be the sort of fellow who depends on the kind mercy of others, for in general I like depending on someone so I can love this person and keep a close watch to see whether I haven’t forfeited his kindness. One might well associate a quite particular sort of conduct with this sweetest of all unfreedoms: conduct that lies halfway between insolence and tender, soft, natural attentiveness, and at this I excel. Above all one must never allow one’s host to perceive one’s gratitude; this would be displaying a faint-heartedness and cowardice that can only insult the giver. In your heart you worship the kind person who has summoned you under his roof, but it would bespeak a lack of sensitivity to press your thanks insistently upon him—he doesn’t want such thanks, as his generosity wasn’t and isn’t motivated by the wish to receive something beggarly in return. Under certain circumstances, giving thanks is only a form of begging, nothing more. Then there’s another thing: In the country, thanks are more silent and still than loquacious. The person obliged to feel gratitude acts in a certain way because he sees his counterpart doing so as well. Refined givers are almost even more diffident than takers, and they prefer for takers to take unselfconsciously, since this allows them, the givers, to give decorously, without fuss. The teacher, by the way, is my sister, but this circumstance wouldn’t prevent her from driving me, as a ne’er-do-well, from her doorstep if the desire happened to seize her. She is courageous and sincere. She received me with a mix of loving-kindness and distrust, as was quite natural, for how could she help but assume that if this good-for-nothing brother of hers came sailing and sauntering up to see her, his comfortably-settled sister, it had to be because in all God’s world he hadn’t the slightest notion where else to go. Certainly there was something disturbing and hurtful about this, for if truth be told I hadn’t written her a single letter for months, indeed years. She must have thought I was coming only out of concern for my own body, which at times might truly profit from a good whipping, rather than because I was worried about my sister and wished to see her. Things have changed meanwhile, these sensitivities have been put to rest, and now we live side by side not merely as blood relatives but as comrades who get along splendidly. Ah, in the countryside it’s simple enough for two people to get along. It’s customary here to thrust aside distrust and secrecy more quickly, and to love more cheerfully and brightly than in the thronging city with its hordes of people and constant woes. In the country, even the poorest man has fewer worries than a far less impoverished city-dweller—for in the city everything is measured by human words and human deeds—while worries here go on worrying as quietly as they may, and pain provides pain’s own natural surcease. In the city, everyone races about pell-mell trying to get rich (for which reason so many think themselves bitterly poor), while in the country, at least to a large extent, the poor are spared the insult of constantly being compared with the rich. They can peacefully go on breathing despite their poverty, for they have a whole sky above them to breathe! What is the sky in the city? —I myself have only a single small silver coin left by way of money, and this must cover the laundry. My sister, who has no secrets from me except those that are utterly unspeakable, has even confessed to me that her money has run out. Not that we’re starting to worry. We have the most luscious bread here, and fresh eggs and fragrant cakes, as much as we could wish for. The children bring us all of this, for their parents send it to school for Teacher. In the country, people know how to give in such a way that it does honor to the taker. In the city you practically have to be afraid to give because it’s begun to defile the taker, I truly cannot say for what reason, perhaps because in the city takers display insolence toward the kind givers. So then people take care not to display noble sympathies toward those suffering privation and give only furtively, or as a form of personal aggrandizement. What atrocious weakness, fearing the poor, and for this reason consuming one’s own riches alone rather than allowing oneself the glory attained, say, by a queen when she reaches out her hand to a lowly beggar-woman. I consider it a great misfortune to be poor in the city because a person isn’t allowed to ask for things, it being quite clear that benevolence is not the order of the day. One thing at least holds true: Better not to give nor feel pity at all than to do so unwillingly, conscious of having succumbed to a weakness. In the country, giving doesn’t make a person weak; people wish to give and sometimes give themselves entirely to the pastime of giving. If a person is wary of giving, he will surely himself—should he one day find himself trampled by destinies of various sorts and forced to ask for help—ask badly and accept what he is given gracelessly and with embarrassment, that is, in a beggarly fashion. How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present, and I find the picture disagreeable, it needs bettering. In the countryside, matters are still quite different. Here, a poor devil knows better where he stands; he can gaze up at the wealthy and well-off with a salubrious envy, and this is permitted, as it only serves to increase the grandeur of the object of these glances. In the country, the wish to possess a house of one’s own is a deeply rooted longing that reaches all the way up to God. For here, beneath the vast open sky, possessing a beautiful roomy house is heavenly. In the city, things are different. There an arriviste can dwell right beside a count of ancient lineage; indeed, money can raze houses and sacred old edifices at will. Who would wish to own a building in the city? There, owning a home is nothing more than a business, not a matter of pride and pleasure. City buildings are filled from top to bottom with the most different sorts of people, all of whom cross paths without knowing one another or expressing the desire to be allowed to make each other’s acquaintance. Is this a dwelling in the true sense? And long, long streets are filled with just such buildings, which certainly don’t deserve to be referred to as homes. In the countryside more happens, properly speaking, than in town; for while city-dwellers coldly, jadedly read of recent occurrences in the newspaper, news in the country passes feverishly, breathlessly from mouth to mouth. Something happens in the country perhaps once a year, but then it is an experience shared by all. A village with all its nooks and c
rannies is certainly almost always livelier and richer in intelligence than city folk generally assume. Many an old woman with facial features that would perhaps suit any fellow’s grandmother sits here behind white window-curtains with her store of enchantingly heartfelt tales, and many a village child is far more advanced in the education of her heart and mind than one might like to suppose. Often it’s happened that a village child like this, having been transferred to a school in town, has astounded her new classmates with her well-developed intellect. But let me not disdain the city and praise the country beyond its due. It’s just that the days here are so beautiful that one quickly learns to forget the city. They awaken a silent longing that draws one off into the distance—and yet one has no wish to go any farther. There is a going in all things and a coming in all. As the day takes its leave, it gives us in exchange the wonderful twilight when you can go strolling about on paths the evening appears to have discovered—paths you discover for the evening. The houses become more prominent, and their windows gleam. Even when it’s raining, it’s still beautiful; for then one thinks how good it is it’s raining. Since my coming here, spring has almost arrived, and it’s arriving more and more, you can leave your doors and windows standing open, and we’re starting to turn over the earth in the garden, everyone else has already done so. We’re the late bloomers, as befits us. An entire cartload of black, moist, expensive soil has been delivered, and this must be mixed with the dirt already in the garden. This will be a job which—implausible as it may sound when I say so—I’m looking forward to. I’m not a born lazybones, really not; I’m a ne’er-do-well only because various offices and notaries public are refusing me employment since they don’t have any idea how useful I could be to them. Every Saturday I shake out the rugs, which is work of a sort, and I’m industriously learning to cook, also a form of ambition. After the meal I dry the plates and chat with the teacher; for there is much to be said and discussed, and I love chatting with a sister. In the morning I sweep the room and carry packages to the post office, then return home and set to pondering what else there is to do. Ordinarily there’s nothing, and so then I go down into the forest and sit beneath the beech trees until the time has come, or I believe the time has come, for me to return home. When I see people at work, I involuntarily feel ashamed that I have no occupation, but it seems to me that beyond feeling this shame there’s nothing I can do. To me it’s as if the day has been tossed into my lap by a benevolent god who likes to give things to good-for-nothings. I demand of myself nothing more than the willingness to work, and the resolve to seize hold of any job I should espy before me—and that way things go well. This outlook, you see, accords quite splendidly with country living. You mustn’t overdo it all too much here, otherwise you lose your view of the lovely whole, along with your perspective as an observer—for even a looker-on must, in the end, exist in the world. The only pain I feel is occasioned by my sister, as I am incapable of repaying the debt I owe her and must watch her laboriously fulfilling her sour duties while I lie about daydreaming. Later ages will punish me for my malingering if intervening earlier ones haven’t done so already, but I believe I am pleasing to my God just as I am; God loves the happy and hates the sad. My sister is never sad for long; for I am constantly cheering her up and giving her something to laugh about by behaving ludicrously, for which I have a talent. But it is only my sister laughing at me, only she who finds me appealingly comical—with others, I comport myself in a dignified manner, though not stiffly. If one doesn’t wish to be taken for a scoundrel, it’s one’s duty to justify one’s existence to the outside world through serious behavior. Country people are quite sensitive about the comportment of young people, whom they wish to see courteous, staid, and modest. I shall conclude here and hope I’ve earned some money with this essay; if not, I nonetheless found it most interesting to write, and my doing so has caused several hours to pass. Several hours? Indeed! For in the country a person writes slowly—you’re constantly being interrupted, your fingers have become less nimble, and even your thoughts wish to think in a country manner. Farewell, cosmopolitans!
The Tanners Page 15
