The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  At just this moment when he was preparing to launch into a monologue, a scream rang out in the corridor, followed immediately by the loud crash of crockery falling to the ground. Simon opened the door and saw the woman gazing with a mournful, silent, crestfallen face at the floor, where lay the shards of a porcelain platter she had no doubt been fond of. She had wished to carry the platter with a piece of cake on it from the icebox to her room and had managed to drop it, she herself couldn’t say how. All it had taken was the most fleeting misperception, or something of the sort, and the misfortune had occurred. When the woman beheld Simon, who was standing behind her, her expression instantly changed from crestfallen to enraged and accusatory, and she said to him in a tone that clearly signified what she was feeling: “Pick this up!” Simon squatted down and gathered up the shards. As he did so, his cheek brushed against the skirt of his employer, and he thought: “Forgive me for having stood by and witnessed your maladroitness. I understand your anger. It is I who bear the guilt for breaking the platter you dropped. I broke it. How this must pain you. Such a beautiful platter. Surely you were fond of it. I feel sorry for you. My cheeks are brushing against your dress. Every shard I gather up says to me: ‘You wretched creature,’ and the hem of your dress says to me: ‘O happy one!’ I’m intentionally taking my time about gathering up the shards. Does it now fill you with fresh rage to be forced to notice? I’m finding it amusing to have been the miscreant. I like you when you’re angry with me. Do you know why your anger so pleases me? Your way of being angry is so tender! You’re only angry because I witnessed your clumsiness. You must have a fair bit of respect for me if it so mortifies you to have made a fool of yourself in my presence. You the grand lady in the presence of ignoble me. With what enchanting rancor you bade me gather up the shards. And I’m not even hurrying as I do so; for I wish you to become utterly furious and incensed over my taking so long with the shards that cannot help telling me the story of your clumsiness, and telling it to you as well. Are you still standing here? The strangest sentiments must now be intermingling within you: shame, pain, fury, vexation, equanimity, irritability, tranquility, surprise and majestic dignity, with so many trivial, unmentionable accompaniments slinking alongside, snatched away again each moment before a person can properly grasp them; that one there was like a pinprick or a whiff of perfume or a pair of twinkling eyes.—Your silk dress is beautiful when one considers that it contains a female body capable of trembling with excitement and weakness. Your hands are beautiful hanging down toward me in all their length. I hope you’ll box my ears with them some day. Now you’re leaving already, without having scolded me. When you walk, your dress giggles and whispers on the floor. A moment ago you forbade me to smoke. But I shall have the impudence to smoke when I walk behind you on the way to market to help with the shopping. There you will see me smoking: gleaming white cigarettes, and I certainly hope you’ll then have the presence of mind to slap the cigarette from my lips. Just now I had to employ all the gestures at my disposal to beg your forgiveness for your having broken a platter. I wish I might have the opportunity to perform some misdeed that would give you cause to send me packing. Oh no, no! What am I thinking. I must be mad. Truly, this shard incident has made me mad. Now it’s no doubt evening out on the street. The lanterns will be burning pale yellow in the waning daylight. I’d like to be out there on the street now. There’s no help for it, I must go downstairs—”

  “I’d like to go out for a brief while,” he said, walking into her room. “May I?”

  “Yes! But see you don’t stay out too long!”

  Simon raced outside and down the stairs, where a veiled female figure stared after him in astonishment, then out of the building to the street, into the air, into mobile damp glittering evening freedom. How strange it was, he thought, this belonging to a household where you lived just like a prisoner. How strange to be a grown man and as a grown man be compelled to seek out a woman, to enter a dark room where you only half see the woman sitting there in the dark, and ask her permission to be allowed to go out. As if you were a piece of furniture in her possession, an object, a purchase, something, a thing, a something or other, and as if this something were nothing or were something only insofar as it was suited to be a thing of this particular sort, something of hers! Strange, too, that you might nonetheless experience this state of affairs as a sort of refuge, a home. That you might feel you were now walking about the streets ten times more exaltedly for having received permission to do so from a person you were obliged to ask. Requesting permission, to be sure, had something schoolboyish about it, he thought; but even graybeards were often enough required to seek permission, sometimes under humiliating circumstances. And so all of life was marvelous, and you had no choice but to enter into this marvel, even if it often looked to you rather strange.

  He walked down the street, falling in love with its sweet tableau of rising stars, of dense trees that stretched in long straight rows, and the peacefully ambulating people, the evening’s splendor, the deep, restless inklings of night. He too was walking peacefully, almost dreamily. In the evening it was no disgrace to put on a dreamy appearance when all were involuntarily compelled to dream in this atmosphere filled with the scent of the early summer twilight. Many women were strolling about with small elegant little bags in their gloved hands, with eyes in which the evening light went on glowing, in narrow dresses cut in the English style or voluminous dragging skirts and robes that filled the streets with their marvelous breadth. Woman, Simon mused, how she glorifies the image of the city street. A woman is made to promenade. You can feel her parading, enjoying her own swaying, beautiful gait. At sunset, women determine the tone of the evening, their figures being well suited to this with these arms full of melancholy and ampleness and these breasts full of breathing mobility. Their hands in gloves look like children wearing masks, hands with which they beckon, and in which they are invariably holding something. Their entire bearing translates the evening world into sonorous music. If you now, as I am just doing, go walking along behind women, you already belong to them in your thoughts, in sentient oscillations, in breaking waves that crash against your heart. They do not beckon, and yet they do beckon you. Though they carry no fans, you can see fans in their hands, flashing and glinting like embossed silver in the fading, blurred evening light. Mature, voluptuous women go particularly well with such an evening, just as gray-haired old women go with winter, and blossoming girls with the newly arisen day, as children go with dawn and young wives with the heat of midday when the sun shows itself to the world at its most glowing.

  It was nine o’clock when Simon returned home. He had stayed away too long, and had to listen to reproaches like this one: If this were to happen again, even one single time more, then— —. He wasn’t actually listening, he took in only the sound of the reproach, inwardly he was laughing, outwardly he appeared dejected, that is, he put on an imbecilic expression and decided it was superfluous to open his mouth to say anything in reply. He undressed the boy, put him to bed, and lit a nightlight.

  “Might I ask for a lamp of my own?” he asked the lady.

  “What do you want the lamp for?”

  “To write a letter.”

  “Come sit here with me, you can write here!” the lady said.

  And he was permitted to sit down at her desk. She gave him a sheet of letter paper, an envelope for the address, a stamp, a pen, and allowed him to use her stationery case to write on. She sat close beside him in an armchair, r
eading a newspaper as he wrote:

  Dear Kaspar, I am back in the city so well known to you and am sitting at a beautiful, dark-hued writing desk in a brightly lit room while down below in the street, in the summer night, beneath the trees with all their dangling leaves, people are out strolling. Unfortunately I cannot promenade along with them, for I am chained to a household, not exactly by my hands and feet, but by the sense of duty I am gradually developing, which does, after all, need to be established sooner or later. I have become the servant of a woman who has a sick little boy whom I look after, not much differently than a mother looks after her son, for his mother, my mistress, observes my every move as if her eye were guiding my actions and she were instilling in me her own solicitousness when I care for the boy. As I write this, she is now seated beside me in an armchair, for this is her own room; I’m sitting here with her permission. Matters now stand as follows: Every time some personal errand sends me out of doors, I must first ask “May I go out?” like an apprentice asking permission of his master. All the same, at least it’s a lady I’m having to ask, which sweetens the indignity of it. Being a servant, you should know, if you do not already, involves waiting attentively for orders, anticipating desires in advance, skillful swiftness and swift skillfulness in setting the table and brushing out carpets. I have already attained a certain perfection at the task of cleaning the shoes of my lady, whom I call simply my lady. This is only a small minor task, and yet it requires one to strive for perfection just like the greatest endeavor. With the small young gentleman I shall have to go for walks in the future when the weather is fair. There is a little brown carriage in which I can push the boy about—which, come to think of it, I’m not particularly looking forward to, since it will be tedious. Good Lord, do it I shall. My mistress is the sort of woman whose most striking and distinctive feature is her bourgeois sensibility. She’s a housewife through and through, but in such a strict and straightforward sense that one can see this characteristic as genteel. She’s quite a master at losing her temper, and I in turn have mastered the art of giving her cause for this. Today, for example, she broke a fancy porcelain bowl out of thoughtlessness and was furious with me for not having been the one to break it. She unleashed her fury at me because I was the disagreeable witness to her clumsiness, and made the sort of face one often sees caricatured in Fliegende Blätter. A real Fliegende Blätter face. I picked up the shards as daintily and slowly as possible in order to vex the woman, for I must admit it gives me pleasure to vex her. She is charming when vexed. Beautiful she isn’t, but severe women like this radiate a profound magic when they get worked up. The entire demure past of such a woman trembles in her fits of excitement, which are delectable to witness, as they’ve been ignited by such delicate causes. For me, this is just how it is: I can’t help adoring such women, for I admire and pity them at one and the same time. Such women can be haughty in their speech and bearing—so much that their cheeks nearly explode and their mouths get all pointy with the most painful scorn. I love scorn of this sort, for it makes me tremble, and I love being filled with shame and fury: This drives me on to higher things, spurs me on to deeds. But my lady there, the scornful one, is after all just a good gentle woman, this I know, and that’s what’s so scoundrelly about this whole business: my knowing this. When I obey her, responding to the commanding tone of her voice, I can’t help laughing all the while, for it clearly gives her pleasure to see how willingly and swiftly I obey. And now when I ask her for something, she snaps at me but then does kindly give in, perhaps feeling a bit of vexation at the fact that I have petitioned her in such a way that it isn’t possible to deny me. I am always hurting her just a little, thinking: It serves her right! Go on! Keep hurting her, just a little. It amuses her. It’s what she wants. She isn’t expecting anything different! It’s so easy to recognize women, yet so much about them is unrecognizable. Isn’t that strange, dear brother? In any case women are the most instructive thing a man can find anywhere on earth.—If she only knew, the one sitting here beside me, what I’ve been writing! One of my most ardent desires is to have my ears boxed by her as soon as possible, but I doubt, painful as this is to realize, that she’s capable of it. A good resounding box on the ears: If I could experience this, I’d gladly give up all kisses I might hope to expect. This ear-boxing business, I admit, is damnable on my part, but it’s also a genuinely bourgeois sentiment: It brings one back to childhood, and isn’t it quite ordinary to feel longing for what lies far behind you? There’s something far-in-the-past about my mistress; glimpsing that element sends your thoughts far, far back in time, to a place possibly even more distant than childhood. I’ll no doubt kiss her hand one of these days, and then she’ll give me the boot or chuck me out, as they say. May I do so, and may she. What would be so awful about that?—Oh, I’m going to the dogs here, let me tell you, it already shows. My mind is occupied with folding napkins and polishing knives, and what’s queer is that I like it. Can you imagine a greater idiocy? How are you? I spent three months in the country, but now it feels to me as if that time’s already far in the past. I have every intention of becoming a person who devotes himself fully to each day without considering his ties to more nebulous things. Sometimes I’m too lazy even to think of you, and this strikes me as enormously indolent. I hope to see Klara again soon. Perhaps you’ve forgotten her already, and then I shouldn’t be bringing up the matter to begin with. And so I shan’t. Adieu, dear brother.

  “Whom did you write to?” the woman asked, worn out by her newspaper reading, when she saw Simon had finished his letter.

  “A friend of mine who now lives in Paris.”

  “What does he do?”

  “At first he was a bookbinder, but since he didn’t have much success with this profession, he’s become a waiter in a restaurant. I love him very much, we went to school together, and that’s when I got attached to him, because he was unhappy already as a boy. Once I saw him being taunted by his classmates, who then threw him down a flight of stone steps, and I caught a glimpse of his beautiful, terrified, sorrowful eyes. Since that day I’ve been his closest friend, and if pity truly binds people together, I shall have to feel bound to him forever without even thinking about it. He’s one year older than I am, but in his manners and lifestyle he’s years ahead of me, for he’s always made his home in great cities where a person matures more quickly. In the old days he was always going on about painting, and during the time he was pursuing a bookbinder’s career, he often tried to paint pictures, but—painful as this was to him—he never got terribly far with his paintings and one day he confessed to me shamefacedly that he’d resolved to throw himself into the maelstrom of life and forget about art and his dreams, and so he became a waiter. What a washout, but at the same time: What an admirable leap forward! I told him how I admired and loved him for his decision, hoping to console him for those quiet, lonely hours when he might find himself surrendering to pangs of memory. Clearly he would often long for that better world while all around him life was raging. But you see, madam, my friend is a proud and worthy man. Too proud to mourn a life that’s slipped through his fingers, and too worthy to be able to just lay it to one side. Each of his sentiments is known to me. Once he wrote me that he was about to die of monotony and boredom. That was his soul. And another time, he wrote: ‘All these stupid daydreams! Life is what’s sweet. I’m drinking absinthe and am filled with bliss!’ That was his masculine pride. Let me tell you: Women are mad for him, there’s something heart-
beckoning about him, but also something icy-cold. Everything about his appearance, the waiter’s tailcoat notwithstanding, radiates love and tact.”

  “What is the name of this unhappy wretch?” the woman asked.

  “Kaspar Tanner.”

  “What? Tanner? That’s your name. So he’s your brother, even though you called him your friend just now.”

  “Of course he’s my brother, but much more than this he’s my friend! A brother like that has to be called a friend if you want to use the right terminology. We’re brothers only coincidentally; but our friendship is quite intentional, and this makes it far more valuable. What is brotherly love? Once back when we were still brothers, we grabbed one another by the throat and tried to do each other in. What charming love! Among brothers, envy and hatred are perfectly ordinary phenomena. When friends hate one another, they part ways; when brothers hate—brothers whom fate has ordained to live beneath a single roof—the outcome is not so tranquil. But this is an old story and not the nicest one.”

  “Why haven’t you sealed your letter?”

  “I’d like you to look over what I’ve written.”

  The woman smiled:

  “No, this I will not do.”

  “I speak of you inappropriately in this letter.”

  “I’m sure it’s not so bad,” she remarked, rising to her feet: “Go to bed.”

  Simon did as she commanded, thinking as he left: