The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  “How sad!” the other man said.

  “Let’s drink up and go,” said the one who’d been telling this story, adding: “Some insist on claiming that the girls of ill repute he’d been involved with had destroyed him, but I don’t believe this; I think people tend to exaggerate the bad influence these wenches can exert on a man. These things aren’t quite so serious, and perhaps madness just ran in the family.”

  Simon leapt to his feet, violently agitated, his cheeks flushed with indignation:

  “What’s that you’re saying? In the family? You’re quite mistaken, my noble storyteller. Take a good look at me, if you will. Do you perhaps see in me as well something that might run in the family? Must I too be sent to the madhouse? This would indubitably occur if it ran in the family, for I too come from this family. That young man is my brother. I’m not at all ashamed to identify as my brother this merely unfortunate and by no means insidious individual. Is his name not Emil, Emil Tanner? Could I know this if he were not my own dear natural brother? Is his father, who is also mine, not a flour merchant by any chance, who also does a flourishing business in wine from the Burgundy region and oil from Provence?”

  “Indeed, all that is true,” said the man who’d been telling the story.

  Simon went on: “No, it cannot possibly run in the family. I shall deny this as long as I live. It’s simply misfortune. It can’t have been the women. You’re quite right when you say it wasn’t them. Must these poor women always be at fault when men succumb to misfortune? Why don’t we think a bit more simply about it? Can it not lie in a person’s character, in a particle of the soul? Like this, and always like this, and therefore in the soul? Look, if you will, how I am moving my hand just now: Like this, and in the soul! That’s where it lies. A human being feels something, and then he acts in such-and-such a way, and then collides with various walls and uneven spots, just like that. People are always so quick to think of horrific genetic inheritances and the like. To me that seems ridiculous. And what cowardice and lack of reverence to insist on holding his parents and his parents’ parents responsible for his misfortune. This shows a lack of both propriety and courage, not to mention the most unseemly soft-heartedness! When misfortune crashes down upon your head, it’s just that you’ve provided all that was needed for fate to produce a misfortune. Do you know what my brother was to me, to me and Kaspar, my other brother, to us younger ones? He taught us on our shared walks to have a sense for the beautiful and noble, at a time when we were still the most wretched rascals whose only interest was getting up to tricks. From his eyes we imbibed the fire that filled them when he spoke to us of art. Can you imagine what a splendid time that was, how ambitious—in the boldest, most beautiful sense of the word—our quest for understanding? Let’s drink one more bottle together, I’m buying, yes that’s right, even though I’m just an unemployed ne’er-do-well. Hey there! Innkeeper, a bottle of Waadtländer, your finest. —I’m a person who knows no pity. I forgot all about my poor brother Emil long ago. I can’t even manage to think of him, for you see, I’m the sort whose standing in the world is so precarious that he must struggle with all his might to keep on his feet. I don’t want to fall down until such time as I’ll no longer harbor thoughts of getting up again. Yes, that’s when I might perhaps have time to think of these unfortunates and feel pity: when I myself have become pitiable. But this isn’t yet the case, and for the moment when it comes to my own death I intend to go on laughing and jesting. In me you behold a fairly indestructible individual able to endure all sorts of adversity. Life need not be so sparkly to enchant my eyes—to me it’s already sparkling. I generally find it quite beautiful and can’t understand the ones who carp and call it ugly. Here comes the wine. Drinking wine always makes me feel so elegant. My poor brother is still alive! I thank you, sir, for having forced my memory to encounter this unhappy man today. And now, leaving all soft-heartedness behind: Let us raise our glasses, gentlemen: Long live misfortune!—”

  “Why, if I might ask?”

  “You go too far!”

  “Misfortune is educational, that’s why I’m asking you to raise your glasses with this glittering wine to drink a toast to it. And again! There. I thank you. Let me tell you, I’m a friend of misfortune, a very intimate friend, for misfortune merits feelings of closeness and friendship. It makes us better—that’s doing us quite a good turn. Indeed, such an act of friendship must be reciprocated if a person wishes to behave respectably. Misfortune is our lives’ cantankerous but nonetheless honest friend. It would be quite insolent and dishonorable of us to overlook this fact. At first glance we never quite understand misfortune, and for this reason we hate it the moment it arrives. Misfortune is a refined, quiet, unannounced fellow who always surprises us as if we were mere galoots and easily surprised. Anyone who has a talent for surprising others must certainly, regardless of who he is and where he comes from, be something quite extraordinarily refined. Not letting any forebodings come to light and then suddenly standing there; having about one not the faintest inquisitive, anticipatory taste or odor, and then all at once clapping a person chummily on the shoulder, addressing him in a familiar tone while smiling and showing him a pale, mild, all-knowing, beautiful face: This takes more skill than eating bread, requires other devices than those flying contraptions mankind has already started boasting about with grandiose, bombastic words even though they’re still just half invented. No, it’s destiny—misfortune—that’s beautiful. It’s also good, for it contains fortune, its opposite. It appears to be armed with weapons of both sorts. It has an angry crushing voice, but also a gentle mellifluous one. It awakens new life when it has destroyed old life that failed to please it. It spurs one on to live better. All beauty, if we still harbor hopes of experiencing beautiful things, is due to it. Misfortune allows us to grow tired of beautiful things and shows us new ones with its outstretched fingers. Isn’t unhappy love the most emotional sort and thus the most delicate, refined and beautiful? Does not abandonment ring out in soft, flattering, soothing notes? Are these things I am saying all new to you, gentlemen? Well, they surely are new when someone says them aloud; for they rarely get said. Most people lack the courage to welcome misfortune as something in which you can bathe your soul just as you bathe your limbs in water. Just take a look at yourself when you’ve undressed and are standing there naked: What splendor: a naked healthy human being! What good fortune: being clothed no longer and standing there naked! It’s already a stroke of fortune to have come into this world, and having no other good fortune than your health is still fortune that outsparkles and outshines all the finest gemstones, all the beautiful tapestries and flowers, the palaces and miracles. The most marvelous thing of all is health, this is a fortune to which nothing comparable can be added, unless a person in the course of time has become savage enough to wish he might become ill in exchange for a money-purse filled with cash. This plenitude of splendor and good fortune—if we are indeed inclined to see the naked, firm, pliant, warm members that have been given us for our journey through life as such a plenitude—must be counterbalanced, and thus we have misfortune! It can prevent us from bubbling over, it provides us with a soul. Misfortune educates our ears to perceive the beautiful sound that rings out when soul and body, intermingled and conjoined, respire as one. It turns our body into something bodily-soulful and gives our soul a firm existence at our center so that if we choose, we can feel our entire body as a soul, the leg as leaping soul, the arm as carrying soul, the ear as
a hearing one, the foot as a nobly walking soul, the eye as the seeing one and the mouth as the kissing one. It makes us truly love, for where can we have loved if no misfortune was present? In dreams it’s even more beautiful than in reality, for when we dream we suddenly understand the sensuality of misfortune, its enchanting kindness. Otherwise it’s usually a hindrance, particularly when it arrives in the form of financial loss. But can this be a misfortune? Say we lose a banknote—what are we losing? Admittedly, this circumstance is highly disagreeable, but it’s no cause to feel inconsolable for any longer than it takes to realize that this is hardly true misfortune. And so on! One could speak a great deal about this; and eventually grow weary of the topic—”

  “You speak like a poet, sir,” one of the men remarked with a smile.

  “That may be. Wine always makes me speak poetically,” Simon replied, “as little a poet as I am otherwise. I tend to lay down rules for myself and in general am hardly disposed to get carried away by fantasies and ideals, since I consider doing so ill-advised and presumptuous in the extreme. Take my word for it, I can be quite dry. It’s also far from permissible to assume any person you happen to hear speaking of beauty is a poet with his head in the clouds, as seems to be your habit; for I do believe it can occur even to an in general coldly calculating pawn-shop broker or bank cashier to think of matters not pertaining to his money-grubbing profession. As a rule, we reckon too few individuals capable of sentimental reflection, for people haven’t learned to look at each other. I’ve taken it upon myself to engage in bold, heartfelt conversation with every single person so that I’ll quickly see what sort he is. You often make a fool of yourself using a rule like this in life, and occasionally you might even get your ears boxed—by a delicate lady, for example—but what harm does that do? I find it enjoyable to disgrace myself and maintain the conviction that the respect of individuals in whose eyes you lose face the moment you begin to speak openly isn’t so terribly valuable that losing it is any reason to feel glum. Human respect must always suffer beneath human love. That’s what I wanted to say in response to the somewhat derisive remark you made at my expense.”

  “I had no intention of hurting your feelings.”

  “In that case, how nice of you,” Simon said and gave a laugh. Then he added abruptly after a moment’s pause: “As for your story about my brother, by the way, it did in fact affect me. He’s still alive, my brother, and scarcely anyone still thinks of him; for when a person steals away, above all to such a dismal place, he’s soon stricken from people’s memories. The unfortunate! You know, I could argue that it would only have taken the tiniest alteration in his heart, perhaps a single teeny jot more in his soul, and he’d have been a productive artist whose work would have enraptured humankind. It takes so very little to make a person strong—and so very little, on the other hand, to thrust him into utter misfortune. What use is there talking about it. He’s ill, and he’s standing now on the side where there’s no longer any sunshine. I shall think of him more often now, for his misfortune is just too cruel. It is a misery even ten criminals wouldn’t deserve, much less him, who had such a heart. Yes, misfortune is sometimes far from lovely, I now freely confess this. I should warn you, sir: I’m a defiant person and like to go about making wild claims, which is no way to act. My heart is at times quite hard—particularly when I see that others are filled with pity. I feel such an impulse then to start raging and laughing in the middle of that nice warm pity. Very bad of me, very very bad! As for the rest, I am by no means a good man, far from it, but I hope one day I will be. It was a pleasure for me to be permitted to speak with you. The happenstance is always the most valuable. I would appear to have drunk rather a lot, and it’s so warm here in the barroom, that I feel an urge to go outside. Farewell, gentlemen! No, not au revoir. Absolutely not. I wouldn’t dream of it. I feel no urge at all to see you again. There are still so many people I have yet to meet, I can’t go about frivolously saying au revoir. That would only be a lie; for I have no desire to see you again unless it’s by chance, and then it will be a pleasure for me, though only to a certain extent. I don’t like to make a fuss and prefer to be truthful, this is perhaps my distinguishing characteristic. I hope it also distinguishes me in your eyes, though you are now gaping at me in a rather astonished and foolish way, as if you were insulted. Well, then, be insulted! Devil take it, what can I have said to insult you? Well?”

  The innkeeper walked over and asked that Simon keep his voice down:

  “It’s best you leave now, it’s time.”

  And Simon allowed himself to be steered gently out into the dark alleyway.

  It was a deep, black, humid night. It was as if the night were some creeping entity making its way along the walls. From time to time a tall building would be standing there, a dark shape, and then another one would glow yellow and white as though it possessed some magic power that made it luminous in the dark night. The walls of the buildings smelled so strange. Something moist and close emanated from them. Isolated lights now and then lit up a patch of street. Up above, the bold rooftops jutted out over the smooth high walls of buildings. The entire wide night seemed to have laid itself into this little tangle of alleyways in order to sleep here or dream. There were still isolated late-night individuals walking about. Here someone was staggering and singing as he went, another one was cursing loud enough to cleave the heavens in two, a third was already collapsed on the ground while a policeman’s helmet came glinting from behind the corner of a building. When you walked, your steps resounded beneath your feet. Simon encountered an old, inebriated man who was reeling from side to side the full width of the street. It was a wretched and at the same time jolly sight: the way the dark, awkward figure was being thrust back and forth as though shoved by an nimble, invisible hand. Then the old, white-bearded man dropped his walking stick and wanted to pick it up from the ground—no doubt a daunting task for this drunkard, who appeared about to fall down himself. But Simon, seized by a smiling merciful sentiment, hurried over to the man and his stick, picking up the latter and pressing it into the man’s hand, who murmured his thanks in the mysterious language of drunkenness, in a tone of voice that suggested he had cause to be still insulted. This sight immediately had a sobering effect on Simon, and he turned out of the old part of town into the newer, more elegant district. As he was crossing a bridge over the river that separated the two halves of the city from one another, he inhaled the strange perfume of the flowing water. He strode down the street in which he’d been addressed three weeks previous by that lady before the shop window, saw a light still burning in the home of his former mistress, reflected that she’d still been his mistress only yesterday, and then went on walking beneath the trees until he came to the broad dark lake lying there before him, appearing to be asleep across its entire splendid expanse. Such sleep! If an entire lake could sleep like that with all its bottomless depths—that was an impressive sight. Yes, it was certainly a strange thing, barely comprehensible. Simon went on gazing out at it for a while until he began to long to sleep himself. Oh, he would sleep excellently now. It would come over him so peacefully, and tomorrow he would remain lying in bed a long time, tomorrow was Sunday after all. Simon went home.

  –15–

  The next morning he didn’t wake up until the bells were ringing. From his bed, he noted that out of doors it must be a splendid blue day. The light flashing in the windowpanes suggested a glorious morning sky high up over the alleyway. Gazing a
t the wall of the building opposite, one was conscious of bright-golden intimations. It was difficult to think how dark and dismal this blotchy wall must look under a sky thick with clouds. One gazed at it for a long time, imagining what the lake must look like now with all the sails upon it in the golden blue morning weather. Certain mountain meadows, certain views and certain benches beneath the lush green trees, the forest, the streets, the promenades, the meadows upon the back of the broad mountain with its full complement of trees, the rampant green slopes and forest ravines, the spring and woodland brook with its large stones and water singing softly when you sat down beside it to be lulled to sleep. All these things could be seen quite clearly when Simon gazed over at the wall that after all was just a wall, but today was reflecting an entire vision of a blissful human Sunday, just because something like a breath of blue sky was bobbing up and down above it. And of course the bells were ringing all this time with their familiar notes, and bells, yes, they know how to awaken images.

  Still lying there in bed, he resolved to be more industrious from now on, to study something, a language for example, and in general to start living a more regulated existence. He’d let so much slip through his fingers! Learning surely brought a person great pleasure. It was so lovely to engage in these heartfelt, vivid imaginings of how it would be to keep studying and studying assiduously, never once emerging from one’s studies. He sensed a certain human maturity within him: And how much lovelier all this studying would be if approached with the sum of this already attained maturity. Yes, that’s what he would do now: study, set himself tasks, and take pleasure in uniting both teacher and pupil within his own person. What about, for example, taking up a melodious language such as French? “I would learn words and imprint them firmly on my memory. My constantly active imagination would come to my aid. Tree: l’arbre. With all my feelings I would see this tree. Klara would come to mind. I’d see her in a white dress with wide folds beneath a broad, shady, dark green tree. In this way many things, things I had almost already forgotten, would return to me. My mind would grow stronger and more active in grasping. It blunts you if you never study anything. How sweet this smallness is, this beginner’s stage! I’m now finding this prospect vastly appealing and don’t understand how I could have been defiant and sluggish so very long. Oh, all sluggishness is just defiance, an insisting on one’s own knowledge and the putative superiority of this knowledge to that of other people. If only we knew how little we knew, things might still turn out well. Hearing the sound of the foreign word, I would think of the German one more warmly and spread its meaning out more fully before me in my thoughts, and so even my own language would become a new, richer sound filled with unfamiliar images. Le jardin: garden. Here I would think of Hedwig’s country garden that I helped plant when spring arrived. Hedwig! In a flash it would all come back to me, the things she said, did, suffered and thought during all the days I spent with her. I have no cause to forget people and things so quickly, above all my sister. After we’d already planted the garden it snowed again one night, and we were terribly worried that nothing would grow. That would have been quite a blow, for we were hoping to harvest a great many splendid vegetables from our garden. How lovely it is to be able to share one’s worries with another person. Just imagine how it must be to suffer the pains and fight the battles of an entire people! Yes, all these things would come to me if I were studying a language—and many others as well, so many that I can’t even imagine them yet! Just to study, to study, who cares what! I’ll also immerse myself in natural history, all on my own, without a teacher, using some inexpensive book that I can go and buy right away tomorrow, since today is Sunday, so of course all the shops are closed. All of this is quite feasible, clearly. Why else is one alive? Could it be I’ve stopped thinking I owe myself anything at all? I’ve got to pull myself together—it’s certainly high time.”