The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  “Yes of course, please do!” And Simon blushed, which he found utterly incomprehensible.

  “I felt fond of you right from the beginning,” said the nurse, whose name was Heinrich, “one need only look at you to be convinced that you are a dear chap indeed. I should rather like to kiss you, Simon—”

  Simon was finding the air in the room oppressively close, and he got up from his chair. He guessed what sort of man it was who was looking at him with such odd tenderness. But what harm could it do. “I’ll go along with it,” he thought. “I see no reason to be uncivil to this Heinrich, who is otherwise so nice, over such a small thing!” And he yielded up his mouth and let himself be kissed.

  It was just a kiss, after all!

  Besides which he found it charming—it suited the state of softness in which he found himself to allow these tender liberties. Even if this time it was only a man! He felt quite clearly that Heinrich’s strange affection for him required the most delicate and provisionally indulgent consideration, and found himself incapable of dashing the man’s hopes, even though these hopes happened to be unworthy ones. Had he any cause to feel indignant? “Not at all,” Simon thought to himself, “for the time being I’ll let him do as he pleases—it goes well with everything else taking place around me!”

  The two of them spent the evening wandering from one bar to another, the nurse being a fairly passionate drinker, since he didn’t know what else to do with his free time. Simon found it appropriate to follow his lead in every sense. There in the tiny, stuffy bars, he made the acquaintance of individuals who played cards with unbelievable endurance. The card game appeared to constitute a world of its own to these people, one in which they were unwilling to be disturbed. Others just sat there all evening long clenching the long pointed stalk of a cigar between their teeth without otherwise calling notice to themselves except by the fact that when the nub of their cigar got too short to be pressed between their lips, they would stick it on the tip of their pocket knives to be able to smoke it all the way down to the most miniscule brevity. An emaciated, ravaged-looking pianist told him that her sister was a bad sister but a celebrated concert singer, and that she’d long since broken off all familial ties with her. Simon found this comprehensible, but he behaved with delicacy and refrained from telling her he found it comprehensible. This person, he felt, was more unfortunate than morally corrupt, and he always honored misfortune, and corruption he saw as a consequence of misfortune, and therefore it also required at least a certain decorousness. He saw short, fat, horribly sprightly innkeepers’ wives who approached their guests with untoward familiarities of all sorts while their husbands dozed on sofas and in armchairs. Often a splendid old folksong would be sung by a person who masterfully executed the modulations of key and voice that were part of these old songs. How beautiful and melancholy they sounded, you couldn’t help sensing how many a rough vibrant throat must already have sung them in bygone days and long before. One man was constantly telling jokes, a short young fellow wearing an old, large, wide, tall, deep hat he must have purchased in a junk shop somewhere. His mouth was lubricious and his jokes no less so, but they forced you to laugh whether you wanted to or not. Someone said to him: “You there, I admire your wit!” But the witty man thrust aside this foolish admiration with well-feigned astonishment, and this was truly a joke that might have brought pleasure even to a learned man. The male nurse told all the people who came to sit beside him that he was basically too flawed and at the same time, when he thought it over more carefully, too good for his native country. Simon thought: “How idiotic!” But then the nurse gave a far more appealing report on the topic of Naples, saying for example that the museums there contained wonderful remnants of ancient human beings, and that one could see by looking at them that these ancestors far outstripped us in height, width and girth. These people had arms nearly the size of our legs! Now that must have been a race of women and men! What were we by comparison? Merely a degenerate, crippled, atrophied, attenuated, longitudinally and latitudinally cracked, torn and shredded, emaciated generation. He also gave a charming portrait of the Gulf of Naples. Many listened to him attentively, but many were asleep and, being asleep, didn’t hear a thing.

  It was very late when Simon got home, and he found the downstairs door locked from within; as he didn’t have his key with him, he brazenly rang the doorbell, for he was in that condition which inevitably causes one to behave inconsiderately. A window flew open at once following the jangle of the bell, and a white figure, no doubt the woman in her nightgown, threw down the key wrapped in heavy paper.

  The next morning, rather than being angry, she smiled at him with the friendliest “Good morning!” and said not a word about the disturbance in the middle of the night. Simon therefore decided it would be inappropriate to mention it, and so, half out of delicacy, half out of laziness, he offered no apology.

  He left and went looking for the nurse. Monday morning was once more resplendent. People were all at work, and so the streets were empty and bright, and when he went into the nurse’s room, he was still lying sleepily in bed. Today Simon noticed on the walls something he’d failed to observe the day before, a number of rather saccharine Christian wall decorations: little angels with ruddy little heads cut out of paper along with plaques containing adages framed in mysterious dried flowers. He read all the adages, some of them were profound and thought-provoking, maxims perhaps older than eight old people taken together, but there were also slick, newfangled sayings that read as if they’d been mass-produced in a factory. He thought: “How strange this is! Everywhere, in so many individual rooms and chambers, wherever you might be and regardless of your present business, you are constantly seeing these fragments of old religions hanging on the walls, fragments that in part say a great deal, in part not so much, and in part nothing at all. What does the male nurse believe? Surely nothing! Perhaps religion for many people nowadays is nothing more than a half-measure, a superficial, unconscious matter of taste, a sort of interest and habit, at least with men. Perhaps a sister of the nurse decorated the room this way. I could believe that—girls have more personal grounds for piety and religious contemplation than men do, whose lives have always been in conflict with religion, always unless they happened to be monks. But a Protestant minister with his snow-white hair, his mild patient smile and his noble gait is and remains a beautiful sight when he strides through a lonely forest clearing. In the city, religion is less beautiful than in the countryside, where peasants live whose very way of life has something deeply religious about it. In the city, religion is like a machine, which is unfortunate, whereas in the country one perceives the belief in God as being just the same as a field of blossoming grain, or like a huge lush meadow, or like the delightful swell of lightly curving hills behind which a house stands hidden, containing quiet people for whom contemplation is a sort of friend. I don’t know, to me it seems as if the minister in the city lives too close beside the stock market speculator and the godless painter. In the city, the belief in God lacks the necessary distances. Religion here has too little sky, it smells too little of the soil. I’m not putting it very well, and besides, what use is any of this to me? Religion in my experience is a love of life, a heartfelt attachment to the earth, joy in the present moment, trust in beauty, belief in mankind, a feeling of carefree pleasure during revelries with friends, the desire to ponder and a sense of not being responsible for misfortune, smiling when death arrives and showing courage in every sort of undertaki
ng life has to offer. In the end, a profound human decency has become our religion. When human beings maintain decency in their dealings with each other, they are maintaining it before God. What more could God want? The heart and all the finer sentiments can together produce a decency that might well be more pleasing to God than dark fanatical belief, which can only disconcert even the Divine One himself, so that in the end He’ll no doubt wish not to hear the prayers thundering up to His clouds any longer. What can our prayers mean to Him if they come bawling up so clumsily, presumptuously, as if He were hard of hearing? Mustn’t you imagine Him possessing infinitely acute ears if you can picture Him at all? I wonder whether the sermons and the peals of the organ are agreeable to Him, the Ineffable One? Well, He’ll surely just smile at our efforts, dubious as they may be, and hope that it will occur to us some day to leave Him in peace a bit more often.”

  “You look so pensive, Simon,” the nurse said.

  “Shall we go?” Simon asked.

  The nurse had made himself ready, and the two of them walked the steep paths together that led up the mountainside. The sun was glowing hot. They went into a small, opulently overgrown beer garden and ordered a morning pint. When they were about to leave again, the innkeeper’s pretty wife encouraged them to stay, and indeed they remained until evening. “And this is how you can drink away a bright summer’s day without even noticing,” Simon thought with a feeling comprised of dizzy pleasure and a gentle, lovely, melodious ache. The colors of the evening amid the foliage were making him drunk. His friend gazed deeply and with desire into his eyes and wrapped one arm around his neck. “Actually this is ugly,” Simon thought. On the path, the two of them addressed flamboyant words to all the women and girls they met. The workers were just coming home from work, people who still walked in a hale, spry way, their shoulders rocking strangely from side to side as though breathing sighs of relief. Simon discovered the most splendid figures among them. When they reached the forest atop the mountain, still warm though it was already tinged with darkness, the sun was just setting down below in the distant world. They lay down among the green leaves and bushes and were silent, just breathing as they lay there. And then came what Simon had been expecting, his comrade’s approach, which, however, left him cold.

  “There’s no point,” he said, “please stop,” and then, “listen, cut it out!”

  The nurse allowed himself to be mollified, but he was aggrieved; people came by and they had to get up and leave the place. Simon thought: “Why am I spending the day with such a person?” But immediately thereafter he confessed to himself that he took a certain pleasure in this man, despite his strange, unlovely inclinations. “Another person might despise the nurse,” he thought further as they set out for home, “but I am the sort who considers each and every person, his virtues and vices notwithstanding, worthy of my interest and love. I shall never arrive at the point of despising other people, or rather, I despise only cowardice and vacuousness, but it’s not hard for me to find something interesting about depravity. Indeed, it sheds light on a great many things, allows us to look more deeply into the world, it makes a person more experienced and helps him judge more leniently and rightly. One must get to know all things, and one makes a thing’s acquaintance only by touching it courageously. To avoid some person out of fear—I’d consider that unworthy. Besides, having a friend is priceless! What does it matter if the friend is somewhat unusual—”

  Simon asked:

  “Are you angry with me, Heinrich?”

  But Heinrich wasn’t saying anything. His face had assumed a dour expression. Once more they arrived at the beer garden whose delicate outlines now lay in darkness. Colorful, shimmering lanterns lit up the dark foliage at several points, sounds and laughter were emanating from within, and both of them, drawn by the lusty fiery life there, went back in, where the innkeeper’s wife gave them a friendly welcome.

  The red dark wine was sparkling in the light glasses, the shimmering lights conjoined with the heated faces, the leaves of the bushes touched the dresses of the women, it seemed so natural to be spending the warm summer night in a susurrating garden, drinking, singing and laughing. From the railway station at the bottom of the hill, the noise of the trains rose up to the revelers’ ears. A wealthy, tall, red-cheeked wine merchant’s son applied himself to a bold philosophical conversation with Simon. The male nurse was constantly contradicting everyone because he was vexed and disgruntled. The waitress, a slim brunette, sat down beside Simon and allowed him to pull her close to him to kiss her. She suffered the kiss willingly, with proud curved lips that looked as if made to sip wine, laugh and kiss. The nurse’s mood was becoming ever blacker, and he wanted to leave, but the others prevented him. Then someone, a young, swarthy, dark-haired lad with a green hunter’s hat, sang a song while his girl, nestled close against his chest, leaned in close to sing along with him in soft happy notes. “This sounds so intoxicating, dark and Mediterranean,” Simon thought: “Songs are always melancholy, at least the beautiful ones are. They remind us that it’s time to go!” But he remained a long time still in the nocturnal garden.

  –16–

  For the entire rest of that week, Simon carried on this otiose social intercourse with the nurse, with whom he’d get into arguments and then make up again. He played cards like someone who’d been doing so for years, and rolled billiard balls around in the middle of the warm day while everyone possessed of hands was working. He saw streets filled with sunlight and alleyways in rainy weather, but always through a windowpane, with a glass of beer in his hand; made long, useless, wild speeches morning, noon and night among all manner of strangers, until finally he saw he had nothing more to live on. And one morning he didn’t go to visit Heinrich but instead made his way to a room where any number of young and old men sat at desks writing. This was the Copyists Office for the Unemployed, where people came who, owing to their particular life circumstances, found themselves in such a position that securing employment in a regular place of business was out of the question. Individuals of this sort worked for meager day-wages here, copying out addresses with hasty fingers beneath the strict supervision of a supervisor or secretary—business addresses for the most part, in lots of one thousand, for which large firms contracted with the office. Writers brought in their scribbled manuscripts, and female students their all but illegible dissertations so as to have them either typed out on the typewriter or copied in a smooth clean hand. People who didn’t know how to write but had something they needed written down brought their documents here, where the work was quickly seen to. Cake-counter ladies, waitresses, laundresses and chambermaids had their letters of recommendation copied out tidily before proffering them for examination. Benevolent associations turned in thousands of yearly reports that had to be addressed and disseminated. The Association for Natural Healing had multiple copies made of the invitations to their folksy lectures, and professors had no end of work for the copyists, who in turn were happy to have the work. This entire copying enterprise was supported by yearly subventions from the local government and headed by an administrator—himself formerly unemployed—for whom the post had been created to give him a suitable occupation for his old days. He was the scion, so to speak, of an old patrician family and had wealthy relatives on the city council who didn’t want to sit back and watch one of their family members go to ruin under shameful circumstances. And so this man became the king and protector of all the vagabonds, lost souls and hard-luck cases, and he discharg
ed these duties with a casual dignity, as if he’d never in all his wild days, some of which he’d spent on the road in America, tasted the bitterness of deprivation.

  Simon made a bow before the administrator of the Copyists Office.

  “What do you want?”

  “Work!”

  “Today there’s nothing. Come back tomorrow morning, perhaps we’ll have something suitable for you then. For now, write down your name, permanent residence, place of birth, profession and age along with your current address on this sheet of paper, and then come back tomorrow at eight on the dot, otherwise there won’t be any work left,” the administrator said.

  He was in the habit of smiling as he spoke, and speaking through his nose. What’s more, he always assumed an almost scornfully mild-mannered tone in his dealings with the unemployed—not intentionally, that’s just how it happened to come out. His face, sunken and ravaged, was the color of cold white lime and terminated in a ragged gray beard with a point to it, as though the beard itself were a pointy scrap of his face hanging down. His eyes lay deep in their sockets, and the man’s hands bore witness to ill health and physical ruin.