The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  The next morning at eight, Simon was already installed at the Office, and a few days later he’d accustomed himself to his co-workers. These were all people who at some point in their lives had succumbed to some form of dissolution and lost the ground under their unsteady feet. There were people there who because of some serious offense committed years before had spent time in jail. An old, very handsome man was known to have spent years in prison because of a heinous crime against morality he’d committed against his own flesh and blood: his daughter, who denounced him to the judge. In all the time Simon observed him, his silent strange face remained free of all expression, as though silence and listening were native to that face and had become a necessity. He worked calmly, peacefully and slowly, was handsome, looked at you calmly when you looked at him, and appeared to be not in the least conscious of some tormenting memory. His heart seemed to be beating as quietly as his old hand was working. No trace of a grimace could be remarked in any of his features. He appeared to have atoned for and washed away everything that might ever have disfigured or soiled him. His clothes were tidier than those of the administrator, although he must have been poor. His teeth and hands were curiously well groomed, as were his shoes and clothes. His soul appeared to be calm and unusually pure. Simon thought of him: “Why not? Can’t sins be washed away, and should a jail sentence destroy an entire life? No, one sees neither a sin once committed nor a jail term served when one looks at this man. He appears to have forgotten both of them completely. There must be goodness and love in this man, and great strength, really a huge amount of it—but all the same: how strange!”

  Embezzlement, theft, fraud and vagrancy all had their representatives in the Copyists Office. Present as well were the merely unfortunate, greenhorns who’d been duped by life and foreigners from abroad who simply found themselves without a bite to eat because their hopes had been dashed. Surely there were also notorious idlers and eternal malcontents. Every combination of culpability and bad luck could be found there, along with that sort of frivolity which takes pleasure in being so out-of-pocket. Simon might have used this opportunity to make the acquaintance of man in his various guises, but he wasn’t much thinking about observing other people, as he himself was kept as busy as all the others filling out forms and sinking as if in a river amid the life and bustle of the Copyists Office with all its cares, labors, little incidents and questions. Someone who’s sunk beneath the surface of a thing doesn’t think so much about the thing itself as about his own physical needs, just like all the others. Everyone here was copying away to earn what they would soon have to invest in food and drink if they wished to go on living. Their earnings flowed down their throats, from hand to mouth. Simon also managed to buy himself a straw hat and a pair of cheap shoes. But when he thought of the rent for his room, he had to confess to himself that he wasn’t in a position to find the cash for this as well. Yet he was always tired and happy in the evenings when he’d finished writing. He’d go walking then, in the company of one of his fellow scribes, through the city streets with his head held high, absentmindedly smiling at the people walking past. He didn’t even have to make an effort to achieve a beautiful proud posture; he stood up straight without even trying, his chest broadened and stretched like a tightly-drawn bow the moment he walked out the door of the Office and into the air. He suddenly felt he was the born lord and master of his limbs and consciously attended to each of his own footsteps. He now no longer kept his hands in his trouser pockets, that would have struck him as undignified. In fact, he no longer slouched at all but rather strolled with measured attentiveness, as if he were only just now, in his twenty-first year of life, beginning to cultivate a beautiful firm gait. Looking at him, a person was not to think of poverty; he was merely to sense that this was a young man who was just coming from work and now permitting himself an evening stroll. The swift, bustling world of the street enchanted his eye. When a carriage with a pair of dancing, delicate horses passed by, he fixed his gaze on the gait of the trotting animals, not deigning to cast even a brief glance at the gentlefolk sitting in the wagon, as though he were a connoisseur of horses, interested only in them. “How agreeable this is,” he thought. “A person really must learn to master his gaze and send it only to places where it is seemly and manly for his eyes to rest.” He cast sidelong glances at a number of women and had to laugh inside to see the sort of impression this made. And all the while he was daydreaming, as always! Except that now he gritted his teeth while dreaming, no longer allowing himself an indolent weary posture: “Even if I’m one of the poorest devils, it wouldn’t occur to me to let this be evident in my person; on the contrary, financial woes practically oblige one to assume a proud comportment. If I were rich, I might possibly allow myself a certain negligence. But under these circumstances, it’s out of the question, as a person must be conscious of maintaining an equilibrium. I’m dog-tired, but I cannot help thinking: Others have cause to feel weary as well. A person doesn’t live merely for himself, but for others as well. You have an obligation to cut a stalwart exemplary figure as long as you’re being observed, so that those of lesser courage can take you as a model. You should give the impression of carefree solidity, even if your knees are trembling and your stomach is warbling up into your throat out of emptiness. Such things are a source of pleasure to a young man who’s just growing up! The clock has not yet struck twelve, not for any of us; after all, any person lying on the ground impoverished enjoys the prospect of rising up again. I’ve a hunch that a proud free bearing can itself draw life happiness to a person like an electrical current, and it’s certainly true that you feel richer and more exalted when you walk about with dignity. Should you happen to be in the company of a second ill-dressed poor devil, as is presently the case, all the more cause to walk with head erect, thereby gently and vigorously apologizing, as it were, for the other’s inferior hairstyle and posture before people who may be taken aback to see two individuals who comport themselves so differently strolling along as cozy as can be, clearly intimate friends, in this elegant street. A thing like this brings you respect, fleeting as it might be. Certainly it’s charming to think you stand out agreeably from a companion who doesn’t yet quite have what it takes or never will. Incidentally my companion is an older, unfortunate man, the former owner of a basket-weaving shop, who has sunk in life thanks to all sorts of adversity and now is a copyist for daily hire, just like me, except that I don’t look entirely like a copyist and day laborer but rather more like a mad Englishman, whereas my comrade looks like someone painfully longing to return to former better days. His gait and the way his head is constantly, sweetly, touchingly wobbling speak of his misfortunate in quite shameless words. He’s an older man and no longer wishes to impress; all he wants is to hold himself a little bit upright. Me he impresses; for I know his pain and understand what a heavy burden he carries. I feel proud to be walking beside him through an elegant part of town, and press myself impertinently close to him to demonstrate my unabashed affection for his paltry suit. I’m receiving many astonished glances, many a splendid eye is looking at me in a strangely quizzical way, which can only amuse me—to so-and-so with all that! I speak loudly, emphatically. The evening is so beautifully suited to speaking. I worked all day long. It’s a splendid thing to have worked all day and then in the evening be so beautifully weary and at peace with all things. To have not a worry, scarcely even a thought. To be allowed to stroll along so frivolously, with a sense of having done no harm to any man. To look around t
o see if you’re meeting with approval. To feel you’re now a bit more deserving of love and respect than before, when you were just a malingerer whose days sank one behind the other into an abyss and drifted away on the air like smoke. To feel much, so very much, on a gift of an evening such as this! To see the evening as a gift, for this is what it is to those who sacrifice their days to work. Thus one gives and receives in turn—”

  Simon was noticing more and more that the Copyists Office was a small world all its own within the larger world. Envy and ambitions, hate and love, preferential treatment and honesty, vehement and modest natures manifested themselves here in microcosm, where only the pettiest advantages were at stake, just as clearly and unmistakably as anywhere people struggled to make a living. There were no sentiments or urges that could not find themselves actualized here, if only on a paltry scale. Glorious troves of knowledge, to be sure, were of little use in the Office. A bearer of such knowledge could put it to use here at most improvisatorially, it could boost his standing, but it wouldn’t help him to acquire a better suit. Several members of the copyists fraternity spoke and wrote three languages to perfection. They were put to work translating, but doing so didn’t earn them any more than the loutish address writers and manuscript copiers received—the Copyists Office did not allow any one individual to rise within its ranks, that would have contradicted its own goals and purpose. After all, the point of its existence was to permit the unemployed to eke out a meager existence, not to disburse high, outrageous salaries. A person had to consider himself fortunate to find work at all at eight in the morning. Often enough it happened that the administrator would say to a group of waiting men: “Terribly sorry. Unfortunately there’s nothing today. Come back at ten. Perhaps some jobs will have come in by then!” and then at ten: “You’d better try again tomorrow morning. Not too likely anything else will turn up today.” The ones thus rejected, a group that included Simon on more than one occasion, then walked slowly and gloomily, one after the other, back down the stairs and onto the street where they remained standing for a little while in a nice round group, as though feeling the need to reflect first for a moment, only then to disperse again in all directions, one after the other. It was no pleasure to go rambling about the city streets with no money in one’s pocket, each of them knew this and each one thought: “What will it be like when winter comes?”

  Sometimes elegantly dressed people with dainty manners came to the Copyists Office to ask for work. To them the administrator was in the habit of saying: “It’s my impression that you’d be better suited to the hustle and bustle of worldly life than to the Copyists Office. Here a person must sit still all day long, bent over and diligently working if he wants to earn his pittance. I’m speaking to you openly in this way because I have a feeling this work would not in fact suit you. Nor do you appear to be suffering doleful, needy poverty. I, however, am charged with giving employment first and foremost to the poor, that is, to those whose clothes might well be hanging off them in tatters as proof of their squalor. You, on the other hand, look far too grand, it would be a sin to employ you here. My advice to you is to mingle with other elegant people. It seems you’ve failed to recognize the gloom of the Copyists Office if you come here wearing such a cheerful expression to ask for work, as though you were going to a ball. Here it is customary to make clumsy defiant bows, or, most commonly, none at all, but you bowed to me a moment ago like a perfect man of the world. That’s no good, I have no use for you, I have neither employment that might satisfy you nor a world in which you might fit. You will have no difficulty finding a position as a shop or hotel clerk, should you have other intentions than just seeking adventure in this city, as I am inclined to suspect. Here a young man will experience only discouragement, but no other sorts of adventure. A person who comes here knows why he has come. You appear most assuredly not to have known this. Your entire person is an affront to my workers, you’ll have to admit this if you cast so much as a single look about the room. Just look at me: I too have seen the world, I know every metropolis, and I too would not be sitting here if I were not compelled to do so. A person who comes here has already experienced misfortune and all manner of adversity. Those who come here are the good-for-nothings, beggars, rogues and shipwrecks: in a word, the unfortunate. Now I ask you: Are you such a one? No, and therefore I now ask that you depart at once from this establishment, which contains no air that you would be capable of breathing for long. I know the creatures who belong here! Know them better perhaps than suits me! And now farewell!”

  And with a wave of his hand he would smilingly dismiss those people who had no business in the Copyists Office. The administrator possessed poise and education, and he enjoyed showing them off on occasion before such happenstance and maladroit visitors who came more out of curiosity than need.

  Beside the Copyists Office flowed a quiet, green, deep and old canal, a former fortress moat and the connecting link between the lake and the flowing river which in this way was given lake water to take along with it on its journey to distant seas. In general this was the quietest part of town; there was something secluded and village-like about it. When the ones who were sent away now tramped back down the stairs, they liked to sit for a while upon the railing at the edge of this canal, which then looked as if a row of large, strange, foreign birds were perched there. There was something philosophical about this, and indeed, many a one gazed down into the green dead water world and pondered the unrelentingness of fate just as fruitlessly as a philosopher is wont to do sitting in his study. The canal had something about it that invited one to dream and reflect, and the unemployed had ample time for this.

  At the same time, the Copyists Office was a job market for the mercantile trade. A gentleman or lady, for example, might walk into the Office, go into the administrator’s office and ask to have a man, that is, a temporary worker for his or her place of business. Then the administrator would appear in the doorframe, looking over his charges, and after considering for a while would call one man by name: The person in question had then found work for a short while, perhaps eight, one, two or fourteen days. It was always an envy-arousing event when someone was called by name, for everyone was eager to work on the outside, since the pay was then higher and the work more interesting. Besides which, such a man who found work with kindhearted employers would be given a nice snack mornings and evenings, which was by no means to be despised. And so there was always a certain competition for such positions and an ogling of the one selected. Many believed they were always unjustly overlooked, while others, on the other hand, thought it advantageous to court and flatter the administrator and his under-official to attain what they so yearned for. It was approximately like a pack of trained dogs leaping up to snatch at a sausage that was constantly being jerked out of reach on a string, each dog firmly convinced that the others had no business going after the sausage, though without, of course, being able to substantiate that belief. Here too one man would growl at another who’d succeeded in snatching the prize, much as in the greater spheres of trade, scholarship, art and diplomacy, where things aren’t done so very differently, just with more cunning, arrogance and culture.

  Simon also worked a few times on the outside—as abbreviated in the copyists’ patois—but he didn’t have much luck at it. Once he was sent to the devil by his boss, a shifty, rather brutal real estate and property agent who nearly fancied himself God almighty, because he’d been reading the newspaper when he should have been writing;
and another time he hurled his pen right in the face of his employer, a wholesale fruit and vegetable merchant, with the words: “Do it yourself!” The fruitseller’s wife had insisted on bossing Simon around; so he simply broke things off; for, as he saw it, this female was merely trying to hurt and humiliate him, which in the end he didn’t see any reason to put up with; at least that’s how he felt about it.

  –17–

  Several weeks of marvelous summer passed in this way. Simon had never before experienced so marvelous a summer as this year, when he was spending so much of his life on the street looking for work. Nothing came of his efforts, but at least it was beautiful. When he walked in the evening through the modern, leaf-trembling, shadowy, light-flickering streets, he was always unceremoniously approaching people and saying something foolish, just to see how it would feel. But all the people just looked at him in bewilderment—they didn’t say anything. Why wouldn’t they speak to the one walking and standing there, why didn’t they ask him, their voices low, to come with them, go into a strange house and there engage in some activity only people of leisure indulge in, people who, like himself, have no other life purpose than watching the day pass by and evening arrive, in full expectation that evening will bring miracles and fantastical deeds? “I’d be prepared to undertake any deed, provided it was bold and required some derring-do,” he said to himself. For hours he sat upon a bench listening to the music that came murmuring from some regal hotel garden, as if the night had been transformed into soft notes. Nocturnal womenfolk passed by the solitary watcher, but they only needed to take a good look to know how things stood with the young man’s wallet. “If only I knew a single person whom I could touch for a bit of money,” he thought. “My brother Klaus? That wouldn’t be honorable; I’d get the money, but accompanied with a faint, sad reproach. There are people one can’t go begging to because their thoughts are too pure. If only I knew someone whose respect weren’t so important to me. No, I can’t think of anyone. I care about everybody’s respect. I’ll have to wait. You don’t actually need so much in summer, but winter’s on its way! I’m a bit scared of winter. I have no doubt that things will go badly with me this coming winter. Well, then I’ll go running about in the snow, even if I’m barefoot. What harm can come of it. I’ll keep going until my feet are on fire. In summer, it’s so lovely to rest, to lie upon a bench beneath the trees. All of summer is like a warm fragrant room. Winter is a thrusting open of windows, the winds and storms come howling and blustering in and that makes you have to move about. I’ll soon give up my laziness then. It’ll be fine with me, come what may! How long the summer seems to me. It’s only been a few weeks I’ve been living in summer, and it already seems so long. I think time must be sleeping and stretching out as it sleeps if you’re always having to think what to do next, just to get through the day on your few coins. Besides which, I believe that time spends the summer sleeping and dreaming. The leaves on the tall trees are growing ever larger, at night they whisper, and in the daytime they doze in the warm sunshine. I, for example, what do I do? When I have no work, I spend entire days lying in bed with the shutters closed, in my room, reading by candlelight. Candles have such a delightful smell, and when you blow them out, a fine, moist smoke floats through the dark room, and then a person feels so peaceful, so new, as if resurrected. How will I manage to pay my rent? Tomorrow it’s due. Nights are so long in the summer because you stroll and slumber all day long, and the moment night falls, you awaken from all sorts of confused buzzings and stirrings and begin to live. Now it would seem to me almost sinful to sleep through even a single summer night. Besides, it’s too humid to sleep. In summertime your hands are moist and pale as if they sense the preciousness of the fragrant world, and in winter they’re red and swollen as if angry about the cold. Yes, that’s how it is. Winter makes you go stamping around in a rage, whereas in summer you wouldn’t be able to find any cause for anger, except perhaps the circumstance that you’re incapable of paying your rent. But this has nothing to do with the beautiful summer. And I’m not angry anymore either, I think I’ve lost the talent for flying into a rage. It’s nighttime now, and anger is such a daylight phenomenon, as red and fiery as a thing can be. Tomorrow I’ll have a talk with my landlady—”