Selected Stories

by Robert Walser

  As regards the blossoming trees in the garden, I allow myself the liberty of using the epithet “enchanting,” and of the owner, the person, that is to say, who was entitled to claim, with regard to all the beauty I have described, “You are mine,” it will be desirable to mention, with a sort of horrified dismay in the voice with which I say it, the fact that he was a pimp, whom the most substantial connections seemingly contrived to make undetectable.

  How winning his appearance was, and how fetchingly he knew how to move about always in the most decorous society, standing out and striding around as one of the most artful seducers of the century, and who, one day, as the air was just beginning to shade into vesperal violet, was walking in my company on steep paths down the mountain, accordingly as an individual whose overcoat I obediently carried, and who suddenly, before my very eyes, in the middle of an old walkway, sank into an abyss that opened at his feet, sank with all his elegant sinuosities, confusing inexplicabilities, like a figure on a stage, simply vanishing.

  A woman of the middle class who saw the drama, too, exclaimed in a shrill voice: “Serves him right!” Never shall I forget the curt, bolt-upright way in which this original, i.e., completely singular member of human society, dropped into the downrightest sawn-offness.

  Ready, set—and that was the end of him. Mantled in thought, I returned to the house. The estimable gentleman’s overcoat was a showpiece of the garment industry.

  “She was spellbound by him,” I believed myself entitled to whisper, thinking the light that had dawned on me not too bright, and first smoking a subtly fragrant cigarette.

  It was one of his.

  [1927]

  Masters and Workers

  THERE are not many things that I want to say on the subject of masters and workers. The problem cuts deeply into conditions at the present time, which appear positively to seethe with beings who are workers and who sometimes disregard this particular fact. Don’t we sometimes dream with our eyes open, see blindly, feel without feeling, listen without hearing, and don’t we often, when walking, stand still? What a succession of quiet, solid, honorable questions!

  Approach, you real barons, that I may discern the lineaments of veritable master types! Masters, to me, are quite a priceless rarity, and a master is, in my view, a man who is touched now and again by the curious need to forget that he is a master. Whereas the workers are distinguished by the way they please to fancy themselves masters, the masters on occasion look down upon them, envying in an understandable sort of way the gaieties and frivolities of the workers; for it seems to me an indubitable fact that the masters are the lonely ones, insofar as they are perpetually in the right and therefore crave to learn what it tastes and smells like to be in the wrong, a thing they cannot know. The masters can behave as they please; not the workers, who consequently never cease longing for command, which they lack, though it could be said to the contrary that the masters are often fed to the teeth with their directordom, would rather be serving and obeying than issuing decrees, the activity in which they see their lives most monotonously absorbed.

  “How I’d love one day to get a really good ticking-off!”—it’s a wish that could easily occur, in my opinion, to this or that master, whereas the workers know nothing of suchlike wishes, which are never fulfilled. It’s not only wealth that makes a master; likewise, on the other hand, a worker doesn’t need to be a poor downtrodden wretch. A master, I’m convinced, is what he is much more because it is he who answers requests, just as a worker is what he thinks he is because it is from his lips that requests ring out. The worker waits; the master keeps people waiting. Yet waiting can sometimes be just as pleasant, or even more so, than keeping waiting, which requires strength. A person waiting can afford the sweet luxury of being in no way responsible; while he waits, he can think of his wife, his children, his mistress, and so on; of course, the person who keeps people waiting can do this too, if it gives him any pleasure. But it can happen that the nondescript who is waiting absolutely refuses to get off his mind, and naturally that’s a burden.

  “This dependent of mine may now be smiling to himself with extraordinary placidity,” he thinks; and he’d gladly expire with a magisterial wrath which almost puts him out of countenance; and that such an incomprehensible kind of wrath should be possible at all belongs among the perils of the master’s state. A master frequently ought to be something like a superman, yet still he remains a man, a fellow man, and “Damnation!” he shouts, fearing for himself, as it were. “Hasn’t he been waiting long enough, this man, martyrizing me with his patience?” And he presses the bell button; that’s to say, he gives the button a bash, and sees in an instant the fatuity of his explosion. He snubs an incoming zealot with a melodramatic brutality that should be seen, and he would happily devour, tigerlike, the sheep who’s waiting for his masterednesses and self-composures, and instead of dropping destructively on an enervating nonentity he jumbles up papers that seem to be giving him a professional look, in a daze, as if they were poor sinners, and the worker has no idea what’s got into the master who is offended to be capable of a sentiment, who is insulted to be able now and again to be unhappy, who is emotionally almost demolished to be regarded as a demolisher, which he is not, doesn’t want to be, cannot be.

  “Let me help you!” They’re most often unspeakably good-humored, the people who write such turns of speech, and an incredibly bad mood can possess a person who has occasion to write: “I readily assume that such and such has been promptly dealt with.”

  Obeying and commanding commingle; good manners rule masters as well as workers. I offer this essay workerishly and regard its peruser as a master to whom I wish acquaintance with the gratification of seeing some chance to prize what I give him.

  My theme does meddle somewhat, of course, as if it came too close to life, which may perhaps have grown too sensitive. What made life so? Is it going to stay as it is, or change? Why am I asking this? Why do so many questions come to me, softly, one after the other? I know, for instance, that I can live without questions. I lived without them for a long time, knew nothing of them. I was open-minded, without their invading me. Now they look at me as if I had an obligation to them. I too, like many people, became sensitive. Time is sensitive, like a person begging for help, a person perplexed. The questions beg and are sensitive and insensitive. The sensitivities harden. The disobliged person is perhaps the most sensitive. Obligations make me, for instance, hard. Those who are begged beg the beggars, who don’t understand this. The questions gaze solicitously in upon them, and are not solicitous, and those who take care of them care for the increase of the questions which regard their answerers as being insensitive. The person who’ll not let them disturb his equanimity for an instant is sensitive in their sight. In that they appear to him answered, he answers them. Why do many people not trust them this way?

  [1928]

  Essay on Freedom

  PUTTING on airs, playing squeamish, acting sensitive, shilly-shallying, finessing, fussing, and frequent dreaming in the night, all this too appertains to freedom, which one can never, in my opinion, comprehend, sense, consider, and respect variously enough. One should always be bowing inwardly to the pure image of freedom; there must be no pause in one’s respect for freedom, a respect which seems to bear a persistent relation to a kind of fear. A remarkable thing here is that freedom sets out to be single, tolerates no other freedoms beside itself. Although this can certainly be said with greater precision, I quickly take occasion to insist that I am a person who tends to appear to himself more frail than he perhaps actually is.

  For instance, I allow myself to be positively governed by freedom, so to speak oppressed by it, to be regulated by it in every imaginable way, and with a constancy that amuses me there dwells within me a most outspoken distrust of it, admirable though it be, this freedom, which I almost refrain from mentioning at all.—Freedom smiles at me, and what in turn do I do but say to myself: “Mind you, don’t let yourself be seduced by this s
mile into all sorts of unprofitabilities.”

  I return now to nocturnal dreams, whose main intent, in my opinion, is to intimidate us. The dreams make the free person aware of the dubieties, limits, or provisos of freedom, especially of its being a beautiful delusion which needs to be handled in the most delicate way. Perhaps for this reason not many people know how to deal with freedom correctly, because they do not wish to become accustomed to allowing for its violability. A delusion quickly flits away; we easily contrive to make the fantasm, as it were, hate us, because we do not understand what it essentially is. Freedom wants both to be understood and to be almost continuously not understood; it wants to be seen and then again to be as if it were not there; it is at once real and unreal, and on this point much more might well be said. Last night I dreamed among other things of quite remarkable advances being made to me by a person from whom I had never, never expected anything of the sort. Enchanting it is, the way dreams can mock the sleeper, the way they flutter the brain with freedoms which, on waking, seem laughable.

  With the reader’s leave, or rather that of the readeress, whom the writer always pictures as a lovely person, well-disposed, I draw attention, with a humility which cannot of course be free from decorous irony, to the droll possibility that, within freedom, puzzles are thinkable. One evening I start off homeward and on arriving at the house where I live I see two people, a man and a woman, looking out of the window of my room. Both these unknown people have conspicuously large faces and are quite motionless, a sight possibly apt to make a free person unfree on the spot, in every way. For quite a long time he stares at the people staring, so to speak nonchalantly, down at him, he cannot explain to himself their presence, goes upstairs, intending to ask the inexplicable occupants of his room, as politely as possible, to tell him, if they would be so kind, why they are there, and I walk in, find everything quiet, no persons are there. For a time I do not sense my own person either, I am pure independence, which is not in every way quite what it ought to be, and I ask myself if I am free.

  Isn’t there a beautiful woman I know who remarks, every time I meet her, that I do not please her, because once I did please her but apparently was not able to feel fortunate enough about it? She is a free woman, and consequently a sensitive one, who feels every insensitivity most sensitively, who in other words considers every freedom one allows oneself to take regarding her to be unrefined and partly forfeits her candor, that is, her freedom, which, as I believe I have been able to stress, has about it much that is not understood, never experienced, constantly astonishing, warming and chilling, something that is troubled by any failure to consider how it is constituted.

  I hope I may be believed if I permit myself to say that freedom is difficult and produces difficulties, with which phrase perhaps there sprang from my mouth an insight the expression of which could be accomplished by none but a connoisseur and gourmet of freedom who notes and cherishes all the unfreedoms internal to freedom.

  [1928]

  A Biedermeier Story

  IN the Biedermeier period, thus during the time when, let’s say, a Lenau brought to the shaping stage his ineffably delicate and beautiful verses, at his ease, and slowly, as he raised them up out of the silent depths of not yet having been written down, there lived, unless my presence of mind forsakes me entirely, a housemaid, of whom and in whose hearing, albeit she was in her way an excellent person perhaps, more young than old, and more nearly beautiful than fundamentally hideous, some were apt to say she was a beast.

  If her hair was a fair match for her eyes, she also enjoyed the not particularly nice reputation of being a glutton, which could have been an insult, of such utterly unwarranted slightness that, living, moving, and standing as I do in my own epoch, I am most gratifyingly astonished by it.

  During the time when, as is well known, the Russian general Gorchakov practically dominated the European scene, there existed with the upper and lower middle class, to set ladies’ maids’ fingers flying, corsets, or bodices. Everyone knows that Biedermeier women were laced to the utmost tightness when they went to their soirées.

  The moment this housemaid, due to the prevailing servant hierarchy, received a blow on the head, she would say of the punishment that had been inflicted upon her, yes, insofar as she would smile politely, that is to say, with impertinent civility.

  She worked in a nimble way, but her lover became, with more success than was welcome to his fellows, a criminal, who did with wondrous precision things I shall not mention.

  While misdeed upon misdeed accrued to his credit, or, in slightly diffierent language, good prose pieces galore seemed to drop from his pen, his conduct toward the housemaid was so beneficial that she believed she was right to think of him as a man whose goodness had no bounds.

  The maid, true, though this emphasis is only incidental, had a habit of eating Schabziger, as they call it, a variety of herb cheese. More and more difficult did it become for him to kiss her on the lips. He once took the risk of indicating disapproval thereof; she begrudged him this.

  With a nobly casual air as befitted his rank as a war lord, General Gorchakov, who only comes into this sketch of mine for local color, commanded his armies.

  Once the housemaid had performed her tasks, instead of going out for a walk, which certainly would have done her no harm, she went to her room, sat down at the table, and started to write.

  If it was letters she wrote that reached her lover safely every time, perhaps the window was open and a sparrow, or chaffinch, would be fluttering on the sill.

  All the songs of singing birds heard by people such a long, long time ago!

  [1928–29]

  The Honeymoon

  IT was ideal, and the couple would think of it for a long time afterwards. He wore on his head a beret and she a voile de voyage floating in the wind that scudded over the blades of grass. The forest edge checked the wind. Firs waved and nodded, and good-naturedly oaks spread their limbs. “We hope with hearts as one,” he said. She looked at him, gratefully. In their rolling motor car they came into a sumptuous town with high-gabled houses glowing duskily. Among the splendid, exquisite buildings were blossoming gracious trees that seemed to bid the new arrivals welcome. On the windowsills flowerpots stood, and in the inn where the couple comfortably dismounted, for repast and repose, musicians were fluting, bag-piping, and trumpeting. The next day their journey took them across fields and through forests. Beside a sparkling brook, as it rippled along, they had a snug idyllic picnic in a setting of distant hills. Traveling on, they encountered a crackpot who, gaunt and very tall, in threadbare lackadaisical clothes, gave them a haughty look. “Bachelor!” said the bridegroom, suffused with love and devotion, to the stranger, “why do you look at us with such contempt?” The scornful smiler answered: “Because I am nagging and caviling at you, and only half believe in your happiness.” The bride shook her head, as if this man who doubted joy was beyond her comprehension. Soon the philosophical figure had disappeared from their sight. In time they came to a station, through which a train passed. Not far from there a friendly body of water spread itself, in a wreath of reeds. A swan was swimming on the calm, clear surface. From a bell tower on whose tip a cockerel shone golden in the sun, a clock announced the hour. A boy on stilts strutted past a table on whose top a pair of gloves was lying. A Gaul or Hun had a tobacco pipe in his mouth and was belaboring with a saw a piece of wood, using a sawing horse. For a time the eyes of the happy couple were attracted to a spindle. A hunter pursued a partridge, aided by a nimble and willing dog. Toward the swan, on the lake shore, a pig walked at a leisurely pace, grunting contentedly from time to time, aiming to cozy up to the noble creature. The ill-favored animal, which even then presented a sort of image of peerlessness, succeeded in coming up alongside. The swan, in its soft and elegant way, was willing to accommodate the eager pig in partnership. What a beautiful thing friendship can be! Yet many other sights were in store for them, a farmer plowing, for instance, and next to him a countr
y manor of townlike appearance, over which a snail was strolling, on some errand or other, if to speak of a stroll can be justified here. A robed rider rode on his buoyant horse out of a suggestive thicket, evidently on a mission, and a piece of rope, or string, was lying on a bench. The bench was absorbed in the expectation of being sat on. To enumerate every concrete thing in the world would exhaust me, and the reader too, so I shall confine myself and wish the couple a safe return home and a cornucopia of delights on their life’s way. All around they looked, were interested in a variety of things, took careful note of some, including an elephant, a dove, and a snake. Capped with fluttering bannerets, and highbreasted, a ship ran into a harbor. Barrels and boxes lay there in quiet heaps. Before a group of soldiers, someone who had made a mistake and was about to atone for it received a number of blows, buffets, or lashes. The person inflicting the punishment stood at attention, while the recipient of it kneeled and implored, quite properly, for trustful behavior did not suit him. Over him as he whimpered, a crocodile was shedding tears. Little swallows flew through the blue over an acrobat competing with a juggler who threw balls, torches, knives, and so forth, into the air, each attempting to astonish with his art, with finesse and winsomeness. Twenty meters and more above the earth an angel sat, as if on a chair. How did he do so, without any basis? There was nothing to support him, sustain him; nevertheless, he sat there, with peace of mind, angelic, absolving an exercise. The friendly expression never left his face for a second. Not a trace of strain did he show. Apparently he could do this difficult thing with perfect ease. A fullness evidently fortified and secured him. And he never ate anything! Food makes one feel tired, crusty, heavy, stiff, and somnolent. In fasting there is unquestionably a deep significance, an impulse, a lifting up. A task had taken possession of the angel; he had been entirely absorbed into it. A will to attain an object, to merge with the object, to become one with it, to be himself, filled him. I could never do what he could. For him it was the opposite. Not to be able to do what he had to do would not have been possible for him. Thus he sat there so peacefully, so dead.