The woman began to speak of her holiday that past summer at Lake Lucerne. This year, alas, there’d be nothing of the sort. It was out of the question. And then it was also so very beautiful here as well. You didn’t need a summer holiday when you could live in such a place. At bottom, one was almost always presumptuous in one’s wishes, always desiring something or other, which of course was perfectly natural—Joseph nodded—but at times this resembled outright arrogance.
She laughed. “How strangely she laughs,” the subordinate mused and went on thinking: “One might, if one was set on it, take this way of laughing as the basis for a geographical study. This laugh precisely designates the region from which this woman comes. It is a handicapped laugh, it comes out of her mouth in a slightly unnatural way, as if it had always been held a little in check in early years by an all-too-strict upbringing. But it is a lovely feminine laugh, even a tiny bit frivolous. Only highly respectable women are permitted to laugh in such a way.”
Meanwhile the woman had continued to speak, describing that really quite idyllic and agreeable holiday. A young American had rowed her out onto the lake each day in a skiff. What a chivalrous young man he was. And then, of course, it was so delightful, so refreshing for a married woman like herself to be able to spend a few weeks all alone, and in so very beautiful a place. Without her husband, without the children. There’s no need to imagine this in an indelicate light. To just do nothing all day long but eat splendid food and lie in the shade beneath such a magnificent, broad-limbed chestnut tree, just such a tree as stood in that spot where she took her holiday last year. Such a tree. She kept picturing it, and herself lying beneath it. She’d also had a tiny white little dog, she always brought it to bed with her. Such a clean, delicate little creature. Well, this animal only served to reinforce the charming impression she was being invited to indulge in: that she was a lady, a true lady. Later she’d had to give the dog away.
“I must go back to work,” Joseph said, rising from his seat.
“Are you really so very diligent?”
“Well, one does what one considers one’s duty.” With these words he withdrew. In the office he was confronted by an invisible-visible apparition: the Advertising Clock. He sat down at his desk and resumed his correspondence. The mailman came to collect a C.O.D. charge; it was a trifling sum, Joseph paid it out of his own pocket. Then he wrote a few letters on behalf of the Advertising Clock. What great investments had to be made in pursuit of such a clock!
“It is like a small or large child, this clock,” the clerk thought, “like a headstrong child that requires constant self-sacrificing care and doesn’t even thank one for watching over it. And is this enterprise flourishing, is the child growing? Little progress can be seen. An inventor does love his inventions. Tobler has become quite enamored of this costly clock. But what will other people think of it? An idea must entrance those who hear of it, fill them with enthusiasm, otherwise it will be difficult to put into practice. As for myself, I firmly believe in the possibility of bringing this idea to fruition, and I believe in it because it is my duty to believe in it, because I am being paid to do so. But come to think of it, what sort of salary am I to receive?”
Indeed, no arrangements had yet been made in this regard.
For the rest of the week, all was calm. What might possibly have troubled the peace? Joseph was obedient and took pains to display a cheerful expression. And what cause did he have to be particularly grumpy? For the time being he appeared to have every cause to feel content. After all, he hadn’t exactly been coddled in the military either. He probed ever deeper into the nature of the Advertising Clock and was already of the opinion that he had fathomed it in its entirety. What did it matter that two bills to the tune of four hundred marks apiece had gone unpaid? It was simple enough to postpone the due date of these items for a month; Joseph even found it gave him tremendous pleasure to be permitted to write to these dunning accounts: “Please be patient a short while longer. The financing of my patents will soon be completed, and at such time, it will be possible for me to resolve these overdue obligations promptly.”
He had several letters of this sort to write, and felt pleased at the facility with which he was mastering the style of business correspondence.
Already he had explored much of the village. Strolling to the post office was always quite enjoyable. There were two ways to get there: either by taking the broad road that led along the lake, or by crossing over the hill between orchards and farmhouses. He almost always chose the latter route. All these things appeared quite simple to him.
On Sunday Tobler presented him with a good German cigar along with five marks pocket money so that he could “treat himself to something” now and again.
The house stood there so beautifully in the bright sunshine. To Joseph it appeared a veritable Sunday house. He walked down through the garden, swinging his swim trunks in one hand, and descended all the way to the lake, where he undressed in a leisurely fashion in a dilapidated bathing shack whose cracked boards admitted the sunlight, then he threw himself into the water. He swam far out, he was in such good spirits. What swimming person, provided he is not about to drown, can help being in excellent spirits? It appeared to him as if the gay, warm, smooth surface of the lake were taking on a rounded, vaulted shape. The water was simultaneously cool and tepid. Perhaps a faint breath of wind came whispering across it, or else a bird flew past above his head, high up in the air. Once he came close to a small boat; a single man was sitting in it, a fisherman peacefully fishing and rocking away his Sunday. What softness, what shimmering light. And with your naked, sensation-filled arms, you slice into this wet, clean, benevolent element. With every stroke of your legs, you advance a bit further in this beautiful deep wetness. From below, you are buoyed up by warm and chilly currents. You plunge your head briefly beneath the water to irrigate the excitement in your breast, squeezing shut your mouth and eyes and breath, so as to feel this delightful sensation in your entire body. Swimming, you want to shout or at least cry out, or at least laugh, or at least say something, and you do. And then from the shores of the lake echo these sounds among high, distant shapes. These wonderful bright colors on a Sunday morning such as this. You splash about with your hands and feet, stand upright in the water, floating and, as it were, balancing upon a trapeze, all the while keeping your arms in motion. There’s no sinking then. Now you press your closed eyes once more into the fluid, green, firm, unfathomable entity and swim to shore.
How splendid that was!
Meanwhile lunch guests had arrived.
The story behind these guests is as follows: Joseph’s predecessor in his position was a certain Wirsich. This Wirsich had won the Toblers’ hearts. They recognized in him a person capable of great devotion and deeply valued his efficiency. He was an extremely precise individual, but only in a state of sobriety. As long as he was sober, he was endowed with practically all—indeed one can say with all—the virtues desirable in a clerk. He was exceedingly orderly, he possessed knowledge of both a commercial and legal nature, he was industrious and energetic. He was skillful at representing his employer at any time and under most any circumstances in a confidence-inspiring, convincing way. On top of this, he wrote a fair hand. Quick-witted as he was, and possessed of a lively interest in all things, this Wirsich had found it child’s play to further his employer’s business interests with autonomy and to the latter’s complete satisfaction. His bookkeeping skills, moreover, were exemplary. But all these fine qualities could sometimes vanish altogether at a moment’s notice: when he had been drinking. Wirsich was no longer a young man, he was around thirty-five years old, and this is an age at which certain passions, if their bearer has not yet learned to govern them, often take on a horrific appearance and terrifying dimensions. The consumption of alcohol regularly (that is, from time to time) turned this man into a wild irrational beast with which, quite understandably, it was impossible to reason. Time and again, Herr Tobler showed him the door, ins
tructing him to pack his things and never return. Wirsich would in fact leave the house, cursing and shouting imprecations, but then, as soon as he was himself again, he would reappear with a contrite poor-sinner face on the very threshold that just a few days before, in the madness and folly of his inebriation, he had vehemently sworn he would never again cross. And miracle of miracles: Tobler would take him back again each time. He would harangue him mercilessly on these occasions, as one might discipline poorly behaved children, but then he would say that Wirsich could stay, that they would draw a veil over what had occurred and give him one last chance. This happened four or five times. There was something irresistible about Wirsich, which was particularly in evidence whenever he opened his mouth to utter a plea or an apology. In such cases he appeared so utterly penitent and distraught that the Toblers were overcome with a feeling of warmth, heat even, and they forgave him, without themselves knowing why. And then there was that peculiar and, as it appeared, profound impression that Wirsich always succeeded in making upon persons of the opposite sex. It can be assumed with reasonable certainty that Frau Tobler, too, was susceptible to this bizarre spell, this inexplicable magic. She respected Wirsich as long as he was even-tempered and sane, and she felt a compassion that even she found inexplicable for the ruffian and brute. His very looks were as if made to be judged by women. His sharp masculine features, supported in their sharpness and assurance by his pallid skin, his black hair, and his large, deep-set dark eyes, were just as involuntarily appealing as a certain dryness that adhered to all the rest of his bearing and nature—a homespun quality that generally gives the impression of kindheartedness and strength of purpose, two features no sensitive woman can resist.
And so it happened that Wirsich was always taken back again. What a woman says to her husband over lunch in a light, laughing, luxurious tone of voice never fails to influence him, particularly, in this case, as Tobler himself had “always been quite fond of this unfortunate individual.” Wirsich’s mother regularly came to call each time her son was reinstated, to give thanks on his behalf. Her, too, they were fond of. People do, by the way, tend to cherish those upon whom they have been able to impose their power and influence. Wealth and bourgeois prosperity like to dispense humiliations, or, no, that’s going too far, but they do have a fondness for gazing down on the humiliated, a sentiment in which we must acknowledge the presence of a certain benevolence, and of a certain brutality as well.
One night Wirsich went too far. He returned home from an evening spent at The Rose, a public house on the main road into town that was heavily frequented by all sorts of vagabonds including unsavory women, drunk out of his mind, blustering and shouting, and demanded to be let in. When he was refused entry, he availed himself of the crooked stick he was carrying to shatter the pane of glass set into the front door and then as much of the lattice as he could manage. He also threatened in a terrifying, unrecognizable voice to “send the whole place up in flames,” as he expressed himself in the ferocity of his ravaged mind, bellowing so loudly that not only the whole neighborhood must have heard him but even those living farther off in the surrounding countryside, and indulging in the most shameful execrations of his benefactors. He had almost, with the help of that physical strength possessed by every unconscious, unfeeling brute, succeeded in breaking down the door—lock and bolt were already wobbling alarmingly—when Herr Tobler, who, it seemed, had at last lost all patience, thrust open the door from within and fell upon the drunkard with a hail of violent blows that knocked Wirsich to the gravel at his feet. In response to Tobler’s unambiguous demand that he instantaneously make himself scarce, as he would otherwise be subjected to further and similar blows, Wirsich raised himself up on all fours to crawl out of the garden. Several times the figure of the drunkard—in the moonlight, those standing above him were able to observe each of his monstrous gestures—tumbled to the ground again, then again stood up and finally thrust itself, much like a clumsy bear, out of the garden altogether, making for the main road, where it was lost from sight.
Two weeks following this nocturnal incident, Tobler held in his hands a voluminous letter of apology from Wirsich wherein the miscreant apparently pledged in well-nigh classical style to mend his ways and requested that Herr Tobler offer him employment one single last time, as otherwise Wirsich would find himself reduced to the most bitter adversity. Both he and his elderly mother implored that the old, agreeable benevolence he had enjoyed might be his once more—just one last time—even though, as he openly admitted, painful as this was for him, he had already forfeited many times over his right to expect kindness. Wirsich, the letter concluded, was filled with such longing for the household, for the entire family he had come to love and cherish, for the site of his erstwhile employment, that he had to tell himself that either he would be permitted to hope for a rebirth of his former existence and be filled with good cheer, or else the bolt had snapped shut behind him once and for all, and all that remained to him was despair, remorse, shame and bitterness.
But it was too late. The bolt had, in fact, snapped shut and locked: he had already been replaced. The very next morning following that appalling nocturnal scene, Tobler had betaken himself to the capital and paid a visit to the Employment Referral Office, where he had engaged Joseph. The aforementioned letter arrived in the Tobler household on the same day Joseph did.
Meanwhile, the guests who had arrived for Sunday luncheon were none other than Wirsich and his mother.
Feeling fresh from the exertion of swimming, Joseph greeted his predecessor warmly. Before the old woman he made a slight bow. It was immediately obvious that the mood at the lunch table was one of dejection. Very little was said, and the few comments ventured were of a general nature. A sense of misery and gingerliness had cast a pall over the white tablecloth and the fragrant steaming food upon it, as well as over the faces of the people seated there. Herr Tobler’s eyes were popping, but as for the rest he was cheerful and friendly and in a benevolently condescending tone of voice encouraged his guests to dig in. Every meal tastes good after a swim, and in the open air, beneath a blue sky like this, almost anything one might eat would taste delicious, but today’s meal struck Joseph as utterly glorious, simple as it was. The others, too, seemed to be enjoying it, not least the old woman who, for the occasion, had donned an air of refined worldliness. Where might this down-at-heels lady be living, and how? In what rooms, in what surroundings? How shabby and gaunt she appeared. She looked, as it were, thrifty, scanty or skimpy, particularly beside the voluptuous, upper-class Frau Tobler, who had been born and raised amid plenty and warmth. Frau Wirsich and Frau Tobler. Indeed, if distinctions exist in this world, these were differences of the purest, truest sort.
Frau Tobler always looked a bit haughty, but how charmingly this faint, unwavering trace of haughtiness flattered the lines of her face and figure. One wouldn’t have wanted to wish it away, it belonged to her appearance, just as a resonant, ineffable magic belongs to a folk song. This song rang out delicately in the very highest notes, Frau Wirsich understood and felt this quite distinctly. How paltry was the sound of the one song, how rich that of the other. Herr Tobler was pouring out red wine. He wanted to fill Wirsich’s glass as well, but his mother quickly covered her son’s glass with her old bony hand.
“Ah bah, why ever not? He’s got to drink something, too,” Tobler exclaimed.
The eyes of the old woman instantly filled up with tears. Seeing this, all of them shuddered. Wirsich wanted to whisper something to his mother, but some stiff stony force, against which he was helpless to defend himself, paralyzed his tongue. He sat there mute as a mullet, gazing down at his own timid eating. Frau Wirsich had withdrawn her hand, thereby declaring, as it were, that now of course it was a matter of complete indifference to her whether her son drank or not. Her gesture said: Go on, fill his glass: All is lost in any case. Wirsich took a few small sips from his glass, and he seemed to be filled with an insurmountable dread of that thing that had toppled h
im from a position in the world that had in fact been quite comfortable.
O Frau Wirsich, how your tear-sullied eyes utterly overshadow those few resplendent worldly mannerisms you’ve adopted. You had so intended to confine yourself to the most delicate gestures, and now your grief has gotten the better of you. Your old hands, as creased as a worried forehead, are trembling considerably. What is your mouth saying? Nothing? Ah, Mother Wirsich, one is required to speak in respectable company. Just look how a certain other lady is observing you.
Frau Tobler was glancing casually over at Frau Wirsich with concerned but cold eyes, at the same time stroking the curls of her youngest child, who sat beside her. A genuinely prosperous woman! On one side, childish affection and trust were beaming up at her, while the other was given over to the woes of a sister human being. Both sides, the sweet and the sorrowful alike, were flattering to this woman. In a soft voice, she spoke a few words of comfort to Frau Wirsich, which the latter fended off, if humbly, by shaking her head. Now the meal was over. Herr Tobler passed around his cigar case, and the gentlemen smoked. This sunlight, this wonderful scenery of mountain, lake, meadow. And then this narrow, wary conversation among this little cluster of people. Certainly it was important to be merciful to others, they were people too. This sentiment was clearly visible in the expression of the lady of the house. But precisely this silent insinuation of the desire to act with mercy was utterly merciless. It was devastating.
The Assistant Page 3