The Assistant

by Robert Walser

  Half an hour later, during coffee hour in the summer house, a rather indelicate scene took place.

  Frau Tobler, who appeared to have recovered her composure entirely, suddenly began to sing the praises of Wirsich most vividly, saying how this person, who was unfortunately given to sin, had been so useful, handy and skillful in all other ways, how he had immediately accepted every insignificant assignment, every task he was charged with, without making a fuss about it, and she said several other things of this sort, glancing repeatedly at Joseph with what struck him as a taunting look, and offended him. For this reason he cried out:

  “This eternal Wirsich! It’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that the man’s a peerless genius. Why is it that he is no longer here, given how constantly one hears tell of his virtually divine qualities? Because he got drunk? And is it then just and proper to demand all imaginable excellence from the person of a clerk and then send him away, drive him off into the huge, difficult world just because a single aspect of his character has cast a pall over all his remaining excellent qualities? In truth, this is a bit much. So here we are presented with faithfulness and intelligence, knowledge and assiduous labor, amusing conversation and deference, and all these qualities, along with one or two additional gems, we take into our employment, accepting them serenely and cheerfully since this is what’s done, and because we are giving the owner of this large gunny-sack of distinctions a salary, food and lodging in exchange for all these qualities. And now one day we detect a black stain on this handsome body, and all at once our easygoing satisfaction has vanished and we tell the man to pack his bundle and move on to wherever he pleases, but we’ll nonetheless go on speaking for a half meter, or a whole one, and a goodly year long and wide about this man and all his ‘good qualities.’ Surely one must admit that this is not such a terribly proper sort of conduct, particularly when one insists on rubbing the nose of this person’s successor in all these precious and princely attributes, no doubt in order to wound him—just as you, Frau Tobler, have been doing to me, the successor of your Wirsich.”

  He gave a loud laugh, intentionally in fact, so as to diffuse and disperse somewhat the insubordinate impression left by his rather long speech. He was a little frightened now that he was coming to his senses, and in order to add a note of humor to mask the touchiness of the words he had spoken, he started laughing, but it was a forced laughter that was more of an apology.

  Joseph had no cause, Frau Tobler said after a few moments of silence, to speak to her in such a way, she would not permit him to use such a tone with her, and she was astonished to see him adopting this sort of behavior. If he were really so proud and sensitive that he could not bear to hear his predecessor praised, then it would be better for him if he were to build himself a hermit’s cottage high up in the forest and make his home among the wildcats and foxes, he needn’t seek the company of other human beings. Here in the world, one was not permitted to place everything on so delicately calibrated a scale. By the way, she had no choice but to inform her husband of the contents of the exceedingly peculiar speech he had made, Tobler should know what sort of man this clerk of his was.

  She was about to get up and leave when Joseph cried out:

  “Don’t say anything. I apologize for everything. Please, forgive me!”

  Frau Tobler gave the young man a look of contempt. She said: “That’s more like it,” and went away.

  “Just in the nick of time. That’s Tobler himself down there,” Joseph thought, and indeed, there was the boss on his way home unexpectedly earlier than usual.

  A mere quarter of an hour later, Herr Tobler had been informed in meticulous detail of all that had transpired. To Joseph he remarked:

  “So you’re starting to mistreat my wife, are you?”

  This is all he said. When it had seemed as if his wife’s complaints would never come to an end, he had shouted at her, “Leave me in peace with this foolishness!”

  Indeed, the engineer was now occupied with graver concerns.

  That evening, the tower room became once more the quiet, lamplit setting for a soliloquy that was spoken aloud. Joseph, taking off his jacket and vest, addressed himself as follows:

  “I’ve got to pull myself better together, things can’t go on like this. What could possibly have possessed me to speak so roughly to Frau Tobler? Do I place so much value and importance in what comes from the lips of such a lady? All this time, poor Herr Tobler is working himself to the bone on his business trips, while his clerk occupies himself with sentimental nonsense in a summer house over cups of coffee. These womanish concerns! What is it to me if Frau Tobler finds this and that characteristic of Wirsich worth praising? It’s all so simple. This pale knight with his poor-sinner face left an impression on her feminine mind. Need this alarm me? Why should it? Instead of thinking every hour and half hour about the technical enterprises, I have made it my business to convince a woman of my character. Convince her of what? Aha, character! As if it were necessary for an engineer’s clerk to have character. It’s just that my head is always brimful with the silliest things when it ought rather to be concentrating on my duty to engage in truly profitable and enterprise-furthering reflection. Is my sense of duty so poorly developed? Here I am eating bread and drinking coffee, and I accompany these pleasant advantages and benefits with a truly inappropriate longing for the most damaging thoughtlessness. And then I hold half-hour-long speeches before a horrified and astonished woman to make it clear to her she has aroused my wrath. What use is this to Herr Tobler? Will it make his difficult financial situation any easier? Has it caused the transactions that need to be carried out to recover from the paralysis with which they have been stricken? Here I am occupying one of the most beautifully situated rooms in all the world, with one of the best views. Lake and mountains and meadow landscape have been laid before my eyes and feet as an extra bonus, and how am I justifying such utterly wasteful generosity? With an utter absence of wits! What are Wirsich and his nocturnal visitors to me? There is something far more important that concerns me far more greatly, namely the firm whose insignia is emblazoned on my brow and whose interests I should bear in my head and my heart. In my heart? Why not? One’s fingers and thoughts can hardly work as they should if one’s heart isn’t in it. There’s a reason people speak of certain matters as being ‘close to one’s heart.’ ”

  He racked his brains for some time longer over the question of what could be done to help get the Advertising Clock back firmly on its feet—“business reflections” over which at last he fell asleep.

  In the middle of the night, he suddenly awoke. He sat up in his pillows: Ah, that was Silvi screaming! He got up, went to the door, opened it and listened, and then he heard the sounds of a repugnant scene. It was Pauline’s voice now, shouting:

  “So you were too lazy to get up and sit on the chamber pot, were you, you hideous creature?” Silvi whimpered and tried to justify herself, speaking in a stammer, but in this she had no hope of succeeding, for in response to her miserable protests the maid was slapping her so hard it sounded like wet laundry.

  Joseph got dressed, went downstairs to the children’s bedroom and gently reproached Pauline. She, however, shouted that he should mind his own business—she knew what her duty was—and he should get out of her sight at once, whereupon she yanked Silvi by the hair, as if to demonstrate what authority she enjoyed in the nursery, and ordered her to get back into bed—into the wet bed, for that was part of her punishment.

  The assistant withdrew, to all appearances meekly acknowledging the sovereignty of this martinet. “Tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever it will be,” he thought, lying back down in his bed, “I shall have to make yet another speech before Frau Tobler. Even if it’s ridiculous. I wonder whether she has a heart. As an employee of the Tobler household, I am obligated to put in a word for Silvi, for Silvi too is a member of this household whose interests I am supposed to represent.”

  The next day he hurried by train to the
capital, having received, as usual, his allowance of five marks. It was beautiful warm weather, and the train tracks ran along the shoreline of the gleaming-blue lake. He had scarcely gotten off the train when he was struck by how unfamiliar this city he once had known so well now appeared to him. His relatively short absence had so transfigured and tinted this place; he would never have thought it possible. Everything appeared to him so small. Along the quay beside the lake, many people were strolling in the glaring noonday sun. What utterly unfamiliar faces! And all these people looked so poor. To be sure, these were people from the underprivileged, working classes, not gentlemen and ladies—but a web of misery that had nothing to do with the wretchedness of poverty in the economic sense had wrapped itself around this entire bright perambulatory scene. It was nothing other than the strangeness, the unfamiliarity casting its glare into his eyes, and feeling this, he said to himself that when a person had lived for weeks at the Villa Tobler, there was no need for him to be surprised at the sight of an urban setting and his own estrangement from it. Faces were plumper and redder out where the Toblers lived, hands grasped more firmly, and people walked with more of a swagger than you saw here in the rarefied city, whose inhabitants quickly took on a pinched, inconspicuous appearance. After all, Joseph considered, it was natural for the small and narrow to become a large, significant world in its own right for a person who had not experienced anything else for a period of time, while the most significant and far-reaching things could appear at first modest and shabby, just because they were so breezy, diffuse, and expansive. In the Tobler household, a certain modest plumpness and thickness had prevailed from the outset, and these qualities had some weight to them, giving them an obvious appeal; whereas wide panoramic vistas of freedom and prolixity might easily leave a person cold, for they appeared so insubstantial. The most comforting things, Joseph felt, always looked so modest, though to be sure the world of a Tobler or tyrant might also display a certain coziness or human warmth emanating enticingly and invitingly from tower rooms and the like. At times the state of being fettered and bound to a particular place could be warmer and richer, more filled with tender secrets, than outright freedom, which left all the world’s doors and windows standing wide open. In freedom’s bright spaces, people all too often found themselves beset by bitter cold or oppressive heat; but as for this other sort of freedom that he, Joseph, was thinking of—well, goodness, freedom of this sort was, in the end, the most fitting and loveliest sort, possessed of an undying magic.

  Yet soon the image of urban Sunday leisure stopped looking so strange to him, so perfunctory and rough-shod, and the further he walked, the more familiar everything appeared to his eyes and heart. He sent his eyes off strolling among the many people strolling before him, and with his nose, which was accustomed to Tobler cuisine, he inhaled the scents of the city and city life. His legs were now marching quite jauntily again upon city streets, as if they had never once set foot upon country soil.

  How brightly the sun was shining, and how modestly people were walking to and fro. How lovely it was that one could lose oneself amid all this bustling, standing, strolling and swinging. How high up the sky was, and how the sunlight was making itself at home upon all the objects, bodies and movements, and how lightly and gaily shadows were slipping in between. The waves of the lake were striking not at all tempestuously against the stone barriers. Everything was so gentle, so overcast, so light and lovely—it all became just as large as it was small, just as near-at-hand as distant, just as extensive as minute and just as dainty as significant. Soon everything Joseph beheld appeared to have become a natural, quiet, benevolent dream, not such a terribly beautiful one, no: a modest dream, and yet it was so beautiful.

  Beneath the trees of a small park or common, people were resting upon benches. How often Joseph as well had availed himself of one or the other of these benches, back when he had been living in the city. He took a seat this time, too, beside a good-looking girl. The conversation then initiated by the assistant revealed her to be a native of Munich who was hoping to find work in this city that was utterly foreign to her. She seemed to be poor and unhappy, but he’d so often encountered poor and melancholy individuals on these benches and spoken with them. The two of them exchanged a few more words, then the girl from Munich abruptly got up to go. Joseph inquired whether he could come to her aid with a small sum of money. Oh no, she said, but then did accept something and took her leave of him.

  You found such different sorts of people sitting upon public benches like these. Joseph began to observe each of them in turn. That young man sitting on his own over there tracing figures in the sand with his walking stick, what might he be, what of all things in the world, if not a bookstore employee? Perhaps this classification was in error, well, in that case he was surely one of those numerous department store clerks who always had “plans” of some sort on Sundays. And that girl over there across from him, was she a coquette or a respectable lady, or perhaps simply a prim, well-mannered little ornamental plant? Or a doll disinclined to accept the experiences the world was holding out to all mankind with its rich, warm arms like a magnificent bouquet? Or might she belong to two, even three different categories at once? This was certainly possible, for such things were known to occur. Life did not so readily allow itself to be sorted into boxes and systems. And that old, decaying man over there with the unkempt beard, what was he, where had he just come from, to what profession and walk of life could we presume him to belong? Was he a beggar? Was he one of those indefinable individuals who spent their weeks sitting in the marvelous Copyists Bureau for the Unemployed, where they earn a couple of marks as a daily or weekly wage? What had he been before that? Had he worn an elegant suit once, along with a ditto walking stick and gloves? Ah, life may have made him bitter, but it could also make you merry and profoundly humble, and grateful for the little you had, for the bit of sweet open air that was there for the breathing. And what about that refined—even genteel, it appeared—pair of lovebirds or bridal couple? Was it a pair of English or American travelers savoring on the fly the entire existing world? The lady was wearing a delicate feather on her little hat that looked as if it had just sailed up and landed on her head, and the gentleman was laughing, he looked very happy—no, both of them did! How the two of them kept laughing the whole time, it was so lovely to laugh and be glad.

  This lovely, dear, long summer! Joseph got to his feet and slowly went on walking, making his way down an affluent and elegant but deserted street. On Sundays, yes, that’s just when wealthy people remain at home, they scarcely show themselves at all; perhaps going out on the street on this day struck them as unrefined. All the shops were closed. Isolated, scattered individuals swayed and tottered along, often decidedly unattractive men and women. What humility lay in such a scattered portrait of persons out for a stroll. In what bitterly impoverished a guise a human Sunday could appear. “Becoming humble,” the assistant thought, “isn’t this where so many find their final refuge in this life?”

  Little by little, he passed through new and different streets.

  So many streets! They reached far out into the landscape, building after building, even extending up the hill and along the canals, an endless progression of larger and smaller blocks of stone, with apartments carved into them for both the wealthy and the indigent. Now and again came a church—a rigid, smooth new one, or else a stately, tranquil older one with ivy on its crumbling walls. Joseph went past a police building, from whose premises he had once heard, years before, the screams of a mistreated person whom they had bound and were trying to subdue by beating him with a stick.

  Now his path led him across a bridge, gradually the streets were becoming less regular and restricted, and the region he was walking through took on a village-like character. Cats were lying before the doors of the houses, and the houses were encircled by little gardens. The evening sun was laying itself yellowish-red upon the upper walls of the buildings and the trees in the gardens and on the faces
and hands of people. He had reached the suburbs.

  Joseph walked into one of the newer buildings that made such a curious appearance in this still almost rural region, climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, and remained standing there, waiting for politeness’ sake until he’d caught his breath, then he brushed the dust from his clothes and rang the bell. The door opened, and the woman who appeared behind it gave a quiet little shriek of astonishment when she caught sight of him:

  “Joseph, is it really you? It is? Come inside!”

  The woman gave him her hand and pulled Joseph into her room. There she gazed for a rather long time into his eyes, took the hat from the head of the one standing there somewhat stiffly, smiled and said:

  “How long it’s been since we’ve seen each other. Sit down.”

  A moment later she said:

  “Come, Joseph, come. Come sit here, beside the window. And then tell me everything. Tell me how you were able to go on living for so long without writing me a single solitary word, and without ever coming to see me. Will you have something to drink? Don’t be shy, I’ve got some wine left in the bottle.”