The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  Come visit me soon. I can give you shelter just as I would shelter a bride whom I assume to be in the habit of reposing on silk while servants wait on her. Admittedly I have no servants, but I do have a room fit for a born lord. The two of us, you and I, have just been offered a splendid chambre as a gift, it’s been laid at our feet. You can paint pictures here just as well as in your luscious fat landscapes, after all you have your imagination. It ought by rights to be summer now so that I might throw a garden party on the lawn in your honor, with Chinese lanterns and garlands of flowers, so as to receive you in a manner approaching what you deserve. Come all the same, but see to it your coming is quick, otherwise I’ll have to come get you. My lady and landlady is pressing your hand in hers. She is convinced that she knows you already just from my descriptions. Once she meets you, she’ll never want to meet anyone else again. Do you have a decent suit? Are your trousers not sagging too terribly about your knees, and does your head covering still merit the designation hat? Otherwise you may not appear before me. Just a joke, what silliness. Let your little Simon embrace you. Farewell, brother. I hope you’ll come soon—

  * * *

  Several weeks had passed, spring was beginning to return, the air was damper and softer, uncertain fragrances and sounds began to assert themselves, coming seemingly from beneath the earth. The earth was soft, one walked on it as on thick supple rugs. You thought you must be hearing birds singing. “Spring is on its way,” people on the street said to one another, awash in sensations. Even the stark buildings were taking on a certain fragrance, a richer hue. Such a peculiar state of affairs, and yet it was such an old, familiar phenomenon—but everyone perceived it as utterly novel, it inspired strange, turbulent thoughts, a person’s limbs, senses, heads, thoughts, everything was stirring as if all these things wished to start growing anew. The water of the lake gleamed so warmly, and the bridges snaking across the river appeared to arch more boldly. Flags were flapping in the wind, and it gave people pleasure to see them flap. And then the sunshine drove everyone out into the beautiful, white, clean streets in clusters and groups, where they remained standing, greedily luxuriating in the warm air’s kisses. Many coats of many people were cast aside. You could see the men moving more freely again, and the women had such strange expressions in their eyes, as though something blissful were emerging from their hearts. At night one heard the sound of vagabond guitars for the first time, and men and women stood amid a whirl of gaily frolicking children. The lights of the lanterns flickered like candles in quiet rooms, and when you went walking across the night-dark meadows, you could feel the blooming and stirring of the flowers. The grass would soon grow again, the trees soon begin again to pour their green over the low roofs of the houses and block the view from the windows. The forest would be luxuriant, voluptuous, heavy, oh the forest.— — Simon was working once more at a large commercial firm.

  This firm was a bank that enjoyed international significance, a large building with a palatial look to it in which hundreds of young and old, male and female people were employed. They all wrote with diligent fingers, made calculations using calculating machines and also sometimes their memories, thought using their thoughts and made themselves useful with their knowledge. There were any number of young, elegant letter-writing clerks who could speak four to seven languages. These clerks stood out from the rest of the calculating pack by virtue of their refined foreign airs. They had traveled on ocean liners, attended the theater in Paris and New York, visited tea houses in Yokohama and knew how to amuse themselves in Cairo. Now they were handling the bank’s correspondence and waited for their salaries to increase while casting aspersions on their homeland, which they found tiny and dingy. The calculating pack consisted for the most part of older individuals who clung to their posts large and small as if to beams and stakes. All of them had long noses from years of calculations and went about in threadbare, shabby, abraded, creased and crumpled garments. But among them were a number of intelligent individuals who perhaps secretly pursued strange exotic hobbies and thus led lives that, while quiet and isolated, were nonetheless dignified. Many of the younger clerks, however, were incapable of spending their free time in refined ways; mostly they were the offspring of rural landowners, innkeepers, farmers and craftsmen, who, the moment they arrived in the city, did all they could to cultivate a refined urban air, though they never quite succeeded, and so they failed to advance beyond a certain clodhopperish coarseness. Meanwhile there were also quiet characters with delicate manners who stood out oddly amid the louts. The bank’s director was an old quiet man whom no one ever saw. It seemed that the threads and roots of the entire monstrous enterprise lay in a tangle inside his head. As a painter thinks in colors, a musician in notes, a sculptor in stone, a baker in flour, a poet in words, and a farmer in patches of land, this man appeared to think in money. One good thought of his, thought at just the right moment, could bring in half a million in the space of half an hour. Possibly! Possibly more, possibly less, possibly nothing at all, and to be sure, this man must secretly have lost money now and then without his subordinates being any the wiser: They went off to lunch when the church-bell rang at noon, returned at two, worked another four hours, went away, slept, awoke, got up for breakfast, went back into the building just like before, resumed their labors, and no one knew a thing, for no one had time to learn anything at all about these mysterious goings-on. And the morose quiet old man went on thinking in his private office. For matters pertaining to his employees he had only a weak half-smile. This smile had something poetic, exalted, plan-hatching and legislative about it. Simon often tried to imagine himself in the director’s shoes. But this image generally vanished before his eyes, and every last concept receded from him when he thought about this: “There is something proud and exalted about him, but also something incomprehensible and almost inhuman. Why in the world do all these people, copyists and calculators, indeed even girls in the bloom of youth, go through the selfsame entryway into the selfsame building just in order to scribble away, try out pens, calculate and wave their arms about, study and blow their noses, sharpen pencils and carry papers about in their hands? Do they do so out of pleasure or under duress, and are they conscious of performing some sensible fruitful activity? All of them come from quite different directions, some even arrive by train from distant regions, pricking up their ears to see whether they still have time to run a private errand before work: They are as patient as a herd of lambs, and when evening arrives they scatter, each on his own particular trajectory, and tomorrow they’ll all be back again at the same time. They see one another, recognize each other by gait, voice and way of opening a door, but they have very little to do with one another. They are all alike and yet are strangers to each other, and when one of them dies or embezzles something, they puzzle about it for the space of a morning, and then things go on as before. It’s been known to happen that in the middle of his copy-work one of them has a stroke. Does it help him that he was employed at this firm for a good fifty years? For fifty years on end he went in and out the selfsame door, employed the selfsame turns of phrase in business letters a thousand times over, went through several new suits and often felt surprised how long each pair of boots lasted. And now? Can one say this man has lived? And don’t thousands of people live just like this? Were perhaps his children the thing that mattered most to him in life, was his wife the joy of his existence? Yes, that could be. I don’t want to pretend to be an expert in these matters, for this would appear quite ap
propriate to me, given my youth. Outside it is spring, and I could spring right out the window, that’s how painful I find this long, long not-being-allowed-to-move-one’s-limbs. A bank is a foolish thing in springtime. How would a banking establishment look standing, say, upon a lush green meadow? Perhaps my pen would look to me like a young flower freshly sprouted from the earth. But no, I’ve no desire to make fun. Perhaps this is all exactly as it has to be, perhaps everything has a purpose. I just can’t make out the big picture because the view itself I see too intensely. This view is somewhat discouraging: this sky outside the windows, and in my ear this sweet singing. The white clouds are out walking in the sky, and I have to sit here writing. Why do I have an eye for the clouds? If I were a cobbler, at least I’d be making shoes for children, men and ladies, and then all these people could go walking in the streets on spring days wearing my shoes. I would experience spring when I saw my shoes on their feet. Here I cannot feel the springtime—the springtime is disturbing me.”

  Simon hung his head, furious to be having such tender feelings.

  One evening as he was on his way home across the bridge all lit up for the night, Simon noticed a man walking ahead of him in long strides. This figure in its greatcoated slimness filled him with sweet alarm. He thought he recognized this walk, these trousers, this odd cauldron of a hat, the fluttering hair. The stranger was carrying a flimsy portfolio beneath one arm. Simon hastened his steps, overcome with tremulous forebodings, and suddenly he threw his arms about the walker’s neck, crying out “Brother!” Kaspar embraced him. Loudly conversing, they went home, that is: They had a rather steep ascent to make up the mountainside whose slope the city had covered with gardens and villas. At the top, they were welcomed by the small run-down cottages of the outskirts. The setting sun blazed in their windows, turning them into radiant eyes gazing fixedly, beautifully into the distance. Down below lay the city, spread out broad and luxuriant upon the plain like a glittering twinkling carpet, the evening bells, which are always different from morning bells, were ringing far below, the lake lay, its outlines indistinct, in its delicate ineffable form at the foot of the city, the mountain and all the gardens. Not many lights were sparkling yet, but those whose glow could be seen were burning with a splendid unfamiliar keenness. People were now walking and hastening down below in all the crooked hidden streets, you couldn’t see them, but you knew they were there. “It would be splendid to stroll down elegant Bahnhofstrasse just now,” Simon said. Kaspar walked in silence. He had become a magnificent fellow. “How he strides along,” Simon thought. Finally they were standing before their house. “Really?” Kaspar laughed: “You live at the edge of the forest?” Both of them went inside.

  When Klara Agappaia beheld the new arrival, a strange flame began to flicker in her large weary eyes. She closed her eyes and tilted her lovely head to one side. She didn’t appear to be feeling such great pleasure at the sight of this young man, it looked like something quite different. She tried not to be self-conscious, tried to smile the way a person smiles when welcoming a guest. But she didn’t quite manage it. “Go upstairs,” she said, “I’m just so tired today. How odd. I really don’t know what’s wrong with me.” The two young men went to their room: It was filled with moonlight. “Let’s not light the lamp,” Simon said, “we can go to bed just like this.” —Then there was a knock at the door, it was Klara, who said, standing outside: “Have you two got everything you need, is nothing missing?” —“No, we’ve already gone to bed, what could be missing?” —“Good night, my friends,” she said and opened the door a little, shut it again and went away. “She seems to be a peculiar woman,” Kaspar remarked. Then they both fell asleep.

  –3–

  The next morning the painter unpacked his landscapes from their portfolio, and first an entire autumn fell out of it, then a winter, all the moods of Nature came to life again. “How little this is of what I saw. Swift as a painter’s eye is, his hand is so sluggish, so slow. There are still so many things I have to paint! Often I think I’ll go mad.” All three of them, Klara, Simon and the painter, were standing around the pictures. Few words were spoken, and these were just exclamations of delight. Suddenly Simon leapt over to his hat, which lay on the floor of the room, thrust it savagely, furiously upon his head and dashed out the door, shouting, “I’m late!”

  “An hour late! This is something a young man should not allow himself,” he was told at the bank.

  “And if he nonetheless does allow it?” the one being scolded replied defiantly.

  “What, insolence on top of everything else? Well, go right ahead! Suit yourself!”

  Simon’s conduct was reported to the director, who decided to dismiss the young man; he called him to his office and gave him this news in a quite soft, even kindly voice. Simon replied:

  “I’m perfectly happy things have come to an end. Do you perhaps suppose you’re striking me a blow by sending me away—robbing me of courage, destroying me or anything of the sort? On the contrary, I’m being raised up and flattered, at long last I’m being infused with new hope. I was never made to be a writing and calculating machine. I like to write, I like doing calculations and find it desirable to behave in a decorous manner towards my fellow men, I enjoy being industrious, and as long as it does my heart no injury, I passionately love to obey. I’d also be perfectly capable of submitting to certain laws if this were important, but it’s been some time now since such things had any importance for me here. When I found myself running late today, I merely felt angry and annoyed, I was by no means filled with honest conscientious concern, nor did I reproach myself, or if I did so, it was only for still being such a cowardly fool that I leap to my feet at the stroke of eight and start running like a wind-up clock that runs whenever it’s wound. I thank you for having the energy to dismiss me and request that you think of me however you please. You are surely an admirable, commendable, great man, but, you see, I too wish to be one, and that’s why it’s good you’re sending me away, why it was so advantageous for me to comport myself today in a manner one might call unseemly. In your offices, which are so highly touted and where anyone at all would be delighted to find employment, there can be no question of a young man developing and growing. I don’t care a whit about enjoying the benefits associated with receiving a fixed monthly income. While receiving it, I degenerate, becoming addlepated and lily-livered, I ossify. You may be surprised to hear me making use of such expressions, but you must admit I am speaking the complete truth. Only one person can be a man here: you! —Doesn’t it ever occur to you that among your poor subordinates there might be some who feel the urge to be men themselves: effective, productive, respect-inspiring men. I can’t possibly find it agreeable to stand off to one side in this world just to avoid acquiring a reputation as a malcontent and therefore a scarcely employable person. How great is the temptation here to feel afraid—and how faint the appeal of extricating oneself from this miserable fear. My having set in motion this all but impossible development on this day is something I cannot help appreciating in myself, let people say what they will. You, Herr Direktor, have barricaded yourself in here, you’re never visible, no one knows whose orders they are following, and in fact one isn’t following orders at all but rather merely stagnating according to one’s own bad habits, which turn out to be perfectly appropriate. What a trap for young people with a tendency to be indolent and sluggish. Here nothing is demanded of all the strength that might animate a young man’s spirit, nothing is required t
hat might distinguish a man and human being. Neither courage nor wit, neither loyalty nor industry, neither creative drive nor the desire for challenges can help a person to advance himself here: Indeed, displaying strength and capabilities is even looked down upon. Naturally, how could it not be looked down upon in such a slow, sluggish, dry, miserable system? Farewell, sir, I leave in order to work myself back to health, even if this means shoveling dirt or carrying endless sacks of coal on my back. I love all sorts of work, excepting the sort whose performance does not require the exertion of all one’s faculties.”

  “Shall I write you out a letter of reference, even though you don’t really deserve one?”

  “A letter of reference? No, please don’t. If I have earned no other reference than at most a bad one, I’d rather have none at all. From now on I shall write my own references. I shall no longer call upon anyone other than myself when someone asks me for references, and this will make the best possible impression on sensible clear-minded people. I am glad to be leaving you without a letter in hand, for a reference from you would only remind me of my own cowardice and fear, a condition of sluggishness and relinquished strength, of days spent in idleness, afternoons filled with furious attempts at escape, evenings dedicated to sweet but pointless longings. I thank you for having had the intention of letting me go with an amicable gesture—that shows me I’ve been standing before a man who possibly grasps at least some of what I say.”

  “Young man, you are far too hot-headed!” the director said. “You are undermining your own future—”