The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  This day was followed by a splendid evening. All the world was strolling along the lake’s lovely shore beneath broad, large-leaved trees. Walking here among all these many lighthearted, quietly conversing people, one felt transported to a fairy tale. The city was ablaze with the setting sun’s flames; later it smoldered, black and dark, in the glowing ashes of the sun that had set. There’s something delightful and enchanting about a summer sun. The lake glittered in the dark, and all the lights shimmered in the depths of the still water. The bridges were looking splendid, and when you walked over them you could see small dark boats shooting past in the water below; in these rowboats sat girls in light-colored dresses, and often when one of the larger flat-bottomed boats slowly, ceremoniously floated past, you could hear the warm crepuscular sounds of an accordion. The notes vanished in the black and then sonorously reemerged, clear and warm, heartbreakingly dark. How far it carried, the sound of this simple instrument played by some boatman! The sound seemed to be making the night even larger and deeper. From the far distant shoreline the lights of rural settlements shimmered, their reddish glint like gemstones in the dark heavy raiment of a queen. The entire earth was fragrant, lying there as still as a sleeping girl. The huge shadowy dome of the night sky arched above all eyes, all the mountains and lights. A sense of spacelessness hovered about the lake, and the sky now had something enclosing, encompassing, overarching about it. Whole groups of people were collecting. The young folk appeared to be waxing rhapsodic, and upon all the benches silent, still people sat pressed close together. There was no lack of flighty, pridefully coquettish women, nor of men who had eyes for these women alone, who kept walking behind them, constantly hesitating before rushing forward again until at last they found their pluck or the words to address these ladies. Many were given a proper dressing-down, as the expression goes.

  Simon was walking beside Klaus, happy that his felicitous simple answers to all the many questions his brother kept asking were successfully instilling in the latter the conviction that he was definitely by no means a lost soul yet. With both a certain pride and humility in his voice he addressed his more seasoned brother, who all the same was like an unschooled child when asking about certain things, though he always displayed a loving concern. Without even trying, they spoke in beautiful, long, circuitous sentences, and it delighted Klaus to see how comprehending Simon was regarding various things he’d at first assumed his brother, given his circumstances, would simply make fun of and laugh at. “I didn’t think you half so serious as you are proving to be!” Simon replied: “I don’t make a habit of displaying my reverence for a great many things. I tend to keep matters like this to myself, for I believe: What’s the point of wearing a serious expression if one’s been earmarked by fate—I mean, if a person has perhaps been chosen—to play the fool. Fates aplenty exist, and to them I shall submit without complaint. Is there any other choice? Besides, I’d like to see someone just try to accuse me of hanging my head, dumbfounded, despondent. I’ve already made it clear to various people how things stand with my innermost being.” —When Simon spoke like this, he did so in fluent sentences and with proper intonation, and with such perfect calm affability that Klaus didn’t view these declarations as chips on his younger brother’s shoulder but rather as a certain searching on his soul’s part to clarify its own status vis-à-vis the world. Klaus was managing to convince himself that Simon possessed some serviceable qualities, but he was nonetheless still somewhat afraid that these qualities might merely be floating, cavorting, beckoning and dancing superficially about the person of his brother rather than rooted firmly within him. After all, it was simple enough for such a soul to grow ardent in speech, conjuring up an entire world of obedience and sweet serviceability that might intoxicate it for hours on end, particularly on such an occasion as a reunion after many years. And yet Klaus was delighting in his brother’s presence and said all sorts of sweet comforting things to him with visible pleasure. Behind them, at a certain remove, pressed tightly together, walked Klara and Kaspar. The painter was intoxicated by the beauty and music of the night. He was dreaming of horses galloping through nocturnal gardens bearing lovely slender riders on their backs whose skirts played on the ground with the horses’ hooves. Then he laughed at it all—impudent, irrepressible laughter—laughed at all the people, the landscape and every last thing that came before his eyes. Klara didn’t even try to quiet him, on the contrary, she was delighting in the beauty of this unshackled spirit. How she loved the youth, the impudence, even the presumptuousness of this boyish creature laboring to reach manhood. He might be jabbering away ridiculously, saying things that, coming from another’s mouth, she’d have found inane and idiotic—but on his lips she loved them. What was it about this person that compelled her to find him so unconditionally fetching in every situation and gesture—his behavior, all he did and left undone, his speaking and his silence? In her eyes he was a match for all mankind, superior to other men, and yet he was scarcely a man at all. His gait, how should she put it, had something awkward about it and yet also commanding. This entire young person displayed not a trace of agitation, and yet there was something shy, foolish, profoundly childish about him. So calm and yet so swift to catch fire! She could see his hair, luminous in the darkness, youthful and undulant. Add to that his gait and the way he held his head aloft with such modest, questioning, contemplative pride. How this youth must daydream when he was thinking of someone. Kaspar had grown quieter. Always she gazed at him, always! On this night filled with wandering strollers, it was lovely to gaze at him, so lovely one might swoon. She found looking at him even lovelier than kissing him. She saw his lips part as if in pain; surely he wasn’t thinking anything in particular, no, most certainly not; it was just the way he held his lips that made her think of pain. His eyes were coolly, calmly gazing into the distance, as though they knew of better things to be observed there. His eyes seemed to be speaking: “We, we are looking upon beauty; do not torment yourselves, all you other human eyes, for you shall never see what we do!” His eyebrows curved with enchanting lightness, as if in worry, like angels bending over children—the eyes—which looked, as they gazed about, as though they might be injured at any moment. “To be sure, any human eye can easily be injured, but gazing at his eyes instantly fills me with pain, as though I can see them already pierced by splinters. So large and prominent and yet apparently so unconcerned, they are always heedlessly wide open; how easily they might be injured!” she lamented. She didn’t even know if he loved her, but what did it matter, after all she loved him, and that was enough, indeed it could not be otherwise; she was on the verge of tears. Then Simon and Klaus came back to join the others. Klara pulled herself together as best she could, took Simon’s arm and walked on with him before the others. “Let me look into your eyes,” she said to him. “You have such lovely eyes, Simon—looking at them is like lying in bed when all is calm, and saying a prayer.”

  Klaus and Kaspar walked in silence. They hadn’t been on such good terms for the past year or two; a minor dispute had broken out between them, and they’d stopped seeing one another or even exchanging letters. Klaus took this very much to heart, while Kaspar simply accepted it as somehow inevitable. He said to himself that it lay in the very nature of things to find oneself misunderstood at times, even by a brother. He didn’t want to keep looking over his shoulder at things in the past; they were over and done with—unworthy of further thought. He preferred to keep marching straight ahead and considered it har
mful to gaze back at former ties. Now, finding it unbearable to remain silent at Kaspar’s side, Klaus began to speak of his brother’s art, encouraging him to take a trip to Italy some time so as to come into his own there as a mature artist.

  Kaspar cried out: “I’d rather the devil came for me right this minute! Italy! Why Italy? Am I suffering from an illness, must I be sent to recover in the land of oranges and pine trees? Why should I go to Italy when I can be here, a place I like? Would I have anything better to do in Italy than paint, and am I not able to paint right here? Or do you mean I should go to Italy because it’s so beautiful there? Isn’t it beautiful enough here? Can it possibly be more beautiful there than here, where I live and work, where I behold a thousand beautiful things that will remain when I myself have long since rotted away? Is it possible to go to Italy when one wishes to be productive? Are the beautiful things more beautiful in Italy than here? Maybe they’re just more sophisticated, and for this reason I prefer not to see them in the first place. When sixty years from now I’ve reached the point of being able to paint a wave or a cloud, a tree or a field, then we’ll see whether or not it was clever of me not to go to Italy. Can I be missing out if I haven’t seen those temples with their columns, those humdrum town halls, those fountains and arches, those pine and laurel trees, those Italian folk costumes and splendid edifices? Must one wish to devour everything with one’s eyes? I find it infuriating when people accuse me of harboring plans to become a better artist in Italy. Italy is just a trap we bumble into if we’re stupendously dumb. Do the Italians come visit us when they wish to paint or write? What use is it to me to go into raptures over bygone cultures? Shall I—if I am honest with myself—have enriched my spirit by these means? No, I’ll just have spoiled it, made it cowardly. Let an ancient, vanished culture be as magnificent as it likes, let it trump us in vibrancy and splendor, there’s still no cause for me to go snuffing about in it like a mole; I prefer to observe it, as long as this is feasible and amuses me, in books, which are constantly at my beck and call. In truth, lost, bygone things are never so utterly worthy of our estimation; for when I gaze about me in the present, which is so often disparaged as lacking beauty and grace, I find no dearth of images that delight me and beautiful sights enough to fill both eyes to overflowing. This mania for all things Italian that has strangely, shamefully beset us makes my blood boil. Perhaps I am mistaken, but even twenty bristly devils stinking up the air and waving their horrific pitchforks around wouldn’t manage to drag me off to Italy.”

  Klaus was shocked and saddened by the vehemence with which Kaspar was gauging matters. He’d always been like this, and, as things stood, it couldn’t be anticipated how a person might succeed in establishing fruitful relations with him. Klaus said nothing, merely offered his brother his hand in parting, for they had reached the place where he was staying.

  Back in his monotonous room, he said to himself: “So now I’ve lost him all over again, and all because of a perfectly innocent, well-meaning but in fact somewhat incautious remark. I just don’t know him well enough, that’s all, and maybe I never shall. Our lives are too different. But perhaps the future, which we never quite fathom, will bring us together some other time. It’s best to wait and endure as one slowly becomes a more seasoned better person.” Feeling terribly lonely, he resolved to depart again soon and return to his own province.

  –5–

  Sebastian was a young poet who recited his poems from a small stage to the audience seated below. Thanks to the impetuousness of his performance, he tended to wind up looking a bit ridiculous. He’d run away from home at an early age, living in Paris at sixteen and returning home at twenty. His father was music director in the small town where Hedwig, the sister of the three brothers, also resided. There Sebastian lived out his odd ne’er-do-well existence, sitting or lying for days at a time in a dusty attic room, stretched out on a narrow bed in which he slept at night without taking the trouble to tidy it before going to sleep. His parents considered him a lost cause and let him do as he pleased. They gave him no money, for they considered it inappropriate to support the dissolute lifestyle to which they knew he was prone with financial contributions. Sebastian could no longer be persuaded to undertake serious university studies; with some book or other tucked beneath his arm, he would wander about in the mountains and forests, often not returning home for days and passing the night, when the weather even halfway permitted, in tumbledown huts no longer used by human beings, not even rough, savage shepherds, in meadows whose altitude made them closer to the heavens than to any human civilization. He always wore the same threadbare suit of light yellow cloth and let his beard grow, but otherwise made a point of looking attractive and clean. He tended his fingernails more carefully than his mind, which he allowed to go to seed. He was handsome, and since it was known he wrote poems, his person was soon surrounded by a half-ridiculous, half-melancholy aura of enchantment, and plenty of serious-minded people in town honestly pitied the young man and warmly took his part every chance they got. As he was excellent company, he was often invited to social gatherings, which was some small compensation for the fact that the world was setting him no tasks that might satisfy his urge to achieve something. Sebastian possessed this urge to a considerable degree, but he’d strayed too far from the tracks of generally accepted and prescribed strivings. When he now strove, it was perhaps too fiercely, and, since he realized his strivings did him no good, he no longer felt much desire to pursue them. He also played songs of his own composition on the lute, singing along in his pleasant soft voice. The only injustice—a large one, to be sure—that had been done him was that he’d been coddled as a schoolboy, thereby helping him arrive at the notion that he was something like a child prodigy. How this proud fantasy insinuated itself into the boy’s receptive heart! Grown women favored the company of this lad, who was old beyond his years and understood such a great many things, and he inspired them with an incomparable attraction at the expense of his own human development. Sebastian was in the habit of saying: “My days of glory lie far behind me now.” It was horrifying to hear so young a man speak in such a way. Indeed, no matter what he did, aspired to, set about and performed, he managed to do this so wearily, coldly, and half-heartedly that he didn’t truly do anything, he was just toying with himself. Hedwig once said to him: “Sebastian, listen to me, I think you often cry over yourself.” He nodded his head, confirming this. Hedwig felt pity for him and sometimes slipped him a little money or something of the sort to make his life somewhat more bearable. Now, for example, she’d taken him along on this little trip to visit her brothers. This same evening when Klara was so blissful, Klaus sad and lonely, Simon in good spirits, and Kaspar irritable and overbearing, the two of them, Hedwig and her bard, went strolling silently, slowly along the shore of the lake. What was there to say; and so they kept silent. Kaspar approached them, saying: