The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  “What a melancholy dream I’ve just had,” he thought as he rose from the bed. Meanwhile evening had come. He went to the window and for the first time looked down into the alleyway that lay far beneath him. Two men were just walking by, there was just barely room for the two of them to walk comfortably side by side between the high walls. They were speaking, and the sound of their words rose to his ears with a strange clarity up the walls which then carried the sound even further. The sky was a golden, deeply saturated blue that awoke an indeterminate longing. Directly opposite Simon in the house across the way, two female figures appeared and prodded him with their rather impertinent, laughing glances. He felt as if he were being touched with unclean hands. One of the figures addressed him across the alleyway without even raising her voice—it was as if the three of them were sitting together in a single room that just happened to contain a narrow band of sky: “You must be very lonely!”

  “Oh, yes! But it’s lovely to be lonely!”

  And he closed the window as the two women burst into laughter. What could he have discussed with them that would not have been unseemly? Today he wasn’t in the mood. The changes once again affecting his life had put him in a somber frame of mind. He drew the white curtains, lit the lamp, and went on reading the Stendhal novel that he hadn’t managed to finish reading in the countryside with Hedwig.

  –14–

  After he’d read for an hour, he extinguished the lamp, opened the window, and went out of his room and then out the building’s front door to the steeply inclined street. A heavy, warm darkness received him. The old part of town was full of tiny drinking establishments, so many that a person walking along might find it difficult to choose. He took a few more steps in the lively, bustling street, then went into a bar. A small, jolly company was assembled at a round table, their focal point apparently a humorous little fellow in their midst, for everyone started laughing whenever he opened his mouth. He must have been one of those people who, whatever he happens to say, always has a comical, laugh-muscle-stimulating effect. Simon sat down at a table occupied by two young men and involuntarily listened to what they were saying. They were conversing earnestly, using many quite intelligent expressions. The subject of their discussion seemed to be a young, unhappy man whom both had apparently known quite well. But now one of them was listening without interruption as the other told his story, and Simon heard the following:

  “Yes, a splendid fellow! Even as a boy, when his hair was still long and his trousers short and he went out for walks on the streets of our small town holding his nursemaid’s hand, already people would turn to look at him, saying: ‘What a stunning little fellow!’ He completed his assignments with a great deal of talent—his school assignments, I mean. His teachers loved him, he was docile and easy to teach. His cleverness made it easy for him to fulfill his responsibilities at school. He was a splendid gymnast, and skilled at drawing and sums. I know at least that the teachers held him up as a role model to later generations of pupils, and even to some of his older schoolmates. His soft features and those magnificent eyes filled with masculine presentiment bewitched all who came into contact with the lad. He enjoyed a certain celebrity by the time his parents sent him away to continue his studies. Coddled by his mother, which everyone could understand, and admired by all, his spirit must have acquired early on that softness that comes with privilege and recognition, that lassitude, that lovely insouciance that permits a young person to easily master the pleasures of life. When school holidays arrived, he’d come home with glorious grade reports and a horde of young schoolfellows who thrilled his mother’s ear with tales of his various successes. Naturally he concealed from his mother the successes that even then he’d begun to have with girls of easy virtue, who found him handsome and kind. He spent his holidays hiking through the lowlands; and in the vast high mountains that beckoned to him because they reached so high up and so far off into the indeterminate distance, he would spend not just hours but days in the gay company of rapturous dreamers like himself. He bewitched and beguiled them all.—In his good health and his mental and physical suppleness he resembled a god who seemed only to be spending a short time at a classical gymnasium for his own amusement. When he was out walking, girls turned to look after him as though the glances he’d cast back in their direction were drawing them on. Upon his blond, handsome head he wore a blue student cap at a rakish angle. He was enchantingly frivolous. Once—the county fair was on, and the large square where usually herds of animals were rounded up was now covered with stands, huts, carousels, slides, pony rides—he substituted a bird rifle loaded with real shot for the ordinary harmless pop-gun at a shooting gallery where he could often be seen, since the girl who worked handing out the guns there had caught his fancy. The tiny bullet pierced the canvas wall of the booth and continued on into the wagon parked right behind it and missed injuring a small sleeping child by a hair’s breadth. This was the wagon that served these itinerant folk as their family home. Naturally this prank came to light, several others were added to it as well, and the next time holidays came around, the report of the young pupil’s grades contained an acrimonious comment from the school principal, who wrote the parents a generous letter simultaneously filled with ceremonious sentiments and the warm recommendation that they voluntarily take their child out of school, since his expulsion would otherwise be an imminent necessity. The reasons: senseless behavior, inciting others, being a bad influence, and irresponsibility. The letter went on about the principal’s great responsibility, the duties to be fulfilled while also taking into consideration—in short, all those things that are always invoked in such cases: morality under siege, the need to protect those not yet corrupted, and so on—”

  The man telling the story paused for a little while.

  Simon took advantage of this opportunity to draw attention to his presence and said:

  “Your story interests me from several points of view. Please, permit me to continue listening to you. I am a young man who has just turned his back on a career opportunity and could perhaps learn something from what you are relating; for it seems to me you always gain something by listening to a true story—”

  The two men took a good look at Simon, but he seemed not to make too bad an impression on them, as the one who had been speaking invited him to go on listening if this gave him pleasure, and then he continued:

  “The youth’s parents were naturally filled with great consternation and even greater worry by his expulsion; for where might one find parents so indifferent that they might behave in their usual way under such distressing circumstances. At first they were of the opinion that it would be best to remove the rogue entirely from his scholarly course of study and have him apprenticed to learn a solid profession like machinist or metalworker. Even the word and land America entered their thoughts; given their son’s predicament, it must have occurred to them of its own accord. But things came to pass quite differently. Once more the mother’s tender heart prevailed as it had so often before when the father was determined to take drastic steps; she had her way. The young man was sent to study at a far-off, isolated institute where he was to prepare for the profession of schoolmaster. This was a French institute where the boy would have no choice but to behave in a fitting manner. At any rate by the time he’d served his sentence and left the place behind, he’d become a practical-minded, youthful teacher. He found a temporary post near his native town. He taught the children as best he could, and at home, w
hen time allowed, read the French and English classics in their original tongues; for he had a truly wonderful talent for languages, and, secretly thinking of another career, he wrote letters to America seeking a post as a private tutor, an endeavor that bore no fruit, and lived a life divided between duty and a reserved unrestrainedness. Since it was summer, he often went with his pupils to bathe in the deep, swift-running canal. He’d join his pupils in the water to show them how to go about learning to swim. But one day the current caught hold of him and whisked him away so fast it looked as if he would surely drown. The pupils were already running back to town, shouting: ‘Our teacher has drowned!’ But the strong young man was able to fight his way free of the treacherous whirlpools and came home again. Some time later, though, he found himself in a different place: surrounded by mountains in a small but affluent village filled with companionable people who respected him less as teacher than as a human being. He was an accomplished pianist in addition to being a generally quite likeable fellow who, when in company with several others, was expert at twining the magical thread of conversation entirely about himself. A perfectly dear but no longer very young maiden fell so terribly in love with the teacher that she arranged for him to enjoy all manner of comforts and conveniences and introduced him to all the most influential people in the village. She came from an old family of officers whose ancestors had once performed military service in foreign lands. One day, as a memento, she gave him a charming little ornamental dagger that was surely by no means innocuous as a weapon and in its day may well have dripped blood occasionally. It was a splendid piece, and the good, dear woman presented this trinket with downcast eyes, perhaps suppressing a deep sigh. When with a romantically noble bearing he sat at the piano and played, she would listen, unable to take her eyes off him. Often she went ice-skating with him, since it was winter, upon the high-up small mountain lake, and both of them delighted in this pleasurable activity. Soon the young man wished to depart again, however, and all the more so as he felt all too vividly the warm, tempting bond that would so dearly have liked to fetter him to this village forever, but from which he must escape if he was still to possess the wish to aspire to some form of greatness in the world. So he went traveling, using the money of this woman, who was rich and found it gave her a melancholy and lugubrious joy to give him money without any restrictions on its use. And he traveled to Munich, where he lived the high life in the manner of the students there, then came home again, started looking for a post, and found one at a private institute that lay at the foot of a mountain range embellished with fir forests. There he was required to instruct young boys from all over the globe, the offspring of the wealthy, which he did for a time with great love and much interest, but then he got into trouble with his superior—the proprietor of the institute—and left. Then it was the turn of Italy, to which he journeyed as a private tutor, followed by England, where he was given two half-grown girls to instruct but only got up to mischief with them. He returned home again, his head haunted by wild notions and his heart, now empty, burning with helpless fantasies that had no claim on reality. His mother, into whose lap he longed to throw himself, died around this time. He was empty and inconsolable. He imagined immersing himself in politics, but for this he possessed neither sufficient general knowledge and cool-headedness nor the necessary polish and tact. He also wrote stock market reports, but senseless ones; for they were written poetically, products of an already destroyed mind. He authored poems, plays and musical compositions, painted and drew, but childishly, like a dilettante. Meanwhile he’d taken up a post again, though admittedly only for a brief time, and then a new post, and then a new one! He drifted around between a dozen different places, believing and finding himself betrayed and hurt everywhere he went, he lost his sense of propriety vis-à-vis his pupils and borrowed money from them, for he was always out of cash. He was still a slender, handsome man, gentle and elegant in appearance and still noble in his bearing as long as he had his wits about him. But this was now rarely the case. Nowhere on earth could he hold a job for long—he’d be sent away as soon as people got wind of his true nature, or else leave of his own accord, giving the most peculiar, cobbled-together explanations. This, of course, led to utter fatigue and enervation. From Italy he’d still been writing his brother enthused, idealistic letters. In London, where he suffered deprivations, he once walked into the business office of a prosperous silk merchant, an uncle of his, petitioning for support in his miserable circumstances; he was asking for money, perhaps not explicitly, but it was clear what he meant, and they sent him away, shrugging their shoulders, without giving him anything. How his beautiful, gentle human pride must have suffered when he found the courage to go beg alms from ignoble people. But what was he not forced to do, seeing the deprivations he suffered! One may speak of pride, but one must also remember all of life’s happenstance, all the circumstances that can make it inhuman to keep demanding pride from a human being. And the one asking for help was soft. He’d always possessed a childishly soft heart, and it was a simple matter for the pain and regret over his lost chances to destroy this heart. One day, after all his wanderings, he turned up at home again: pale, fatigued and exhausted, with his clothes in tatters. His father no doubt received him heartlessly, and his sister as kindly as she dared before the eyes of their incensed father. It was his idea to find a little editorial job somewhere, and he meanwhile loitered about the city, where he gave all the girls rings and said he wanted to marry them. It was quite clear he was already becoming infantile. There were rumors, of course, and people laughed. Then he went away again, to take up a teaching post, but there it was demonstrated that for this world he was no longer suitable. One day he came into the schoolroom with one bare foot; one of his feet was missing its shoe and stocking. He no longer knew what he was doing, or else he was simply doing what his other, mad mind commanded him. During this same period he erased a demerit that had been recorded in his military service record, one he’d received years before on account of a serious failing on his part. As a result—since this bold crime came to light—he was locked up in prison. From there, since his mental state was soon apparent, he was transferred to a madhouse, where he still lives today. I know all these things because I was often his companion, over many years, both in civilian life and in the military, and I also helped bring him to the place where he is now, where he had to be brought unfortunately.”