The Tanners

by Robert Walser

  The next morning he inserted his head into the door of the room where his landlady lived and asked with intentionally precise intonation whether he might have a word with her, should she have the time.

  “Of course! What is it?”

  Simon said: “I can’t pay you this month’s rent. I won’t even try to explain how embarrassing this is to me. Anyone can say that in such a case. On the other hand, I assume it goes without saying that you consider me capable of striving to find a way and means to acquire a substantial sum of money such that I can eradicate my debt as quickly as possible. I know people who’d give me money if I so desired, but my pride forbids me to borrow money from people whom I prefer to have beholden to me. From a woman, to be sure, I’d accept a loan, in fact I’d do so willingly, for I have quite different sentiments regarding women, sentiments that must be judged by a different sort of honor. Would you, Frau Weiss, be willing to advance me the money, first of all the money to cover the rent, and then a small additional sum to cover my living expenses?—Is it now your impression that my behavior is outrageous? You shake your head. I believe you have some trust in me. You can see how I’m blushing at my own shameless request, you see me standing here not without embarrassment at this moment. But I’m in the habit of seizing resolves rather quickly and carrying them out promptly, even if this impulsiveness should take my own breath away. I’m happy to accept a loan from a woman because I’m incapable of deceit where women are concerned. With men I can lie when circumstances require, lie mercilessly, take my word for it. But with women never. Do you really wish to loan me so much? I could live on that for half a month. By then, many things will improve in my current situation. And I haven’t even thanked you yet. You see, that’s the sort I am. Only rarely in my life have I expressed feelings of gratitude to another person. Where gratitude is concerned, I’m a bungler. Well, I should also say, to be sure, that I’ve always, whenever possible, disdained acts of benevolence. A benevolent act! I truly feel at this moment what benevolence is. I really shouldn’t be accepting this money.”

  “Just listen to you!”

  “Well, I’ll take it then. But don’t fret about not having it returned. I’m temporarily overjoyed about this money. Money is something only a dunce could despise.”

  “Are you leaving already?”

  Simon had already gone back out the door and returned to his room. He found it uncomfortable, or at least acted as if he found it uncomfortable, to go on speaking about this matter. Besides, he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do, and he wasn’t fond of giving long apologies or making promises when he’d asked someone for a favor and had it granted. If he himself were one day to be the giver, he wouldn’t demand excuses or assurances; it wouldn’t occur to him to do so. You should either have trust and sympathy and therefore give, or else just turn your back coldly on the petitioner because you find him distasteful. “She found me not at all distasteful, in fact I noticed that she gave me the money with a sort of eager joy. It’s all a matter of bearing when you wish to achieve an aim. It gives this woman pleasure to make me beholden to her, probably because in her eyes I’m a tolerable person. No one likes to give anything to disagreeable persons because you don’t want to have them beholden to you; after all, an obligation like the repayment of a debt brings people together, it rubs shoulders, binds, shares confidences and closeness, remaining always at one’s side. How utterly unenviable it is to have distasteful debtors—such people sit practically astride their creditors’ necks, it makes you want to forgive their debts just to be rid of them. It’s delightful when someone thoughtlessly, swiftly gives you something; what better attestation could there be to the fact that you still have people around who find you agreeable—”

  Popping the money he’d received into his vest pocket, he walked over to the window and beheld, down below in the narrow alleyway, a woman dressed all in black who seemed to be looking for something, for she kept tilting her head to look up, and in one such moment her eyes met those of Simon. These were large, dark eyes, true female eyes, and Simon involuntarily thought of Klara, whom he hadn’t seen in such a long time now; indeed he’d almost forgotten her. But it wasn’t Klara. This beautiful creature in the deep alley with her elegant, opulent dress offered a strange contrast to the dismal filthy walls between which she was slowly walking. Simon would have liked to call out to her: “Is it you, Klara?” But already the figure was vanishing around a corner, and nothing of her remained in the alleyway except the faint scent of melancholy that beauty always leaves behind in dismal places. “How beautiful it would have been, and how fitting, just at the moment when she looked up, to have thrown her a large dark red rose that she would have bent down to pick up. She would have smiled at this, astonished to be met by such a friendly greeting in so squalid an alleyway. A rose would have suited her well, as a pleading, crying child suits its mother. But how would a person who’s just had to avail himself of others’ generosity come to be in possession of expensive roses, and how could it be foreseen that at precisely nine in the morning a beautiful female figure would pass through this alleyway—which is the darkest of all alleys—a woman who appears to be the most elegant creature I’ve ever set eyes on?”

  He went on for quite some time daydreaming about this woman who’d reminded him so strangely of his forgotten, vanished Klara, then he left the room, raced down the stairs and through the streets, spent his day doing nothing, and then toward evening found himself in one of the outlying districts of this sprawling city. Here workers lived in relatively attractive tall apartment buildings; but when you looked at these buildings more closely, you were struck by a certain austere squalor creeping up the walls, peering out of the monotonous cold rectangles of the windows and even perching on rooftops. The landscape of woods and meadows that began here formed a strange contrast with the tall but shabby building blocks that more disfigured than graced the area. Beside them, several lovingly built, low old cottages could be seen nestled in the landscape like children in their mother’s warm lap. Here the land formed a forest-topped hill beneath which the train line ran through a tunnel, having just emerged from the jumble of buildings. Evening light fell on the meadows; standing here, one felt one was already in the country, that the city and all its hubbub had been left behind. Simon was not put off by the ugliness of the workers’ housing; to him the entire admixture of city and country presenting itself here in a strange, graceful tableau was beautiful. When he walked a bare stone street and felt the warm meadow close beside him, this struck him as most peculiar, and when immediately afterward he went striding between meadows upon a narrow, earthen path, what harm did it do to know this was actually municipal and not country soil? “The workers have it good here,” he thought: “through every one of their windows they have a green forest view, and when they sit on their small balconies, they enjoy a good, strong, spicy breeze and an entertaining panorama featuring hills and vineyards. Even if the new tall buildings are smothering the old ones and will eventually force them out altogether, you must nonetheless consider that the earth never stands still and that people must always remain in motion, even if it’s in what appears at present to be a less than charming form. An area is always beautiful because it always bears witness to the life present both in nature and architecture. To build a settlement in a pretty meadow and woodland region might seem at first somewhat barbaric, but in the end every eye will make its peace with the unification of building and world, finding all sorts of ench
anting views to glimpse from between the new walls, and forget its irritably critical condemnation, which after all never gives rise to better things. We need not compare the old and new buildings like architectural scholars; we can take pleasure in both sorts, in both the modest and the vainglorious. When I see a building standing here, there’s no cause to think that if I find it insufficiently attractive I can just knock it down, for it stands rather firmly on its foundations, housing a great many sentient persons, and is therefore a respectable entity whose creation was the work of many diligent hands. Those who search for beauty must oftentimes feel that the mere search for beauty in this world gets you only so far, that there are other things worth finding besides the good fortune of being able to stand before a charming antique. The struggle of the poor for a bit of peace—I’m referring to the so-called Workers’ Question—is itself quite an interesting matter, so to speak, and must certainly engage a stalwart mind more than the question of whether a house is well or poorly situated in a landscape. What smooth-tongued idlers this world contains! To be sure: Every thinking head counts, and every question is priceless, but it’s surely more admirable and does more honor to our heads to address life questions first and more delicate artistic questions later. Of course questions of art are sometimes life questions as well, but life questions are questions of art in a far higher and nobler sense. Naturally I’m thinking this way now because the first question on my mind is how I shall go on existing, given that my sole employment is copying out addresses for paltry day-wages, and I cannot sympathize with the snobbery of art since at the moment it strikes me as the most irrelevant thing on earth; and indeed just consider, what is art compared with Nature, which dies and awakens over and over again? What means does art have when it wishes to portray a blossoming fragrant tree, or the face of a human being? I admit I’m musing somewhat insolently now, condescendingly—or rather furiously con-ascendingly, from down in the depths inhabited by people who have no money. The thing is, I’m critical but at the same time feel quite melancholy because of my lack of funds. I’ve got to get some money, it’s quite simple. Borrowed money isn’t money; money must be earned or stolen or received as a gift—and then there’s one thing more: evening! In the evening I’m generally tired and dispirited.”

  As he was thinking in this way, he’d been walking up a short but fairly steep street and now paused before a building from which a woman’s head was looking out at him through an open window. Looking into the woman’s eyes, Simon thought he was gazing into a distant sunken world, but then a wonderfully familiar voice called down to him: “Oh, Simon, it’s you! Do come up!”

  It was Klara Agappaia.

  When he’d leapt up the stairs, he beheld her sitting at the window in a heavy dark red dress. Her arms and breast were only half concealed by the luxurious fabric. Her face had grown paler since he’d seen her last. In her eyes a deep fire was burning, but her mouth was pressed closed. She smiled and held out her hand to him. In her lap lay an open book, apparently a novel she’d started reading. At first she was unable to speak. It seemed to be causing her shame and effort to ask questions and relate things. She seemed to be struggling to shake off the sense of alienation she now felt before her young former friend. Her mouth appeared to weep each time it tried to open and soften. Her beautiful, long, voluptuous hands seemed to have taken over the task of speaking, at least until her mouth was able to shake off its self-consciousness. She didn’t look Simon up and down the way people examine friends they haven’t seen in a long while; instead she gazed into his eyes, whose peaceful expression calmed her. Once more she seized his hand and at last said:

  “Give me your hand, let me be to you what I am to my son, who understands me as soon as he hears the rustle of my garments from the next room, who grasps me with a single glance, to whom I needn’t say a word, not even a whispered one, to share my secrets with him; whose sitting, coming, going, standing and lying down tell me all his feelings exist only with the goal of understanding his mother; before whom a person must bend down to the ground, to his feet, to tie his shoes better when the laces have gotten loose; to whom one gives a kiss when he’s been courageous and good; for whom one keeps all secret things open; from whom one wouldn’t even know how to keep a secret; to whom one gives everything even though he’s a little traitor and has managed to neglect his mother for a long, long time, just like you, even though he’s been able to forget her, like you. No, you never managed to forget me. No doubt you often tried to shake me off in defiance, but whenever a woman crossed your path who looked even a tiny bit like me, you imagined you were seeing me, thought you’d found me again. Didn’t this make you tremble, didn’t you feel, as you experienced this deceptive encounter, as if suddenly above a bright regal staircase carved in stone a pair of doors had swung open to admit you to a chamber filled with the joy of reunion? What a joyous thing it is to see someone again. When we’ve lost one another on the street or in the countryside and then a year or so later find each other again, quietly, without further ado, on such an evening when the bells are already tolling out a premonition of this reunion, we press each other’s hands and no longer think of the separation and the cause of this long digression. Leave your hands in mine! Your eyes are still just as kind and beautiful. You remain identical to yourself. Now I can tell you:

  “When all of us, Kaspar, I and you, had to leave the forest house last summer, do you remember, and your brother then disappeared, and I didn’t know where to, I rented myself an elegant room down in the city, yearning for the two of you and for a long time inconsolable. Toward winter everything around me appeared suffused in a red glow, I forgot everything and hurled myself into the maelstrom of worldly pleasures, for I still possessed part of my fortune, a small part, but still a lot by local standards. I used them up, and received in exchange the realization that often one needs a bit of rapture to be able to keep oneself more or less afloat upon the waves of life. I had a box at the theater, but the theater interested me far less than the balls where I could show how beautiful and spirited I was. The young men swarmed around me and I saw nothing that might have prevented me from feeling contempt for them all or from subjecting them to my whims. I thought of you and your brother, and often wished, standing at the center of all that emasculated swarming, to see your peaceful faces and open manner. Then a dark black-haired man approached me, a student at the polytechnical university, heavy and clumsy in appearance, a Turk with large forceful eyes, and he danced with me. After this dance, he possessed me body and soul, I was his. For us women, when we are whirling about in worldly raptures, there is a particular sort of man that can vanquish us only on the dance floor. If I’d encountered him anywhere else, I might well have laughed at him. From the first moment on, he behaved towards me as though he were my master, and while I marveled at his insolence, I couldn’t manage to defend myself against it. He commanded me: now like this, and now like this! And I obeyed. We women can achieve stunning feats of obedience when we feel moved. We accept everything then, and wish, perhaps out of shame and fury, for our beloved to be even more brutal than he is. No matter how brutally he treats us, it isn’t enough. To this man, the last bit of money I had to my name was quite simply his property, and I agreed and gave it to him, I gave him everything. When eventually he’d had his fill of oppressing, tyrannizing, preying on and exploiting me, he went away, back to his native land, to Armenia. His slave—I—did nothing to hold him back. I found all his actions appropriate.
Even if I’d loved him less than I did, I’d still have let him go, for my pride would have prevented me from trying to detain him. And so it was simply my duty to obey him when he ordered me to help him prepare his departure: The love in me was happy to obey. I wasn’t mortified to be kissing him goodbye, this man who scarcely even deigned to look at me any longer. He gave voice to the hope that he would later, when his circumstances allowed, bring me to his country to make me his wife. I could tell it was a lie, but I felt no bitterness. With regard to this man, any unlovely feeling in me was utterly impossible. I have a child by him, a girl, she’s sleeping there in the next room.”