The Tanners (25 page)

After a brief moment of silence, during which the nurse gazed at him
intently, he went on:

“What’s more, I haven’t the least desire to pursue some splendid
career. What means the most to some people means least to me. I cannot in God’s
name value careerist ambitions. I want to live, but I don’t want to go running
down some career path—supposedly such a grand enterprise. What’s so grand about
it: people acquiring crooked backs at an early age from stooping at undersized
desks, wrinkled hands, pale faces, mutilated workday trousers, trembling legs,
fat bellies, sour stomachs, bald spots upon their skulls, bitter, snappish,
leathery, faded, insipid eyes, ravaged brows and the consciousness of having
been conscientious fools. No thank you! I prefer to remain poor but healthy and
forego a stately dwelling in favor of an inexpensive room, even if the view is
of the darkest of alleyways; I’d rather live with financial difficulties than
be
faced with the difficult decision of where to travel on summer holidays to
restore my ruined health, though to be sure I currently enjoy the respect of
only a single person, namely myself. But this is the one whose respect is worth
the world to me; I am free and can always, when necessity commands, sell my
freedom for a certain length of time so as to be free again after. It’s worth
remaining poor for the sake of freedom. I have enough to eat; for I possess the
talent of feeling sated after eating very little. I fly into a rage whenever
someone approaches me with the words ‘lifetime position’ and all the
presumptions implied therein. I wish to remain a human being. In a word: I love
what is risky, unfathomable, floating and uncontrolled!”

“I like you,” the nurse said.

“I certainly had no intention of inducing you to like me, but it
nonetheless pleases me if you do, as I’ve been speaking quite freely and
frankly. Incidentally, there was no call for me to be so testy in speaking of
others. That’s always stupid—you have no right to disparage circumstances simply
because they don’t happen to be to your liking. One can always leave, I can
always leave! But no, things are quite to my liking. My situation pleases me.
People please me just as they are. For my part, I use all the means at my
disposal to induce my fellow men to like me. I’m hardworking and industrious
when I have a task to perform, but I won’t sacrifice the pleasure I take in the
world for anyone’s sake, at most I’d sacrifice it for our sacred fatherland—the
occasion for which, however, has to this day failed to present itself, a
circumstance I expect to continue. Let them pursue their careers, I can
understand this, they wish to live in comfort and see to it their children will
also have something, they’re good providers whose actions are nothing if not
laudable; so let them also leave me to do as I please, to pluck life’s pleasures
as I see fit—this is something everyone tries to do, every one of us, just not
in the same way. How wonderful it is to be mature enough to let others do as
they will in their own way, as best they know how. No, if a person has
faithfully discharged his duties for thirty years, he is certainly no fool when
he reaches the end of his career, as I said before in my testiness; rather, he
is a man of honor who has earned the wreaths that will be placed on his grave.
You see, I don’t want any wreaths on my grave—that’s the whole difference. My
end is a matter of no interest to me. They’re always telling me, other people,
that I shall have to pay bitterly one day for my cockiness. Well then, so I’ll
pay, and I’ll learn then what it means to pay for something. I like to learn
things and so I’m not nearly as apprehensive as people who worry about their
nice smooth futures. I’m always afraid some life experience might pass me by.
In
this sense I’m as ambitious as ten Napoleons. But now I’m hungry, I’d like to
get something to eat, would you join me? It would be a pleasure for me.”

And the two of them went off together.

After his rather wild speech, Simon had suddenly grown soft and
gentle. With enchanted eyes he gazed at the beautiful world, the round, opulent
crowns of the tall trees and the streets where people were walking. “Dear,
mysterious people!” he thought to himself and raised no objection when his new
friend touched his shoulder with his hand. It pleased him that the other was
becoming so chummy: This fit quite nicely, it was both a bond and a release.
He
saw everything with laughing, happy eyes, at the same time thinking: “How
beautiful eyes are!” A child was looking up at him. To be walking along beside
a
companion like the nurse struck him as a great novelty, something he’d never
before experienced, but agreeable in any case. On the way, the nurse purchased
a
portion of fresh beans from a greengrocer’s and some bacon at a butcher shop,
and he invited Simon to come have lunch with him, an offer that was willingly
accepted.

“I always cook myself,” the nurse said when the two of them had
reached his apartment, “it’s become a habit with me. I enjoy cooking, take my
word for it. Just wait and see how tasty you’ll find the beans with this lovely
bacon. I also knit my own socks, for example, and do my laundry myself. You save
a lot of money this way. I’ve learned to do all these things, and why shouldn’t
such tasks be suitable for a man in exceptional cases if he happens to have a
taste for them? I don’t see what could be shameful about activities of this
sort. I also make my own house slippers, like these you see here. Such a task
certainly requires a bit of care. Knitting wrist warmers for winter or making
vests doesn’t cause me any particular difficulty. When one is always so alone
and on journeys like myself, one picks up the oddest habits. Make yourself at
home, Simon! May I call you by your first name? I feel we’re becoming
friends—”

“Yes of course, please do!” And Simon blushed, which he found utterly
incomprehensible.

“I felt fond of you right from the beginning,” said the nurse, whose
name was Heinrich, “one need only look at you to be convinced that you are a
dear chap indeed. I should rather like to kiss you, Simon—”

Simon was finding the air in the room oppressively close, and he got
up from his chair. He guessed what sort of man it was who was looking at him
with such odd tenderness. But what harm could it do. “I’ll go along with it,”
he
thought. “I see no reason to be uncivil to this Heinrich, who is otherwise so
nice, over such a small thing!” And he yielded up his mouth and let himself be
kissed.

It was just a kiss, after all!

Besides which he found it charming—it suited the state of softness in
which he found himself to allow these tender liberties. Even if this time it
was
only a man! He felt quite clearly that Heinrich’s strange affection for him
required the most delicate and provisionally indulgent consideration, and found
himself incapable of dashing the man’s hopes, even though these hopes happened
to be unworthy ones. Had he any cause to feel indignant? “Not at all,” Simon
thought to himself, “for the time being I’ll let him do as he pleases—it goes
well with everything else taking place around me!”

The two of them spent the evening wandering from one bar to another,
the nurse being a fairly passionate drinker, since he didn’t know what else to
do with his free time. Simon found it appropriate to follow his lead in every
sense. There in the tiny, stuffy bars, he made the acquaintance of individuals
who played cards with unbelievable endurance. The card game appeared to
constitute a world of its own to these people, one in which they were unwilling
to be disturbed. Others just sat there all evening long clenching the long
pointed stalk of a cigar between their teeth without otherwise calling notice
to
themselves except by the fact that when the nub of their cigar got too short
to
be pressed between their lips, they would stick it on the tip of their pocket
knives to be able to smoke it all the way down to the most miniscule brevity.
An
emaciated, ravaged-looking pianist told him that her sister was a bad
sister but a celebrated concert singer, and that she’d long since broken off
all
familial ties with her. Simon found this comprehensible, but he behaved with
delicacy and refrained from telling her he found it comprehensible. This person,
he felt, was more unfortunate than morally corrupt, and he always honored
misfortune, and corruption he saw as a consequence of misfortune, and therefore
it also required at least a certain decorousness. He saw short, fat, horribly
sprightly innkeepers’ wives who approached their guests with untoward
familiarities of all sorts while their husbands dozed on sofas and in armchairs.
Often a splendid old folksong would be sung by a person who masterfully executed
the modulations of key and voice that were part of these old songs. How
beautiful and melancholy they sounded, you couldn’t help sensing how many a
rough vibrant throat must already have sung them in bygone days and long before.
One man was constantly telling jokes, a short young fellow wearing an old,
large, wide, tall, deep hat he must have purchased in a junk shop somewhere.
His
mouth was lubricious and his jokes no less so, but they forced you to laugh
whether you wanted to or not. Someone said to him: “You there, I admire your
wit!” But the witty man thrust aside this foolish admiration with
well-feigned astonishment, and this was truly a joke that might have
brought pleasure even to a learned man. The male nurse told all the people who
came to sit beside him that he was basically too flawed and at the same time,
when he thought it over more carefully, too good for his native country. Simon
thought: “How idiotic!” But then the nurse gave a far more appealing report on
the topic of Naples, saying for example that the museums there contained
wonderful remnants of ancient human beings, and that one could see by looking
at
them that these ancestors far outstripped us in height, width and girth. These
people had arms nearly the size of our legs! Now that must have been a race of
women and men! What were we by comparison? Merely a degenerate, crippled,
atrophied, attenuated, longitudinally and latitudinally cracked, torn and
shredded, emaciated generation. He also gave a charming portrait of the Gulf
of
Naples. Many listened to him attentively, but many were asleep and, being
asleep, didn’t hear a thing.

It was very late when Simon got home, and he found the downstairs door
locked from within; as he didn’t have his key with him, he brazenly rang the
doorbell, for he was in that condition which inevitably causes one to behave
inconsiderately. A window flew open at once following the jangle of the bell,
and a white figure, no doubt the woman in her nightgown, threw down the key
wrapped in heavy paper.

The next morning, rather than being angry, she smiled at him with the
friendliest “Good morning!” and said not a word about the disturbance in the
middle of the night. Simon therefore decided it would be inappropriate to
mention it, and so, half out of delicacy, half out of laziness, he offered no
apology.

He left and went looking for the nurse. Monday morning was once more
resplendent. People were all at work, and so the streets were empty and bright,
and when he went into the nurse’s room, he was still lying sleepily in bed.
Today Simon noticed on the walls something he’d failed to observe the day
before, a number of rather saccharine Christian wall decorations: little angels
with ruddy little heads cut out of paper along with plaques containing adages
framed in mysterious dried flowers. He read all the adages, some of them were
profound and thought-provoking, maxims perhaps older than eight old
people taken together, but there were also slick, newfangled sayings that read
as if they’d been mass-produced in a factory. He thought: “How strange
this is! Everywhere, in so many individual rooms and chambers, wherever you
might be and regardless of your present business, you are constantly seeing
these fragments of old religions hanging on the walls, fragments that in part
say a great deal, in part not so much, and in part nothing at all. What does
the
male nurse believe? Surely nothing! Perhaps religion for many people nowadays
is
nothing more than a half-measure, a superficial, unconscious matter of
taste, a sort of interest and habit, at least with men. Perhaps a sister of the
nurse decorated the room this way. I could believe that—girls have more personal
grounds for piety and religious contemplation than men do, whose lives have
always been in conflict with religion, always unless they happened to be monks.
But a Protestant minister with his snow-white hair, his mild patient
smile and his noble gait is and remains a beautiful sight when he strides
through a lonely forest clearing. In the city, religion is less beautiful than
in the countryside, where peasants live whose very way of life has something
deeply religious about it. In the city, religion is like a machine, which is
unfortunate, whereas in the country one perceives the belief in God as being
just the same as a field of blossoming grain, or like a huge lush meadow, or
like the delightful swell of lightly curving hills behind which a house stands
hidden, containing quiet people for whom contemplation is a sort of friend. I
don’t know, to me it seems as if the minister in the city lives too close beside
the stock market speculator and the godless painter. In the city, the belief
in
God lacks the necessary distances. Religion here has too little sky, it smells
too little of the soil. I’m not putting it very well, and besides, what use is
any of this to me? Religion in my experience is a love of life, a heartfelt
attachment to the earth, joy in the present moment, trust in beauty, belief in
mankind, a feeling of carefree pleasure during revelries with friends, the
desire to ponder and a sense of not being responsible for misfortune, smiling
when death arrives and showing courage in every sort of undertaking life has
to
offer. In the end, a profound human decency has become our religion. When human
beings maintain decency in their dealings with each other, they are maintaining
it before God. What more could God want? The heart and all the finer sentiments
can together produce a decency that might well be more pleasing to God than dark
fanatical belief, which can only disconcert even the Divine One himself, so that
in the end He’ll no doubt wish not to hear the prayers thundering up to His
clouds any longer. What can our prayers mean to Him if they come bawling up so
clumsily, presumptuously, as if He were hard of hearing? Mustn’t you imagine
Him
possessing infinitely acute ears if you can picture Him at all? I wonder whether
the sermons and the peals of the organ are agreeable to Him, the Ineffable One?
Well, He’ll surely just smile at our efforts, dubious as they may be, and hope
that it will occur to us some day to leave Him in peace a bit more often.”