The Tanners (4 page)

The Tanners

–1–

One morning a young, boyish man walked into a bookshop and asked to
be introduced to the proprietor. His request was granted. The bookseller, an
old
man of quite venerable appearance, gave a sharp glance at the one standing
rather shyly before him and instructed him to speak. “I want to become a
bookseller,” said the youthful novice, “I yearn to become one, and I don’t know
what might prevent me from carrying out my intentions. I’ve always imagined the
trade in books must be an enchanting activity, and I cannot understand why I
should still be forced to pine away outside of this fine, lovely occupation.
For
you see, sir, standing here before you, I find myself extraordinarily well
suited for selling books in your shop, and selling as many as you could possibly
wish me to. I’m a born salesman: chivalrous, fleet-footed, courteous,
quick, brusque, decisive, calculating, attentive, honest—and yet not so
foolishly honest as I might appear. I am capable of lowering prices when a poor
devil of a student is standing before me, and of elevating them as a favor to
those wealthy individuals who, as I can’t help noticing, sometimes don’t know
what to do with all their money. Although I’m still young, I believe myself in
possession of a certain knowledge of human nature—besides which, I love people,
of every variety, so I would never employ my insight into their characters in
the service of swindling—and I am equally determined never to harm your esteemed
business through any exaggerated solicitousness toward certain underfinanced
poor devils. In a word: My love of humankind will be agreeably balanced with
mercantile rationality on the scales of salesmanship, a rationality which in
fact bears equal weight and appears to me just as necessary for life as a soul
filled with love: I shall practice a most lovely moderation, please be assured
of this in advance—”

The bookseller was looking at the young man attentively and with
astonishment. He appeared to be having trouble deciding whether or not his
interlocutor, with this pretty speech, was making a good impression on him. He
wasn’t quite sure how to judge and, finding this circumstance rather confusing,
he gently inquired in his self-consciousness: “Is it possible, young
man, to make inquiries about your person in suitable places?” The one so
addressed responded: “Suitable places? I’m not sure what you mean by suitable.
To me, the most appropriate thing would be if you didn’t make inquiries at all!
Whom would you ask, and what purpose could it serve? You’d find yourself regaled
with all sorts of information regarding my person, but would any of it succeed
in reassuring you? What would you know about me if, for example, someone were
to
tell you that I came from a very good family, that my father was a man worthy
of
respect, that my brothers were industrious hopeful individuals, and that I
myself was quite serviceable, if a bit flighty, but certainly not without
grounds for hope, in fact that it was clearly all right to trust me a little,
and so forth? You still wouldn’t know me at all, and most certainly wouldn’t
have the slightest reason to hire me now as a salesclerk in your shop with any
greater peace of mind. No, sir, as a rule, inquiries aren’t worth a fig, and
if
I might make so bold as to venture to offer you, as an esteemed older gentleman,
a piece of advice, I would heartily advise against making any at all—for I know
that if I were suited to deceive you and inclined to cheat the hopes you place
in me on the basis of the information you’d gather, I would be doing so in even
greater measure the more favorably the aforementioned inquiries turned out,
inquiries that would then prove to be mendacious, if they spoke well of me. No,
esteemed sir, if you think you might have a use for me, I ask that you display
a
bit more courage than most of the other business owners I’ve previously
encountered and simply engage me on the basis of the impression I am making on
you now. Besides, to be perfectly truthful, any inquiries concerning my person
you might make will only result in your hearing bad reports.”

“Indeed? And why is that?”

“I didn’t last long,” the young man continued, “in any of the places
I’ve worked at thus far, for I found it disagreeable to let my young powers go
stale in the narrow stuffy confines of copyists’ offices, even if these offices
were considered by all to be the most elegant in the world—those found in banks
for example. To this day, I haven’t yet been sent packing by anyone at all but
rather have always left on the strength of my own desire to leave, abandoning
jobs and positions that no doubt carried promises of careers and the devil knows
what else, but which would have been the death of me had I remained in them.
No
matter where it was I’d been working, my departure was, as a rule, lamented,
but
nonetheless after my decision was found regrettable and a dire future was
prophesied for me, my employers always had the decency to wish me luck with my
future endeavors. With you, sir, in your bookshop (and here the young man’s
voice grew suddenly confiding), I will surely be able to last for years and
years. And in any case, many things speak in favor of your giving me a try.”
The
bookseller said: “Your candor pleases me, I shall let you work in my shop for
a
one-week trial period. If you perform well and seem inclined to stay,
then we can discuss it further.” With these words, which signaled the young
man’s dismissal, the old man at the same time rang an electric bell, whereupon,
as if arriving on the gusts of a strong wind, a small, elderly, bespectacled
man
appeared.

“Give this young man something to do!”

The spectacles nodded. With this, Simon became an assistant
bookseller. Simon—for that was his name.

At around this same time, Professor Klaus, a brother of Simon’s who
lived in a historic capital where he’d made a name for himself, had begun to
worry about his younger brother’s behavior. A good, quiet, dutiful person, he
would dearly have loved to see his brothers find the firm
respect-commanding ground beneath their feet in life that he, the
eldest, had. But this was so utterly not the case, at least till now, in fact
it
was so very much the opposite, that Professor Klaus began to reproach himself
in
his heart. He told himself, for example: “I should have been a person who would
long since have had every opportunity to lead my brothers to the right path.
Until now I’ve failed to do so. How could I have neglected these duties, etc.”
Dr. Klaus knew thousands of duties, small and large, and sometimes it seemed
as
if he were longing to have even more of them. He was one of those people who
feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing
edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that
some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them. They cause themselves
to experience many a troubled hour because of these unfulfilled duties—never
stopping to consider how one duty always piles a second one upon the person
undertaking the first—and they believe they’ve already fulfilled something like
a duty just by being made anxious and uneasy by any dark inkling of its
presence. They meddle in many an affair that—if they’d stop to think about it
in
a less anxious way—hasn’t a blessed thing to do with them, and they wish to see
others as worry-laden as themselves. They tend to cast envious glances
upon naïve unencumbered people, and then criticize them for being frivolous
characters since they move through life so gracefully, their heads held so
easily aloft. Dr. Klaus often forced himself to entertain a certain small modest
sensation of insouciance, but always he would return again to his gray dreary
duties, in the thrall of which he languished as in a dark prison. Perhaps, back
when he was still young, he’d once felt a desire to stop, but he’d lacked the
strength to leave undone something that resembled a nagging duty and couldn’t
just walk past it with a dismissive smile. Dismissive? Oh, he never dismissed
anything at all! Attempting this—or so it seemed to him—would have split him
in
twain from bottom to top; he’d have been incapable of avoiding painful
recollections of what he’d cast aside and dismissed. He never dismissed or
discarded anything at all, and he was wasting his young life analyzing and
examining things utterly unworthy of examination, study, attention or love. Thus
he’d grown older, but since he was by no means anything like a person devoid
of
sensibility and imagination, he often also reproached himself bitterly for
neglecting the duty of being at least a little happy. This was yet another
neglect of duty, a new one, which with perfect acuity demonstrated that the
dutiful never quite succeed in fulfilling all their duties, indeed, that such
individuals are the most likely of all human beings to disregard their foremost
duties and only later—perhaps when it’s already too late—call them once more
to
mind. On more than one occasion Dr. Klaus felt sad about himself when he thought
of the precious happiness that had faded from his view, the happiness of finding
himself united with a young sweet girl, who of course would have to have been
a
girl from an impeccable family. At around the same time as he was contemplating
his own person in a melancholy frame of mind, he wrote to his brother Simon,
whom he genuinely loved and whose conduct in this world troubled him, a letter
whose contents were approximately as follows:

Dear Brother,

It would appear you are refusing to tell me anything about yourself.
Perhaps things aren’t well with you and this is why you don’t write. You are
once more, as so often before, lacking a solid steady occupation—I’ve been sorry
to hear this, and to hear it from strangers. From you, it seems, I can no longer
expect any candid reports. Believe me, this pains me. So very many things now
cause me displeasure, and must you too—who always seemed to me to hold such
promise—contribute to the bleakness of my mood, which for many reasons is far
from rosy? I shall continue to hope, but if you are still even a little bit fond
of your brother, please don’t make me hope in vain for too long. Go and do
something that might justify a person’s belief in you in some way or other. You
have talent and, as I like to imagine, possess a clear head; you’re clever too,
and all your utterances reflect the good core I’ve always known your soul
possesses. But why, acquainted as you are with the way this world is put
together, do you now display so little perseverance? Why are you always leaping
from one thing to the next? Does your own conduct not frighten you? You must
possess quite a stockpile of inner strength to endure this constant change of
professions, which is such a disservice to yourself in this world. In your
shoes, I would have despaired long ago. I really cannot understand you at all
in
this, but for precisely this reason—that after experiencing all too often that
nothing can be achieved in this world without patience and goodwill—I’m not
abandoning my hope of one day seeing you energetically seize hold of a career.
And surely you wish to achieve something. In any case, such a lack of ambition
is hardly like you, in my experience. My advice to you is: Stick it out, knuckle
under, pursue some difficult task for three or four short years, obey your
superiors, show that you can perform, but also show that you have character,
and
then a career path will open before you—and it will lead you through all the
known world if you desire to travel. The world and its people will show
themselves to you quite differently once you yourself are truly something: when
you are in a position to mean something to the world. In this way, it seems to
me, you will perhaps find far more satisfaction in life than even the scholar
who (though he clearly recognizes the strings from which all lives and deeds
depend) remains chained to the narrow confines of his study but nonetheless,
as
I can report from experience, is often not so terribly comfortable. There’s
still time for you to become a quite splendidly serviceable businessman, and
you
have no idea to what an extent businessmen have the opportunity to design their
existences to be the most absolutely liveliest of lives. The way you are now,
you’re just creeping around the corners and through the cracks of life: This
should cease. Perhaps I ought to have intervened earlier, much earlier; maybe
I
ought to have helped you more with deeds than with mere words of warning, but
I
don’t know, given your proud mind, with its one determination to be helped only
by yourself in every way possible, perhaps I’d have done more to offend than
to
genuinely convince you. What are you now doing with your days? Do tell me about
them. Given all the worries I’ve endured on your behalf, I might now perhaps
deserve your being somewhat more loquacious and communicative. As for me, what
sort of a person am I? Someone to be wary of approaching unreservedly and with
trust? Do you consider me a person to be feared? What is it about me which makes
you wish to avoid me? Perhaps our circumstance? That I am the “big brother” and
possibly know a bit more than you? Well then, know that I would be glad to be
young again, and impractical, and naïve. And yet I am not quite so glad, dear
brother, as a person should be. I am unhappy. Perhaps it’s too late for me to
become happy. I’ve now reached an age when a man who still has no home of his
own cannot think of those happy individuals who enjoy the bliss of seeing a
young woman occupied with running their households without the most painful
longing. To love a girl, what a lovely thing this is, brother. And it’s beyond
my reach. —No, you really have no need to fear me, it is I who am seeking you
out once more, who am writing to you, hoping to receive a warm friendly
response. Perhaps you are now in fact richer than I—perhaps you have more hopes
and far more reason to have them, have plans and prospects I myself cannot even
dream of—the thing is: I don’t fully know you anymore. How could I after all
these years of separation? Let me make your acquaintance once more, force
yourself to write to me. Perhaps one day I shall enjoy the good fortune of
seeing all my brothers happy; you, in any case, I should like to see content.
What is Kaspar up to? Do you write to one another? What about his art? I’d love
to have news of him as well. Farewell, brother. Perhaps we shall speak together
again soon.