“Yes, he is older and a much better person than I am.”
“You are an honest man to say such a thing.”
“My name is Simon, and my brother is Kaspar.”
“My husband’s name is Agappaia.”
She turned pale as she spoke these words, but quickly pulled herself together and smiled.
Simon wrote to his brother Kaspar:
What odd fish we are, the two of us. The way we drift about this earth, it’s as if only you and I were alive, and no one else. What a crazy sort of friendship the two of us have forged, it’s as though among all mankind no one else could be found who might be worthy of the designation “friend.” We’re not really brothers at all, we’re just friends, two people who find themselves companions in this world. I’m not truly made for friendship, and can’t understand what it is about you I find so splendid that I’m forced constantly to imagine myself at your side, pressed against your back as it were. I’ll soon be thinking your head is my own, for you’re so very often in my head already; and if things go on like this, perhaps I’ll soon be seizing things with your hands, walking with your legs and eating with your mouth. Truly there is something mysterious about our friendship when I say to you I consider it quite possible that our hearts have been trying to draw apart from one another, but they’re incapable of separating. I’m overjoyed I have to admit that you still can’t quite manage this, for your letters sound so nice and for the time being I also wish to remain under this mystery’s spell. For us this is good, but how can I be speaking in such a horribly dry tone: I find it simply, not to tell a lie, enchanting. And why shouldn’t two brothers overdo things a little? We fit together quite well — and we did even back in the days of still hating one another when we nearly beat each other to a pulp. Do you remember? This appeal, with a dash of healthy laughter, is all that’s needed to stir up within you, to glue together, paste, and draw pictures that are truly more than worth remembering. We had become, for reasons I can no longer recall, mortal enemies. Oh, how accomplished we were at hating — our hatred was decidedly resourceful in inventing torments and humiliations to inflict on one another. Once at the dinner table, just to provide a single example of this lamentable and childish state of affairs, you threw a platter of sauerkraut at me, because you couldn’t resist, saying: “Here, catch!” I have to tell you, at the time I was trembling with fury even if only for the fact that here was this lovely opportunity for you to insult me so cruelly, and there was nothing I could do about it. I caught the platter, but was stupid enough to savor the pain of this mortification all up and down my gullet. And do you remember how, one noon — it was a quiet, a deathly quiet summer-hot Sunday afternoon mad with this deathly silence — someone came creeping up to you in the kitchen and asked you to be friends with me again. It was an incredible feat of self-control, let me tell you, to overcome those feelings of shame and defiance to reach out to you, the very figure of an enemy inclined to scornfully reject me. I did this and to this day am grateful to myself for doing so. Whether you’re grateful as well is a matter of the most joyous and fragrant indifference. I can only guess. Go away, I hear you trying to get a word in. Sorry, not possible. Desist! — How many delightful hours I thereafter enjoyed in your company. All at once I found you tender, loving, considerate. I think blissful feelings of joy burned on our cheeks. We wandered, you as painter and I as observer and commentator, through the meadows on the broad mountain slopes, wading in the scent of the grass, in the wetness of cool mornings, under the heat of midday and with the damp, infatuated setting of the sun. The trees watched what we were doing there, and the clouds balled themselves up, no doubt in anger at possessing no power to break our newly forged love. In the evenings we would come home horribly broken, dusty, starved and exhausted, and then suddenly you went off one day. The devil knows I helped you leave, as though I’d bound myself to do so for some sort of retainer, or as though I were in a hurry to see you depart. Certainly it was an unheard-of pleasure for me to see you setting off, for you were traveling out into the wide world. How far from wide this world is, brother.
Come visit me soon. I can give you shelter just as I would shelter a bride whom I assume to be in the habit of reposing on silk while servants wait on her. Admittedly I have no servants, but I do have a room fit for a born lord. The two of us, you and I, have just been offered a splendid chambre as a gift, it’s been laid at our feet. You can paint pictures here just as well as in your luscious fat landscapes, after all you have your imagination. It ought by rights to be summer now so that I might throw a garden party on the lawn in your honor, with Chinese lanterns and garlands of flowers, so as to receive you in a manner approaching what you deserve. Come all the same, but see to it your coming is quick, otherwise I’ll have to come get you. My lady and landlady is pressing your hand in hers. She is convinced that she knows you already just from my descriptions. Once she meets you, she’ll never want to meet anyone else again. Do you have a decent suit? Are your trousers not sagging too terribly about your knees, and does your head covering still merit the designation hat? Otherwise you may not appear before me. Just a joke, what silliness. Let your little Simon embrace you. Farewell, brother. I hope you’ll come soon—
* * *
Several weeks had passed, spring was beginning to return, the air was damper and softer, uncertain fragrances and sounds began to assert themselves, coming seemingly from beneath the earth. The earth was soft, one walked on it as on thick supple rugs. You thought you must be hearing birds singing. “Spring is on its way,” people on the street said to one another, awash in sensations. Even the stark buildings were taking on a certain fragrance, a richer hue. Such a peculiar state of affairs, and yet it was such an old, familiar phenomenon — but everyone perceived it as utterly novel, it inspired strange, turbulent thoughts, a person’s limbs, senses, heads, thoughts, everything was stirring as if all these things wished to start growing anew. The water of the lake gleamed so warmly, and the bridges snaking across the river appeared to arch more boldly. Flags were flapping in the wind, and it gave people pleasure to see them flap. And then the sunshine drove everyone out into the beautiful, white, clean streets in clusters and groups, where they remained standing, greedily luxuriating in the warm air’s kisses. Many coats of many people were cast aside. You could see the men moving more freely again, and the women had such strange expressions in their eyes, as though something blissful were emerging from their hearts. At night one heard the sound of vagabond guitars for the first time, and men and women stood amid a whirl of gaily frolicking children. The lights of the lanterns flickered like candles in quiet rooms, and when you went walking across the night-dark meadows, you could feel the blooming and stirring of the flowers. The grass would soon grow again, the trees soon begin again to pour their green over the low roofs of the houses and block the view from the windows. The forest would be luxuriant, voluptuous, heavy, oh the forest. — Simon was working once more at a large commercial firm.