Inside, in his brother’s room, he gazed at everything with wondering eyes, though there wasn’t much to observe. In one corner stood the bed, an interesting bed — after all, it was where Kaspar slept; and the window was a marvelous window — though made of simple wood and with plain curtains — since Kaspar had just stuck his head out this very window. The floor, table, bedspread and chairs were covered with drawings and pictures. Each separate sheet now slid through the visitor’s fingers, every one beautiful and so perfectly executed. Simon found it all but inconceivable what a worker this painter was, so many things lay before his eyes that he could scarcely manage to look at them all. “Why, it’s nature herself you’ve painted,” he exclaimed. “I find it so bittersweet to look at new pictures of yours. Each one is so beautiful, they gleam with sentiment and seem to strike nature in her heart, and yet you are always painting new things, always striving for something even better — possibly you also destroy many things that have turned out poorly in your eyes. I’m incapable of finding any of your pictures weak, each one moves me and bewitches my soul. Even just a brushstroke of yours, or a color, gives me a firm and unshakeable conviction of your talent — it’s simply wonderful. And when I look at your landscapes, painted so expansively and so warmly by your brush, I always see you, and along with you I feel a sort of pain which tells me there is never an end to art. I understand art so well — the urgency human beings feel for its sake, that longing to vie for Nature’s love and good graces in this way. Why do we wish to see a charming landscape reproduced in a picture? Is it just for the sake of pleasure? No, we are hoping this image will explain something—but this is a something that will surely always remain inexplicable. It cuts so deeply into us when we, lying at a window, dreamily watch the setting sun; but that’s nothing at all compared to a street when it’s raining and the women are daintily raising their skirts, or to the sight of a garden or lake beneath the weightless morning sky or to a simple fir tree in winter or to a boat ride at night, or a view of the Alps. Fog and snow enchant us no less than sunshine and colors: Fog refines the colors, and snow is, after all, and particularly beneath the blue of the warm early spring sky, a profound, marvelous, almost incomprehensible thing. How beautiful that you paint, Kaspar, and paint so beautifully. I’d like to be a little bit of nature and be loved by you the way you love every bit of nature. A painter must love nature so ardently and achingly, even more tempestuously and tremblingly and openly than a poet, such as Sebastian, for example — and people are saying he’s built himself a hut up in the high pastures so he can worship nature undisturbed, like a Japanese hermit. But poets, no doubt, are less faithfully attached to nature than you painters; for as a rule they approach nature with their heads over-educated, over-stuffed. But perhaps I’m mistaken, and in this case I would gladly be mistaken. How you must have worked, Kaspar. Surely you have no cause to reproach yourself. I wouldn’t do so. Not even I reproach myself, and truly, I have ample cause. But I don’t, because this makes a person nervous, and nervousness is an ugly state unworthy of human beings—”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Kaspar replied.
The two of them then strolled through the little town, looking at everything, which didn’t take long, and yet, considering the seriousness with which they regarded it all, did in fact take quite some time. They passed the mailman, who handed Kaspar a letter, making a face as he did so. The letter was from Klara. The church was admired, as was the majesty of the town’s towers and the defiant protective walls, which however had often been breached, the vintners’ huts and gazebos set into the mountainside, places where life had died out long ago. The fir trees gazed down solemnly at the small old town, and at the same time the sky was so sweet above the houses which appeared defiant and sullen in their thickness and breadth. The meadows were shimmering and the hills with their golden beech forests beckoned the viewer up to their distant heights. In the afternoon the young men went into the forest. They were no longer speaking much. Kaspar had fallen silent, his brother sensed what he was thinking of and preferred not to rouse him, for it seemed to him more important for things to be thought over than spoken about. They sat down on a bench. “She won’t let go of me,” Kaspar said, “she’s unhappy.” Simon said nothing, but he felt a certain joy on his brother’s behalf, that the woman was unhappy over him. He thought: “How lovely I find it that she is unhappy.” This love enchanted him. Soon, however, the two took leave of one another; it was time for Simon to return, by train this time.
— 7–
Winter arrived. Simon, left up to his own devices, sat dressed in a coat, writing at the table in his small room. He didn’t know what to do with all the time on his hands, and since his profession had accustomed him to writing, he now sat and wrote offhandedly, without forethought, on small strips of paper he’d cut to size with scissors. Outside the weather was damp, and the coat Simon had wrapped himself in was serving the function of a heating stove. This sitting at home in his room seemed so cozy to him, while out of doors violent winds were raging, promising snow. He felt so comfortable sitting like that, engaged in his activity and embracing the notion that he’d been utterly forgotten. He thought back on his childhood, which wasn’t yet so terribly far behind him but nonetheless appeared as distant as a dream, and wrote:
I wish to recall to my mind my childhood, as my current circumstances make this a fascinating and instructive task. I was a boy who liked to lean back against warm heating stoves. Doing this made me fancy myself both important and sad, and I would wear a simultaneously self-satisfied and melancholy expression. What’s more, I donned felt slippers whenever possible for indoor wear — changing shoes, exchanging wet ones for dry, gave me the greatest pleasure. A warm room always struck me as ravishing. I was never ill, and always envied people who could fall ill, as they were then cared for and had somewhat more delicate words addressed to them. For this reason I often imagined myself falling ill and was touched when I heard, in my fantasy, my parents speaking tender words to me. I had a need to be treated with affection, but this never happened. My mother frightened me because she uttered affectionate words so infrequently. I had a reputation for being a scallywag — not without cause, as I recall — but it was nonetheless sometimes hurtful always to be reminded of that. I would so have loved to be coddled; but when I saw it was out of the question that attentions of this sort would be shown me, I became a ruffian and made a point of provoking the children who enjoyed the advantage of being well-mannered and loved — my sister Hedwig and my brother Klaus. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than when they boxed my ears, for this demonstrated that I’d been skillful enough to arouse their ire. I don’t have many memories of school, but I know I found it a sort of compensation for the minor affronts I suffered in my parents’ home: I was able to excel. I took great satisfaction in bringing home good grades. School frightened me, and so I always behaved well there; whenever I was at school my conduct was diffident and restrained. The teachers’ weaknesses didn’t remain hidden from me for long, but I found them more terrifying than ridiculous. One of the teachers, a cloddish, monstrous person, had a real drunkard’s face; it nonetheless never occurred to me to suspect him of drinking, and yet a mysterious rumor was circulating in the world of the school about another teacher, saying drink had been his downfall. The expression of suffering on this man’s face is something I shall never forget. I considered Jews more refined than Christians, for there were several enchantingly beautiful Jewish girls who set me trembling when I met them on the street. Often my father would send me on errands to one of the elegant Jewish homes; it always smelled of milk in this house, and the lady who would open the door to me there would have on wide white dresses and would bring with her a warm spicy scent that at first I found distasteful, but later I came to love. I think I can’t have worn such nice clothes as a child, in any case I would gaze with malicious admiration at a few of the other boys who wore beautiful high-topped shoes, smooth stockings and well-tailored suits. One boy in particular made a deep impression on me because of how delicate his face and hands were, and the softness of his movements and the voice that came from his lips. He was exactly like a girl, dressed always in soft fabrics, and with the teachers he enjoyed a respect that bewildered me. I felt a pathological longing to have him deign to speak to me, and was overjoyed when one day he suddenly addressed me before the window of a stationery store. He flattered me, saying I wrote so beautifully, and that he wished his own handwriting were that beautiful. How it delighted me to be superior in at least this one respect to this young god of a boy, and I fended off his compliments blissfully blushing. That smile! I can still remember how he smiled. For a long time his mother was my dream. I overvalued her to the detriment of my own mother. How unjust! This boy was attacked by several pranksters in our class who put their heads together and declared him to be a girl, a real one just dressed up in boy’s clothes. Naturally this was pure nonsense, but the claim struck me like a thunderbolt, and for a long time I imagined I ought to be worshiping this boy as a girl in disguise. His overripe figure provided ample fodder for my high-strung romantic sentiments. Naturally I was too shy and proud to declare how fond I was of him, and so he considered me one of his enemies. What elegant aloofness he could convey. How curious to be thinking of this just now! — In religion class I once delighted one of my teachers by finding just the right word for a certain feeling; this too I shall never forget. In various subjects I was indeed quite good, but it always felt shameful to me to stand out as a model pupil, and I often practically made an effort to get bad marks. My instincts told me that the students I surpassed might hate me, and I liked being popular. I found the thought that my schoolmates might hate me rather frightening — a calamity. It had become fashionable in our class to detest all swots, and therefore it often happened that clever, intelligent pupils would try to look stupid as a precaution. This conduct, when it was recognized, counted among us as exemplary behavior, and indeed, there was no doubt something heroic about it, even if only in a misunderstood sense. To be singled out for praise by teachers therefore carried with it the danger of being held in low regard. What a curious world: school. One of my earliest years at school, I had a classmate, a little squirt of a thing with blotches on his pointy face, whose father was a basket weaver and swillpot known to all and sundry. The little fellow was constantly being made to pronounce the word “schnapps” before the entire mocking classroom, which he couldn’t do — he always said “snaps” instead of “schnapps” because of some miserable speech impediment. How we howled with laughter. And when I now think back on it: How crude this was. Another boy, a certain Bill, a jovial little fellow, was always late for school because his parents lived in a remote, rugged mountain region far from town. The latecomer would always be forced to hold out his hand as punishment for his tardiness, whereupon he would receive a biting, sharply painful blow of the cane. Every time, the pain would force tears from the lad’s eyes. How intently we witnessed this castigation. Let me emphasize, by the way, that I have no wish to make accusations about anyone — the teacher in question, say — as one might easily suspect, but am simply reporting what I recall from those days. — Up on the mountain, in the forest above the town, all sorts of rough unemployed derelicts — then even more than now, I would assume — were in the habit of gathering to drink from schnapps bottles in the thickets, play cards or court the womenfolk who were present, recognizable as women by the scraps of clothes they wore, their faces home to misery and affliction. These people were known as vagrants. One Sunday evening we — Hedwig, Kaspar and I — were out walking with a girl we called Anna, who was fond of us all, on a narrow path that led over this mountain, and as we stepped out into a forest clearing full of rocks, we saw a man seize one of these rocks in his fist and smash it audibly into the face of another man, his opponent, so that blood came spurting out and the man who had been struck fell at once to the ground. This fight, whose end we didn’t witness, as we immediately fled, appeared to have started because of a woman; at any rate I can still see clearly before me the dusky tall figure of a woman who at the time was standing by, nonchalant, observing the fight with a wicked expression. This encounter filled me with a profound distress and terror that kept me from eating and made me avoid that part of the forest for a long time. There was something horrifyingly primitive, even primeval about the sight of those men doing battle—