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.”