Simon said to her:
“My name is Tanner, Simon Tanner, and I have four siblings, I am the youngest and the one who occasions the fewest hopes. One brother is a painter, he lives in Paris, and he lives there more quietly and reclusively than in a village, for he is painting. He must have changed a bit by now, it’s been over a year since I last saw him, but I think if you were to meet him the impression you’d have is of an important and utterly autonomous person. Getting close to him is not without its perils: He captivates people in such a way that one can commit foolhardy acts for his sake. He’s a consummate artist, and if I, his brother, understand something about art, it’s to his credit rather than my own understanding, which only developed a little as it was drawn to him. I think he must be wearing long curls now, but on him the curls look as natural as a closely shorn head on an officer, they aren’t obtrusive. He disappears in the crowd, and it’s his wish to disappear so he can work in peace. Once in a letter to me he wrote something about an eagle that spreads its pinions above rocky crags and feels most at home hovering above chasms, and another time he wrote to me that a man and artist must work like a horse — collapsing from exhaustion meant nothing at all, it was necessary to collapse and get back up again at once to return to work. He was still just a boy then, and now he paints pictures. If some day he ceases to be able to paint, he’ll scarcely be alive any longer. His name is Kaspar, and as a schoolboy he was always considered a lazybones both at school and in the parental home, take my word for it, and this was only because his general manner was so placid, so mild. He was taken out of school at an early age since he wasn’t doing well there, and had to carry about boxes and crates, and then he escaped from his homeland, and outside it learned to compel people to give him the respect he deserved. He’s one of my brothers, and another is named Klaus. Klaus is the oldest, and I consider him the best and most thoughtful person in all the world. His very gaze bespeaks his forbearance, scrupulousness and consideration. He’s an able man, so very able that his modest, discreet abilities will always remain hidden. He watched us younger ones grow up and devote ourselves to our desires and passions, he observed this all in silence and waited, occasionally speaking a word of concern or advice, but always he saw that everyone must tread his own path, he merely did what he could to avert misfortune, and his uncanny acuity of vision always let him discern what was good in a person. This brother is secretly worried about me, I know this quite well, for he loves me, in fact he loves all people and has a strangely shy esteem for them that we younger ones lack. Although he holds a position of prominence in the scholarly world, I am nonetheless convinced that only his scrupulousness — which is tempered always with shyness — is to blame for his not yet occupying an even higher one, because he deserves the very highest position, the one of greatest responsibility. I have a third brother as well who is unfortunate and nothing more; all that remains of him is what memories of his earlier days can tell a person. He’s in the madhouse — shouldn’t I be permitted to state this candidly? Given that you’re sitting here listening to me with such an attentively harkening ear, I assume you’re interested in hearing all there is to tell in its most truthful form or else nothing at all, isn’t that right? You nod, which says to me I already know you rather well if I make bold to assume you to be a simultaneously kind-hearted and courageous woman. Please keep listening. This unfortunate brother was surely, and I may say so without hesitation, the ideal of a young beautiful man, and he had talents that would have been better suited to the gallant, charming eighteenth century than our times, whose demands are so much harder and drier. Allow me to pass over his misfortune in silence; for in the first place talk of it might dishearten you, and secondly and thirdly, and as far as I’m concerned sixthly, it isn’t proper to tug apart all the folds of misfortune and cast aside all ceremony, all lovely veiled mourning, which can exist only when one keeps silent on such matters. I’ve now given you a tentative, sketchy portrait of my brothers, and now a girl will appear, a lonely schoolmistress sequestered in a little village with thatched roofs, my sister Hedwig. Would you like to make her acquaintance? You and all your sensibilities would be delighted by this girl. There is no prouder creature on all the planet. I lived a full three months with her in idleness in the countryside; she wept when I arrived and laughed at me when, suitcase in hand, I tried to bid her a tender farewell. She threw me out, and at the same time gave me a kiss. She said to me that all she felt for me was a faint, insuppressible contempt, but she said that so sweetly I couldn’t help but feel it as a caress. Just imagine, she gave me shelter in her home when I came to her with more beggarly, more importunate demands than the most insolent vagabond who only remembered his sister because it occurred to him: “You can go there until you’re standing on your own two feet again.” —But then we lived for three entire months as if in a gay pleasure garden filled with bower-lined paths. Such a thing can never be forgotten. When I went out and took walks in the woods, finding myself too indolent to know whether to scratch my chin or behind my ears, I dreamed of her, of her alone, as if wanting to dream of what was simultaneously closest and farthest away. She was far from me out of reverence and close out of love. She was so proud, I’ll have you know, that she never allowed me to feel how very shabby I must have appeared to her. She just felt glad when I made myself at home and settled in with her. This persisted until the very last hour, and then she simply cut my farewell off before it left my lips, in the presentiment that I would say only hurtful, stupid things. When I’d left, I turned to look back down the hill behind me and saw her waving at me amicably and simply, as if I were just heading off to the nearest village cobbler and would return in an hour’s time. And yet she knew she was being left behind, alone with her isolation, and would be faced with the task of adjusting to the absence of a companion — and this certainly was a task, an internal labor. When we sat together in the evenings, we’d tell each other stories about our lives, and we heard the wings of childhood beating once more, just as our mother’s dress would rustle on the floor of the room when she came toward her children. My mother and my sister Hedwig always comprise in my head an intimately conjoined and interwoven image. When our mother fell ill, it was Hedwig who cared for and tended her, as one must tend a little child. Just imagine: A child must watch her own mother become a child, and becomes a mother to her own mother. What a strange displacement of feelings. My mother was a highly respected woman, and the esteem she received from all sides was pure and heartfelt. The impression she made was always at once rural and refined. Simultaneously unassuming and dismissive, she could quickly put a damper on disobedience and unkindness. Her expression could ask and command at one and the same time. How the ladies in our town would cluster about her when she went for a walk, how many gentlemen’s hats were doffed before her. Then, when she fell ill, she was forgotten and became an object of worry and shame. For one feels ashamed when a family member is ill and is almost enraged to remember the days when a healthy woman commanded the respect of all who knew her. Shortly before her death — I was fourteen years old at the time — she sat down at noon one day to write a letter: “My beloved son.” But do you imagine her whimsically slender handwriting continued any further than this salutation? No, she just gave a weary confused smile, murmured something and was compelled to lay down the pen once more. There she sat, there lay the beginning of a letter to her son, there the pen, and the sun was shining out of doors, and I observed all these things. One night Hedwig then knocked at the door of my room, telling me to get up, Mother had died. A thin ray of light fell through the crack of the door as I leapt out of bed. As a girl, my mother had been unhappy, born into unfavorable circumstances. She left the distant mountains and came to live in town with her sister, my aunt — where she was forced to work as a maid practically. As a child she walked a long road deeply covered in snow to get to school, and she did her homework in a tiny little room by the light of a paltry candle stub that made her eyes hurt because she could scarcely read the letters in her book. Her parents were unkind to her, and so she became acquainted with melancholy at an early age, and one day, when she was a girl, she stood leaning against the railings of a bridge, wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to leap down into the river. She must have been neglected, shunted back and forth and in this way maltreated. When as a boy I once heard about her wicked childhood, I trembled with indignation, rage shot into my face, and from then on I hated the unknown figures of my grandparents. For her children, our mother had, when she was still healthy, something almost majestic about her that frightened and intimidated us; when she became ill in her mind, we pitied her. It was a crazy leap to make: from fearful, mystical awe to pity. All that lay between — tenderness and trust — remained unknown to us. And so it happened that our pity was strongly intermingled with an unspeakable regret over all we’d never felt, which then caused us to pity her all the more deeply. I remembered all my boyish pranks, all my disrespectful behavior — and then the sound of our mother’s voice, with which she meted out punishments even at a distance, so that the actual physical punishment that followed was sweet, laughable sugar-candy by comparison. She employed just the right tone of voice to make you instantly regret the error you’d committed and desire to see her outrage mollified as quickly as possible. There was something so wonderfully mild about her mildness, and seeing it was like receiving a present; we didn’t receive it often. Oversensitive irritability was my mother’s usual state. We weren’t nearly as frightened of our father as of her, we feared only that he might say or do something that would cause Mother to fly into a rage. He was powerless before her — it was in his nature to prize vigor far less than relaxation. He was a boon companion, and as such well-loved, but when it came to difficult matters, he wasn’t the one to take things in hand. Now he’s eighty years old, and when he dies, a piece of town history will die along with him; the old people will shake their heads more pensively and wearily when they no longer see the old man going about his business, which he still does today, and on fairly spry legs. In his youth he was rather a wild fellow who was gradually polished by city life, but this life also gave him a taste for luxury. Both Mother and Father came from rugged, secluded, mountainous regions and then found themselves in a town that even at the time was known, if not notorious, for its liberal vitality. Industry was flourishing in those days like a fiery plant, permitting an easy, carefree lifestyle — much money was earned, and much spent. When five or six days a week were workdays, this was considered industriousness. Workers lay for days at a time upon the sunny riverbank, catching fish, when they weren’t getting up to mischief. And whenever they needed more money to finance this life, they’d go work a few days more, earning enough to return to their leisure. The craftsmen were making money off the workers, for when even the poor have money, how much more prosperous must the well-to-do be. The city appeared to have acquired an additional ten thousand inhabitants overnight, everyone came streaming in from the surrounding countryside into buildings that were occupied and filled the moment they looked on the outside as though they might be finished, never mind how damp and dirty the inside might still be. Construction firms were having a heyday, all they had to do was keep producing buildings, which they did as shoddily as could be managed. Factory owners rode around on horseback, and their ladies traveled in barouches while the town’s old nobility observed these activities and sniffed. On festival days the town went all out, surpassing all rivals, and left no stone unturned in its bid to be celebrated everywhere as the best town for revelries. The merchants had nothing to complain about under these circumstances, nor did the schoolchildren; the only ones who felt uneasy were a handful of insightful individuals who couldn’t find the courage to join their neighbors on the unsteady, rose-strewn pleasure ground of superficial amusements. Into such surroundings my parents now came, Mother with her irritable sensitivities and her taste for simple refinement, and Father with his talent for assimilating everything around him. For children, every region is lovely and charming, but this particular place, thanks to its setting, was made for children who love to pursue their games amid lairs such as rocks, caves, riverbanks, meadows, hollows, gorges and wooded ravines. And so we enjoyed this entire landscape for our games and inventions until we left school. When Mother died, I was sent