The Tanners

“When all of us, Kaspar, I and you, had to leave the forest house last summer, do you remember, and your brother then disappeared, and I didn’t know where to, I rented myself an elegant room down in the city, yearning for the two of you and for a long time inconsolable. Toward winter everything around me appeared suffused in a red glow, I forgot everything and hurled myself into the maelstrom of worldly pleasures, for I still possessed part of my fortune, a small part, but still a lot by local standards. I used them up, and received in exchange the realization that often one needs a bit of rapture to be able to keep oneself more or less afloat upon the waves of life. I had a box at the theater, but the theater interested me far less than the balls where I could show how beautiful and spirited I was. The young men swarmed around me and I saw nothing that might have prevented me from feeling contempt for them all or from subjecting them to my whims. I thought of you and your brother, and often wished, standing at the center of all that emasculated swarming, to see your peaceful faces and open manner. Then a dark black-haired man approached me, a student at the polytechnical university, heavy and clumsy in appearance, a Turk with large forceful eyes, and he danced with me. After this dance, he possessed me body and soul, I was his. For us women, when we are whirling about in worldly raptures, there is a particular sort of man that can vanquish us only on the dance floor. If I’d encountered him anywhere else, I might well have laughed at him. From the first moment on, he behaved towards me as though he were my master, and while I marveled at his insolence, I couldn’t manage to defend myself against it. He commanded me: now like this, and now like this! And I obeyed. We women can achieve stunning feats of obedience when we feel moved. We accept everything then, and wish, perhaps out of shame and fury, for our beloved to be even more brutal than he is. No matter how brutally he treats us, it isn’t enough. To this man, the last bit of money I had to my name was quite simply his property, and I agreed and gave it to him, I gave him everything. When eventually he’d had his fill of oppressing, tyrannizing, preying on and exploiting me, he went away, back to his native land, to Armenia. His slave — I—did nothing to hold him back. I found all his actions appropriate. Even if I’d loved him less than I did, I’d still have let him go, for my pride would have prevented me from trying to detain him. And so it was simply my duty to obey him when he ordered me to help him prepare his departure: The love in me was happy to obey. I wasn’t mortified to be kissing him goodbye, this man who scarcely even deigned to look at me any longer. He gave voice to the hope that he would later, when his circumstances allowed, bring me to his country to make me his wife. I could tell it was a lie, but I felt no bitterness. With regard to this man, any unlovely feeling in me was utterly impossible. I have a child by him, a girl, she’s sleeping there in the next room.”

Klara paused for a moment, smiled at Simon, and then went on: