The Tanners

Klara felt divine. Dressed in a dark-blue morning coat that flowed loosely about her body in opulent folds, she sat upon the balcony, which provided a view of fir trees whose tips bobbed gently to and fro in the light morning breeze. How glorious the forest is, she thought, leaning out toward it over the delicately worked railing to have its fragrance closer. “How it lies there, the forest, as though already slumbering its way closer to night. When you walk into a forest during the daytime, in broad sunlight, it’s as if you’re walking into an evening where the sounds are piercing and fainter, the scents moist and more tender, where a person can rest and pray. In the forest you pray involuntarily, and it’s also the only place in the world where God is near; God seems to have created forests so we can pray in them as if in sacred temples; one person prays in one way, another in another, but everyone prays. When you lie beneath a fir tree reading a book, you are praying, if praying is the same as being lost in thought. Let God be where He will, in the forest you can sense Him, and you offer up your little bit of belief with silent rapture. God doesn’t want us to believe in Him so terribly much, He wants us to forget Him, it even makes Him happy to be scorned, for He is benevolent and great beyond all measure; God is the most pliant thing in the universe. He insists on nothing, wants nothing, requires nothing. Wanting things might be something for us humans, but not for Him. Nothing is for Him. He is happy when people pray to Him. Oh, this God is enraptured and cannot contain His bliss when I go and thank Him, thank Him only just a little. Even if my thanks are superficial, God is so grateful. I’d like to know who could be more grateful than He. He has given us everything, He’s so incautious and kind, and the way things are with Him, He cannot help being happy when the beings He’s created think of him a little. This is the unique thing about our God, that He wants to be God only when it pleases us to elevate Him as our God. Who teaches humility better than He does? Who is more prescient and still? Perhaps God merely has inklings of us, as we do of Him, and all I’m doing, just now for instance, is giving voice to my own inklings. Does He also sense that I’m sitting here on the balcony, admiring His splendid forest? If only He knew how beautiful His forest is. But I think God has forgotten His Creation, not out of bitterness — how could He be capable of bitterness — no, He’s simply forgotten, or at least it looks as if He’s forgotten us. You can feel many different things about God — He permits all sorts of thoughts. But when you think of Him, you can easily lose Him: that’s why we pray. Great God, lead us not into temptation: That’s how I prayed as a child, lying in my little bed, and I always felt pleased with myself when I prayed. How happy I feel today, how glad; my entire being is a smile, a blissful smile. My whole heart is smiling, the air is so fresh, I think it must be Sunday, people will come from the city to go walking in the forest, and I shall pick out some child, ask the parents to entrust it to me for a little while and then we’ll play. How I can just sit here like this, feeling joy at my very existence, at my sitting here and leaning over the railing! How beautiful I find myself — I could almost forget Kaspar, forget everything. How could I possibly ever have cried over anything, felt perturbed over anything? How imperturbable the forest is, and yet also so flexible, warm, alive and sweet. What a respiration comes from the fir trees, what rustling! The rustling of the trees makes all music superfluous. Indeed, I like to hear music only at night, never in the morning, the morning is too sacred. How strangely refreshed I feel. How mysterious it is to lie down to sleep, no, first to be tired and then lie down, and then wake up again and feel newborn. Every day is our birthday. It’s like getting into the bath when one climbs out of the veils of nighttime into the waves of the blue day. Now the blaze of noon will soon come, until the sun longingly sinks down again. What longing, what a miracle from eve to morn, from noon to eve, from night to morn again. We’d find everything miraculous if we were sensible of it all, for how could one thing be miraculous and another not? I think I must have been ill yesterday and no one’s telling me. How beautiful and innocent my hands look still. If they had eyes, I’d hold up a mirror to show them how beautiful they are. How fortunate any man is whom I caress with my hands. What peculiar thoughts I’m having. If Kaspar were to come now, I’d have to weep at letting him see me like this. I haven’t been thinking about him, and he’d sense I hadn’t given him a thought. All at once I feel so wretched — the thought that I’ve neglected him. But am I his slave? What is he to me?”

She began to cry. Then Kaspar came up to her: “What’s the matter, Klara?”