The Tanners

The very next day found him working at a large machine-producing factory that employed a number of young people to take inventory. He spent his evenings reading by the window, or else supplemented his trip home from the factory to Klara’s house with a lengthy detour around the entire mountain, passing through the dark verdant forested ravines that cut into the broad mountain. He would always stop at a spring he passed to quench his prodigious thirst, then would lie down in a secluded forest meadow until night arrived, reminding him to go home. He loved watching the summer evening give way to summer night, this slow rosy subsiding of the forest’s hues into the blackness of deep night. He was in the habit then of dreaming without words or thought, setting aside all self-reproach and surrendering to a delicious exhaustion. Often it seemed to him that a large fiery-red ball went whistling up into the air from the dark bushes beside him, from the sleeping earth, and when he looked, it was the moon dancing up into the sky, floating ponderously against its backdrop, the universe. How his eye then clung to the pale weightless shape of this loveliest of heavenly bodies. That this far-distant world appeared to be tucked away just behind the bushes seemed so strange to him, close enough to be fingered and grasped. Everything appeared to him near at hand. What was the concept of distance in the face of such withdrawal and drawing near. The infinite suddenly appeared to him infinitely close. When he returned, passing amid all the heavy, singing, fragrant nocturnal verdure, Simon perceived it as a mysterious, dear gesture when Klara walked to meet him, as she did every evening, and welcomed him home. Her eyes always appeared to have been weeping when she walked toward him like this or waited. Then the two of them would sit together until deep into the night on the small balcony, which had been transformed into a little mid-air summer-house, playing a game with tiny cards, or else she would sing some melody or have him tell her a story. When at last she bid him goodnight, he would sleep so soundly it might have been a magic spell, this “good night” of hers, giving her the power to shackle him to an exceptionally beautiful, deep slumber. In the morning, silver dew would glitter in the bushes, on the blades of grass and leaves as he walked to his place of employment to get to work writing and helping with the inventory. One Sunday he returned from a walk to find Klara sleeping on the divan in his bedroom. From outdoors the sound of an accordion could be heard coming from one of the squalid huts built into the foothills, where poor workers lived, at the edge of town. The shutters had been drawn and the room held a hot green light. He sat down at the foot of the divan beside the sleeper, and she touched him lightly with her feet. Overjoyed at the sensation of her feet pressing against him, he gazed intently at the face of the slumbering woman. How beautiful she was when she slept. She was one of those women who are most beautiful when their faces are immobile, at rest. Klara was breathing in peaceful waves; her chest, half-exposed, rose and sank gently; a book had fallen from the hands now dangling at her side. The idea arose in Simon that he might kneel beside her and quietly kiss these lovely hands, but he refrained. He might have done so had she been lying there awake, but sleeping? No. Secret, surreptitious, furtive expressions of tenderness are not for me, he thought. Her mouth was smiling, as though she were just casually sleeping, fully aware she was asleep. This smile upon the sleeper’s lips barred all uninnocent thoughts, but it forced one to gaze at this mouth, this face, this hair and these elongated cheeks. Still sleeping, Klara suddenly pressed her feet more urgently against Simon, then she woke up and looked about her questioningly, and for a long time remained looking into Simon’s eyes as though there were something she failed to grasp. Then she said: “Simon! I have something to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“We aren’t going to live in this house much longer. Agappaia has gambled and lost everything. He’s fallen into the hands of swindlers. The house has already been sold, it’s been bought by your Ladies’ Association for the Public Good and Moderation. The ladies are going to create a woodland health spa for the working class. Agappaia has thrown in his lot with a group of Asian explorers and will be traveling far away with them soon to discover a sunken Greek city somewhere in India. I no longer figure in his plans. How strange, this doesn’t even distress me. My husband was never capable of causing me distress. Enough! I shall keep house in a simple room down in the city, and Kaspar and you will visit me. I shall take a job, some employment or other, just like you. We’re moving out this autumn, and the house is to be renovated straight away. What do you say to all this?”