The Tanners

Simon raced outside and down the stairs, where a veiled female figure stared after him in astonishment, then out of the building to the street, into the air, into mobile damp glittering evening freedom. How strange it was, he thought, this belonging to a household where you lived just like a prisoner. How strange to be a grown man and as a grown man be compelled to seek out a woman, to enter a dark room where you only half see the woman sitting there in the dark, and ask her permission to be allowed to go out. As if you were a piece of furniture in her possession, an object, a purchase, something, a thing, a something or other, and as if this something were nothing or were something only insofar as it was suited to be a thing of this particular sort, something of hers! Strange, too, that you might nonetheless experience this state of affairs as a sort of refuge, a home. That you might feel you were now walking about the streets ten times more exaltedly for having received permission to do so from a person you were obliged to ask. Requesting permission, to be sure, had something schoolboyish about it, he thought; but even graybeards were often enough required to seek permission, sometimes under humiliating circumstances. And so all of life was marvelous, and you had no choice but to enter into this marvel, even if it often looked to you rather strange.

He walked down the street, falling in love with its sweet tableau of rising stars, of dense trees that stretched in long straight rows, and the peacefully ambulating people, the evening’s splendor, the deep, restless inklings of night. He too was walking peacefully, almost dreamily. In the evening it was no disgrace to put on a dreamy appearance when all were involuntarily compelled to dream in this atmosphere filled with the scent of the early summer twilight. Many women were strolling about with small elegant little bags in their gloved hands, with eyes in which the evening light went on glowing, in narrow dresses cut in the English style or voluminous dragging skirts and robes that filled the streets with their marvelous breadth. Woman, Simon mused, how she glorifies the image of the city street. A woman is made to promenade. You can feel her parading, enjoying her own swaying, beautiful gait. At sunset, women determine the tone of the evening, their figures being well suited to this with these arms full of melancholy and ampleness and these breasts full of breathing mobility. Their hands in gloves look like children wearing masks, hands with which they beckon, and in which they are invariably holding something. Their entire bearing translates the evening world into sonorous music. If you now, as I am just doing, go walking along behind women, you already belong to them in your thoughts, in sentient oscillations, in breaking waves that crash against your heart. They do not beckon, and yet they do beckon you. Though they carry no fans, you can see fans in their hands, flashing and glinting like embossed silver in the fading, blurred evening light. Mature, voluptuous women go particularly well with such an evening, just as gray-haired old women go with winter, and blossoming girls with the newly arisen day, as children go with dawn and young wives with the heat of midday when the sun shows itself to the world at its most glowing.

It was nine o’clock when Simon returned home. He had stayed away too long, and had to listen to reproaches like this one: If this were to happen again, even one single time more, then—. He wasn’t actually listening, he took in only the sound of the reproach, inwardly he was laughing, outwardly he appeared dejected, that is, he put on an imbecilic expression and decided it was superfluous to open his mouth to say anything in reply. He undressed the boy, put him to bed, and lit a nightlight.

“Might I ask for a lamp of my own?” he asked the lady.

“What do you want the lamp for?”

“To write a letter.”

“Come sit here with me, you can write here!” the lady said.

And he was permitted to sit down at her desk. She gave him a sheet of letter paper, an envelope for the address, a stamp, a pen, and allowed him to use her stationery case to write on. She sat close beside him in an armchair, reading a newspaper as he wrote: