The Tanners

“I’m a nurse, but at present I’m nothing but a loafer. I come from Naples, where I cared for the sick at the International Hospital. It’s quite possible that ten days from now I’ll be somewhere in the American interior, or else in Russia; they send us wherever nurses are needed, even to the South Sea Islands. It’s one way to see the world, quite true, but your own homeland becomes so unfamiliar, I can’t express this clearly enough. You for example no doubt have always lived in your own native land, it constantly surrounds you, you feel encircled by familiar sights, you do your work here, you’re happy here and surely experience adversity here as well, never mind, but at least you’re allowed to feel connected to a soil, a land, a sky, if I may say it thus. It’s lovely to be bound to something. You feel at ease, you have the right to feel at ease, and every reason to expect the understanding and love of your fellow men. But me? Nothing of the sort! You see, I’ve grown too wicked for my own narrowly circumscribed homeland — perhaps also too good, too all-comprehending. I can no longer share the sentiments of my countrymen. I now understand their preferences just as little as I do their anger and dislikes. In any case, I’m a stranger there, and when you’ve become a stranger, people do hold it against you. And certainly they’re right — for it was wrong of me to become estranged. Even if my views about so many things are now more worldly and intelligent, what use is this if they serve only to offend my countrymen’s sensibilities? They must be wicked views if they cause offense. You have to hold a country’s customs and values sacred if you don’t wish to become a stranger there one day, as has happened now with me. In any case, I’ll soon be traveling far from home again, to wherever my patients are—”

He smiled and asked Simon: “What do you do?”

“I’m an outlandish figure in my own homeland,” Simon replied. “Actually I’m a copy clerk, and you can no doubt imagine how great a role I therefore play in my fatherland, where the copyist is pretty much at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. Other young people intent on pursuing commercial trades go off traveling to distant lands for educational purposes and then return home with a sack full of knowledge to find that honorable positions have been reserved for them. I however — take my word for it — shall always remain in this country. It’s as if I were afraid that in other countries no sun would shine, or an inferior one. I’m bound fast to this place and am always seeing new things amid the old, perhaps this is why I’m so unwilling to leave. I’m going to the dogs here, I can see that perfectly well, and nonetheless I must, or so it seems to me, go on breathing beneath the sky of my homeland if I wish to live at all. Naturally I don’t enjoy much respect, I’m generally seen as a wastrel, but this doesn’t matter at all to me, not one bit. Here I am and shall no doubt remain. It’s so sweet to remain. Does nature go abroad? Do trees wander off to procure for themselves greener leaves in other places so they can come home and flaunt their new splendor? Rivers and clouds are always leaving, but this is a different, more profound sort of leave-taking, without any returning. It’s not really a departure anyhow, just a flying, flowing way of being at rest. Such a depature — how beautiful it is, if I may say so! I’m always looking at the trees and telling myself: They aren’t leaving either, so why shouldn’t I be permitted to remain? When I find myself in a city in winter, I feel tempted to see it in spring: Seeing a tree in winter, I wish to see it resplendent in the springtime, sending out its first enchanting leaves. After spring, the summer always comes, inexplicably beautiful and quiet, like a glowing huge green wave arising from the unfathomable depths of the world, and of course I wish to enjoy the summer here, do you understand me, sir, here, where I saw the spring blossoming. Take, for example, this little strip of meadow or lawn. How sweet it looks in early spring when the snow upon it has just melted beneath the sun’s rays. It’s this tree and this lawn and this world that matter: In other places, I don’t think I’d even notice summer. What it comes down to is that I have a truly devilish desire to remain right where I am, along with all sorts of not terribly amusing reasons that preclude my undertaking a journey abroad. For example: Would I have any money for travel? As you surely know, a person needs money to travel by rail or boat. I have money enough for perhaps twenty more meals; but I don’t have the money to travel. And I’m glad not to have any. Let other folks go traveling and come home more clever. I’m clever enough to be able to die here with dignity one day, in the land of my birth.”

After a brief moment of silence, during which the nurse gazed at him intently, he went on: