Wandering with Robert Walser

For the first time, Robert seems to me an aging man who’s fighting the shrinking of his strength. In any case the blazing sun makes today’s walk particularly exhausting. First we were to go swimming in Lake Constance. But in Rorschach, Robert suddenly took the other path, towards forests smelling of mushrooms and fir trees. Then over fields. Uphill, downhill, at one point wading through a deep stream. Robert stops frequently at the edge of the forest with his left hand cupping his ear and his head stuck out, sniffing around. Distant childhood memories of playing “Little Indians” rise before me. Sometimes Robert talks to himself, cursing the inconsiderate motorists, from whom he flees frightened every time we cross a road, and circumnavigating barking farm dogs. But what I notice most of all today is his heavy, halting walk and the frequency with which he stays behind, especially along the steaming asphalt roads on which, with a cigarette butt in his lips and his “high-water pants” he looks like a worn-out farmer. On his head, burnt red by midday, he wears a grey felt hat that he sometimes tosses crabbily to the side.

I’ a gorgeous, bright blue day with golden-green meadows and deer-brown cows, luminous gardens of zinnias, geraniums and gladiolas; also there are already meadow saffrons blooming with spinsterish violet. In the trees dangle cider apples, cherries and pears, in blessed abundance. The wet summer will be followed by a fruitful fall.

With lunch we have less luck. The full breakfast is served by a pretty, red-cheeked girl in a terrible mood. A crucifix hangs above us. From the kitchen come sounds of bickering women and children shrieking and scolding, drowned out by the voice of the pretty waitress. Afterwards it is quieter. Only the pans and dishes clanging, as if continuing the argument. Then we hear a murmured litany from the kitchen. The family, saying their morning prayers.

On the walk, Robert asks me if I’ve ever written dramas. I answer: “A version of Nestroy’s farce, Der Zerrissene, which I did with Alfred Polgar, and which was performed around two dozen times in a playhouse in Zurich, is the only sin I’ve committed in that department. And you? Have you also tried it out?” — “Yes, but nothing really came of it. It takes a hook-nosed character. Think of Schiller”

He talks to me about the poet Max Dauthendey, with whom he spent a nice, full week in Wurzburg. Dauthendey’s father had been the first portrait photographer in Russia. In Munich, Robert had also conversed a few times with Frank Wedekind, a stimulating but disquieting man full of demonic pitfalls. He wouldn’t have liked to see him on stage:

“Writers mostly take themselves way too seriously as actors. Today the art of acting is overall overestimated. What matters is what the writer says and how he says it. This whole dance around Max Reinhardt and his underwriters has something indecent, narcissistic about it. As far as I’m concerned, third-rate staging and acting can amuse just as much. The most sophisticated isn’t always the most agreeable.”

We talk at length about Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Holderlin’s version. Robert is enraptured by this work, and does not consider the sexual relationship between mother and son unequivocally abhorrent. It can also create something beautiful, for example, Antigone. But, naturally, incest must be forbidden for social reasons. That protects the offspring from the drives of procreation and possessiveness of old age.

I tell him about the curious customs that the orthodox Jews have maintained. Upon his request, I describe how on a Shabbat evening I visited the house of prayer of an orthodox sect in Zurich-Aussersihl. My companion was the Yiddish-language poet Lajzar Ajchenrand, who was then living in Zurich, an immigrant. The son of a tailor in a small city, he spent his childhood in the outskirts of the Polish city Lublin, and is now a tailor himself. On one occasion, his father came home completely ruined because antisemites had cut off his beard. For weeks he didn’t dare leave the house, because to do so would have made his shame greater. That Saturday night Ajchenrand and I arrived a little late at the house of prayer, where one must cover his head to enter. The ritual chants and prayers, which had begun at sundown, were nearing the end, but there were still some devotees in their ecstatic trance, doing their monotonous drone with ardent expressions and waving their arms about energetically. In the same place, another small group started talking again about business and family matters. Upon entering the house of prayer, two pale boys had courteously shaken our hands: Shalom! As others entered, we fished around in a tureen in which a couple of chunks of herring were swimming in vinegar. Then we approached a group of men seated at a wooden table, helping themselves to beer and bread. In the adjacent room, the women and girls were also celebrating Shabbat. When the last worshippers were heading home, a thin man of about forty years began to complain. In Yiddish, he said that he was from Kiev and he was an upholsterer. He had fought the English and the Arabs in Israel. Later he had been captured by Jewish organizations to send Jews to Israel from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They had caught him twice, and only his flight had allowed him to escape severe punishment. The papers that he shook were indeed covered with countless visas and notes in foreign languages. The man mediating was a low-standing rabbi, a little man with a white beard and rosey skin, fresh as a suckling pig. He smiled mockingly but not inattentively, at the dramatic gestures and laments of the foreigner, who wanted to go via Switzerland to a kibbutz in Israel. You could see he was used to such scenes. His happy, peaceful eyes produced a sharp contrast with the desperate looks that the immigrant ceaselessly shot the little group that had gathered around him to hear the dispute, half-interested, half-bored or mistrusting that it would all end in a plea for money. The foreigner accused all the Jews in Zurich of having hearts of stone: “No one wants to help! You only help yourselves!” The rabbi consoled him, saying they could meet tomorrow. They would find a way out. In Zurich, no Jew had been murdered yet. Upon saying these words, his pleasingly soft voice grew to a forte because a Yiddish proverb says that you can only make a furious dog shut up by biting a stronger one. And in fact, everyone seemed tired of talking, and headed out into the dark street.

We too, the poet and I. We went to a Jewish restaurant to eat cold carp. It wasn’t too good, it was a character-less place with character-less people. You could smell the meticulous cleanliness of Zurich. I would’ve prefered a little unfalsified Eastern Judaism. But I heard all sorts of interesting things about orthodox custom, before which often the Western European Jews scrunch up their noses in a completely unjustified fashion. They told me that during the Passover Hagaddah, which is when the People of Israel leave Egypt, the head of the family stretches in his seat to evoke the state of liberty in which the Jews find themselves upon liberation after this long enslavement. The family gathers together around the patriarch to hear about the flight. The children, curious, ask questions, a custom linked to the joke about the goy who asked why Jews don’t use their hands to work, who was answered, “Because they still hurt from making all those bricks in Egypt!” Another peculiar custom is that of the hasidim’s courting; on Friday nights, during Shabbat, the husband must copulate with his wife. First he throws his keepah onto his wife’s bed. If she doesn’t throw it back, but rather keeps it in her bed, the man knows that he is welcome. Otherwise, he has to renounce copulation. If this ancient custom is not follwed, the wife may ask the rabbi to decree a divorce.

“Those old legislators were no dummies,” says Robert. “What they were after is often interpreted today way too rationally.”

[trans. Smyth & Rosi]

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Sam :: Dec.10.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »

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