Selected Stories (21 page)

Even if I saw that my employer—I do not know if I should be saying this—sometimes
indulged her habit of pressing together her unspeakably thin lips, still she was for
me the world’s most beautiful woman, while it would never have occurred to me to extol
her as a miracle of rare proportions, to which reality did give me every imaginable
reason.

The mountain ridge upon which one looked across from one of the surely very numerous
windows had a very pleasant face, by which I would like to have intimated that it
was a joy to devote to it a proper measure of the attention it well deserved. Oh,
the freedom, the finesse, of which it was, from afar, seeming to be at once both far
and near, a perfect expression! I thought I could touch the mountain with my hands;
in any event, its stoninesses had the effect of a face that responded, in content
as in form, to each and every demand.

Days and days went by before I could somewhat orient myself as to what sort of business
the delightfully located house, ringed around as it was, so to speak, with little
dancings, might be based upon. What very remarkable purpose did it serve? More than
once, this was my question.

Unbelievably diffuse festivities spreading out for as long as one could wish over
fabulously beautiful gardens and lasting from first light, each time so graceful it
was like a goddess awakening, far into the dusk and longer still, to the edge of night,
were lavished in the countryside in which this estate stood, proud as a temple and
yet modest in every way, on all who wished to have a share in a healthy and thus worthwhile
experience, some of whom had been invited by word of mouth, some in writing.

That the meadows, enlivened here and there most charmingly by trees, were of a green
to the intensity of which even the most intense grumblers, and to the gaiety of which
even the most innate peeves, could raise little if any objection, is almost certain
to be as good as obvious.

The house was thronged with well-disciplined girls, vying with one another as regards
their proper tasks, which is probably the best and most civil thing to be said about
human apparitions clad generally in aprons and equipped with feathered dust absorbers.

From time to time I heard my beautiful and doubtless much beleaguered employer exclaim
in quite a loud voice: “Don’t put me on edge!” To what species of earth dweller did
she say this? Naturally for me it could only remain for a long time an inscrutable
riddle, whose insolubility was like a sumptuous garment, of which I became, so to
speak, enamored.

One thing I may and must mention with due care. In the garden which, bordered to the
south perhaps by a stream that propelled itself with extraordinary gentleness along
its course, and extending northward into a most motley hilliness, there was, like
a bouquet of flowers, a multitude of delicious nooks, which really did appear like
friendly little faces, and where, at one’s pleasure, that is to say, most freely,
one could lark about, take a rest, make a little love—saying which reminds me that
kind fate, of which I have undertaken never to complain, since that would not, in
my opinion, be appropriate, once led me into a theater to share the spectacle of a
play which simultaneously delighted me and left me somewhat dissatisfied. Might I
confess to finding that it is exquisite to be of two minds regarding works of art?
To find fault with something that I welcome on the whole, how nice I find this is!

As regards the blossoming trees in the garden, I allow myself the liberty of using
the epithet “enchanting,” and of the owner, the person, that is to say, who was entitled
to claim, with regard to all the beauty I have described, “You are mine,” it will
be desirable to mention, with a sort of horrified dismay in the voice with which I
say it, the fact that he was a pimp, whom the most substantial connections seemingly
contrived to make undetectable.

How winning his appearance was, and how fetchingly he knew how to move about always
in the most decorous society, standing out and striding around as one of the most
artful seducers of the century, and who, one day, as the air was just beginning to
shade into vesperal violet, was walking in my company on steep paths down the mountain,
accordingly as an individual whose overcoat I obediently carried, and who suddenly,
before my very eyes, in the middle of an old walkway, sank into an abyss that opened
at his feet, sank with all his elegant sinuosities, confusing inexplicabilities, like
a figure on a stage, simply vanishing.

A woman of the middle class who saw the drama, too, exclaimed in a shrill voice: “Serves
him right!” Never shall I forget the curt, bolt-upright way in which this original,
i.e., completely singular member of human society, dropped into the downrightest sawn-offness.

Ready, set—and that was the end of him. Mantled in thought, I returned to the house.
The estimable gentleman’s overcoat was a showpiece of the garment industry.

“She was spellbound by him,” I believed myself entitled to whisper, thinking the light
that had dawned on me not too bright, and first smoking a subtly fragrant cigarette.

It was one of his.

[1927]

Masters and Workers

T
HERE
are not many things that I want to say on the subject of masters and workers. The
problem cuts deeply into conditions at the present time, which appear positively to
seethe with beings who are workers and who sometimes disregard this particular fact.
Don’t we sometimes dream with our eyes open, see blindly, feel without feeling, listen
without hearing, and don’t we often, when walking, stand still? What a succession
of quiet, solid, honorable questions!

Approach, you real barons, that I may discern the lineaments of veritable master types!
Masters, to me, are quite a priceless rarity, and a master is, in my view, a man who
is touched now and again by the curious need to forget that he is a master. Whereas
the workers are distinguished by the way they please to fancy themselves masters,
the masters on occasion look down upon them, envying in an understandable sort of
way the gaieties and frivolities of the workers; for it seems to me an indubitable
fact that the masters are the lonely ones, insofar as they are perpetually in the
right and therefore crave to learn what it tastes and smells like to be in the wrong,
a thing they cannot know. The masters can behave as they please; not the workers,
who consequently never cease longing for command, which they lack, though it could
be said to the contrary that the masters are often fed to the teeth with their directordom,
would rather be serving and obeying than issuing decrees, the activity in which they
see their lives most monotonously absorbed.

“How I’d love one day to get a really good ticking-off!”—it’s a wish that could easily
occur, in my opinion, to this or that master, whereas the workers know nothing of
suchlike wishes, which are never fulfilled. It’s not only wealth that makes a master;
likewise, on the other hand, a worker doesn’t need to be a poor downtrodden wretch.
A master, I’m convinced, is what he is much more because it is he who answers requests,
just as a worker is what he thinks he is because it is from his lips that requests
ring out. The worker waits; the master keeps people waiting. Yet waiting can sometimes
be just as pleasant, or even more so, than keeping waiting, which requires strength.
A person waiting can afford the sweet luxury of being in no way responsible; while
he waits, he can think of his wife, his children, his mistress, and so on; of course,
the person who keeps people waiting can do this too, if it gives him any pleasure.
But it can happen that the nondescript who is waiting absolutely refuses to get off
his mind, and naturally that’s a burden.

“This dependent of mine may now be smiling to himself with extraordinary placidity,”
he thinks; and he’d gladly expire with a magisterial wrath which almost puts him out
of countenance; and that such an incomprehensible kind of wrath should be possible
at all belongs among the perils of the master’s state. A master frequently ought to
be something like a superman, yet still he remains a man, a fellow man, and “Damnation!”
he shouts, fearing for himself, as it were. “Hasn’t he been waiting long enough, this
man, martyrizing me with his patience?” And he presses the bell button; that’s to
say, he gives the button a bash, and sees in an instant the fatuity of his explosion.
He snubs an incoming zealot with a melodramatic brutality that should be seen, and
he would happily devour, tigerlike, the sheep who’s waiting for his masterednesses
and self-composures, and instead of dropping destructively on an enervating nonentity
he jumbles up papers that seem to be giving him a professional look, in a daze, as
if they were poor sinners, and the worker has no idea what’s got into the master who
is offended to be capable of a sentiment, who is insulted to be able now and again
to be unhappy, who is emotionally almost demolished to be regarded as a demolisher,
which he is not, doesn’t want to be, cannot be.

“Let me help you!” They’re most often unspeakably good-humored, the people who write
such turns of speech, and an incredibly bad mood can possess a person who has occasion
to write: “I readily assume that such and such has been promptly dealt with.”

Obeying and commanding commingle; good manners rule masters as well as workers. I
offer this essay workerishly and regard its peruser as a master to whom I wish acquaintance
with the gratification of seeing some chance to prize what I give him.

My theme does meddle somewhat, of course, as if it came too close to life, which may
perhaps have grown too sensitive. What made life so? Is it going to stay as it is,
or change? Why am I asking this? Why do so many questions come to me, softly, one
after the other? I know, for instance, that I can live without questions. I lived
without them for a long time, knew nothing of them. I was open-minded, without their
invading me. Now they look at me as if I had an obligation to them. I too, like many
people, became sensitive. Time is sensitive, like a person begging for help, a person
perplexed. The questions beg and are sensitive and insensitive. The sensitivities
harden. The disobliged person is perhaps the most sensitive. Obligations make me,
for instance, hard. Those who are begged beg the beggars, who don’t understand this.
The questions gaze solicitously in upon them, and are not solicitous, and those who
take care of them care for the increase of the questions which regard their answerers
as being insensitive. The person who’ll not let them disturb his equanimity for an
instant is sensitive in their sight. In that they appear to him answered, he answers
them. Why do many people not trust them this way?

[1928]

Essay on Freedom

P
UTTING
on airs, playing squeamish, acting sensitive, shilly-shallying, finessing, fussing,
and frequent dreaming in the night, all this too appertains to freedom, which one
can never, in my opinion, comprehend, sense, consider, and respect variously enough.
One should always be bowing inwardly to the pure image of freedom; there must be no
pause in one’s respect for freedom, a respect which seems to bear a persistent relation
to a kind of fear. A remarkable thing here is that freedom sets out to be single,
tolerates no other freedoms beside itself. Although this can certainly be said with
greater precision, I quickly take occasion to insist that I am a person who tends
to appear to himself more frail than he perhaps actually is.

For instance, I allow myself to be positively governed by freedom, so to speak oppressed
by it, to be regulated by it in every imaginable way, and with a constancy that amuses
me there dwells within me a most outspoken distrust of it, admirable though it be,
this freedom, which I almost refrain from mentioning at all.—Freedom smiles at me,
and what in turn do I do but say to myself: “Mind you, don’t let yourself be seduced
by this smile into all sorts of unprofitabilities.”

I return now to nocturnal dreams, whose main intent, in my opinion, is to intimidate
us. The dreams make the free person aware of the dubieties, limits, or provisos of
freedom, especially of its being a beautiful delusion which needs to be handled in
the most delicate way. Perhaps for this reason not many people know how to deal with
freedom correctly, because they do not wish to become accustomed to allowing for its
violability. A delusion quickly flits away; we easily contrive to make the fantasm,
as it were, hate us, because we do not understand what it essentially is. Freedom
wants both to be understood and to be almost continuously not understood; it wants
to be seen and then again to be as if it were not there; it is at once real and unreal,
and on this point much more might well be said. Last night I dreamed among other things
of quite remarkable advances being made to me by a person from whom I had never, never
expected anything of the sort. Enchanting it is, the way dreams can mock the sleeper,
the way they flutter the brain with freedoms which, on waking, seem laughable.

With the reader’s leave, or rather that of the readeress, whom the writer always pictures
as a lovely person, well-disposed, I draw attention, with a humility which cannot
of course be free from decorous irony, to the droll possibility that, within freedom,
puzzles are thinkable. One evening I start off homeward and on arriving at the house
where I live I see two people, a man and a woman, looking out of the window of my
room. Both these unknown people have conspicuously large faces and are quite motionless,
a sight possibly apt to make a free person unfree on the spot, in every way. For quite
a long time he stares at the people staring, so to speak nonchalantly, down at him,
he cannot explain to himself their presence, goes upstairs, intending to ask the inexplicable
occupants of his room, as politely as possible, to tell him, if they would be so kind,
why they are there, and I walk in, find everything quiet, no persons are there. For
a time I do not sense my own person either, I am pure independence, which is not in
every way quite what it ought to be, and I ask myself if I am free.