The Tanners

“The poor thing,” Klara said, “I do pity him. I wish he were here, and if he were ill, how gladly I would care for him. An unhappy artist is like an unhappy king. What pain he must feel deep in his soul to know he’s so lacking in talent. I can imagine that so well. The poor fellow. I would like to be his friend, since you have no time to take pity on him. I could make time for him. What unfortunate people there are in this world!”

Kaspar said in a low voice, seizing her hand for the first time: “How kind you are!”—

The forest was inky black, everything was dark, the house was a dark patch in the darkness. Simon and Agappaia were waiting for the two others at the door.

“They aren’t coming. Come, let’s go inside.”

“I’m going to go to bed this minute,” Simon said.

When he was already lying in bed, about to shut his eyes, he suddenly heard a shot ring out. In sheer terror, he leapt out of bed, tore open the window and looked outside. “What was that?” he shouted down into the darkness. But only his own voice echoed back at him from the forest. The forest was eerily cloaked in a deathly silence. Suddenly he heard a man’s voice speaking just below him: “It’s nothing, go to sleep. Forgive me for alarming you. I often go shooting in the woods at night, it gives me pleasure to hear the shots resound and echo. Some people whistle a melody to amuse themselves when everything all around them is so quiet. Me, I shoot. Take care not to catch cold there at the open window — the nights are still cold. In a minute you’ll hear me shooting again, and this time you won’t be frightened. I’m still waiting for my wife to return. Good night. Sleep well.” Simon lay back down. Nonetheless he couldn’t fall asleep. The man’s voice had sounded so peculiar to him, so calm, that’s precisely what was so odd. So icy — actually the voice had an ordinary friendliness about it, and that’s just what was so icy. Surely something lay behind it. But perhaps it was just that he didn’t yet know this man’s habits. “Lord knows,” he thought to himself, “there are plenty of odd fish swimming about. Life is so tedious, and this encourages the development of oddities. You can turn odd before you know it. And so Agappaia too might not see anything queer about this queer habit of his. He can just call it sporting and so lay to rest any other thoughts that might suggest themselves. All the same, I’m going to try to get some sleep now.” —But other thoughts now came to him, all having to do with nighttime: He thought of small children afraid to enter dark rooms and who cannot fall asleep in the dark. Parents instill in their children the most dreadful fear of the dark and then, as punishment, lock recalcitrant ones up in silent dark rooms. Then the child clutches at the darkness in this deep dense dark and finds only darkness and nothing more. The child’s fear and this darkness are soon the best of friends, but the child is not managing to befriend its fear. The child has such talents for feeling fear that the fear just grows and grows. It soon overpowers the little child, being such a large, dense, heavily-breathing entity; the child might wish for example to cry out, but doesn’t dare. This not daring increases the fear even further; for there must be something utterly terrifying there if the child is too frightened even to utter cries of fear. The child believes someone is listening in the dark. How melancholy it is, thinking of such an unfortunate child. How the poor little ears strain to hear something: even the thousandth part of some faint little sound. Not to hear anything at all is more frightening by far than hearing something, when a person stands in the dark listening. Even this alone: The child cannot help listening and almost hearing its own listening — sometimes it merely listens and sometimes it hearkens, for the child is capable of such distinctions in its nameless fear. When we speak of listening, this presupposes something to be heard, but hearkening is often done in vain, it is a waiting to hear, a hoping. Hearkening is the activity performed by a child locked away in a dark room as punishment for disobedience. And now let us imagine someone approaching — approaching softly, so dreadfully softly. No, it’s better not to imagine this. Better not imagine it at all. A person who imagines such a thing will die of terror along with the child. Children have such sensitive souls, how could one be thinking up terrors for such souls! Parents, parents, never shut your recalcitrant children in dark rooms if you have first taught them to fear the dark, which is otherwise so dear, so sweet—