The Tanners

The pictures I am most familiar with are those from his time in Herisau, showing Walser on one of his long walks, for there is something in the way that the poet, long since retired from the service of the pen, stands there in the landscape

that reminds me instinctively of my grandfather Josef Egelhofer, with whom as a child I often used to go for walks for hours at a time during those very same years, in a region which is in many ways similar to that of Appenzell. When I look at these pictures of him on his walks, the cloth of Walser's

three-piece suit, the soft collar, the tie-pin, the liver-spots on the back of his hands, his neat pepper-and-salt moustache and the quiet expression in his eyes — each time I think I see my grandfather before me. Yet it was not only in their appearance that my grandfather and Walser resembled each other, but also in their general bearing, something about the way each had of holding his hat in his hand, and the way that, even in the finest weather, they would always carry an umbrella or a raincoat. For a long time I even imagined that my grandfather shared with Walser the habit of leaving the top button of his waistcoat undone.

Whether or not that was actually the case, it is a fact that both died in the same year, 1956–Walser, as is well known, on a walk he took on the 25th of December, and my grandfather on the 14th of April, the night before Walser's last birthday, when it snowed once more even though spring was already underway. Perhaps that is the reason why now, when I think back to my grandfather's death, to which I have never been able to reconcile myself, in my mind's eye I always see him lying on the horn sledge on which Walser's body — after he had been found in the snow and photographed — was taken back to the asylum. What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, and coincidences? Are they rebuses of memory, delusion of the self and of the sense, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationship, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which lies beyond our comprehension? Carl Seelig relates that once, on a walk with Robert Walser, he had mentioned Paul Klee — they were just on the outskirts of the hamlet of Balgach — and scarcely had he uttered the name than he caught sight, as they entered the village, of a sign in an empty shop window bearing the words Paul Klee — Carver of Wooden Candlesticks. Seelig does not attempt to offer an explanation for the strange coincidence. He merely registers it, perhaps because it is precisely the most extraordinary things which are the most easily forgotten. And so I too will just set down without comment what happened to me recently while reading The Robber, the only one of Walser's longer works with which I was at the time still unfamiliar. Quite near the beginning of the book the narrator states that the Robber crossed Lake Constance by moonlight. Exactly thus — by moonlight — is how, in one of my own stories, Aunt Fini imagines the young Ambros crossing the selfsame lake, although, as she makes a point of saying, this can scarcely have been the case in reality. Barely two page further on, the same story relates how, later, Ambros, while working as a room service waiter at the Savoy in London, made the acquaintance of a lady from Shanghai, about whom, however, Aunt Fini knows only that she had a taste for brown kid gloves and that, as Ambros once noted, she marked the beginning of his Trauerlaufbahn (career in mourning). It is a similarly mysterious woman clad all in brown, and referred to by the narrator as the Henri Rousseau woman, whom the Robber meets, two pages on from the moonlit scene on Lake Constance, in a pale November wood — and nor is that all: a little later in the text, I know not from what depths, there appears the word Trauerlaufbahn, a word which I believed, when I wrote it down at the end of the Savoy episode, to be an invention entirely my own. I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, but it is one thing to set a marker in memory of a departed colleague, and quite another when one has the persistent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side.