A Village Tale

by
Robert Walser
I
si1 uovN somewhat reluctantly at my
desk to play my piano, that is to say, to
begin to discourse on the potato famine
which long ago struck a village on a hill
that stood about two hundred meters high.
Painfully I wrest from my wits a tale that tells
of nothing of more account than a country girl.
The longer she labored the less she was able to
do for herself.
The stars were twinkling in the sky. The
parson of the village where what is here told
occurred was out of doors elucidating for his
young proteges the planetary system. A writer
was working in a lamplit room at his rapidly
waxing work when, vexed by visions, the girl
rose up from her bed intending to rush into
the pond, which she did with almost laughable
alacrity.
When she was found the next morning in a
condition which made it plain to all that she
had ceased to live, the question rose among
these countryfolk: should she be buried or
not. Not a soul was ready to lay a hand on the
hnished article that lay quite motionless there.
Tribal displeasure asserted itself.
The bailin approached the group, which
intrigued him primarily from the viewpoint of
painting, for in his leisure-hours he would paint,
government burdening him with no excessive
duties. He urged the country people forthwith
to be sensible, but his expostulations had no
success; at no price would they inter the girl, as
if they believed it might harm them to do so.
The sherin strode into his omce with its
three large windows through which streamed
the most dazzling light, and he wrote a report
on the incident which he dispatched to the city
authorities.
But what feelings assail me when I con-
sider the famine whose waves rose higher and
higher! The populace grew unspeakably thin.
How they longed for food!
The very same day a laborer of superlative
emciency took his gun from its nail and shot,
with authentic popular wrath, his rival who
was crossing the street below, yodeling in all
innocence, clear proof of how happy his days
were. In fact the rival was just returning from a
successful encounter with the young lady who
seemed to be a somewhat indecisive person,
for loving both she onered prospects to both of
heaven.
Never in all my years as a writer have I
written a tale in which a person, struck by a
bullet, falls down. This is the hrst time in my
work that a person has croaked.
Understandably they lifted him up and car-
ried him into the next best cottage. Houses,
in the present comfortable sense of the word,
did not at that time exist in the country; there
were only indigent dwellings, whose roofs of
straw reached almost to the ground, as one may
still observe, at ones leisure, in a few surviving
examples.
When the young lady, a country belle with
swaying hips and a taut, tall body, heard what
had occurred on her account, she simply stood
there, bolt upright, pondering deeply perhaps
her peculiar nature.
Her mother besought her to speak, but all
in vain; it seemed she had been changed into a
statue.
A stork few through the azure air high
over the village drama, bearing in its beak a
baby. Wafted by a slight wind the leaves whis-
pered. Like an etching it all looked, anything
but natural.
1
1
Translated by Christopher Middleton.