And then he read to them for a full hour. His breath was somewhat strained, but he read with accurate, clear, good enunciation, in a warm voice that demonstrated the reader was moved by what he read. The lady appeared pleased, and the boy was all ears to the very end, whereupon he thanked Simon graciously for the treat. Simon, whose cheeks were glowing bright red with emotion, found it lovely to be thanked. He betook himself, since for the moment he didn’t know what else to do, into the domestics’ quarters, which were lit up red by the evening sun, and began to smoke out the window.
“I disapprove of your smoking here,” said the woman, entering the room.
He, however, went on smoking, and she left again, rather miffed. “Certainly I can understand her disapproval, but must she really approve of everything about me? I’m not about to give up smoking. No, I won’t, devil take it! Even if twenty ladies were to come one after the other and forbid me to smoke.” He was furious, but at once his mood lightened again, and he said to himself: “I ought to have tossed the cigarette away; that was impertinent!”
At just this moment when he was preparing to launch into a monologue, a scream rang out in the corridor, followed immediately by the loud crash of crockery falling to the ground. Simon opened the door and saw the woman gazing with a mournful, silent, crestfallen face at the floor, where lay the shards of a porcelain platter she had no doubt been fond of. She had wished to carry the platter with a piece of cake on it from the icebox to her room and had managed to drop it, she herself couldn’t say how. All it had taken was the most fleeting misperception, or something of the sort, and the misfortune had occurred. When the woman beheld Simon, who was standing behind her, her expression instantly changed from crestfallen to enraged and accusatory, and she said to him in a tone that clearly signified what she was feeling: “Pick this up!” Simon squatted down and gathered up the shards. As he did so, his cheek brushed against the skirt of his employer, and he thought: “Forgive me for having stood by and witnessed your maladroitness. I understand your anger. It is I who bear the guilt for breaking the platter you dropped. I broke it. How this must pain you. Such a beautiful platter. Surely you were fond of it. I feel sorry for you. My cheeks are brushing against your dress. Every shard I gather up says to me: ‘You wretched creature,’ and the hem of your dress says to me: ‘O happy one!’ I’m intentionally taking my time about gathering up the shards. Does it now fill you with fresh rage to be forced to notice? I’m finding it amusing to have been the miscreant. I like you when you’re angry with me. Do you know why your anger so pleases me? Your way of being angry is so tender! You’re only angry because I witnessed your clumsiness. You must have a fair bit of respect for me if it so mortifies you to have made a fool of yourself in my presence. You the grand lady in the presence of ignoble me. With what enchanting rancor you bade me gather up the shards. And I’m not even hurrying as I do so; for I wish you to become utterly furious and incensed over my taking so long with the shards that cannot help telling me the story of your clumsiness, and telling it to you as well. Are you still standing here? The strangest sentiments must now be intermingling within you: shame, pain, fury, vexation, equanimity, irritability, tranquility, surprise and majestic dignity, with so many trivial, unmentionable accompaniments slinking alongside, snatched away again each moment before a person can properly grasp them; that one there was like a pinprick or a whiff of perfume or a pair of twinkling eyes. — Your silk dress is beautiful when one considers that it contains a female body capable of trembling with excitement and weakness. Your hands are beautiful hanging down toward me in all their length. I hope you’ll box my ears with them some day. Now you’re leaving already, without having scolded me. When you walk, your dress giggles and whispers on the floor. A moment ago you forbade me to smoke. But I shall have the impudence to smoke when I walk behind you on the way to market to help with the shopping. There you will see me smoking: gleaming white cigarettes, and I certainly hope you’ll then have the presence of mind to slap the cigarette from my lips. Just now I had to employ all the gestures at my disposal to beg your forgiveness for your having broken a platter. I wish I might have the opportunity to perform some misdeed that would give you cause to send me packing. Oh no, no! What am I thinking. I must be mad. Truly, this shard incident has made me mad. Now it’s no doubt evening out on the street. The lanterns will be burning pale yellow in the waning daylight. I’d like to be out there on the street now. There’s no help for it, I must go downstairs—”
“I’d like to go out for a brief while,” he said, walking into her room. “May I?”
“Yes! But see you don’t stay out too long!”
Simon raced outside and down the stairs, where a veiled female figure stared after him in astonishment, then out of the building to the street, into the air, into mobile damp glittering evening freedom. How strange it was, he thought, this belonging to a household where you lived just like a prisoner. How strange to be a grown man and as a grown man be compelled to seek out a woman, to enter a dark room where you only half see the woman sitting there in the dark, and ask her permission to be allowed to go out. As if you were a piece of furniture in her possession, an object, a purchase, something, a thing, a something or other, and as if this something were nothing or were something only insofar as it was suited to be a thing of this particular sort, something of hers! Strange, too, that you might nonetheless experience this state of affairs as a sort of refuge, a home. That you might feel you were now walking about the streets ten times more exaltedly for having received permission to do so from a person you were obliged to ask. Requesting permission, to be sure, had something schoolboyish about it, he thought; but even graybeards were often enough required to seek permission, sometimes under humiliating circumstances. And so all of life was marvelous, and you had no choice but to enter into this marvel, even if it often looked to you rather strange.
He walked down the street, falling in love with its sweet tableau of rising stars, of dense trees that stretched in long straight rows, and the peacefully ambulating people, the evening’s splendor, the deep, restless inklings of night. He too was walking peacefully, almost dreamily. In the evening it was no disgrace to put on a dreamy appearance when all were involuntarily compelled to dream in this atmosphere filled with the scent of the early summer twilight. Many women were strolling about with small elegant little bags in their gloved hands, with eyes in which the evening light went on glowing, in narrow dresses cut in the English style or voluminous dragging skirts and robes that filled the streets with their marvelous breadth. Woman, Simon mused, how she glorifies the image of the city street. A woman is made to promenade. You can feel her parading, enjoying her own swaying, beautiful gait. At sunset, women determine the tone of the evening, their figures being well suited to this with these arms full of melancholy and ampleness and these breasts full of breathing mobility. Their hands in gloves look like children wearing masks, hands with which they beckon, and in which they are invariably holding something. Their entire bearing translates the evening world into sonorous music. If you now, as I am just doing, go walking along behind women, you already belong to them in your thoughts, in sentient oscillations, in breaking waves that crash against your heart. They do not beckon, and yet they do beckon you. Though they carry no fans, you can see fans in their hands, flashing and glinting like embossed silver in the fading, blurred evening light. Mature, voluptuous women go particularly well with such an evening, just as gray-haired old women go with winter, and blossoming girls with the newly arisen day, as children go with dawn and young wives with the heat of midday when the sun shows itself to the world at its most glowing.