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27 December 1953
Morning snack in the cafeteria of the Rorschach train station. The mumbling of a drunk grinds on like a mill wheel. Robert seems glued to his chair.
I suggested walking along the lake to Arbon. He preferred the opposite direction, aiming for St. Gallen with a turn of 180 degrees. The result: chatting pleasantly, in a quarter of an hour we've climbed to the area of Fünfländerblickes. At our feet blooms the valley. But the further we go, the deeper the snow, and Robert, despite the biting wind, is without an overcoat or long underwear. I am in light street shoes. The Bodensee area gradually disappears. After all this time in the woods without meeting a single person we decide we're lost. Eventually we're on a ridge on which, gasping, we toil onwards. Half an hour later I knock on the door of a farmhouse to task directions. In the living room, a large family, and behind the kitchen table stands a Christmas tree the family had decorated. The young farmer told us we were near Eggersriet. It was about noon, and we headed on a steep downhill to St. Gallen.
Robert spoke only in single syllables, and was obviously very tired. When we reached the edge of St. Gallen I told him that Heinrich Simon, the former owner of the Frankfurter Zeitung, had been murdered in New York by a homosexual. He was interested because Simon had bought a fantasy painting that his brother Karl had done, using a photo of Robert as a model, sitting dreamily on a boulder by a birch at the edge of a forest. Did I remember that? It had appeared in the magazine Der Lesezirkel. “Yes I do, but Fridolina, your brother Oscar's wife, told me your sister Lisa had said that you'd destroyed it.” “Perhaps” said Robert, and wrapped himself again in silence.
Then we took the tram to the St. Gallen train station where in the cafeteria our hands were so stiff with cold that we could scarcely hold our soup spoons. We lingered over our food--the daily special--and when Robert grew a little more comfortable I dared to ask him why his novel Theodor, from which he gave a reading in March 1922, was never published. To my surprise he answered happily: “After finishing the manuscript I sent it to Verlag Grethlein, but they chose not to publish it. What became of it afterward, I don't know.”
I remind him that Max Rychner published two episodes from Theodor in 1923, in his journal Wissen und Leben. One of them was the part in which Theodor describes in the first person how he looked for a job in an art gallery in Berlin. Robert waves it off : “Assez de ces temps passés.”