by Robert Musil
They were all women; their hair hung loose down to their shoulders, and their faces were repellent, with fat, blurred, puffy features. One of them came rushing up to the doctor and forced a letter on him. “It’s always the same thing,” Dr. Friedenthal explained to his visitors and read aloud: “‘Adolf, my love! When are you coming to see me? Have you forgotten me?’” The woman, about sixty, stood there with an apathetic face and listened. “You’ll send it out right away, won’t you?” she begged. “Of course!” Dr. Friedenthal promised, then he tore the letter into pieces in front of her eyes and smiled at the nurse. Clarisse instantly challenged him: “How could you do this?” she asked. “These patients must be taken seriously!”
“Come along,” Dr. Friedenthal said. “There’s no point in wasting our time here. If you like, I’ll show you hundreds of such letters later. You must have noticed that the old woman didn’t react at all when I tore it up?”
Clarisse was disconcerted, because what Dr. Friedenthal said was true, but it confused her thoughts. And before she could straighten them out again, they were further disturbed when, on their way out, another old woman, who had been lying in wait for them, lifted up her skirt and exposed to the passing gentlemen her ugly old-woman’s thighs up to her belly, above coarse woolen stockings.
“The old sow,” Stumm von Bordwehr muttered, sufficiently outraged and disgusted to forget politics for a while.
But Clarisse had discovered a resemblance between the thigh and the face. The thigh probably showed the same stigmata of fatty physical degeneration as the face, but this gave Clarisse for the first time an impression of strange correspondences and a world that worked differently from what one could grasp with the usual categories. She also now realized that she had not noticed the transformation of the white angels into these women, and indeed that even while walking through their midst she had not been able to distinguish the patients from the nurses. She turned around and looked back, but because the path had curved behind a building, she could no longer see anything and stumbled after the others like a child that turns its head away. From this point on, her impressions no longer formed the transparent flow of events that one accepts life to be, but became a foaming torrent with only occasional smooth patches that stuck in the memory.
“Another quiet ward, this time for men,” Dr. Friedenthal announced, gathering his flock at the entrance to a building, and when they paused at the first bed he presented its occupant to them in a considerately lowered voice as a case of “depressive dementia paralytica.”
“An old syphilitic. Delusions of sin and nihilistic obsessions,” Siegmund whispered, translating the terms for his sister. Clarisse found herself face-to-face with an old gentleman who, to all appearances, had once belonged to the upper reaches of society. He sat upright in bed, was perhaps in his late fifties, and had a very white skin. His well-cared-for and highly intelligent face was framed in thick white hair and looked as improbably distinguished as the faces one finds described only in the cheapest novels.
“Couldn’t one do a portrait of him?” Stumm von Bordwehr asked. “The very model of intellectual beauty! I’d love to give the portrait to your cousin!” he said to Ulrich.
Dr. Friedenthal gave a sad smile and commented: “The noble expression is caused by a slackening of tension in the facial muscles.” He demonstrated with a quick movement the unresponsive fixity of the man’s pupils, then led them onward. There was not enough time for all the available material. The old gentleman, who had nodded mournfully to everything said at his bedside, was still muttering in a low, troubled voice when the five of them stopped again, several beds farther on, to consider the next case Dr. Friedenthal had chosen for them.
This time it was someone who was himself engaged in art, a cheerful, fat painter whose bed stood close to a sunny window. He had paper and many pencils on his blanket, and busied himself with them all day long. Clarisse was immediately struck by the happy restlessness of his movements. “That’s the way Walter should be painting!” she thought. Friedenthal, seeing her interest, quickly snatched a sheet of paper from the fat man and handed it to Clarisse; the painter snickered and behaved like a serving girl who’d just been pinched. But Clarisse was amazed to see a sketch for a large composition, drawn with sure, accomplished strokes, entirely sensible to the point of banality, with many figures woven together in accurate perspective and a large hall, everything executed in meticulous detail, so that the whole effect was of something so salutary and professorial that it could have come from the National Academy. “What amazing craftsmanship !” she cried impulsively.
Dr. Friedenthal responded with a flattered smile.
The artist gleefully made a rude noise at him.
“You see, that gentleman likes it! Show him some more, go on! Amazing how good it is, he said! Go on, show him! I know you’re only laughing at me, but he likes it!” He spoke good-humoredly, holding out the rest of his drawings to the doctor, with whom he seemed to be on easy terms although the doctor didn’t appreciate his work.
“We don’t have time for you today,” Dr. Friedenthal told him and, turning to Clarisse, summed up the case by saying: “He’s not schizophrenic; sorry he’s the only one we have here at the moment. Schizophrenics are often fine artists, quite modern.”
“And insane?” Clarisse said dubiously.
“Why not?” Dr. Friedenthal answered sadly.
Clarisse bit her lip.
Meanwhile Stumm and Ulrich were already on the threshold to the next ward, and the General was saying: “Looking at this, I’m really sorry I called my orderly an idiot this morning. I’ll never do it again!” For the ward they were facing was a room with extreme cases of idiocy.
Clarisse had not yet seen this and was thinking: “So even academic art, so respectably and widely recognized, has a sister in Bedlam—a sister denied, deprived, and yet so much a twin one can barely tell the difference!” This almost impressed her more than Friedenthal’s remark that another time he might be able to show her expressionist artists. She made up her mind to take him up on it. Her head was down, and she was still biting her lip. There was something wrong with all this. It seemed to her clearly wrong to lock up such gifted people; the doctors might know about diseases, she thought, but probably did not understand art and all it stood for. Something would have to be done, she felt. But it was not clear to her what. Yet she did not lose heart, for the fat painter had immediately called her “that gentleman”—it seemed to her a good omen.
Friedenthal scrutinized her with curiosity.
When she felt his gaze she looked up with her thin-lipped smile and moved toward him, but before she could say anything an appalling sight made her mind a blank. In this new ward a series of horrible apparitions crouched and sat in their beds, everything about their bodies crooked, unclean, twisted, or paralyzed. Decayed teeth. Waggling heads. Heads too big, too small, totally misshapen. Slack, drooping jaws from which saliva was dribbling, or brutish grinding motions of the mouth, without food or words. Yard-wide leaden barriers seemed to lie between these souls and the world, and after the low chuckling and buzzing in the other room, the silence here, broken only by obscure grunting and muttering sounds, was oppressive. Such wards for severe mental deficiency are among the most horrifying sights to be found in the hideousness of a mental institution, and Clarisse felt herself plunged headlong into a ghastly darkness that blotted out all distinctions.
But their guide, Friedenthal, could see even in the dark, and pointing to various beds, he explained: “That’s idiocy over there, and over here you have cretinism.”
Stumm von Bordwehr pricked up his ears. “A cretin is not the same as an idiot?” he asked.
“No,” the doctor said, “there’s a medical distinction.”
“Interesting,” Stumm said. “In ordinary life one would never think of such a thing.”
Clarisse moved from bed to bed. Her eyes bored into the patients, as she tried with all her might to understand, without succeedi
ng in the least in gleaning anything from these faces that took no cognizance of her. All thought in them was extinguished. Dr. Friedenthal followed her softly and explained: “congenital amaurotic idiocy”; “tubercular hypertrophic sclerosis”; “idiotia thymica …”
The General, who meanwhile felt that he had seen enough of these “morons” and assumed that Ulrich felt the same way, glanced at his watch and said: “Now, where were we? We mustn’t waste time!” And rather unexpectedly he resumed: “So, if you’ll bear in mind: the War Ministry finds itself flanked by the pacifists on one side and the nationalists on the other… .”
Ulrich, not so quick to tear his mind away from his surroundings, gave him a blank stare.
“This is no joke, my friend!” Stumm explained. “I’m talking politics! Something’s got to be done. We’ve come to a stop once before already. If we don’t do something soon, the Emperor’s birthday will be upon us before we know it, and we’ll look like fools. But what is to be done? It’s a logical question, isn’t it? And summing up rather bluntly what I told you, we’re being pushed by one crowd to help them love mankind, and by the other to let them bully the rest of the world so that the nobler blood will prevail, or however you want to call it. There’s something to be said for both sides. Which is why, in a word, you should somehow bring them together so there’ll be no damage!”
“Me?” Ulrich protested at his friend’s bombshell, and would have burst out laughing in other circumstances.
“Certainly you—who else?” the General replied decisively. “I’ll do all I can to help, but you’re the campaign’s secretary and Leinsdorf’s right hand!”
“I can get you admitted here!” Ulrich announced firmly.
“Fine!” The General knew from the art of war that it was best to avoid unexpected resistance in the most unruffled manner possible. “If you get me in here I might meet someone who has found the Greatest Idea in the world. Outside they seem to have lost their taste for great ideas anyway.” He glanced at his watch again. “I hear they’ve got some people here who are the Pope, or the universe. We haven’t met a single one, and they’re the ones I was most looking forward to getting acquainted with. Your little friend’s terribly conscientious,” he complained.
Dr. Friedenthal gently eased Clarisse away from the defectives.
Hell is not interesting, it is terrifying. If it has not been humanized—as by Dante, who populated it with writers and other prominent figures, thereby distracting attention from the technicalities of punishment—but an attempt has been made to represent it in some original fashion, even the most fertile minds never get beyond childish tortures and unimaginative distortions of physical realities. But it is precisely the bare idea of an unimaginable and therefore inescapable everlasting punishment and agony, the premise of an inexorable change for the worse, impervious to any attempt to reverse it, that has the fascination of an abyss. Insane asylums are also like that. They are poorhouses. They have something of hell’s lack of imagination. But many people who have no idea of the causes of mental illness are afraid of nothing so much, next to losing their money, as that they might one day lose their minds; an amazing number of people are plagued by the notion that they could suddenly lose themselves. It is apparently an overestimation of their self-worth that leads to the overestimation of the horror with which the sane imagine mental institutions to be imbued. Even Clarisse suffered a faint disappointment, which stemmed from some vague expectation implanted by her upbringing. It was quite the contrary with Dr. Friedenthal. He was used to these rounds. Order as in a military barracks or another mass institution, alleviation of conspicuous pains or complaints, prevention of avoidable deterioration, a slight improvement or a cure: these were the elements of his daily activity. Observing a good deal, knowing a good deal, without having a sufficient explanation for the overall problems, was his intellectual portion. These rounds through the wards, prescribing a few sedatives besides the usual medications for coughs, colds, constipation, and bedsores, were his daily work of healing. He felt the ghostly horror of the world he lived in only when the contrast was awakened through contact with the normal world, which did not happen every day, but visits are such occasions, and that was why what Clarisse got to see had been prepared not without a certain sense of theatrical production, so that no sooner had he aroused her from her absorption with one phenomenon that he immediately went on to something new and even more dramatic.
They had hardly left this ward when they were joined by several large men in crisp white uniforms, with hulking shoulders and jovial corporals’ faces. It happened so silently that it had the effect of a drum roll.
“Now we’re coming to a disturbed ward,” Dr. Friedenthal announced, and they approached a screaming and squawking that seemed to issue from an immense birdcage. They stood in front of a door that had no handle, which had to be opened with a special key by one of the attendants. Clarisse started to enter first, as she had done up until now, but Dr. Friedenthal pulled her back roughly.
“Wait!” he said with emphasis, wearily, without apology.
The attendant who had opened the door had opened it only a crack, while covering the open space with his powerful body; after first listening and then peering inside, he hastily slipped in, followed by a second attendant, who took up a position at the other side of the entrance. Clarisse’s heart started to pound.
“Advance guard, rear guard, cover flank!” the General said appreciatively. And thus covered, they walked in and were escorted from bed to bed by the two attending giants. What were sitting in the beds thrashed about, agitated and screaming, with arms and eyes, as if each of them was shouting into some private space that was for himself alone, and yet they all seemed to be caught up in a raging conversation, like alien birds locked in the same cage, each speaking the dialect of its own island. Some of them sat without restraints, while others were tied down to their beds with straps that allowed only limited movement of the hands.
“To keep them from attempting suicide,” the doctor explained, and listed the diseases: paralysis, paranoia, manic depression, were the species to which these strange birds belonged.
Clarisse again felt intimidated at first by her confused impressions and could not get her bearings. And so it came as a friendly sign when she saw someone waving to her excitedly from a distance, calling out something to her while she was still many beds away. He was moving back and forth in his bed as if desperately trying to free himself in order to dash over to her, outshouting the chorus with his complaints and fits of rage, and succeeding in concentrating Clarisse’s attention on himself. The closer she came to him, the more she was troubled by her sense of his addressing himself only to her, while she was completely unable to understand a word of what he was trying to say. When they finally reached his bed, the senior attendant told the doctor something so softly that Clarisse could not hear, and Friedenthal, looking very grave, gave some instructions. But then he said something in a light vein to the patient, who was slow to react but then suddenly asked: “Who’s that man?” with a gesture indicating Clarisse.
Friedenthal nodded toward Siegmund and answered that it was a doctor from Stockholm.
“No, that one!” The patient insisted on Clarisse. Friedenthal smiled and said she was a woman doctor from Vienna.
“No. That’s a man,” the patient contradicted him, and fell silent. Clarisse felt her heart thudding. Here was another who took her for a man!
Then the patient intoned slowly: “It is the seventh son of our Emperor.”
Stumm von Bordwehr nudged Ulrich.
“That is not so,” Friedenthal told him, and continued the game by turning to Clarisse, saying: “Do tell him yourself that he’s mistaken.”
“It’s not true, my friend,” Clarisse said in a low voice to the patient, so moved she could barely speak.
“You are the seventh son,” the patient replied stubbornly.
“No, no,” Clarisse assured him, smiling at him in her excitement as i
f she were playing a love scene, her lips stiff with stage fright.
“Yes you are!” the patient repeated, and looked at her in a way she could not find words for. She could not think of another thing to say, and just kept gazing helplessly with a fixed smile into the eyes of the lunatic who took her for a prince. Something remarkable was happening in her mind: the possibility was forming that he might be right. The force of his repeated assertion dissolved some resistance in her; in some way she lost control over her thoughts, new patterns took shape, their outlines looming from mist: he was not the first who wanted to know who she was and to take her for a “gentleman.” But while she was still gazing at his face, caught up in this strange bond, taking no account of his age or of any other vestiges of a normal life still left in his countenance, something quite incomprehensible was beginning to happen in that face and in the whole person. It looked as though her gaze was too heavy for the eyes on which it rested; they began to slide away and fall. His lips, too, began to quiver, and like heavy drops merging more and more quickly, audible obscenities mixed themselves with a rush of jabbering. Clarisse was as stunned by this slithering transformation as if something were slipping away from her; she impulsively reached out to the miserable creature with both arms, and before anyone could interfere, the patient leapt to meet her: he cast off his bedclothes, knelt at the foot of the bed, and began to masturbate like a caged monkey.
“Don’t be such a pig!” the doctor said quickly and sternly, while the attendants instantly grabbed the man and his bedclothes and in a flash reduced both to a lifeless bundle on the bed. Clarisse had turned dark red. She felt as dizzy as when the floor of an elevator all at once seems to drop away from under one’s feet. Suddenly it seemed to her that all the patients they had already passed were shouting at her back and the others, whom they had not yet seen, were shouting at her from in front. And as chance would have it, or the infectious power of excitement, a friendly old man in the next bed, who had been making good-natured little jokes while the visitors stood nearby, leapt up the instant Clarisse hurried past him, and began raving at them in foul language that formed a disgusting foam on his lips. On him, too, the attendants’ fists descended like a heavy press, crushing all resistance.