Young Torless

by Robert Musil

  “Reiting knows only the outward thread, but I follow the second. For the present he has got ahead of me in everybody else's eyes, for my road is slower and more uncertain. But I can overtake him with one stride, just as if he were a worm. You see, they say the universe is governed by mechanical laws that are unshakable. That's all wrong! That's only what the school-books say! The external world is stubborn, I dare say, and to some extent its so-called laws stand firm, but there have been people who succeeded in bending them to their will. It's written about in sacred books that have stood the test of time and of which most people know nothing. From these books I know there have been people who could move stones and air and water merely by means of their will, and whose prayers were stronger than any earthly power. But even these are only the external triumphs of the spirit. For him who entirely succeeds in beholding his own soul, physical life, which is only an accidental thing, dissolves. It is written in the books that such beings enter directly into a higher spiritual realm.”

  Beineberg spoke with entire seriousness and with suppressed excitement. Törless still kept his eyes shut almost all the time; he could feel Beineberg's breath like something touching him and drew it into himself like a suffocating narcotic. And so Beineberg concluded his harangue: “Well, you can see what I am concerned with. What tells me to let Basini off is something of low, external origin. You can obey it if you like. For me it is a prejudice from which I have to cut myself loose as from everything else that would distract me from my inner way.

  “The very fact that I find it hard to torture Basini-I mean, to humiliate him, debase him, and cast him away from me-is good. It requires a sacrifice. It will have a purifying effect. I owe it to myself to learn daily, with him as my material, that merely being human means nothing-it's a mockery, a mere external semblance.”

  Törless did not understand all of it. But once again it seemed to him as though an invisible noose had suddenly been tightened into a palpable and fatal knot. Beineberg's final words went on echoing in his mind: “. . . a mockery, a mere external semblance.” It seemed to apply also to his own relation to Basini. Was it not in such fantasies that the queer fascination lay which Basini held for him? Was it not simply in the fact that he could not enter into Basini's mind and so always experienced him only in vague images? Just now, when he had tried to picture Basini to himself, had there not been behind his face a second one, blurred and shadowy and yet on a tangible likeness, though it was impossible to say what it was a likeness of?

  So it came about that, instead of thinking over Beineberg's very odd intentions, being bemused as he was by these new and unfamiliar impressions, Törless was engaged in trying to become clear about himself. He remembered the afternoon before he had heard about Basini's offence. Come to think of it, these fantasies had been there even then. There had always been something that his thoughts could not get the better of, something that seemed at once so simple and so strange. There had been pictures in his mind that were not really pictures at all. It had been like that passing the cottages on the road back from the station, and also when he was sitting in the cake shop with Beineberg.

  They were likenesses and yet at the same time unlikenesses, unsurmountable. And the toying with it all, this secret, entirely private perspective, had excited him.

  And now a human being took possession of this. Now it was all embodied in a human being; it had become real. Thus all the queerness of it attached itself to that human being. Thus it shifted out of the imagination into life itself and became a menace.

  All this agitation had tired Törless; his thoughts were now but loosely linked together.

  The only thing he could really hold on to was the thought that he must not let go of this Basini, that Basini was destined to play an important part in his life too, one that he already recognised, although as yet unclearly.

  And yet, recalling Beineberg's words, he could not help shaking his head in amazement. Was it the same with him . . . ?

  'It can't be that he is after the same things as I am, and yet it was he who found the right words for it...

  Törless was dreaming rather than thinking. He was no longer capable of distinguishing his own inner problem from Beineberg's flights of fancy. In the end nothing remained but the one feeling:

  a vast noose tightening, tightening round everything. .

  No more was said between them. They put out the light and crept warily back to their dormitory.

  The next days brought no decision. There was a great deal of school work, Reiting was careful not to find himself alone with either of them, and Beineberg too avoided any reopening of their last discussion.

  So it happened, in the days that followed, that the thought of the affair went deeper into Törless, like a river forced underground, and set his imagination moving irrevocably in one particular direction.

  This put a definite end to any intention of getting rid of Basini. Now for the first time Törless felt he was focused exclusively on himself, and was incapable of thinking of anything else. Bozena too had become a matter of indifference to him. What he had felt about her now became a mere fantastic memory; it had been replaced by something really serious.

  Admittedly, this really serious matter seemed no less fantastic.

  * *

  Absorbed in his thoughts, Törless had gone for a walk alone in the park. It was noon, and in the light of the late autumn sun the lawns and paths shone as though with the wan gleam of memory. Since in his restlessness he felt no inclination to go far, he merely walked round the building and then threw himself down on the pale, rustling grass at the foot of an almost windowless sidewall. The sky above him was a vault-of that faded, ailing blue which is peculiar to autumn, and there were little white puffs of cloud scudding across it.

  Lying flat on his back, he blinked, vaguely and dreamily, looking up between the tops of two trees in front of him, now almost leafless.

  He thought about Beineberg. What a strange fellow that was! His way of talking would not have been out of place in some crumbling Indian temple, among uncanny idols, where wizard serpents lay hidden in deep crannies. But what place had such talk in broad daylight, in this school, in modern Europe? And yet those words of his, after trailing on and on, like an endless road of a thousand meanderings, leading no one knew where, had seemed suddenly to arrive at a tangible goal

  And suddenly-and it seemed to him as if it had happened for the very first time-Törless became aware of how incredibly high the sky was.

  It was almost a shock. Straight above him, shining between the clouds, was a small, blue hole, fathomlessly deep.

  He felt it must be possible if only one had a long, long ladder, to climb up and into it. But the' further he penetrated, raising himself on his gaze, the further the blue, shining depth receded. And still it was as though some time it must be reached, as though by sheer gazing one must be able to stop it and hold it. The desire to do this became agonisingly intense.

  It was as if, straining to the utmost, his power of vision were shooting glances like arrows between the clouds; and yet, the further and further it aimed, still they always fell just a little short.

  Now Törless began to think about this, making an effort to as calm and rational as he could. “Of course there is no end,” he said to himself, “it just keeps going on and on for ever, into infinity.' He kept his eyes fixed on the sky, saying this aloud to himself a~ though he were testing the power of a magical formula. But it was no use; the words meant nothing, or rather, they meant something quite different, as if, while dealing with the same subject, they were taking it from another side, one that was strange, unfamiliar and irrelevant.

  “Infinity!” Törless had often heard the word in mathematics lessons. It had never meant anything in particular to him. The term kept on recurring; somebody had once invented it, and since then it had become possible to calculate with it as surely as with anything, real and solid. It was whatever it stood for in the calculation; and beyond that Törless had
never sought to understand it.

  But now it flashed through him, with startling clarity, that there was something terribly disturbing about this word. It seemed to him like a concept that had been tamed and with which he himself had been daily going through his little circus tricks; and now all of a sudden it had broken loose. Something surpassing all comprehension, something wild and annihilating, that once had been put to sleep by some ingenious operation, had suddenly leapt awake and was there again in all its terrifying strength. There, in the sky, it was standing over him, alive and threatening and sneering.

  At last he shut his eyes, the sight of it was such anguish to him.

  * * *

  When a little later he was aroused by a gust of wind rustling through the withered grass, he could scarcely feel his own body:

  there was a pleasant coolness streaming upwards from his feet, enfolding his limbs in gentle numbness. Now a kind of mild exhaustion mingled with his dismay. He still felt the sky as something vastly and silently staring down at him, but now he remembered how often before he had felt the same thing; and in a state between waking and dreaming he went back through all those memories, feeling how they spun their threads round him, wrapping him up in ever further meanings and associations, as in a cocoon.

  There was, first of all, that childhood memory of the trees standing there as solemn and silent as if they were really people under an enchantment. Even then he must have felt this thing that was later to happen to him again and again. There had been something of this even behind those thoughts he had had in Bozena's room, something special, something of a larger premonition, that was more than the thoughts themselves. And that moment in the cake-shop when everything had grown quiet outside the window, in the garden just before the dark veils of sensuality sank about him, yes, that too had been the same. And often, for the fraction of a thought, Beineberg and Reiting would turn into something strange, unfamiliar, unreal. And what about Basini? The thought of what was happening to Basini had rent Törless in two. At one moment this thought was rational and commonplace; at another it was vested in the same silence, flashing with sudden mental images, which was common to all these impressions, which had been steadily seeping through into Törless's conscious mind and which now all at once was asserting its claim to be treated as something real and living: just as the idea of infinity had, a while earlier.

  Törless now felt it enclosing him on all sides. Like some far-off obscure force it had probably been threatening from the very beginning, but he had instinctively shrunk from it, only now and then giving it a shy, fleeting glance. But now a chance happening hid made him alert to it, forced him to attend to it, and, as at a signal, it came rushing at him from all directions: a torrent of immense perplexity that spread out further and further with every instant.

  Törless was assailed by a sort of madness that made him experience things, processes, people, all as something equivocal: as some-thing that by some ingenious operation had been fettered to a harmless explanatory word and which nevertheless was something entirely strange, which might break loose from its fetters at any moment now.

  True, there is a simple, natural explanation for everything, and Törless knew it too; but to his dismayed astonishment it seemed only to tear off an outer husk, without getting anywhere near laying bare what was within-that other, further thing which now, as with a gaze that had grown unnaturally penetrating, he could always see glimmering underneath.

  So he lay there, all wrapped up in memories, out of which strange notions grew like exotic flowers. Those moments that nobody forgets, when there is a failure of that power of association which generally causes our life to be faultlessly reflected in our under-standing, as though life and understanding ran parallel to each other and at equal speed-those moments formed a bewilderingly close-knit mesh around him.

  In his memory that dreadfully still, sad-coloured silence of certain evenings alternated abruptly with the hot, quivering uneasiness of a summer noon-an uneasiness that had once rippled over his soul in blazing heat and as with the light flitting feet of innumerable iridescent lizards.

  Then suddenly he recalled that little prince-his smile, the glance the movement-with which, at the time when they had reached the end of their relationship, he had gently freed himself from all the associations that Törless had involved him in, and moved off into some distance-new and alien and, as it were, concentrated in the life of one ineffable instant-that had all at once opened out before him. Then again there came memories of the forest and from out in the fields. Then there was a silent scene in a darkening room at home, where he had suddenly felt reminded of his lost friend. Words of a poem came into his mind. ...

  And there are yet other things in which this incomparability reigns, somewhere between experience and comprehension. Yet it is always of such a nature that what in one moment we experience indivisibly, and without question, becomes unintelligible and con-fused as soon as we try to link it with chains of thought to the permanent store of what we know. And what looks grand and remote so long as our words are still reaching out towards it from a long way off, later, once it has entered the sphere of our everyday activities, becomes quite simple and loses all its disturbing quality.

  * * *

  And so it was that all these memories all at once had the same mystery in common. As though they all belonged together, they stood before him so distinctly that it seemed he could almost take hold of them.

  In their own time they had been accompanied by an obscure emotion of which he had taken little notice.

  And it was this that he was trying to get at now. It occurred to him that once, when he had been standing with his father, looking at one of those landscapes he had suddenly cried out: 'Oh, how beautiful it is!'-and then been embarrassed when his father was glad. For he might just as easily have said: 'How terribly sad it is.' It was the failure of language that caused him anguish, a half-awareness that the words were merely accidental, mere evasions, and never the feeling itself.

  And today he recalled the scene, recalled the words-very distinctly recalled the sense he had had of falsehood, though without knowing why or in what way. In memory his eye went over it all again. But time and again it returned without bringing relief. A smile of delight in the wealth of the thoughts that came to him, a smile that had gradually become more and more absentminded, now slowly took on a just perceptible twist of pain.

  He felt the urge to search unceasingly for some bridge, some connection, some means of comparison, between himself and the wordless thing confronting his spirit.

  But as often as he had put his mind at rest about any one idea, there would again be that incomprehensible objection: It's all a lie.

  It was as if he must work out an unending sum in long division with a recurring decimal in it, or as if he were skinning his fingers in the frantic struggle to undo an endless knot.

  And finally he gave up. It all closed tightly round him, and the memories grew large, weirdly distorted.

  He had raised his eyes to the sky again-as though he might yet by some fluke snatch its secret from it and, that once gained, guess what perplexed him everywhere. But he grew tired, and a feeling of profound loneliness closed over him. The sky kept silent. And Törless felt that under that immovable, dumb vault he was quite alone, a tiny speck of life under that vast, transparent corpse.

  But it hardly frightened him any more at all. It was like an old, familiar pain that had at last spread even to the last limb.

  It seemed to him as if the light had now become milky and shimmering, dancing before his eyes like a pallid, cold mist.

  Slowly and warily he turned his head and glanced about him to see if everything had really changed. His glance happened to pass over the grey, windowless wall behind him: it seemed to have leaned forward over him and to be looking at him in silence. From time to time there was a faint rustling in it, the sound of uncanny life awakening in the bricks and mortar.

  It was the same faint rustling he had often
listened to in the lair upstairs, when Beineberg and Reiting had raised the curtain on their fantastic world, and he had rejoiced in it as in the queer incidental music to a grotesque play.

  But now the bright day itself seemed to have turned into an unfathomable lair, and the living silence closed in on Törless from all sides.

  He could not turn his head away. Beside him, in a damp, shady corner, the ground was overgrown with colt's-foot, its broad leaves making fantastic lurking-places for slugs and snails.

  Törless could hear the beating of his own heart. Then again there was a faint, whispering rustle that came and faded away. . . . And these sounds were the only things alive in a timeless world of silence.

  The next day Törless saw Beineberg and Reiting together, and he went and joined them.

  “I've talked to Reiting,” Beineberg said, “and it's all fixed. After all, you're not really interested in such things, are you?”

  Törless felt something like anger and jealousy rising up in him at this sudden change; but he did not quite know whether to mention the nocturnal discussion in front of Reiting.

  “Well, you might have called me in on it,” he remarked. “After all, I've as much say in the whole thing as you chaps have.”

  “Oh, we would have, my dear Törless,” Reiting hastened to say obviously wishing to have no unnecessary difficulties this time. “But you happened to have disappeared, and we assumed you'd agree. Well, and what do you think of Basini now?” (There was no word of excuse, just as if his own behaviour were entirely a matter of course.)

  “If you want to know,” Törless replied, in embarrassment, “I think he's a low skunk.”

  “Isn't he just? A thorough skunk.”

  “But you're going in for something a bit off-colour yourself!' And Törless smiled in a rather forced manner, for he was ashamed of not being more indignant with Reiting.