by Robert Musil
Whereupon her thoughts crossed over in a flash into complete consciousness. She looked up to find her fellow passengers joking around cheerfully and harmlessly, like when you see a light and decipher the shapes of small figures at the end of a dark tunnel. And all of a sudden she was struck by a curious, detached, sober awareness of reality. She was astonished to notice that she nevertheless felt herself being touched, felt it, in fact, quite strongly. The realization well nigh frightened her in that it struck her as a pale, almost overly bright burst of consciousness, with no recourse to the mere vagary of dreams, a consciousness unencumbered by a single thought, and yet in which people betimes grew jagged-edged and puffed-up like hills in the landscape, as if suddenly gliding through an invisible fog in which the real swelled into a massive shadowy second silhouette of itself. Then she felt humbled and apprehensive in their presence, never completely forfeiting the impression that this weakness might well be a special asset; it was as if the sentient borders of her being had spread invisibly and appreciably since last she looked, and the quiet collision with it all made her tremble. And for the first time the day’s odd doings scared her, the lonely trail of time slipping little by little, as if through an underground tunnel, leading into the wild whisper of an awakening, and then finally dropping her in a faraway place only to suddenly rear upright, bearing the implacable claws of the actual, forcing her to face a vast, strange, unwanted reality.
She snuck a furtive peak at the stranger. At that instant he struck a match; his beard, an eye lit up in the glow; this perfectly anodyne act suddenly struck her as so strange, she felt the steadfastness of the string of occurrences, how naturally one followed another, foolishly and tranquilly, and yet weighing upon her with a simple, immeasurable, firmly established force. She pondered that he must surely be a perfectly ordinary person. And then, little by little, she was overcome by a quiet, scattered, incomprehensible sense of herself; dissolved and dilacerated like a pale white, fluffy foam, she felt as if she were floating there before him in the dark. It now gave her a wondrous thrill to reply in a friendly manner; all the while observing her own actions with a quiet resolve, powerless to stop herself, divided in her sentiments between satisfaction and suffering, as if cowering in the suddenly overpowering grip of a profound exhaustion.
But then it stuck her all at once that this is precisely how it sometimes started in the past. And the very thought of such a thing happening again stirred in her a whirring, impulsive, prurient fright as of a still nameless sin; she suddenly wondered if he had noticed her glancing at him, and the thought infused her body with a quiet, almost docile rush of sensuality that felt like a dark lair in the secret recesses of her soul. But the stranger just sat there, looming large and quiet in the dark carriage, flashing a smile from time to time, or so it seemed to her.
And so they rolled on in close proximity into the ever-darkening dusk. And little by little, that pressing disquiet once again took hold in her thoughts. She tried to tell herself that it was all on account of the beguilingly disorienting inner silence of this sudden solitary journey in the company of total strangers, and then at times she thought it was the wind swaddling her in its stiff, icy grip that made her go numb and limp, but then at other times she had the strangest feeling, as if her husband were close at hand, and this weakening of will and burst of voluptuousness were a blessed boon of love. And once – when she yet again happened to glance over at the stranger, and felt a hard and unforgiving burst of this shadowy surrender of will – her past was suddenly illumined by a glow, revealing an untold, oddly ordered distance; it was a curious inkling of the future, as if reenacting long gone episodes of the past. But a moment later it was nothing more than a fast fading streak of insight in the dark, a faint trace of which still lingered in her heart of hearts, bewildering and strange, as if burdened with debris and silently swinging, it somehow encompassed the heretofore unseen landscape of her love; hesitant and all wrapped up in herself, infused with a flurry of as yet unfathomable resolves rooted in that other realm, she no longer knew quite how to react. And it made her think of days strangely cut off from the rest that stretched before her like a row of secluded rooms, one leading into the other, interspersed with the steady hoof clops of the horses carrying her – helplessly pressed by present circumstances in the paltry proximity of strangers in that sleigh – ever closer to a future she feared, trying to latch onto the forced laughter of an idle conversation, all the while feeling knotted up inside and powerless to elude the inevitable, as if draped and muffled in a stifling scarf.
That night she was awakened; as if by the sound of the doorbell. She suddenly sensed that it was snowing. She looked out the window; the snow stood soft and heavy like a wall suspended in mid-air. She slunk forward on tiptoes. Everything happened in rapid succession, it gave her a dark feeling inside to graze the ground with bare feet like an animal. Then she gaped up close and was stunned by the thick crystalline latticework of snowflakes. All this she did as one does shooting up out of sleep, in the cramped confines of a kind of consciousness that suddenly crops up like a little desert island. It felt as if she stood there very far removed from herself. And all at once what the man said and the way he said it leapt to mind: We will be snowed in here.
Then she tried to clear her mind and turned around. The room lay close behind her and there was something unsettling about this closeness, something like a cage or like being hit. Claudine lit a candle and held it over the things around her: wardrobe, chest of drawers, bed; slowly sleep fell off these dull objects that still loomed before her as if they hadn’t yet found their way back to themselves, as if they were a touch too much or too little, a surfeit of nothingness, a raw, rippling nothingness; they stood there blind and shrunken in the stark dawning of the flickering light; the table and walls were covered with a thick carpet of dust, practically beckoning her to walk barefoot over them. The room opened onto a narrow, whitewashed, wood-floored corridor; she knew that where the stairs emerged onto the landing a dimly lit lamp dangled from a wire ring, casting five bright, swaying circles on the ceiling, the light of which ran like the traces of grimy hands down the chalky white walls. These five bright, senseless circles swung like alarm signals in a curiously agitated emptiness…Strangers slept in surrounding rooms. Claudine felt a sudden illusory burst of heat. Standing there, abruptly awakened in the night, she could have emitted a quiet cry, like the fearful tremolo of a cat in heat, while the last shadowy traces of her strangely perceived actions slipped silently back into the smooth contour of her inner self. And suddenly she thought: what if he came and just tried to do what he clearly desired…The thought of it made her shrink back in terror. It rolled right over her like a burning ball; for minutes on end she felt nothing but that strange fright followed by the whiplash sting of the silent space closing her in.
After that she attempted to introduce herself to the people in the inn. But it didn’t work; she felt hemmed in by the distended, animal-like stride of her thoughts. Only every now and then did she catch a glimpse of him, as he really was, his beard, his one glowing eye in the dark…Which made her recoil in disgust. She felt that she could never again give herself to a stranger. And in the very grip of it, along with this revulsion at the thought of intimacy with anyone else, while intimately bound to her beloved, she simultaneously felt – as if at a second, deeper level – a submission, a dizziness, perhaps an inkling of human fallibility, perhaps a fear of herself, perhaps simply an unfathomable, senseless, enticing hankering after another, and fear ran through her veins like the torrid cold stirred up by a ruinous desire.
Serenely, meanwhile, a clock hanging somewhere started talking to itself, footsteps sounded and faded under her window, quiet voices…It was cool in the room, the warmth of sleep suffused from her skin; soft and defenseless, as if enveloped by a cloud of weakness, she swung herself back and forth in the darkness…She shrank back before the lifeless objects staring at her now, so certain and steadfast and long since r
educed back to niggling inconsequence, while she stood there in a frenzy waiting for a stranger. And yet she dimly discerned that it was not the lure of the stranger per se, but rather a fine-toothed, wild, self-abandoning bliss at the fact of his being there and waiting, awakened like a wound of knowing among dumb inanimate things. And while she felt her heart beating, as if a wild beast had somehow managed to creep inside her breast, silently staggering around the room, her body lifted and closed in upon itself like a big, bowing flower, shuddering suddenly at the thrill of a secret intimacy stretched taut over invisible distances, and she heard the faint and distant beat of the heart of her beloved ambling, restless, unsteady, homeless, in the muffled room, like a tinkle of flickering starlight blown hence from some distant frontier, engulfed by the uncanny lonesome sound of this consonance seeking her out, far from the landscape of her soul.
She sensed that something was about to run its course here, and had no idea how long she had been standing around waiting; for minutes, hours…time floated still, fed by invisible founts, like a lake without shores, without mouth or outlet. Only once, at some point did a dark inkling, a thought, a fancy emanate from that boundless horizon, and as soon as it crossed her mind she recognized in it the memory of long gone dreams from her earlier life – dreams of feeling trapped by secret enemies who forced her to perform humiliating acts – and no sooner recalled than already fading, they dissolved into nothing, and out of the distant blur some residue of this dark reverie arose in her one last time with a ghostly clarity, something like an armature, a knotted rigging of emotion spanned one mesh upon another, and she remembered how she could never fight it off, crying out, how she nevertheless persisted in her futile struggle until her strength gave out and she lost consciousness, battling this boundless, formless affliction in her life. And then it was gone, leaving nothing in the flood of silence but a glimmer, a wave rolling back, expiring, as if in the wake of something unspeakable. And then all of a sudden it came over her again as before – that terrible defenselessness of her entire being in the face of dreams, distant, unfathomable, revived yet again in her imaginings – an avowal, a glimmer of longing, a semblance of softness, an appearance of self – stripped naked by the fearful finality of fate – and then even divested of the last shred of self as she reeled in the grip of ever more enfeebling cravings, strangely bewildered by the turmoil of it stirring inside, by the aimless tenderness of a splinter of love seeking consummation for which in the mundane jargon of the everyday and the hard and fast matter of fact no word has yet been coined.
At that moment she no longer knew if she had not just dreamed this dream for the last time before waking. It had been many years that she’d thought to have put it out of her mind, and now all of a sudden it appeared close at hand, as when you suddenly turn around and find yourself staring someone right in the face. And it gave her such a funny feeling, as if in this lonesome isolated room her life were sucked back into itself like footsteps in the mud. The little light that she had switched on glowed behind Claudine’s back, keeping her face in the dark; and after a while she could no longer tell what she looked like, her silhouette struck her like a strange hole in the darkness. And little by little it began to seem as if in reality she were not there at all, as if only a distant trace of her had wandered and wandered through time and space, only now awakening far from her true self in the twisted distance, and was standing there enveloped by that sense of being immersed in a dream…somewhere…an apartment cropped up, people, a dreadfully tangled terror…And then turning red in the face, lips softening…and suddenly the inkling that another would soon come knocking, and reawaken another long gone tingle of her undone hair, of her arms, as if she were still wed to infidelity…And then and there all at once – her trembling uplifted hands slowly tiring, clinging fearfully to the resolve to remain faithful to her beloved – the thought: we were unfaithful to each other before we met…It was only the feeble flicker of a half-hearted thought, almost nothing but a flush of emotion; a wondrously sweet burst of bitterness, like a gust of wind that lifts from the sea often purled with a briny trace, then almost nothing but the thought, we loved each other before we met – as if the infinite reach of their love suddenly extended from deep within unfurling from the fold of infidelity, from which it had once sprung forth to bring them together in a prior incarnation of the eternal intimate tie between them.
And she let herself sink, and for the longest time, as if stupefied, felt nothing, except that she was seated on a bare wooden chair at a bare wooden table. And then that fellow G. came to mind, and the conversation with its veiled innuendos, and words left unspoken. And then at some point a burst of damp, mild, snowy night air came through a crack between window and frame, and quietly, gently caressed her naked shoulder. And then she began to speculate in a pained and distant way, like a wind wafting over the dark rain-drenched fields, that infidelity must be a rain-silent pleasure, the way a cloudy sky hangs heavy over a landscape, an inkling of life’s secret closure…
That morning and from then on a curious whiff of the past hung over everything. Claudine wanted to visit her daughter’s school; she shot up out of sleep early, as if emerging from clear, heavy water, having forgotten all of the previous night’s ruminations; she set the hand mirror in front of the window and pinned up her hair; it was still dark in the room. But as she combed her hair – straining her eyes before that blind little mirror – she felt like a country girl prettying herself up for a Sunday outing, gripped by a powerful impression that she was taking pains for the teachers who would see her, or perhaps for the stranger, and from that moment on could not get that ridiculous idea out of her mind. This foolish notion had nothing to do with her, but it clung to everything Claudine did, and every move she made had a daft, blundering formality that slowly, insidiously, and irresistibly seeped from the surface to the depths of her being. After a while she just let her arms hang down; but finally all of this puttering about was simply too nonsensical to hold off what had to happen, and while the clumsy compulsion would not let go and kept twisting impalpable feelings of the forbidden, of wanting and not wanting into another, more nebulous, less tightly linked chain of reflection than that of actual decision-making, and while Claudine’s hands fondled her soft hair and slid up the white sleeves of her dressing gown, it all seemed to her to be happening again – whenever, once upon a time, forever after – and to have always been so, and it suddenly struck her as strange that now wide awake, in the emptiness of morning, her hands kept going up and down, as if not beholden to her will, but rather to some indifferent external force.
And then, little by little, the dark mood that had gripped her that night began to dissipate, memories poked their heads up and then sank again, tension hung like a shaky curtain before half-forgotten upset. Everything grew light and skittish outside, looking out at this steady, blinding light, Claudine felt a stirring like the deliberate disengagement and slow, seductive downwards slide of an invisible hand in a sea of luminous silvery bubbles and strange bug-eyed fish; the day began.
She took a piece of paper and scribbled words to her husband: “Everything feels strange. It will only last a few days, but I feel as if I were swallowed up by something hovering high overhead. Our love, tell me, what is it? Help me, I need to hear from you. I know that our love is like a tower, but right now all I feel is the trembling of a slender stalk…”
But when she went to mail the letter, the clerk at the post office told her that delivery was suspended because of the weather.
After that she went walking on the outskirts of the town. All was white far and wide like a sea of snow. Sometimes a crow flew by overhead, and in certain spots a lone shrub cast a black fleck. Only far below at the edge of town did life start up again in small, dark, disconnected dots.
She headed back and strolled through the streets of the town, restless, for maybe an hour or so. She turned down every lane, after a while returning along the same route, then left it again �
�� passing to the other side of town – crossed squares, where she still felt the same uneasiness as she had minutes before; everywhere the feverish white shadow play of empty distance slid through this little hamlet cut off from the rest of the world. The houses were closed in by high barricades of snow; the air was clear and dry; it was still snowing, but only a sprinkle and in flat pitiful little splotches, as if it was about to stop. Every now and then, above closed doors, windows glistened light blue and crystalline upon the streets, and even underfoot it sounded like you were walking on glass. But sometimes a lump of frozen snow fell from a rain gutter; whereupon, for moments on end, it was as if the fallen lump had pierced a gaping wound in the silence. And then suddenly somewhere else a house wall started glowing pink or light yellow like a canary…Every step she took now seemed strange, looming larger than life; in the soft-footed silence, for a moment everything that lay there before her eyes seemed to repeat itself like an echo in another parallel perceptible reality. The next moment everything sank back into itself; the houses were arranged in indistinguishable lanes around her, like wild mushrooms clumped together, or like a bunch of low-lying shrubs on a broad swath of earth, and the sight of it made her feel dizzy. Something like a fire flared up in her, like a burning-bitter fluid, and walking along, lost in thought, she felt like an immense, secret receptacle of something being carried through the street, thin-walled and burning hot.
Then she tore up the letter to her husband and spoke until noon with the teachers at her daughter’s school.
It was perfectly still inside; when peering out through the dark somber arches, the wide-open fields seemed so far away, so hushed, as if veiled with gray snow light. And the people looked strangely corporeal, bulky and burdened by their accented contours. She only spoke with them and heard them speak of the most impersonal matters, but sometimes even that was almost a commitment. It surprised her, seeing as she did not like the look of them, in none could she find a single attractive feature, every single one, in fact, repelled her by his lowlife look, and yet she sensed their masculine appeal, the lure of the other with what struck her as a never-before fathomed or long-forgotten clarity. She realized that it was the sharpened facial expressions in the dim light, the dull ordinariness of their looks, almost incomprehensibly elevated by their sheer ugliness, which like the odor of big burly cave creatures wafted about these people. And little by little she began to feel that old apprehension of helplessness come over her again, a hint of which had hit her again and again ever since she set out on the journey alone, and she was gripped by a strange sense of submissiveness that seemed to pursue her every which way she turned, in little inconsequential turns of phrase, in the over-attentive way in which she felt obliged to listen, in the very fact that she even stood there and took part in the conversation.