by Robert Musil
Then Claudine got antsy, feeling that she had already stuck around here too long, and found the semidarkness of the room to be stifling and unsettling. She was suddenly and for the first time struck by the thought that, never having been separated from her husband, no sooner was she alone than she might well already have begun to slip back into old ways.
What she now felt was no longer just a vague anxiety, but a sentiment linked to actual people. And yet it was not a fear of them per se, but rather a fear that they might get under her skin, as if while the utterances of these people had engulfed her, they had secretly moved and quietly shaken something in her; it was not a single decipherable feeling, but a grounding in which all her feelings were rooted – as when you sometimes pass through apartments that repel you, but little by little you are gently persuaded by the sense that people could be happy living in such a place, and then suddenly there comes a moment when it surrounds you, as if they and you were one and the same, and you feel hemmed in, closed in on every side, you want to jump, but stand quietly in the middle of it all…
In the gray light these black-bearded men flew in her face like big menacing tableaux ringed by dimly lit bubbles of malaise, and she tried to imagine what it must be like to feel this closing in around her. And while her thoughts sank quickly as in a soft, formlessly whirling quicksand, she soon only could hear a voice grown hoarse from smoking, the words embedded in a cloud of cigarette smoke, a voice that while speaking kept rubbing up against her face, and another voice, the latter light and high as a tin rooftop, and she tried to picture the broken timber of sexual arousal that would drag her down, then again clumsy movements twisted her affective self into curious convolutions, and an Olympic bauble of foolishness tried to coax her into feeling like a woman who believed in it…A strange something with which her true self had nothing whatsoever in common loomed large and threatened to pounce like some shaggy, vile-smelling creature; it felt as if all she wanted now was to lash out with a whip, and she suddenly froze, aware that she was hemmed in by a predictable spectrum of emotions playing themselves out on a face not unlike her own.
Then she thought to herself: People like us could perhaps even live with people like that…It gave her a strangely needling rush, a lingering brain twitch, covered by something like a thin pane of glass, against which her thoughts were painfully pressed, only to gape with an uncertain distress into the great beyond; it pleased her all the while, boldly and above suspicion, to look people in the eye. Then she tried to imagine herself estranged from her husband, as she might be perceived by strangers. She managed to quietly conjure him up; he remained a wonderful, incomparable person, but having forfeited the imponderable, a certain something her mind could not wrap itself around, he appeared pale and not that close; sometimes just prior to the onset of an illness you see the world with just such a cool, distant clarity. But then it struck her how strange it was that she should once have really experienced something of the sort she now toyed with, that there was a time when she would definitely have viewed her husband in this distant way as she now tried to do, without even giving it a second thought, and the entire situation suddenly seemed odd to her.
Every day you go walking among particular people or through a landscape, a city, past a certain house, and this landscape or these people always accompany you every step of the way, they’re just there without wanting to be, day in, day out. But then all at once, they suddenly stop dead in their tracks with a start and just stand there incomprehensibly stiff and still, detached, in the grip of a strange, stubborn feeling. And when you look back at yourself there’s a stranger standing there among them. Then there’s the past. But what is that? Claudine asked herself, and looking up again, she was suddenly unable to say just what it was that might be different from before.
At that moment she also knew that nothing is simpler than to acknowledge that it is you yourself who has changed, and yet she began to feel a curious reluctance to accept this truth; and maybe, she pondered, we only really grasp the big, decisive connections in curiously inverted retrospect, whereas moments later she no longer fathomed the ease of her present estrangement from a past that was once as close as her own skin, and it seemed inconceivable that there might once have been anything other than the present, then she remembered how when a person sees something peculiar-looking in the distance, and then walks over, and at a certain point it enters the sphere of the familiar, but the spot where one stood before is now somehow meaningless; one only needs to imagine that yesterday I did this or that: any second is always like an abyss before which a sick, pallid man hesitates, a body just doesn’t think about it – and all of a sudden in a lightning flash her entire life seemed to be riddled by this incomprehensible, unending infidelity, by which, while remaining the same for everyone else, one instantaneously separates from oneself without knowing why, all the while nevertheless sensing in it a last, never depleted tenderness beyond conscious reach, in the throes of which, more than with anything else, the person you are feels completely in touch with himself.
And while, with the full force of this feeling laid bare, the realization flickering into consciousness, it was as if the premise on which her life depended, like an orbiting certainty no longer held, and a hundred possibilities emerged, sliding like the stage sets of multiple life choices, one after another, amidst which, in a white, empty, restless room, the teachers cropped up like dark, uncertain bodies greeting her with their sinking, searching gaze, with their feet firmly planted on the ground before her. She took a peculiar, sad pleasure to be seated there before them, locked in the reserved stance and the unapproachable smile of a stranger from afar, incidental even to herself, separated from them by nothing but the folds of a reversible husk of accident and actuality. And while the hasty and empty words leapt from her lips, the conversation nimbly and lifelessly unraveling like the thread of a fallen spool, little by little she began to be troubled by the thought that if the orbit of one of these people closed around her what she did would be real, as if reality were just an insignificant something that occasionally burst forth through the indifferent loophole of a moment’s lapse, and unable to get a hold of herself, she would be washed along in the lonesome, otherworldly whispering flood of the unfulfilled. Her sense of security, that fearful loving link to another, seemed at this moment like something random, nonessential, merely superfluous in comparison with that inkling of an intimate bond, beyond the reach of reason, of a last imponderable, lonesome, uneventful belonging together.
And that was what thrilled her when the undersecretary now suddenly crossed her mind. She fathomed that he desired her, and that what had heretofore been only a play of possibilities would take a turn for the real with him.
For an instant something made her shudder and flashed a warning; the word sodomy came to mind; should I commit sodomy…? But behind it lurked the temptation to challenge love: so that the being you are must feel it in the flesh, feel the self, the self sullied by a beast. The unimaginable. So that you, my beloved, can never again think of me as a hard and simple fact. So that as soon as you let go, I become unfathomable and all-encompassing like an illusion. Nothing but an illusion, so that you know that I only exist in you, through you, only as long as you hold me tight, nothing else, my beloved, while we lie with our limbs entwined…
And she was gripped by the quiet faithless sadness of intrigue, that melancholy that takes hold when you do something not for its own sake, but just to have done it. She sensed that the undersecretary was standing somewhere, waiting for her. It seemed to her that the constricted space around her face was already permeated with his breath, and the air around her took on his smell. She grew restless and started to take her leave of the teachers. She knew that she would approach him, and just imagining the moment, picturing where it would happen gave her a chill. It was as if something grabbed her and dragged her to a door, and she knew that this door would fall shut, and she resisted, all the while anticipating it on pins and
needles.
When she and the man met up again, it no longer felt like they’d just gotten acquainted, but rather like the prelude to the start of something between them. She knew that in the meantime he, too, had thought of her and had put together a plan of action. She heard him say: “I understand why you rebuffed my advances, but never will anyone adore you as selflessly as I do.” Claudine made no reply. His words were spoken slowly, emphatically; she felt their effect, if indeed they were realized.
Then she said: “Do you know for a fact that we are really snowed in?” It all seemed to her as if she had already experienced it; her words seemed to get stuck in the tracks of words she must already have uttered some time before. She did not remain mindful of what she did, but rather of the tenuous difference between her present actions and something similar that happened in the past; the same capricious, come-what-may soupçon of what lay ahead. And she had a powerful, dispassionate intimation of herself, like little waves rolling again and again over the past and present.
After a while the undersecretary suddenly said: “I can sense that something in you is hesitating. I know that hesitation. Every woman faces it at some point in her life. You cherish your husband and no doubt don’t want to hurt him and therefore close yourself off. But as you must know, there are moments in life when you’ve got to let go to give free rein to the great storm of emotion.”
Again Claudine said nothing. She sensed how he must misconstrue her silence, but she found the ambiguity strangely beguiling. That there was something in her that did not translate and so remained immune to the effect of her actions, something for which she could make no excuses, since it lay beneath the reach of words, something which in order to be fathomed had to be loved, as it loved itself, something she shared only with her husband – this she felt all the more poignantly in her silence; it was the consummation of an intimate tie with him deep inside herself, while surrendering her superfluous self to this stranger who shamelessly mishandled her.
In this way they went walking and talking with each other. And she sensed herself bending over, feeling faint, as if in the process grasping all the more profoundly the wondrous unfathomable bond of belonging to her beloved. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had already modified her demeanor to suit her present companion, even if on the outside she appeared the same, and it sometimes seemed as if pleasantries, fancies, and gestures were reawakened from her young womanhood, things she had long since thought herself to have outgrown; then he said: “Dear lady, you are divine.”
As he spoke in this way and walked beside her, it struck her that his words streamed forth into a completely empty space which they alone filled with nothing but their own murmurings. And little by little, houses cropped up in their path, a bit off kilter and distended, as if reflected in window panes, as was the lane down which they walked, and a little while later they too took on a somewhat skewed allure, but in a way that still left them recognizable. She felt the power that emanates from perfectly ordinary people, a force that engenders an unnoticeable dislocation of the world as we plow into it; he exuded a simple vitality that twisted the surface of things. It confused her to catch sight of herself in this elusive mirror-like flux; it seemed to her that if she even let down her guard a little, this mirror image would completely take hold of her. And then all of a sudden he said: “Believe me, it’s all just a matter of habit. If at seventeen or eighteen – at whatever age – you had met and married another man, you would find it equally difficult to conceive of yourself as the wife of your present husband.”
They arrived before the church, lone souls standing tall on the wide open square; Claudine looked up, the undersecretary’s gesticulations reached out into the emptiness. Then all at once it felt for a fleeting instant as if a thousand crystals attached to her body bristled in the icy air; a toppled, restless, fractured twilight emanated from her torso, and the man looked suddenly different in its glow, every line of perspective converged on her, fluttering like her heart, from deep inside she felt his every gesture grazing the surface of her skin. She wanted to cry out, better be careful, but the urge never took shape, like a lawless, never quite crystallized inclination it wavered in her breast, as if it had nothing to do with her.
The next moment she was nothing but a dissolving light fog of emotions. She looked around her; the houses stood silent and straight on the square, the great clock sounded in the belfry. Each stroke of the clock sounded round and metallic emanating from the hatches in the four walls, dissolving as it fell and fluttered against the rooftops. Claudine imagined that each stroke of the clock must then surely resound far and wide, rolling over the open fields, and she suddenly shuddered at the thought: voices travel through the world, towering and heavy like booming cities of iron, something beyond the ken of reason…a sovereign, intangible realm of feeling that only randomly, haphazardly, and silently melds with mundane reason, like those bottomless soft wells of darkness that sometimes shroud a stark, shadowless sky.
It was as if something were standing around with its gaze fastened upon her. She felt the man’s arousal like something surging and breaking in a distance devoid of meaning, a dark something battering alone against itself. And more and more it seemed to her as if what this person desired from her, this seemingly so intense act, were in fact something altogether impersonal; it amounted to nothing more than being looked at, plain and simple, like strange spots studying each other in space that something impalpable unites into a tenuous entity. She shrank back beneath the thought of it, allowing herself to be squeezed together as if she herself were such a spot. It gave her a curious sense of self, having nothing more to do with mindfulness and freely willed actions, and yet at the same time everything was pretty much the same as usual. And then suddenly she lost sight of the fact that this person standing there before her had a hideously commonplace spirit. And it felt as though she were standing out in the open, far from everything, surrounded by those sounds swirling in the air and the still clouds overhead, his utterances digging deep into her here and now, and she were nothing more than the sum total of these stimuli, tugging, reverberating…she felt at that moment that she fathomed the love of animals…and of the clouds and the murmurings of nature. And she sensed the eyes of the undersecretary searching for hers…and took fright and badly wanted to get a hold of herself, and suddenly felt her clothes covering the last remaining shreds of tenderness, and her blood pulsing beneath, convinced she could sniff out his sharp, quavering scent, herself reduced to nothing but this body she was to surrender, and this most immaterial, transcendent sense of soul linking her to him – this last burst of bliss – and did not know at that moment: was she about to gamble all her love, or had it already faded, with her senses flung open like curious windows?
Later she sat in the dining room. It was evening. She felt alone. A woman called over to her: “This afternoon I saw your little daughter waiting for you, such an enchanting child, you must surely take great pleasure in her.” Claudine had not gone back to the school that day, but she was unable to answer, she suddenly felt as if her only contact with these people were with some insensate part of her herself, her hair or her fingernails, or as if her body were ringed by an animal’s horn. Then some words did finally spill from her mouth, and it seemed to her that everything she said somehow dropped in a pouch or got tangled up in nets; her own words sounded strange swimming among strange syllables, like fish flouncing against the cold damp bodies of other fish in the indecipherable whirlpool of opinions.
She was gripped by disgust. Again she felt that it did not so much matter what people say of themselves, what they manage to put into words, but rather that any real revelation was conveyed in altogether different ways – a smile, a lapse into silence, an ear turned inward to the secret murmurings of self. And she suddenly felt an inexpressible longing for the one other person, lonesome like her, whom no one else here would understand, and who possessed nothing but that soft tenderness infused with transient
images, which like a foggy fever envelop the hard thud of things, dispensing with all external occurrences as flat, muffled irrelevancies, while inside everything hovered in an eternal, secret, all-encompassing equilibrium of self.
Yet while ordinarily, when she was in such a mood, a room pulsing with people would have curled itself around her like a hot, swirling mass of strangeness, she was struck here every now and then by a clandestine stillness and release and a kind of hopping in place. Gruffly rebuffing her. A cabinet, a table. Something went awry in her rapport with these ordinary things, they revealed something uncertain and wavering. Again she sensed the same ugliness as on her train trip here, no run-of-the-mill ugliness, but rather like a hand reaching out to her through these things, its fingers wanting to grab hold. Rifts opened in the stormy path of her feeling, as if – ever since that last trace of certainty languorously began to gape back at itself – something had loosened in her emotional grasp of the ordinarily indiscernible arrangement of things, and instead of a chained chime of impressions, because of these disruptions in the emotional norm the world sounded around her like an endless noise.