by Robert Musil
Johannes jumped up. He didn’t understand. “How can you say such a thing?” he cried out. “What the devil are you thinking?!”
But Veronica defended herself with a hint of disappointment, “Why didn’t you become a priest? A priest has something of an animal about him! That emptiness where others are full of themselves. That mildness of manner that you can already smell in their priestly garb. That empty mildness that momentarily keeps things from happening, like a sieve, that then immediately runs dry. We really ought to try to make something out of it. It made me so happy when I realized that…”
He sensed the unbridled emotion in her voice and fell silent, and felt himself bristling as he pondered her remark, getting hot under the collar, all bent out of shape, straining not to let her conceits eclipse his, their foggy resemblance notwithstanding, though his own seemed far more real and tight like a hotel room for two. Once they had both calmed down, Veronica said: “It’s that thing that I still can’t quite seem to grasp that we ought to examine together.” She opened the door and peered down the stairs. They both felt as if they were looking around to make sure they were alone, and the dark, empty house suddenly hung there over them like a great void. Veronica said: “Whatever I just said, that’s not it…I don’t really know myself…But tell me, what were you thinking, tell me what do you mean by that sweet, smiling, face of fear! You looked completely devoid of self, stripped down to some warm naked softness within when Demeter struck you in the face.”
But Johannes did not know what to say. So many possibilities ran through his mind. It was as if he heard someone speaking in a room next door and grasped from stray words that that person was talking about him. Then all at once he asked, “And you talked about it with Demeter too?”
“But that was much later,” Veronica replied, hesitated, and said: “just once,” and after a while, “a few days ago. I don’t know what got into me.” Johannes sensed…a vague something…a distant dismay: that’s what jealousy must feel like.
And only after quite a while did he once again notice that Veronica was speaking. He caught what she said, mid-sentence: “…it was so strange, I really got what that person meant.”
To which he responded mechanically, “That person?”
“Yes, the peasant woman who lives upstairs.”
“Oh, yes, the peasant woman.”
“The one the boys in the villages talk about,” Veronica repeated.” “But can you imagine? She never again had a lover, only her two big dogs. And it may be repulsive what they say about her, but just imagine it: those two big beasts rearing up, sometimes snarling, strutting their stuff, imperious, as if you were their equals, and somehow you are, afraid but for a minuscule speck of self, afraid of what’s hiding under their fur, even though you know that it takes just one gesture to make them back off, and the next moment they’re obedient, submissive beasts – but it’s not just about the animals, it’s about you and your loneliness, you and again you, it’s you and an empty room full of animal hair, no animal longs for that, what they want is something I can’t express, and I’m not sure how, but I do understand.”
Johannes protested, “It’s a sin what you’re suggesting, it’s disgusting.”
But Veronica wouldn’t let up: “You wanted to become a priest. Why? I thought to myself…it was because then you’d stop being a man to me. Listen…just listen. Without any prompting Demeter said to me, ‘That one over there won’t marry you, not that one; you’ll stay here and grow old like your aunt…’ Don’t you get it, that that shook me up? Isn’t it the same for you? I had never conceived of my aunt as a person. I never thought of her as a man or a woman. Now all of a sudden I panicked at the thought that what she was I too could become, and felt that something had to happen. And it suddenly struck me that for the longest time she hadn’t aged and then all at once grew very old and remained that way. And Demeter said, ‘We can do as we please. We don’t have much money but we’re the oldest family in the province. We’re different from the others, Johannes didn’t join the ministry and I didn’t join the army, he didn’t even become a priest. They all look down on us a little because we’re not rich, but we don’t need money and we don’t need them.’ And maybe because I was still shook up about my aunt, it struck me as so mysterious – so dark, like a door quietly sighing – and somehow Demeter’s words summed up my sense of our house, but you know what I mean, don’t you, the way you too always felt it, our garden and the house itself…oh, that garden…Sometimes in the middle of the summer I thought: that’s what it must feel like lying in the snow, so inconsolably languorous, floating between heat and cold with nothing beneath you, you want to leap up but go limp in a sweet effusion. When you think of that garden, don’t you feel this empty, boundless beauty, suffused with light, light in dull abundance, light that makes you speechless, senselessly soothing on the skin, and a groaning and rubbing in the barks of trees and an incessant quiet swish in the leaves…? Don’t you also feel as if life’s loveliness were coming to an end here in our garden, as if it were something flat, endlessly level, something that closes you in and cuts you off like a sea in which you’d drown if you entered it…?”
And now Veronica jumped up and stood before Johannes; with her outstretched fingers glowing in the waning rays of some lost light, she seemed to fearfully pluck the words out of the darkness.
“And often then I feel our house,” her words fumbled about, “its darkness with the creaking steps and complaining windows, its nooks and towering cupboards and sometimes, somewhere, near a high, little window, light slowly seeping in, as if emptied out of a toppled bucket, and a fear, as if someone were standing there with a lantern in hand. And Demeter said, ‘It’s not my way to spin words, that’s more Johannes’ thing, but I can tell you there is sometimes something senselessly erect in me, a swaying, like the trunk of a tree, emitting a terrible, altogether inhuman sound, like a child’s rattle, a whimper…all I have to do is bend over and I feel like an animal…sometimes I’d like to paint my face…’ Whereupon it seemed to me as if our house were a world unto itself in which we lived all alone, a sad world in which everything gets twisted and funny looking like things under water, and it seemed to me almost natural that I give in to Demeter’s wish. He said, ‘It remains a place apart and hardly really exists, since nobody knows it as we do, it has no connections to the real world, no longing to let it get out…’ You must not think, Johannes, that I felt anything for him. He just sprung open like a big mouth with sharp teeth that wanted to devour me, as a man he remained as strange to me as all the others, but I suddenly imagined myself impassive and stiff, tipping into him, the excess droplets of self falling from his lips, and me being gulped down as if by a slurping animal…There are times when you’d like to experience things simply as actions shared with no one and nothing else. And then you came to mind, and for no particular reason I rejected Demeter’s advances…there must be a good way to deal with it, I thought, your way maybe…” Johannes stammered, “What do you mean?”
She said: “I have only the vaguest idea of what we could be for each other. We are still afraid of each other, sometimes when you speak even you seem as hard and unforgiving as a stone striking out at me: but what I mean is a way in which we can completely meld into the mix of being two, and not stand by like a stranger and listen…I don’t know how to explain it…what you sometimes call God is so…”
Then she said things that bewildered Johannes: “He whom you really ought to mean is nowhere present because he is in everything. He is a fat, nasty woman who forces me to kiss her breasts, and at the same time He is me myself, who sometimes, when she’s alone, lays herself flat on the floor in front of a cupboard and thinks things like this. And maybe you’re just like that; you’re sometimes so impersonal and withdrawn from the world like a candle in the dark, nothing in itself, but just a thing that makes the darkness greater and more visible. Ever since that time I saw you shrink back in fear, it sometimes se
ems as if you’d vanished from my consciousness and all that remains is fear, a dark speck, and then a warm, soft rim around it. And what it really comes down to is that you’re like the action itself and not the person engaged in it; we have to be alone with what happens, and at the same time together, silent and closed off like the inside of the four windowless walls of a room in which anything could happen, and yet just like that, without cutting into one another, as if it were all only happening in our thoughts…”
And Johannes did not understand.
Whereupon a change suddenly came over her, like something sinking back into itself, even the lines of her face grew finer in parts, and elsewhere more pronounced; she still might have had something more on the tip of her tongue, but no longer appeared to be the same person who had just spoken, and her words now came out haltingly, as if stumbling on a wide, unfamiliar pathway, “What are you thinking?…No man I know could possibly be so impersonal, only an animal could be like that…Help me please…for heaven’s sake, why does an animal always come to mind when I try to talk about it?”
And Johannes tried somehow to bring her back to her senses, all at once he spoke up, he wanted to keep listening.
But she just shook her head.
From then on Johannes felt a terrible ease knowing that he was reaching past what he really wanted by a hair’s breadth. Sometimes you can’t say just what it is that you darkly crave, but you know that it is going to slip through your fingers; you then live out the rest of your life as if in a locked room afraid to leave. It sometimes worried him that he might suddenly feel the uncontrollable urge to burst out whimpering and get down on his hands and knees and sniff at Veronica’s hair; such notions crossed his mind. But nothing happened. They just kept passing each other by, exchanging glances, swopping empty niceties or searching words – every day.
One time the whole thing seemed to him like being absolutely alone and then suddenly bumping into someone, and with one fell blow that random burst of proximity hems in and tops off your solitary state. Veronica came down the stairs at the foot of which he stood waiting; each was frozen in his own isolation in the dark. And he did not think at all that he desired something from her, but it was as if the two of them had sprung out of some fever dream, the impression was so alarming that he said: “Come on, let’s go away from here together.”
In response to which, however, she muttered something, only fragments of which he caught: “…can’t love…can’t marry…I cannot leave my aunt.”
And then he tried again, he said: “Veronica, a person, or sometimes even just a word uttered, a burst of warmth, a breath, is like a little pebble tossed into a whirlpool that suddenly reveals the axis you turn on…we really should to do something together, then maybe we might find it…”
But the sound of her voice in reply had something even more wanton than that other time when she replied the same as she did now: “No man I know could possibly be so impersonal, only an animal…well maybe if you were about to die…” And then she said: “No.”
Whereupon he was once again gripped, not by a resolve, but by a vision, nothing to do with reality, but rather a solely self-referential construct like a piece of music, and he said, “I’m going away, that’s for sure, maybe I’ll die.” But again he knew that it wasn’t really what he meant to say.
And again and again at this point in his life he sought to justify his resolve, and asked himself what she must really be like to demand so much. He sometimes said: “Veronica,” and sensed the sweat clinging to her name, the meek, irredeemable longing, the cold wet clamminess of making do with her isolation. And he had to keep thinking of her name every time he saw the two little ringlets of hair hanging there before him over her forehead, those little curls, painstakingly stuck to her brow, like something not a part of her, or when he saw her smile those times when they sat together at table and served her aunt. And he felt compelled to look at her whenever Demeter opened his mouth to speak; but time and again he struck something that defied his understanding, how a person like her could have become the object of his ardent resolve. And when he thought back, there was already in his earliest memory something about her, something long since eclipsed like the odor of extinguished candles, circumvented like the guest rooms in the house, those lifeless spaces draped with linen sheets eternally slumbering behind drawn curtains. And only when he heard Demeter speak, saying things so awfully commonplace and colorless, superfluous words like those unused sticks of furniture in empty rooms, it all suddenly seemed to him like a sinful ménage-à-trois.
And despite everything, later, whenever he thought of her, all he heard was her saying no. Three times she suddenly burst out saying no as if she were a complete stranger. One time it was only in a whisper, and even so it sounded strangely unhinged, dissolved from the rest, and resounded throughout the house, and then, then it was like the stroke of a whip or like some senseless obstinate insistence, but then it was quiet again, sunk back into itself and almost like a plaint of pain.
And from time to time when he thought of her, he almost found her beautiful. Hers was an aggregate beauty the eye can easily miss and just as soon find ugly. And she gave the impression as she emerged before him out of the darkness in the house, a darkness that, strange as it may seem, closed in again behind her, and as she glided by with that utterly strange and enticing sensuality – moving as if afflicted with some rare condition – gliding past him, every time it made him feel as if she took him for an animal. He felt it incomprehensibly and terribly in his heightened sense of reality, so unlike the way he used to think things were. And even though she wasn’t standing there before him, he perceived everything about her with an inordinate clarity, her towering height and her broad, somewhat flat breasts, her low, receding brow, those strange, soft, little curls of hers peeking out from under her thick, dark, tightly bound hair, her big, sensual mouth, and the light down of black hair covering her arms. And the way she stood, head bowed, as if her slender neck couldn’t bear the weight without bending, and the curious, almost shamelessly resigned indifference with which she leaned her body a little bit forward when she walked. But now they hardly spoke to each other.
Veronica suddenly heard a bird call, and another bird answer the call. And that was the end of that. All that there was between them ended with this little random occurrence, and something else began that only mattered to her.
For then, as if grazed by a lacey, swift, soft-haired animal tongue, a gust of wind carrying the scent of the high grass and the wild flowers brushed hastily, cautiously against their faces. And the preceding conversation that had dragged on sluggishly, suddenly broke off the way you let something you’ve long since stopped thinking about just run through your fingers. Veronica was startled; she only fathomed the odd intensity of her fear after the fact from the redness that now rose to her face, and from a memory that suddenly cropped up again unannounced and lingered, still hot and vivid, after all those years. So many memories had indeed recently reawakened, and it seemed to her she had already had a hint of it the night before, and the night before that, and one night two weeks ago. And it also struck her that this same association had already troubled her sometime long ago, perhaps in her sleep. Again and again these strange memories came to mind in the last few days, tumbling out to the left and to the right, in advance and in the wake of whatever she happened to be thinking, like a shoal of fish guiding her somewhere, in the precinct of childhood; but this time she knew with an almost unnatural certainty that it was the real thing. It was a memory that she suddenly recognized from many years ago, a memory that sprung up completely out of context, in a hot flash, as if it were happening then and there. Back then she loved to look at the pelt of a great big Saint Bernard, especially the fur up front where, with each step, the broad chest muscles protruded over the vaulted bones like two hills; the fur at that spot was so very profuse and golden brown, and it was so much like immeasurable wealth and quiet infinity that her e
yes grew blurry when calmly fixed on a single spot. And whereas she ordinarily felt a lone, inarticulate, powerful feeling of well-being, the gentle camaraderie of a fourteen-year-old girl for a favorite object, in this case it was something like silent rapture before an entire landscape. It’s like when you go walking and there is the forest and the meadow, and the mountain and the field, and in this great order all the constituent parts fall obediently into place, as perfectly as a pebble; but viewed as a whole, the entire spectacle looks so terrifying, so very much alive, that amidst your admiration you suddenly shrink back in fear as if before a beast with its legs drawn in, hunched in ambush.
But one time when she lay there beside her dog, it suddenly struck her that this is how the giants must be; with a mountain and a valley and forests of fur on the chest, and songbirds swaying in the hair, and little lice clinging to the songbirds, and – that was as much as she knew, but it didn’t mean it had to end here, and again everything seemed so organized, so tightly pressed together, that it all only seemed to hold still by the sheer force of fear and order. And she thought to herself: if the parts of the whole got angry it would all suddenly fly apart into a shrieking, thousand-fold explosion of life and shower you with its terrible plethora, and when it all then pounces upon you with loving intent it must feel like being stomped upon by mountains and tousled by trees, and little wafting hairs would have to sprout all over your body, crawling with vermin, and your ears would ring ecstatically with the sound of an unfathomably strident voice, engulfing you and tearing you into the thrall of its animal multitude.