by Robert Musil
And when she noticed that her little pointed breasts rose and sank in rhythm with that villous breath panting beside her, she suddenly wanted it all to stop, lest she be otherwise impelled to permit the unspeakable. But when, overpowered by the force and no longer able to hold it off, her breath once again fell in line, as if that other life slowly drew her in. She closed her eyes and again imagined herself lying among the giants in a fitful flux of images, but much closer now and warmed as if by the passage of low floating clouds.
When after a long while she once again opened her eyes everything was as before, except that the dog now stood up straight and stared at her. And then all at once she noticed that something pointed, red, woefully twisted had silently poked its way out of his meerschaum yellow fleece, and at the very moment she now wanted to get up she felt the tepid touch of a tongue against her face. And feeling stunned, unable to move…it was as if she herself were also an animal, and despite the terrible fear that gripped her, something cringed hot inside her…like birds squawking and feathers fluttering in the hedgerow, till all falls silent and soft like a flurry of floating feathers…
And that was what she remembered from before, it was precisely in that hot, heretofore unknown burst of terror that she now suddenly situated everything again. For though we cannot know what brings on a certain feeling, she now sensed so many years later that she was gripped by the very same fear as back then. And there before her stood Johannes, who was going to leave today, and here she stood. Thirteen or fourteen years had since elapsed and her breasts were not as pointedly red-nippled with anticipation as before, they sagged a wee bit and seemed just a little sad, like two paper party hats left lying on a flat surface, for her chest had widened and it felt as if the room had swelled away from her. But she hardly noticed, peering at herself in the mirror when naked, in the bath, or changing clothes, since she had long since limited her gestures to the bare essentials, but rather, just sensed the difference. It sometimes seemed as if she used to be able to lock herself up snug and tight in her clothes, whereas it was now as if she were only still able to cover herself. She remembered how in the past she could feel herself from the inside out, the sensation like that of a round, tightly stretched droplet of water, though now for the longest time she felt more like a little, soft-rimmed puddle – the feeling had become so broad and flaccid that it might well have been mistaken for lassitude and languor if it did not sometimes swell up, as if something incomparably soft were slowly, very slowly, from the inside out, to nestle up against it in a thousand painstakingly gently folded pleats. And there must have been a time when she rubbed up against life and felt it more distinctly, as if with her hands or pressed up against her own body, but for the longest time now she no longer sensed that kind of immediacy, and only knew then that something must have come over her and covered it up. And she didn’t know what it was, whether a bad dream or a waking fear, as if she had shrunk back in terror before something she had witnessed with her own eyes – until today. For in the meantime the feeble drift of everyday experience had draped itself over these impressions and wiped them away, as a languid, long-lasting wind wipes away traces in the sand; all that still registered in her soul was the quiet hum of monotony, now rising, now falling. She felt no more intense pleasures or sufferings, nothing that might noticeably or lastingly have lifted her out of the mundane muddle, living had just become a little less vivid. Days passed, each one the same as the next, the years likewise followed suit; each year, she felt, took something away and added something, and she slowly changed, but at no point was there a clear demarcation; she had a vague, fluid sense of self, and when she tried to sound her depths all she found was the flux of approximate and concealed forms, like when you feel something moving under a blanket without being able to identify it. It struck her little by little that she lived her life beneath a soft sheet or under a finely carved horn bell that grew ever more opaque. The things around her fell back farther and farther and lost their faces, and even her sense of self sank ever deeper into the distance. She was surrounded by a vast empty space in which her body hovered; it perceived the things around it, it smiled, it lived, but it all seemed unrelated and all too often she was engulfed by a dogged disgust that blurred all other feelings as if beneath a mask of tar.
And only when that strange agitation bestirred itself in her, coming to a head, as it did today, did she wonder if things might not turn out again as they had in the past. And later she even pondered if it might be love; love come long ago and long in coming.
And yet though it was happening far too fast for the tempo of her life, the cadence of taking it in was slower still, extremely slow, it was like a slow opening and closing of the eyes, interrupted by a fleeting glimpse that can’t quite grasp what it sees, glancing and gliding by untouched. With this glance she saw it coming, and so could not conceive that it might be love; she abhorred him as darkly as she did everything outside her grasp, without hatred, without acrimony, feeling toward him as one does toward a distant land viewed from across the border, where the self softly and cheerlessly melds with the sky. But she knew that ever since then her life had become joyless, since something compelled her to revile the unknown. And while she otherwise just felt like someone unable to fathom why she did what she did, it now sometimes seemed to her that she had just forgotten how and could perhaps remember, if she put her mind to it. And something wondrous tormented her, which she suspected had to be like the remnant of the memory of an important forgotten thing stirring just beneath the surface of consciousness. And all of this started when Johannes returned – at that very moment, for reasons she could not explain, she remembered the time Demeter struck him and Johannes just smiled in reply.
Ever since then she felt as if someone had arrived who possessed precisely what she was lacking and quietly carried it around through the fading wasteland of her life. All he had to do was walk by and cast a passing glance at something or other and already the objects of his attention haltingly arranged themselves; when he cracked a startled smile at himself, it sometimes seemed to her as if he were able to inhale the whole world and hold it in his body and feel it from the inside, and when he then set it back down gently he looked to her like an artist juggling flying hoops; that was all there was to it. It piqued her with a blind imaginative intensity to think how lovely everything might well look in his eyes, to admit that she was envious of something he only might have felt. For although every semblance of order fell apart again under her gaze, and all she could muster for the things around her was the avid love of a mother for her child, too limited a love, she felt, her world weary languor now sometimes started to vacillate like a sound, like a sound ringing in her ear, like a sound ringing in her ear and that somewhere or other cambers and ignites a flame…a light and people making gestures of elongated longing, like parallel lines extending beyond the reach of reason that only conjoin far far out, almost in the infinite. He said they were only ideals, which gave her the courage to imagine that they might yet be realized. And perhaps it was only that at that very moment she attempted to stand up, but her body ached as if she were ill and couldn’t bear its load.
And then, too, so many other memories came to mind, except that one. They all poured out and she didn’t know why, and sensed somehow that only one was missing, and all the others tried to make up for it. And the notion took hold in her that Johannes could help her retrieve it, and that her whole life depended on her doing this one thing. And she also knew that it wasn’t a strength that she sensed in him, but rather a silence, his weakness, this quiet, invulnerable weakness that extended like a vast space behind him, a space in which he could linger alone with the reverberations of everything that happened to him. But she could not think it through, which bothered her, furious that every time she felt she was on the verge of figuring it out, an animal came to mind; every time she thought of Johannes, an animal or Demeter intruded, and it dawned on her that they had a common enemy and tempter, Demeter,
his mental image looming like a great straggling shrub, blocking and sapping the strength of her memory. And she could not tell if all this was rooted in that one memory that eluded her, or in a reason still to reveal itself. Was it love? It was a meandering in her mind, a tugging at the edge of consciousness. It was like walking along on a trail, ostensibly headed in a given direction, but dragging your legs with the lingering anticipation of suddenly arriving at and recognizing an altogether different destination from sometime long ago.
And he didn’t get what made her tick, and could not comprehend how hard it would be to build a life for the two of them out of this wavering feeling based on something beyond her ken, but simply desired her, to make her his wife or lover. Unable to fathom why, it seemed to her so senseless and in the moment almost vile. She had never felt a focused desire; moreover, at that moment as never before, men seemed to her a mere pretext for something best avoided, something they could only vaguely incarnate. And suddenly she sank back again into herself and cowered in her darkness and stared at him, and for the first time she was stunned to experience this self-enclosure as a voluptuous gesture to which she wantonly surrendered, right there before his eyes, and yet out of reach. Something in her bristled against him like the soft, rustling fur of a cat, and as if toying with a little, glittering ball, she let a softly muttered “no” out of its box to roll before his feet…And then she screamed, as if suddenly convinced that he meant to stomp on it.
And now that their parting loomed irrevocably between them, hanging over their last moments together, this remote memory suddenly leapt forth crystal clear in Veronica’s mind. She only sensed that this was the missing memory, couldn’t say for certain why it mattered, and was a bit disappointed, because there was nothing in it as such to explain why she would have forgotten it till now; and its retrieval felt only like a cathartic coolness in the heat of the moment. She felt that she had already once in her life stood in fear before Johannes, as she did now, and could not fathom what the connection was, why this memory should have meant so much to her, and what it would mean to her in the future – but it suddenly seemed to her as if she now stood at exactly the same spot where she lost him long ago, and she sensed that it was at that moment that her actual experience, the experience of the real Johannes, had crested and come to an end.
At that moment it felt as if whatever there had once been between them was falling apart; although they stood very close to one another, she felt dizzy, off-kilter, as if they were sinking and sinking away from each other; Veronica peered at the trees beside which they were walking, their trunks stood straighter and more upright than seemed natural. And then and there she felt the full import of her No! that she had previously uttered only haltingly and with a vague sense of apprehension, and it dawned on her that it was because of that that he was now leaving, even though he didn’t want to. And for a while the realization gave her a leaden feeling like that of two bodies lying side by side, but distinctly separate, one beside the other, separate and sad, and each reduced to a solitary self, all the while sensing that they were on the edge of an emotional attachment; and something or other came over her that made her feel small and weak and good for nothing like a little dog limping pitifully on three legs, or like a ragged flag flapping in the breeze, it made her fall to pieces; and she longed to hold him to her with a quiet contortion like a soft snail with a broken shell reaching for another mollusk, in a desperate attempt to cling to it while dying.
But then she looked at him and hardly knew what she was thinking, and suspected that the only thing she really knew for certain – that memory that suddenly erupted and lay there like a solitary lump of debris – was perhaps not something that you could fathom in and of itself, but rather only in connection with something else – something that a burst of fear once held in abeyance and had since hardened and been encased by that fear, imprisoning a sentiment that it might have become, and from the broken shell of which it would surely fall out like a foreign body. Already her feeling for Johannes began to wane and drain off – something burst out of her in a released rush and tore her withered sentiment along like a dead and powerless branch of flotsam – and in its place a radiance rounded out the contours of the distant recesses of emotion she’d released, endlessly uplifted and glittering, protruding through the severed thread of dream nets.
And the conversation that they still carried on came out in short spurts and trickles, and while she took pains to participate, Veronica sensed between the words that it had already evolved into something else, knew now that he was determined to leave, and broke it off. All that they continued to say and do seemed perfectly futile now that it was clear that he was leaving and would not be coming back – and because she fathomed that she no longer wanted what she might otherwise have still persuaded herself to do, her residual sentiments hardened with a sudden twist into a stony, incomprehensible facial expression; without rhyme or reason, it hit her swift and hard, grabbed her and wouldn’t let go.
And as he stood there before her in the web of his words she began to feel the insufficiency of his presence, his tenuous attachment to her true self, and the feeling pressed hard against something in her that already associated him with her memory of him, further intensifying her response, and she jabbed at his feeble life force the way you jab at the stiff and forbidding carcass of a dead cat stubbornly lying in your path, trying to shove it aside. And when she noticed that he still kept eying her with such an intense look, Johannes seemed to her like a big, beaten-down beast she couldn’t get off her back, and she felt her memory like a little, hot object clasped in hand, and it almost made her stick her tongue out at him, riddled as she was with the contradictory urge to escape and entice, almost like a woman biting to fight off her attacker.
But at that moment the wind picked up again and her feeling dissolved in it and disengaged from all stiff resistance and hate, not jettisoning her harsh sentiments but swallowing them like something very soft, until all that remained was a residual dismay; no sooner did Veronica sense it than she felt that she left herself behind in its wake, and everything else around her trembled with foreboding. The murky morass that had until now hung like a dark fog over her life lifted, was suddenly set in motion, and it seemed to her as if the shapes of objects she’d long been searching for appeared as if pressed against a veil, and then vanished again. And yet nothing materialized fully enough for her to grasp, everything eluded consciousness, slipping through the still tentative words; and nothing could really be voiced, but once uttered every word was viewed from a distance, as if from a broad perspective and accompanied by that remarkably resonant understanding that everyday doings attain when crowded together on the stage of life and piled up helter-skelter on the gravel-strewn ground, suddenly looming as signposts on an otherwise invisible pathway. Like a gossamer silken mask, the morass draped everything in a light, silver-gray mist, and shifted about as if in anticipation of being ripped apart; straining her eyes, the dark realization flickered before her, as if shaken by invisible blows.
So they stood side by side, and as the wind picked up over the pathway and spread itself out before them like a wondrous, soft, sentient animal, rubbing up against face, neck, and armpits, breathing and rubbing its soft satiny hair, and with every rise of the breast pressing tighter against the skin, all of her dread and expectation dissolved in a weary, heavy warmth that started silently, invisibly, slowly circling around her like a spray of blood. And she suddenly thought of something she’d once heard, that millions of tiny organisms settle on human skin, and with every puff of air numberless streams of life come and go, and the thought gave her pause, and made her feel warm and dark as if enveloped by a great purple billow of air, but then close beside this hot stream of blood she felt another bloodstream pulsing, and as she looked up he stood there before her, his hair blowing against hers in the wind, the strands already silently touching each other with their trembling tips; whereupon she was gripped by a grinding desire,
as if in the wake of two intermingling swarms, and she could have torn her life out at the roots just to dust him over with it in a frenzy of hot, defensive darkness. But their bodies stood there stiff and numb, with eyes shut tight, and let these clandestine doings play themselves out, not daring to know, and only growing emptier and more tired out, whereupon they sank a little closer, so softly and serenely, gently and silent as death, as if spilling their lifeblood into each other.
And as the wind picked up she felt as if his blood were climbing up under her skirts, filling her with stars and calyxes and blue and yellow and with fine threads and voluptuous groping and with an inert desire, as when flowers stand in the wind receiving pollen. And as the setting sun shone through the hem of her skirt, she stood there, sluggish and still and shamelessly yielding, as if all the world could see. And only in an altogether absent way did she contemplate that greater yearning yet to be fulfilled, but at that moment she was overcome with a quiet sadness, as if brought on by bells ringing somewhere in the distance; and they stood side by side rearing upright, stately and solemn, like two big animals with backs bent, bowing to the evening sky.
* * *
—
The sun went down; Veronica ambled back, alone and lost in thought, along the path that wound its way between field and meadow. This parting left her with an empty feeling, like a broken husk lying on the ground; it suddenly felt so piercing, as if she were a knife stuck in the life of that other person. It was all clearly linked, he went off and would kill himself; she didn’t mull it over, it weighed heavy on her like a dark, heavy object lying on the ground. It seemed so irrevocable, like a cut in time before which everything came to an unshakable halt, this day of all days surged with a sudden gleam like a blade, indeed it felt as if right there before her very eyes she could actually see its physical manifestation, the relation between her soul and that other soul transformed into something final, unalterable, jutting out for eternity like the stump of a severed branch. She felt a momentary tenderness for Johannes, whom she had to thank for this, then again she felt nothing, just the swing of her step. Driven by a firm determination she embraced solitude with no other aim, ambling between field and meadow. The dark world was shrinking around her. And little by little she began to be consumed by a strange desire that swelled up in her like a light and terrible breeze that she breathed in, filling her with a quavering dread, informing her every gesture, reaching into the distance, in the grip of which her steps released themselves from the ground with a quiet gravity and rose above the forest floor.