Intimate Ties

by Robert Musil

  She felt almost queasy with lightness and bliss. This excitement only dissolved when she laid her hand on the doorway of her house. It was a small, round, firmly fixed postern; when she shut the door behind her she stood there in the darkness as in a silent, subterranean body of water. Slowly she stepped forward, feeling all the while, albeit without touching them, the proximity of the cool walls closing her in; it was a curiously furtive feeling, and she knew that she was home.

  Then she quietly went about her business, and the day came to an end like all other days. From time to time Johannes came to mind, then she looked at the clock and knew where he must be. At one point she took pains not to think of him for a long time, and the next time she did the train must already have rolled south through the night of mountain valleys and darkly imagined unknown landscapes filled her mind.

  She went to bed and quickly fell asleep. But it was a light and fitful sleep, as of someone anticipating something out of the ordinary the next day. A lingering lightness lay beneath her eyelids; toward morning it grew even lighter and seemed to spread out far and wide; when Veronica awakened, she knew: it was the lake.

  By now he must surely have seen it there in front of him, with nothing else to do than to carry out his resolve. He would row out to the middle and shoot. But Veronica didn’t know when. She began to speculate and weigh the pros and cons. Would he immediately hire a boat upon disembarking from the train? Would he wait for evening, when the lake lies there perfectly still and peers at you as if with eyes wide open? She walked restlessly around all day as if thin needles kept grazing her skin. From time to time Johannes’ face cropped up again somewhere or other – ringed by the golden frame that lit up the wall in the darkness of the stairway, or peering up at her from the white linen in her lap she was embroidering. Pale and with crimson lips…deformed and bloated with water…or just like a black curl hanging over a sunken brow. Now and then she felt suffused with drifting fragments of a suddenly returning tenderness. And when night fell she knew that it must have happened.

  She had a distant inkling that all this fuss was for naught, this speculation, this posturing, treating something altogether uncertain like a fact of life. At times the thought flashed through her mind that Johannes might not be dead, a tenuous shred of truth that lifted and let go, tearing a hole in the soft coverlet she had spread over her reality. Then she sensed the evening silently and inconspicuously closing in around the house just like that; at some point night fell, fell and lifted again; she knew it. But suddenly it all died down. A profound calm and a sense of the inscrutable slowly fell in many folds over Veronica.

  And night came, that one night in which all that had welled up under the twilit roof of her long afflicted life, that inhibition had kept locked up inside, finally found the force to lift into consciousness, bursting out like a fermented fleck of reality into strange manifestations of heretofore inconceivable experiences.

  Driven by some unconscious impulse, she lit up all the lights in her room and sat still in their midst; she fetched Johannes’ photograph and set it before her. But it no longer seemed to her that what she’d been waiting for had anything to do with his actions, or that it was something in her, some illusion she’d clung to; she felt rather that all of a sudden her sense of the world around her had changed, expanding into an unknown province on the threshold of dreaming and waking.

  The empty space between her and the things around her dissolved, and their relation to her became strained. The furniture and appliances weighed heavy, unmovable, each in its assigned place – the table and the cupboard, the clock on the wall – altogether self-contained, apart from her and wrapped up in themselves like a balled-up fist; and yet sometimes it seemed as if they had slipped back again inside her ken, or as if they peered out at her like suspended eyes from a space that lay like a sheet of glass between Veronica and the room. And they stood there as if they had been waiting many years for this very evening, to find themselves, arching and bending upwards, forever emitting the aura of an existence beyond measure, lifting and hollowing out Veronica’s sense of the moment, as if she herself suddenly stood there like a room lit up with silently flickering candles. And sometimes this tension brought on a complete exhaustion, whereupon she appeared to glow, a brilliance burning in all her limbs, and feeling it from the outside in she grew tired of herself as if fatigued by the quietly humming circle of light cast by a lamp. And her thoughts seeped throughout and emanated from that luminous languor, protruding pointedly and becoming visible like a network of the thinnest veins.

  Everything grew ever quieter then, a haze fell over her consciousness, soft as snow flurries before a dimly lit window, and here and there great jagged flashes of light broke through…But after a while she once again bestirred her conscious thoughts to rise to the surface of her strangely fraught wakefulness with a sudden, crystal-clear inkling: that’s how Johannes is now, suspended in a kind of reality, in an altered space.

  Children and the dead have no soul; but the soul of the living is that element of self that does not let you love, much as you’re so inclined, that stubborn residue that stands in the way of all love – Veronica felt that this one unshakable constant, immune to amorous lures, is the focal point of all feeling, clinging fearfully, a private precinct forever out of reach of the dearly beloved, beckoning from afar; and even if you draw near, it keeps its distance, smiling back, as if waiting for a secret rendezvous. But children and the dead, they are either nothing yet or nothing more, giving us to believe that everything lies ahead or everything lies behind; they are like the hollowed vessels that give shape to dreams. Children and the dead have no soul, no soul to speak of. And animals. Veronica found animals terrifying in the threat of their ugly onslaught, but their piercing pupils dripped with dumb droplets of forgetting.

  Soul is something of the sort, a vehicle for an uncertain pursuit. Throughout her long dark life Veronica dreaded and yet longed for love, only in dreams did it sometimes turn out as she wished. Powerful and plodding as they are, actual occurrences slip away and yet seem to seep inside; they hurt, but like something you do to yourself; they mortify, but just barely: mortification flies off like a restless cloud and nobody else notices; mortification dissipates like the rapture of a dark cloud…She kept wavering between Johannes and Demeter…And dreams do not reside inside the self, nor are they fragments of reality, they carve out their own nook in a burst of complete feeling, and that’s where they reside, hovering, weightless, like a liquid seeping out. That’s how you give yourself to a beloved in dreams, like a liquid seeping out; with an altered sense of space; for the waking soul is a bottomless hollow, billowing up against reality in undulating bubbles of ice.

  Veronica managed to remember that in the past she sometimes dreamed. Such matters never crossed her mind before, only every now and then when she woke up she was struck by the narrowness of her consciousness, as if accustomed to another stirring inside, and somewhere through a crack a lingering glimmer of light broke through…just a crack, but she sensed a wide expanse behind it. And now she realized that she must have often dreamed. And with a waking awareness she saw the body of her dream as though refracted through the memories of long ago conversations and actions, the recollection of a heretofore hidden fabric of feelings and thoughts suddenly came to light, the way the mind latches onto the gist of a certain conversation, and all of a sudden after all those years you fathom that church bells must have been ringing all the while for its entire duration…Conversations with Johannes, conversations with Demeter. And amidst the words and the clang of the bells she began to recognize the contour of the dog, the cock, a fist blow, and then Johannes spoke of God; slowly, as if soaking up the fringe of consciousness, his words grazed the whetstone of memory.

  Veronica had always known somewhere in the indifferent morass of awareness that there was an animal lurking inside, everyone knows it, a creature with its foul smelling and repulsive, slimy skin; but in her it was only a
restless, ill-defined darkness that sometimes slid under her waking consciousness, or a forest infinite and tender as a sleeping man, there was nothing beastlike about it, except for certain contours of its effect on her soul extending beyond the ordinary borders of self…And then Demeter said: “All I have to do is bend over…” and then at midday Johannes said: “Something sank in me, something extended…” And she sensed a very soft, pale wish take hold in her that Johannes be dead. And still caught in the nebulous muddle of waking awareness, peering at him with a maddeningly quiet intensity, letting her looks pierce like needles, deeper and deeper, sounding the flutter of his smile and a twist of his lips for a sign of torment, like a last gift of the dead, testing to see if he might not suddenly lift his head to meet her gaze in the incalculable fullness of life. Then his hair waved like brushwood and his nails grew out like great sparkling tiles, she saw dripping wet clouds in the white of his eyes and tiny reflective pools of water; he lay split open, hideously prone, the borders of his being defenseless, but his soul was still concealed within, wrapped up in a last gasp of self. And he spoke of God, which made her think: By God he means that feeling, perhaps of a space in which he’d like to live. It was a sick thing to think. But she also thought: That space must resemble an animal gliding by, the way watering eyes transform small and distant things into giant figures seen from the outside in; why should it only be in fairy tales that one can conjure up creatures, awaken sleeping princesses? Was it sick to think such a thing? In that one night she felt herself and these hazy figments of her imagination in a portentous burst of terror of sinking back into the slime of oblivion. Her creeping waking existence would break down again around such notions, that much she knew, and she recognized that there was something positively unsound and full of holes in her way of thinking; but if only she could hold together all of the prolonged disparate particulars like pick-up sticks in one hand, without accepting the repulsive conclusion that necessarily follows if you meld it all into a whole: her thinking that night allowed her to enjoy an illusion of high mountain health, light as a chamois in the way she let her feelings leap about.

  This hint of bliss whirled through her thoughts the way you glimpse a light at the end of the tunnel when torn by tension. You are dead, dreamed her love, by which she meant nothing but that peculiar feeling that held her at arm’s length from the outside world, cloistered in an imagined enclave in which Johannes lived, but the light of her imaginings burnt hot on her lips. And all that happened that night was nothing but an illusion of reality flickering somewhere in her body, trickling between fragments of feeling, the fuzzy shadow of which was flung outwards. It seemed to her then as if she felt Johannes up close, as close as herself. He wafted in her whimsy, and her tenderness passed through him unimpeded the way the waves pass through those soft, purple, bell-like animalcules that float in the sea. At times her love just lay there over him, far-flung and senseless, like the lake, all tired out, sometimes proud and placid as a cat purring in the grip of sweet dreams, the way the lake lay over his lifeless body. And then time trickled by like a bubbling brook.

  And when she awakened with a start she felt the first sting of sorrow. The air was cool around her, the candles had burnt out and only a last one still flickered; in the place where Johannes used to sit there was a hole that all her thoughts could not fill. And suddenly that last tremor of light went out without a sound, the way a last departing guest quietly shuts the door behind him; Veronica huddled in the darkness.

  Suppliant roaming sounds passed through the house, with a wistful shrug the stairs shook off the weight of whoever strode upon them, somewhere a mouse was gnawing and a bug burrowing into wood. When a clock struck, she braced herself, filled with foreboding at the unceasing life of this thing that restlessly roamed though all the rooms as she lay awake listening, sometimes scraping against the ceiling, sometimes deep down below. Like a cold-blooded killer who mindlessly strikes out and cuts up merely because his victim won’t stop twitching, she felt like grabbing and strangling that quiet clink that kept striking her ear. And all of a sudden she sensed her aunt sleeping far back in the nethermost room in the house, her leathery face all riddled with wrinkles; and the inanimate objects stood dark and heavy and drained of life; and she once again took fright at this strange presence that surrounded her.

  And there was just one thing that kept her afloat, but it was hardly enough to hold onto, just a slowly sinking piece of flotsam to drown with. It had already dawned on her that it was something in herself, not Johannes, that made her so sensually attuned to the world around her. Above and beyond her imagination she harbored a stubborn resistance to the reality of the day, to any sense of shame, to her aunt’s words so tightly bound to things, to Demeter’s scorn, to the stranglehold of the real; an aversion to Johannes, a need that dawned on her little by little to take it all in like a sleepless night; and even that memory she’d been trying so long to retrieve, as if it had secretly wandered off while she wasn’t looking, once again lay small and removed from the moment, never having altered her life in the slightest. But the way a person who passes with pale rings under the eyes, in the wake of experiences that he can reveal to no one, senses his own ridiculousness and weakness like a passing melody, quiet and thin as a thread in the warp and weft of his stalwart and reasonable fellow beings, despite her abiding sorrow, she too felt a gentle, niggling bliss that hollowed out her body until it bore itself light and delicate as a thin capsule.

  She suddenly felt inclined to undress. Just for herself, just for the feeling of being close to her essence, to stand alone with herself in a dark room. It thrilled her to feel her clothes falling with a quiet rustle to the floor; it was like taking a few steps out into the darkness, as if looking for someone, then having second thoughts and rushing back to snuggle against your own body. And as Veronica slowly and with hesitant delight gathered up her clothes again, her skirt and slip had taken on folds in the dark, in which her own warmth still curled up, and bulging spaces rose around them, beckoning like hideouts in which to huddle, and when her body grazed against these husks she felt a sensual rush passing through her like a hidden flicker of light that filters through closed shutters, restlessly trickling through the house.

  It was that room. Veronica’s gaze instinctively sought out the spot on the wall where the mirror hung, and didn’t find her image; she saw nothing. Well, maybe a dim floating glimmer in the dark, maybe this too was a delusion. The darkness filled the house like a heavy liquid, nowhere could she see herself; she started walking around, but there was nothing but darkness everywhere, nowhere the least trace of herself, and yet she felt nothing but herself, and wherever she went she was and was not, the way words on the tip of the tongue sometimes hang there unuttered in a ball of silence. In this way she once spoke with angels as she lay sick in bed, they stood there around the rim of the bed, and without moving their wings they emitted a thin, high pitched tone that pierced the shell of things. The things disintegrated like silent stones, the whole world lay there with sharp, conchoidal cracks and only she could pull herself together; afire with fever, scraped thin as a wilted rose petal, she became an invisible vessel of feeling, she felt her body from every angle at once, minuscule in its total mass, as if holding it in the palm of her hand, and she was ringed by men with quietly fluttering wings like hair rustling in a gust of wind. None of this seemed to be visible to the others present; the angelic tone emanated like a glimmering gate through which you can only exit. And Johannes spoke with her as with someone you needed to touch with kid gloves and not take seriously, and in the room next door Demeter paced back and forth, she heard his sarcastic step and his big, hard voice. And all the while she had the feeling that angels were standing around her, men with wondrously plumed hands, and while the others took her for sick, these magical beings, wherever they were, seemed to stand around her in an invisible, tautly distended circle. And back then it already seemed to her as if she had done all she had to do, but it was
only the effect of a fever, and she fathomed that it must be a feverish illusion as the feeling dissolved.

  But now in the voluptuous feeling that enveloped her there was some residue of that long-ago state brought on by sickness. Carefully pulling back into herself, she dodged the objects around her, and felt them from afar; quietly all hope collapsed and faded in her, plowing a path of burst illusions and emptiness and leaving a soft streak in its wake, as if all were shrouded under a quiet curtain of crushed silk. Little by little the twilight trickled in with a light gray glow. She stood at the window upstairs; come morning the people flocked to the market. Here and there a stray word struck her ear; she leaned back then, as if trying to avoid contact with anything or anyone, and slip back before dawn.

  And quietly something came over Veronica, it was a longing as aimless and undirected as the sore indefinite tingle of recoiling she felt before the new day. Curious musings swept through her: to love yourself in that way, it’s like being able to do anything in front of someone; and as the memory resurfaced with its hard, ugly face, that she had in effect killed Johannes, it did not frighten her, she only hurt herself looking at him, it was as if she had glimpsed her innards, her repulsive entrails wiggling like giant worms, but at the same time she saw and was horrified by her own image peering at itself, even though in this horrifying spectacle there was an undeniable glimmer of love. A tonic fatigue flowed through her veins, and she sank down, huddled in the consciousness of what she’d done as if in a cooling cloak of fur, gripped by sadness and tenderness, sitting quietly beside herself, a soft radiance, like when, enticed by something in your pain, you smile in your misery.