by Robert Musil
Meanwhile the footsteps came closer, more confident now.
Then a foot stumbled over a plank again, even closer this time, and the next moment, pale and ashen in the shadows, Basini’s face appeared at the base of the cone of light.
He was smiling – a sweet, affectionate smile. It was a fixed expression, rather like in a portrait, and set off by the frame of lamplight.
Törless pressed himself back against the crossbeam; he could feel the muscles in his eyes twitching.
In a severe, unwavering voice, Beineberg listed Basini’s unspeakable deeds, and then asked him, “So aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
The look that Basini gave Reiting seemed to say: “It’s time you stood up for me.” But at that moment Reiting punched him in the face, and he staggered backwards, tripped over a beam and fell to the ground. Beineberg and Reiting threw themselves on him.
The lamp tipped over, and the shaft of light lay at Törless’s feet, inanimate.
From the different sounds he could tell they were tearing Basini’s clothes off and thrashing him with something thin and whippy. All this had clearly been agreed in advance. He could hear Basini whimpering, his faint cries of pain as he begged for mercy. Eventually there was just a moan, like a stifled howl among the muffled curses and Beineberg’s heavy, excited breathing.
Törless didn’t move from where he was sitting. At first he felt a brutish desire to leap up and join in, but was held back by the thought that he might be too late and just get in the way. It was as if a strong hand were gripping his limbs, leaving him paralysed.
Seemingly indifferent, he kept his gaze fixed on the floor. He didn’t even strain his ears to try to interpret what the noises meant, and his heartbeat returned to normal. He studied the lamplight, the puddle it created at his feet; in it glimmered balls of fluff and a horrid little spider’s web. Farther away, the rays seeped between the beams and petered out in a half-light of dust and dirt.
He could have sat like this for a whole hour without noticing. He wasn’t thinking about anything, and yet his mind was totally absorbed. He was observing himself – although it was as if he were staring into a void, and only catching sidelong glimpses in a vague, confused shimmering. And then from out of the haze of uncertainty, from another oblique angle and becoming gradually more visible, a desire found its way into the clearer region of his consciousness.
Something – he wasn’t sure what – made him smile. But then the desire grew stronger. It tried to drag him from where he was sitting, onto his knees, onto the floor; to make him press himself against the floorboards. He could feel his eyes getting larger and larger like a fish’s, while through his naked body his heart was pounding against the planks.
He was seized with a violent agitation, and had to grip the crossbeam to stop the giddy sensation forcing him downwards. His forehead was beaded with sweat, and he began to worry what all this meant.
Roused from his apathy, he listened hard to try to work out what the other three were doing in the darkness. But everything was quiet now; all he could hear was Basini sobbing as he fumbled around for his scattered clothes.
Törless found something enjoyable about this sobbing sound. A shudder ran down his spine, as if spiders were scuttling up and down it; the sensation came to rest between his shoulder blades, and tugged at his scalp with its tiny little claws. To his consternation he realized that his excitement was of a sexual nature. Thinking back, although he couldn’t remember exactly when it had started, he knew it was connected with the strange desire to press himself against the floorboards. He felt ashamed; yet it was as if he had had a sudden rush of blood to the head.
Beineberg and Reiting groped their way back and sat either side of him without saying a word. Beineberg stared at the lamp.
At this very moment, Törless felt himself being dragged down again. It started with his eyes – he could tell that now – with his eyes, as if they had hypnotized his brain into a state of rigidity. It was a question of, yes, it was a… no, it was despair… something that he was all too familiar with… the wall, the garden of the patisserie, the hovels beside the road, his childhood memories… it was the same thing! The same! He glanced at Beineberg. “Can’t he feel anything?” he thought. But Beineberg just leant forward to pick up the lamp. Törless held him back. “Don’t you think it’s like an eye?” he said, pointing at the pool of light on the floor.
“Are you trying to be poetic?”
“No. But you admit yourself that the eyes have a special purpose, don’t you? That they sometimes work with a power – think of your pet theories about hypnosis – that has nothing to do with anything we learn in physics. And it’s true that you can often tell more about a person from their eyes than from what they say…”
“And?”
“To me this light is like an eye. Directed towards a different world. It’s as if I’m supposed to guess something, but I can’t. I want to drink it down, swallow it…”
“Now you’re being poetic again.”
“No, I’m serious. In fact I’m at my wits’ end. Just look at it and you’ll feel the same: a need to roll around in this pool, to crawl on all fours into the dirtiest, dustiest corner, as if by doing so you might be able to guess…”
“My dear fellow, that’s just silly sentimentality. You mustn’t fill your head with such things.”
And Beineberg bent down and stood the lamp back up again. Törless had a malicious feeling of satisfaction. He realized he had a sensibility for such things, one that his classmates didn’t possess.
As he waited for Basini to reappear he noticed, with a secret, inner frisson, that the tiny claws were dragging at his scalp again.
He was already acutely aware that something was being reserved for him personally, something that was signalling its presence with ever-greater insistence; a sensation that was beyond the grasp of the other two, yet which clearly had great importance for his life.
What he didn’t know was what this sensual excitement meant, although he remembered that it occurred every time events began to seem strange – but only to him – and that he was tormented by his inability to understand why.
He resolved to give some serious thought to this problem at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime he abandoned himself to the excitement that preceded Basini’s reappearance.
By now Beineberg had set the lamp up again, and the shaft of light traced a circle in the darkness, creating what looked like an empty frame.
And then suddenly Basini’s face was there again, just like the first time, wearing the same sweet, fixed smile, as if nothing had happened; except that drops of blood were tracing bright-red, worm-like trails across his upper lip, mouth and chin.
“Sit down over there!” Reiting pointed at the enormous crossbeam. Basini obeyed. Then Reiting began: “I suppose you thought you’d get off lightly, eh? You thought I’d help you? Well that’s where you were wrong. What I did with you was just to find out how low you would sink.”
Basini made to protest, but Reiting looked as if he might set on him again. So Basini said: “For God’s sake, I’m begging you – what else could I do?”
“Be quiet!” screamed Reiting. “We’ve had enough of your excuses! We know all we need to know about you now, and we’ll act accordingly…”
There was a brief silence. Then suddenly, in a quiet, almost kindly voice, Törless said: “So just say ‘I’m a thief’.”
Basini’s eyes widened in fright; Beineberg smiled approvingly.
But Basini didn’t reply. Beineberg jabbed him in the ribs and yelled: “Didn’t you hear? You have to say that you’re a thief! Say it right now!”
Again there was a short silence; and then, in a single breath and in the most expressionless voice that he could muster, Basini said quietly: “I’m a thief.”
Beineberg and Reiting turned to Törless and laughed in satisfaction: “That was a good idea of yours, lad.” Then they looked at Basini: “And now you have to say: ‘I am a
creature, a filthy, thieving creature – your filthy, thieving creature!’”
Without drawing breath Basini did as he was told, keeping his eyes firmly closed.
By now Törless had leant back into the darkness again. He found the whole scene thoroughly nauseating, and was ashamed for having given away his idea to the others so cheaply.
9
IT WAS DURING A MATHS LESSON that he suddenly had another idea.
During the last few days he had been paying special attention in every lesson, because he was thinking: “If this is really preparation for life as they say it is, then there ought to be at least a hint of what I’m searching for.”
And, after his ruminations on the infinite, it was mathematics in particular that was on his mind.
Then it just came to him out of the blue, in the middle of the lesson. As soon as the period was over he went and sat next to Beineberg, who was the only one he could talk to about such things.
“So did you understand all that?”
“All what?”
“All that stuff about imaginary numbers?”
“Yes. It’s not terribly difficult. You just have to remember that the unit of calculation is the square root of minus one.”
“Exactly – but that doesn’t exist. Whether it’s positive or negative, when any number is squared it always gives a positive. So there can’t be any real number which could be the square root of a negative.”
“Absolutely right. Even so, why shouldn’t we still try to use the calculation to extract a square root from a negative number? Obviously it won’t give a real value, which is why we describe the result as imaginary. It’s as if we’re saying: someone has always sat here, so we’ll put out a chair for him today as usual; and even if in the meantime he has died, we’ll still behave as if he’s going to come.”
“But how can we do that, when we know for certain – with mathematical certainty in fact – that it’s impossible?”
“That’s precisely the point, we should behave as if it isn’t impossible. It might prove quite successful. After all, isn’t that always the case with irrational numbers? A process of division that never ends, a fraction whose true value will never ever be known, regardless of how far we take the calculation? And how do we set about visualizing the fact that two parallel lines only ever intersect at infinity? I think if we tried to be overly punctilious there wouldn’t be any mathematics at all.”
“I agree with you on that point. If you view it from that angle then it certainly does seems odd. But what’s even more peculiar is that we can still use imaginary or impossible values to perform real calculations and get a tangible result!”
“It’s simply that for those purposes, the imaginary factors cancel each other out during the course of the calculation.”
“Yes yes, I know that as well as you do. But isn’t there still something extremely odd about the whole thing? How can I put it? Think of it like this: at the start of any calculation of this kind there are always concrete figures which represent length or weight or something tangible, and which are at least real. And at the end of the calculation there is something similar. But these two sets of figures are connected by something that doesn’t exist. Isn’t it like a bridge that only has supports at each end, and yet we still walk across quite happily as if the whole construction were intact? Calculations like that make my head spin; as if at one point the road leads God knows where. But to me the most mysterious thing is the hidden power contained in calculations like that, which hold on to you so tightly that you arrive safely on the other side.”
Beineberg grinned: “Now you’re beginning to sound like our parish priest. ‘You see an apple – there are waves of oscillating light, your eyes, et cetera – and you reach out your hand to steal it – there are nerves and muscles which cause these to move – but between these things there is something else, which makes them happen in sequence, and that is your immortal soul, which by doing this has committed a sin… Oh yes, yes! None of your actions can be explained without the soul, which plays you like the keys of a piano…’” And he imitated the voice of the catechist repeating the age-old, traditional comparison. “But none of that really interests me.”
“Well I think it ought to interest you. At least, it made me think of you straight away, because if it’s really so inexplicable then it would confirm your beliefs.”
“Why shouldn’t it be inexplicable? I find it perfectly possible that the people who invented mathematics simply tripped over their own feet. Why shouldn’t something that is beyond our powers of understanding not play tricks on us? But I don’t concern myself with such things, they never lead anywhere.”
10
THAT SAME DAY, Törless asked the maths tutor if he could come and see him to get him to explain some of the lesson in more detail.
The next day during lunch break he walked up the stairs to the master’s small set of rooms.
He had acquired a new respect for mathematics, which had changed from being a dry-as-dust subject that he was forced to study into something very much about life. Along with this respect he felt a certain envy for the master, who was undoubtedly familiar with this field and carried his knowledge around with him like the key to a secret garden. He was also driven by a hesitant curiosity. He had never been in a young man’s room before, and was itching to find out how this learned but reserved individual lived, or at least as far as he was able to judge from the objects with which he surrounded himself.
Törless was generally shy and unforthcoming with the masters, and so had no reason to believe that this one felt particularly well disposed towards him. Now he was standing nervously outside the door, his request seemed an act of daring that would not so much help him to get some explanations – which deep down he already doubted he would receive – as to catch a glimpse, over his tutor’s shoulder so to speak, of the man’s everyday cohabitation with the art of mathematics.
He was shown into the study. It was a long room with only one window, beside which stood an ink-stained desk, and, against the wall, a sofa upholstered in coarse green corded fabric decorated with tassels. Above it hung a faded undergraduate’s cap and an assortment of yellowing, postcard-sized photographs taken during his time at university. On the oval table, which had X-shaped feet, and whose spiral scrolls attempted to give an impression of grace and elegance but just looked like a misplaced curtsey, lay a pipe and some cheap, rough-cut tobacco. The smell of it filled the entire room.
Törless barely had time to absorb these impressions and to register a certain feeling of discontent, as if a dish of unappetizing food had just been put in front of him, before the master walked in.
He was quite young, no more than thirty, fair-haired and quite highly strung: a very capable mathematician who had already given a number of noteworthy papers at the Academy.
He immediately went over and sat at the desk, rummaged around for a moment among the papers that were lying all over it (only later did it occur to Törless that he had gone straight there to seek refuge), cleaned his pince-nez with his handkerchief, crossed his legs and then turned to Törless with a look of expectation.
Having studied the room, Törless now began to scrutinize his tutor. He noticed the thick, white woollen socks, and that the under-straps of his fitted trousers were scuffed black by boot polish where they fastened under his shoes.
His handkerchief, on the other hand, was brilliant white and prettily embroidered, and although his cravat had been mended in places it was as gaily coloured as a painter’s palette.
Törless couldn’t help feeling even more put off by these observations: there was little hope that the man possessed any significant knowledge, as there was nothing about him or his surroundings that suggested he might. He had imagined a mathematician’s study quite differently: there would be evidence of the terrifying thoughts that came into being here. Its banality offended him, and so he transferred this feeling onto mathematics itself, and his newfound respect began to give
way to mistrust and hesitation.
As the maths tutor shifted impatiently in his chair, not knowing quite what to make of this prolonged silence or the boy’s penetrating gaze, an atmosphere of misunderstanding began to take hold between them.
“Well then… we could… you could… I’m perfectly happy to answer any questions you might have,” the young man began.
Törless told him what his objections were, and did his best to explain the sense in which he understood them. But he felt as if he were speaking through dense, swirling mist, and that his best arguments were sticking in his throat.
The master smiled, coughed, and then said: “Do you mind if I smoke?”, lit a cigarette and took rapid little drags at it; the paper – details which in the meantime Törless had noted and found utterly mundane – was soon stained with grease and crackled with every puff. The man took off his pince-nez, put them back on again, nodded… but in the end he didn’t even let Törless finish what he was saying. “I’m delighted, my dear Törless, absolutely delighted,” he said, interrupting him. “Your misgivings are a sign of seriousness, of mature reflection, of… hmm… but it isn’t easy to give you the explanation you’re looking for… please don’t misunderstand me on this point.
“Let me see, you were talking about the role of transcendent… hmm, yes, that’s the name usually given to them… transcendent factors…
“Of course it’s true that I’m not privy to your feelings on the matter; questions of a super-sensory nature, which go beyond the defined boundaries of reason, are a quite specialized subject. I’m not really qualified to comment, as it lies outside my field; people have different opinions about it, and I certainly wouldn’t want to inveigh against anyone… But as far as mathematics is concerned” – and he stressed the word “mathematics” as if he were closing a door behind him, inevitably and for all time – “as far as mathematics itself is concerned, it’s clear that what we are dealing with here is a natural and purely mathematical relationship.