The Confusions of Young Master Törless (Alma Classics)

by Robert Musil

  Several minutes went by. Törless knew he had neither the nerve nor the willpower for these Machiavellian intrigues, but only because they didn’t interest him, because he never felt fully engaged with them; he always had more to lose than he stood to gain. Yet if things turned out differently he sensed that he possessed a quite different type of tenacity and daring. He just had to know when it was the right moment to stake everything on one roll of the dice.

  “Did they tell you anything else… what they were thinking of doing… something that concerns me?”

  “Anything else? No. They just said they would take care of things.”

  Nonetheless… there was still a danger… hidden away somewhere… lying in wait for him: every step he took might be a trap, every night could be the last before battle was joined. Along with this thought came terrible uncertainty. It was no longer a question of casually looking on, playing games with mysterious visions – this was reality, unvarnished and with all its nasty sharp edges.

  They continued their earlier conversation.

  “And so what do they do with you?”

  Basini didn’t reply.

  “If you’re serious about mending your ways then you have to tell me everything.”

  “They make me take my clothes off.”

  “Yes yes, I noticed… and then?…”

  There was a slight pause, and then Basini suddenly said:

  “Various things.”

  He spoke in an effeminate, almost provocative voice.

  “So you’re their… miss… mistress?”

  “Oh no, I’m their friend!”

  “How can you have the nerve to say that?”

  “It’s what they say themselves.”

  “What?…”

  “Yes, Reiting says it.”

  “Reiting?”

  “Yes, he’s very friendly with me actually. Usually I just have to take my clothes off and read to him from a history book; something about Ancient Rome and the Caesars, the Borgias or Tamerlane… you know the sort of stuff, all those bloodthirsty epics. At those times he’s even quite affectionate with me.

  “And then afterwards he usually beats me…”

  “Afterwards?… Oh, right!”

  “Yes. He says that if he didn’t beat me then he would have to accept that I’m a man, and he wouldn’t be allowed to be so gentle and affectionate with me. But this way I’m just a possession, so he doesn’t need to feel awkward.”

  “What about Beineberg?”

  “Oh, Beineberg is dreadful. Don’t you think his breath smells?”

  “Shut up! What I think or don’t think is none of your business! Just tell me what Beineberg does with you!”

  “Much the same as Reiting, except… but you mustn’t insult me again…”

  “Get on with it.”

  “Except… in a more roundabout way. He always begins by lecturing me about my soul. About how I’ve corrupted it, although only its outer vestibule so to speak. Compared with the inner sanctum this is insignificant, superficial. It just has to be mortified; that was how many great sinners became saints. So seen from a higher level the sin isn’t terribly serious: you just have to take it to its most extreme point and it will destroy itself of its own accord. Then he makes me sit and stare into a piece of crystal…”

  “He hypnotizes you?”

  “No, he says that whatever is floating on the surface of my soul has to be put to sleep and rendered powerless. Only then can he make contact with my soul.”

  “How does he make contact with it?”

  “It’s an experiment that he’s never managed to get to work. He sits down and makes me lie on the floor so he can rest his feet on my body. I have to be sleepy and relaxed from staring at the crystal. Then all of a sudden he tells me to bark. He describes to me exactly how to do it: softly, more of a whimper, like a dog barking in its sleep.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “How do I know? He gets me to grunt like a pig as well, and keeps telling me that there’s something of a pig in me. But it’s not meant as an insult; he says it very quietly, in a kind way, so that – to use his words – it’s imprinted on my mind. According to him I might have been a pig in a previous existence, and it has to be drawn out of me to remove the danger.”

  “And do you believe all this?”

  “Good God, no: I don’t think he really believes it himself. In any case it’s got nothing to do with that. And why would I believe in that sort of thing? Who believes in the soul nowadays – let alone transmigration? I know perfectly well that I did something wrong, but I was hoping that I could put it right. There’s no need for hocus-pocus to do that. I’m not going to lose any sleep over how and why I did it. Things like that happen so quickly, almost of their own accord; it’s only afterwards that you realize you’ve done something stupid. But if he gets pleasure from trying to find something supernatural in it, then it’s all the same to me. But in the meantime I have to submit to his will. If only he would stop pricking me…”

  “What?”

  “Yes, with a needle – oh, not very hard, just to see how I react… or if it leaves a visible trace on my body. But it still hurts. According to him the doctors don’t understand anything about it; I haven’t paid much attention to how he says he can prove it, all I remember is that he talks a lot about fakirs, who, while they are contemplating their soul, are insensible to physical pain.”

  “Oh yes, I know about those theories. But you said this wasn’t everything.”

  “No, definitely not: as I said, in my opinion it’s just a diversion. Afterwards there are periods of fifteen minutes or so when he doesn’t say a word and I’ve no idea what’s going on inside his head. Then suddenly he flies into a rage like a thing possessed and demands that I do things – far worse than anything Reiting makes me do.”

  “And you do everything he tells you?”

  “What choice have I got? I want to go back to being a respectable person and to be left in peace.”

  “And you think that what’s happening in the meantime is neither here nor there?”

  “But I can’t do anything about that.”

  “Now, think carefully before you answer my questions: how did you come to steal?”

  “How? I needed the money urgently, that’s how. I’d run up debts at the restaurant in town and they weren’t prepared to wait any longer. And I was sure that I’d be getting some money in the post any day. No one in the class would lend me a penny: some because they didn’t have any themselves, and the misers because they’re always delighted when the extravagant ones are short of funds at the end of the month. I certainly didn’t want to deceive anyone: I just wanted to borrow it secretly…”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” interrupted Törless, who was losing patience with this recital that was clearly helping unburden Basini’s conscience. “The question was: how and why could you do it, what did you feel? What was going on in your head at the time?”

  “Nothing at all. It only took a second or two – I didn’t feel anything, I didn’t stop to think: it just happened.”

  “And the first time with Reiting? The first time he made you do these things? Do you understand me?…”

  “It was really unpleasant. Because I was being forced to do it. Although… if you think about it there are plenty of people who do it because they want to, because they enjoy it, without anyone knowing. That can’t be so terrible.”

  “But you did it because you were forced to. You degraded yourself. Like crawling through excrement just because someone told you to.”

  “That’s true – but I had to do it.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “But they would have given me a thrashing, reported me; all the blame and disgrace would have come crashing down on me.”

  “Fair enough, but forget about that for a moment. Listen, I want you to tell me something else. You spent a lot of money with Božena. You bragged to her, puffed yourself up, flaunted your masculinity.
So you want to be a man? You don’t just want to talk about it, don’t just want to… you know what I mean… you actually want to be a man, deep down inside? And then someone comes along and asks you to do degrading things and you’re too much of a coward to refuse: doesn’t that tear your whole being apart? Aren’t you even vaguely frightened that something unspeakable has happened inside you?”

  “For God’s sake, I don’t understand. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I can’t tell you any more than I have already.”

  “Look here: I’m going to order you to get undressed again.”

  Basini smiled.

  “And to lie on the floor at my feet. Don’t laugh! I’m actually ordering you, do you hear! If you don’t do what you’re told this instant then you’ll soon find out what’s in store for you when Reiting gets back!… Fine. So you see: now you’re lying naked at my feet. You’re even trembling – are you cold? Now I can spit on you whenever I like. Press your face hard onto the floorboards; doesn’t the dust look strange? Like a landscape with clouds and rocks as big as houses? I could stick needles in you too. There are some over there in the alcove, by the lamp. Can you feel them in your flesh already?… But I don’t want to… I could get you to bark, like Beineberg does, make you lick the dust from the floor like a pig, I could make you perform certain acts – you know what I’m talking about – and at the same time sigh: ‘Oh, my dear Mother…’” Törless halted this blasphemy in mid-flow. “But I don’t want to; I don’t want to, do you hear me!”

  Basini was crying. “You’re tormenting me…”

  “Yes, I’m tormenting you. But that’s not my intention. I just want to know one thing: when I stick all this in you like knives, what does it feel like? What happens to you? Does something shatter inside you? Tell me! Like a glass that smashes into a thousand pieces although there’s no sign of a crack in it? Hasn’t the image that you had of yourself suddenly blown away on the breeze, while another one leaps out of the darkness and takes its place like a picture from a magic lantern? Do you really not understand what I’m saying? I can’t make it any clearer; it’s up to you to tell me!…”

  Basini was still crying. His girlish shoulders were shaking, he just kept repeating the same thing over and over again: “I don’t know what you want. I can’t explain it any more than I have. It just happened in a flash, there was nothing I could do to stop it. You would have behaved exactly the same as I did.”

  Törless didn’t reply. He stayed where he was, leaning against the wall, exhausted, not moving, staring straight ahead into the void.

  “If you were in my position you would have behaved exactly the same” – that was what Basini had said. If that were so, then events were no more than a necessity, something you did calmly and quietly without making a fuss.

  Törless’s self-consciousness rebelled against the effrontery of this suggestion, reacted with contempt. And yet this revolt of his whole being didn’t seem to offer adequate guarantees. “…Yes, I would have more strength of character than him, I wouldn’t stand for any such effrontery – but is that the most important thing? Is it important that out of moral strength, decency, for honourable motives that at the moment are secondary to me, I would behave any differently? No, it’s not important to know how I would behave, but to know that if one day I did behave like Basini, would I feel, like he does, that it was completely unremarkable? That’s the main thing: that my knowledge of myself would be as simple and unclouded by doubts as his is…”

  This thought, which came to him in disjointed, tangled fragments that were constantly being re-examined, added a faint yet intimate element of suffering to his contempt for Basini, one that was far more unsettling for his inner equanimity than any sense of morality, and which sprang from the memory of an emotion which he had recently felt and was unable to get out of his mind: that when he had found out from Basini that Reiting and Beineberg might be a threat to him he had been scared. Simply scared, like when you are attacked unexpectedly, and without thinking he had responded in a flash, looked for a way of retaliating as well as somewhere to take cover. He had done this in a moment of real danger, and the emotions he had experienced as a result, these rash, unthinking impulses, now began to tantalize him. He tried to unleash them again within himself, but to no avail. But he realized that they had deprived this threat of the possibility of being in any way unusual or ambiguous.

  Nonetheless, it was the same threat that he had foreseen a few weeks earlier in the same place. The night when he had been so strangely frightened by this room, which after the warm, brightly lit classrooms was like a relic from the Middle Ages, and by Beineberg and Reiting, who from being fellow pupils suddenly seemed to become quite different, something sinister, bloodthirsty, characters from another world. At the time it had been a form of metamorphosis, a great leap for him, as if he had woken after sleeping for a hundred years and had seen his surroundings with completely different eyes.

  And yet it was still the same threat… That was what he kept repeating to himself, while trying to compare the memory of these two feelings.

  In the meantime Basini had got up from the floor; he noticed Törless’s fixed, absent-minded gaze, quietly gathered up his clothes and crept out of the room.

  Törless saw him as if through a mist, but let him go without saying anything. His attention was concentrated on trying to locate the precise point where this change in his inner perspective had taken place.

  But whenever he approached it it moved away, as if he were trying to compare something very close with something far away; his memory never managed to seize hold of both feelings at once, and between them came another feeling, a kind of faint click which on a physical level was not unlike the barely perceptible muscular sensations that occur when the eye shifts in a new direction. Yet at the decisive moment it was always this that held his attention, the act of making a comparison took the place of the object that was being compared, there was a slight jolt and everything stopped.

  And each time he started again from the beginning.

  This almost mechanical process left him in something like an icy, waking dream, and for a while he just stood where he was, motionless.

  Then he was woken by a thought that brushed against his senses like a warm, gentle hand. A thought that seemed so obvious that he was surprised it hadn’t occurred to him a long time ago.

  It was a thought that did little more than register the experience that it had just had. Anything that looks vast and mysterious from a distance always seems simple when viewed from close up, and takes on normal, everyday proportions. It is as if there is an invisible boundary around human beings. Everything that approaches us from beyond this borderline is like a mist-covered ocean full of gigantic, constantly changing shapes; anything that crosses this border, becomes an action, touches our lives, is small, clear and of natural, human dimensions. And between the life we lead and the one we feel, whose existence we can only guess at and which we only see from a distance, there is an invisible boundary, like a narrow gateway where the images of past events have to make themselves smaller before they can find their way inside us.

  And yet however closely this resembled his own experience, he kept staring at the ground, lost in thought.

  “What an extraordinary idea,” he said to himself.

  Eventually he got back to bed. He had virtually banished all thoughts from his mind; thinking was so difficult, it achieved so little. What he had discovered about his friends’ clandestine activities probably passed through his subconscious, but it left him as indifferent and impassive as an article in a foreign newspaper.

  There was nothing more to expect from Basini. Although that was his problem! But it was such an unknown quantity, and he was so tired, so utterly exhausted. Maybe it was just an illusion – no more than that.

  All that remained was the image of Basini, his naked, radiant flesh, drifting like the scent of lilacs among the half-light of sensations and impressions that ushers in sleep. Eve
n his moral outrage had disappeared. Finally he fell asleep.

  No dreams came to disturb his rest. But a delicious warmth kept spreading soft rugs beneath his body, and it was this that eventually woke him. He almost cried out: Basini was sitting beside his bed! The next moment, with almost wild haste the other boy had pulled off his nightshirt, slipped under the covers and pressed his naked, trembling body against Törless.

  Before he had recovered from the shock of this invasion, he pushed Basini away.

  “What’s got into you?…”

  But Basini began to plead. “Oh, don’t start that again! There’s no one else like you. The others don’t despise me the way you do; they just pretend so later on they can look even more different. But you? You’re just you! You’re younger than me, although you’re stronger… we’re both younger than the others… you’re not rough and boastful like they are… you’re so gentle… I love you!…”

  “What? What do you mean? What do you want? Go away – get away from me!” Literally in pain, Törless pushed Basini’s shoulder to make him move away. But he was fixated by the presence of this soft, unfamiliar flesh burning so close to his own, and which seemed to surround him, stifle him. And all the time Basini was whispering: “Yes… oh yes… please, I’m begging you… I’ll gladly do anything you want.”

  Törless didn’t know what to say. As Basini was speaking, as he wasted valuable seconds thinking, trying to make up his mind, it was as if the same dark-green ocean had washed over his senses again. Only Basini’s frantically repeated words stood out, like the shimmering of tiny silverfish.

  He kept pushing him away with both arms, but a damp, heavy warmth seemed to weigh them down; and then his muscles went limp, he forgot all about them… It was only when a new, glittering word appeared that he woke up, and all of a sudden – as if in a terrifying, incomprehensible reality, a kind of dreamworld – he felt his hands drawing Basini closer.