by Robert Musil
When the two friends came in she was, as usual, lying on her bed, smoking and reading.
Even as he hesitated in the doorway, Törless was greedily devouring her with his eyes.
“Bless my soul, look at the pretty boys that have come!” she called out in scornful greeting, surveying them with a shade of contempt. “Well, young Baron? What'll Mamma say to this, eh?” This was the sort of welcome to be expected from her.
“Oh, shut up!” Beineberg muttered, sitting down on the bed beside her. Törless sat down at some distance; he was annoyed with Bozena for taking no notice of him and pretending she did not know him.
Visits to this woman had recently become his sole and secret delight. Towards the end of the week he would become restless, scarcely able to wait for Sunday, when he would steal off to her in the evening. It was chiefly this necessary stealth that preoccupied him. What, for instance, if the drunken yokels in the bar-room just now had taken it into their heads to pursue him? Say for the sheer pleasure of taking a swipe at the vicious young gentleman. .. . He was no coward, but he knew he was defenceless here. By comparison with those big fists his dainty sword was a mockery. And apart from that, the disgrace and the punishment that would follow! There would be nothing for it but to run, or to plead for mercy. Or to let himself be protected by Bozena. The thought went shuddering through him. But that was it! That was just it! Nothing else! This fear, this self-abandonment, was what seduced him anew every time. This stepping out of his privileged position and going among common people-among them? no, lower than them!
He was not vicious. When it came to the point his repugnance always had the upper hand, and together with it his fear of possible consequences. It was only his imagination that had taken an unhealthy turn. When the days of the week began to lay themselves, leaden, one by one, upon his life, these searing lures began to work upon him. The memories of these visits gradually took on the character of a peculiar temptation. Bozena appeared to him as a creature of monstrous degradation, and his relationship to her, with the sensations it evoked in him, was like a cruel rite of self-sacrifice. It fascinated him to have to break the bounds of his ordinary life, leaving behind his privileged position, the ideas and feelings with which he was, as it were, being injected, all those things that gave him nothing and only oppressed him. It fascinated him to throw everything to the winds and, shorn of it all, to go racing off crazily and take his refuge with this woman.
This was no different from the way it is with such young people generally. Had Bozena been pure and beautiful and had he been capable of love at that time, he would perhaps have sunk his teeth in her flesh, so heightening their lust to the pitch of pain. For the awakening boy's first passion is not love for the one, but hatred for all. The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.
Almost every first passion is of short duration and leaves a bitter after-taste. It is a mistake, a disappointment. Afterwards one cannot understand how one could ever have felt it, and does not know what to blame for it all. That is because the characters in this drama are to a large extent accidental to each other: chance companions on some wild flight. When everything has calmed down, they no longer recognise each other. They become aware of discordant elements in each other, since they are no longer aware of any concord.
With Törless it was different only because he was alone. The aging and degraded prostitute could not release all the forces in him. Yet she was woman enough to, as it were, bring to the surface, prematurely, particles of his innermost being, of all that still lay dormant in him waiting for the moment of fulfillment.
Such, then, were his weird imaginings and fantastic temptations. But at times he was almost as ready to fling himself on the ground, screaming with desperation.
* * *
Bozena was still taking no notice of Törless. She seemed to be behaving in this way out of spite, merely in order to annoy him. Suddenly she broke the talk off by saying: “Give me some money, you boys, I'll fetch tea and gin.”
Törless gave her one of the silver coins that had been a present from his mother that afternoon.
She took a battered spirit-lamp from the window-sill and lit it. Then she went out, slowly shuffling down the stairs.
Beineberg nudged Törless. “Why are you being such a bore? She'll think you're scared.”
“Leave me out of it,” Törless said. “I'm not in the mood. You go ahead and have your fun with her. By the way, why does she keep on about your mother like that?”
“Since she's known my name she insists she was once in service with my aunt and knew my mother. I dare say there's some truth in it, but I'm sure the rest is a lie-she likes lying. Anyway, I can't quite see what the joke is.”
Törless blushed. A strange thought had just occurred to him. But at that moment Bozena came back with the gin and sat down on the bed again beside Beineberg. And she at once took the conversation up where it had been dropped.
“Yes, your Mamma was a good-looking girl. You don't take after her very much, really, with those ears of yours sticking out like that. She was a gay one, too. There were plenty of men after her, I dare say. How right she was.
After a pause, something particularly amusing seemed to occur to her. “You know your uncle, the dragoon officer... Karl was his name, I think, he was a cousin of your mother's. How he did pay court to her! But on Sundays, when the ladies were in church, he was after me. Every few minutes I had to be bringing something to his room for him. A stylish chap he was, I remember him well, but he didn't beat around the bush much, I must say. . .” And she laughed insinuatingly. Then she continued elaborating this theme, which apparently afforded her particular pleasure. Her manner of speech was impertinently familiar, and her tone was even more scurrilous than her words. “. . . It's my guess your mother had a liking for him too. If she'd only known about the goings-on! I dare say your aunt would have had to kick me out of the house, and him too. That's the way fine ladies are, and all the more when they haven't got a man yet. Dear Bozena here and dear Bozena there-that's the way it went all day long. But when the cook got in the family way, my word, you should have heard them! I'm sure what they think about the like of us is that we only wash our feet once a year. Not that they said a word to the cook, but I heard plenty when I happened to be in the room and they happened to be talking about it. Your mother looked as if she felt like drinking nothing but eau-de-Cologne. And for all that it wasn't so long before your aunt herself had a belly on her so big it nearly touched her nose. . .
While Bozena was talking, Törless felt almost totally defenceless against her coarse innuendos.
He could see vividly before his eyes what she was describing Beineberg's mother turned into his own. He remembered the bright rooms at home; the well-cared-for, immaculate, unapproachable faces that often inspired him with a certain awe when his parents gave dinner-parties; the cultivated, cool hands that seemed to lose none of their dignity even while handling knife and fork. Many such details came back to his mind, and he was ashamed of being here in a malodorous little room, trembling whenever he replied to the humiliating words uttered by a prostitute. His memory of the perfected manners of that society, which never for an instant allowed itself any slip out of its own style, had a stronger effect on him than any moral considerations. The upheaval of his dark passions suddenly seemed ridiculous. With visionary intensity he saw the cool gesture of rejection, the shocked smile, with which those people would brush him off, like a small, unclean animal. Nevertheless he remained sitting where he was, as though transfixed.
For with every detail that he remembered riot only the shame grew greater in him, but with it a chain of ugly thoughts. It had begun when Beineberg explained what Bozena was talking about and Törless had blushed.
At that moment he had suddenly found him
self thinking of his own mother, and this now held him in its grip and he could not shake it off. At first it had simply shot across the frontiers of his consciousness-a mere flash of something, too far away to be recognised, on the very edge of his mind-something that could scarcely be called a thought at all. And immediately it had been followed by a series of questions that were meant to cover it up: 'What is it that makes it possible for this woman Bozena to bring her debased existence into proximity with my mother's existence? To squeeze up against her in the narrow space of one and the same thought? Why does she not bow down and touch the ground with her forehead when she speaks of her, if she must speak of her at all? Why isn't it as plain as if there were an abyss between them that they have nothing whatsoever in common? How can it be like this?-this woman, who is for me a maze of all sexual lust, and my mother, who up to now moved through my life like a star, beyond the reach of all desire, in some cloudless distance, clear and without depths
But all these questions were not the core of the matter. They scarcely touched it. They were something secondary, something that occurred to Törless only afterwards. They multiplied only because none of them pointed to the real thing. They were only ways of dodging the real problem, circumlocutions for the fact that, all at once, preconsciously, instinctively, an association of feelings had come about that was an inimical answer to the questions even before they were formulated. Törless devoured Bozena with his eyes, and at the same time was unable to put his mother out of his mind. It
was his being that linked them one with another, inextricably; everything else was only a writhing under this convolution of ideas. This was the sole fad. But because he was unable to shake himself free of its tyranny, it assumed a terrible, vague significance that hovered over all his efforts like a perfidious smile.
* * *
Törless looked around the room, trying to rid himself of these thoughts. But by now everything had taken on the one aspect. The little iron stove with the patches of rust on the lid, the bed with the rickety posts and the paint peeling off the wooden frame, the dirty blankets showing through holes in the worn counterpane; Bozena with her shift slipping off one shoulder, the common, glaring red of her petticoat, and her broad, cackling laughter; and finally Beineberg, whose behaviour by contrast with other times struck Törless as like that of a lecherous priest who had taken leave of his senses and was weaving equivocal words into the solemn formulae of a prayer: all this was urgent in one and the same direction, invading him and violently turning his thoughts back again and again.
Only at one place did his gaze, which fled nervously from one thing to another, find rest. That was above the little curtain over the lower half of the window. There the sky looked in, with the clouds travelling across it, and the unmoving moon.
Then he felt as if he had suddenly stepped out of doors into the fresh, calm air of the night. For a while all his thoughts grew still. A pleasant memory came back to him: that of the house they had taken in the country the previous summer. . . nights in the silent grounds . . . a velvety dark firmament tremulous with stars . . . his mother's voice from the depths of the garden, where she was strolling on the faintly glimmering gravel paths, together with his father . . . songs that she hummed quietly to herself . . . But at once-a cold shudder went through him-there was again this tormenting comparison. What must the two of them have been feeling then? love? The thought came to him now for the first time. But no, that was something entirely different. That was nothing for grown-up people, and least of all for his parents. Sitting at the open window at night and feeling abandoned by everyone, feeling different from the grown-ups, misunderstood by every laugh and every mocking glance, being unable to explain to anybody what one already felt oneself to be, and yearning for her, the one who would understand-that was love! But in order to feel that one must be young and lonely. With them it must have been something different, something calm and composed. Mamma simply hummed a little song there in the evening, in the dark garden, and was cheerful. - -.
But that was the very thing Törless could not understand. The patient plans that for the adult imperceptibly link the days into months and years were still beyond his ken. And so too was that blunting of perception which makes it cease to be anything of a problem when yet another day draws to its close. His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.
That was why he had always supposed there was something behind it that they were keeping from him. The nights seemed to him like dark gateways to mysterious joys that were kept a secret from him, so that his life remained empty and unhappy.
He recalled the peculiar ring of his mother's laughter and how, as he had observed on one of those evenings, she had clung more tightly, as though jokingly, to her husband's arm. There seemed to be no doubt. There must be a gate leading hither even out of the world of those calm and irreproachable beings. And now, since he knew, he could think of it only with that special smile of his, expressing the malicious mistrust against which he struggled in vain ...
Meanwhile Bozena had gone on talking. Törless began to listen with half an ear. She was talking about somebody who also came almost every Sunday. “Let me see now, what's his name? He's in your class.”
“Reiting?”
“What does he look like?”
“He's about as tall as him over there,” Bozena said with a jerk of her head in Törless's direction, “only his head is a bit too big.”
“Oh, Basini?”
“Yes, that's right, that's what he said his name was. He's really comical. And quite the fine gentleman, drinks nothing but wine.
But he's stupid. It costs him a pretty penny, and he never does anything but tell me stories. He boasts about the love-affairs he says he has at home. What does he get out of it? I can see quite plainly it's the first time in his life he's been with a woman. You're only a young lad too, but you've got a nerve. But he's clumsy and frightened of it, and that's why he spins his long-winded stories about how to treat women if you're a sensualist-yes, that's what he calls himself. He says women don't deserve anything else. How do the like of you know that so soon, I wonder?”
By way of answer Beineberg grinned at her mockingly.
“Oh all right, laugh if you like!” Bozena flung at him in amusement. “One time I asked him if he wouldn't be ashamed for his mother to know. 'Mother? Mother?' he said. 'What's that? There's no such thing now. I left that at home, before I came to see you. - -
Yes, you may well prick up your big ears, that's what you boys are like! Good little sons you are, you fine young gentlemen! It almost makes me sorry for your mothers!”
At these words Törless recalled his former notion of himself, realizing how he was leaving everything behind him and betraying the image of his parents. And now he had to admit to himself that ~n this he was not even doing something unique and terrible; it was really quite commonplace. He was ashamed. But the other thought were there again too. They do it too! They betray you! You have secret accomplices! Perhaps it is somehow different with them, but this one thing must be the same: a secret, frightful joy. Something ~n which one can drown oneself and all one's fear of the monotony of the days. - - Perhaps indeed they know more? - . - something quite extraordinary? For in the daytime they are so calm . . - Arid that laughter of his mother's? . . - as though she were going, with quiet steps, to shut all the doors -
In this conflict there came a moment when Törless abandoned himself, letting the tempest rage over his suffocating heart.
And at that very moment Bozena got up and came over to him.
“Why is our little boy not talking? Miserable, eh?”
Beineberg whispered something and smiled spitefully.
“Homesick, eh? Mamma's gone away, has she? And the moment she's gone the naughty boy comes running to the like of me'.”
Bozena du
g her fingers caressingly into his hair.
“Come on, don't be silly. Give me a kiss, that's right. You fine gentry are only made of flesh and blood, after all, the same as everyone else,” and she bent his head back.
Törless wanted to say something, to pull himself together and utter some crude joke, for he felt that everything now depended on his being able to speak some indifferent word that would not betray him. But he could not utter a sound. With a stony smile he gazed into the depraved face, the blank eyes looking down into his own, and then the outer world began to shrink, to withdraw further and further.. . . For a moment there loomed before him the image of the peasant who had picked up the stone, and it seemed to jeer at him. Then he was quite alone.
“I say,” Reiting whispered, “I've got him.” Who?”
“The chap who's been stealing from the lockers!”
Törless had just come in, together with Beineberg. It was only a short time till supper, and the usher on duty had already left. Groups of chattering boys had formed between the green baize tables, and the whole large room hummed and whirred with warm life. It was the usual classroom with whitewashed walls, a big black crucifix, and portraits of the Emperor and Empress on each side of the blackboard. Beside the large iron stove, which was not yet lighted, the boys sat-some of them on the platform, some of them on overturned chairs-among them those who had been at the railway station that afternoon to see Törless's parents off. Apart from Reiting they were the tall Hofmeier and Dschjusch, a little Polish count who was known by this nickname.