by Robert Musil
Ulrich had released her. He could not bring himself to help undress her like a fond lover and stood apart, flinging off his own clothes. Gerda saw the man’s tall, straight body, powerfully poised between violence and beauty. Panic-stricken, she noticed that her own body, still standing there in her underthings, was covered with gooseflesh. Again she groped for words that might help her, that might make her less of a miserable figure where she stood. She longed to say something that would turn Ulrich into her lover in a way she vaguely imagined as dissolving in infinite sweetness, something one could achieve without having to do what she was about to do, something as blissful as it was indefinable. For an instant she saw herself standing with him in a field of candles growing out of the earth, row upon row to infinity, like so many pansies, all bursting into flame at her feet on signal. But as she could not utter a single word of all this, she went on feeling painfully unattractive and miserable, her arms trembling, unable to finish undressing; she had to clamp her bloodless lips together to keep them from twitching weirdly without a sound.
At this point Ulrich, who saw her agony and realized that the whole struggle up to now might come to nothing, went over to her and slipped off her shoulder straps. Gerda slid into bed like a boy. For an instant Ulrich saw a naked adolescent in motion; it affected him no more, sexually, than the sudden blinking of a fish. He guessed that Gerda had made up her mind to get it over with because it was too late to get out of it, and he had never yet perceived as clearly as in the instant he followed her into bed how much the passionate intrusion into another body is a sequel to a child’s liking for secret and forbidden hiding places. His hands encountered the girl’s skin, still bristling with fear, and he felt frightened too, instead of attracted. This body, already flabby while still unripe, repelled him; it made no sense to do what he was doing, and he would have liked nothing better than to escape from this bed, so that he had to call to mind everything he could think of that would help him to see it through. In his frantic haste he summoned up all the usual reasons people find nowadays to justify their acting without sincerity, or faith, or scruple, or satisfaction; and in abandoning himself to this effort he found, not, of course, any feeling of love, but a half-crazy anticipation of something like a massacre, a sex murder or, if there is such a thing, a lustful suicide, inspired by the demons of the void who lurk behind all of life’s images. This reminded him of his brawl with the hoodlums that night he met Bonadea, and he decided to be quicker this time. But now something awful happened. Gerda had been gathering up all her inner resources to alchemize them into willpower with which to resist the shameful terror she was suffering, as though she were facing her execution; but the instant she felt Ulrich beside her, so strangely naked, his hands on her bare skin, her body flung off all her will. Even while somewhere deep inside her she still felt a friendship beyond words for him, a trembling, tender longing to put her arms around him, kiss his hair, follow his voice to its source with her lips; and imagined that to touch his real self would make her melt like a fragment of snow on a warm hand—but it would have to be the Ulrich she knew, dressed as usual, as he appeared in the familiar setting of her parental home, not this naked stranger whose hostility she sensed and who did not take her sacrifice seriously even as he gave her no time to think what she was doing—Gerda suddenly heard herself screaming. Like a little cloud, a soap bubble, a scream hung in the air, and others followed, little screams expelled from her chest as though she were wrestling with something, a whimpering from which high-pitched cries of ee-ee bubbled and floated off, from lips that grimaced and twisted and were wet as if with deadly lust. She wanted to jump up, but she couldn’t move. Her eyes would not obey her and kept sending out signals without permission. Gerda was pleading to be let off, like a child facing some punishment or being taken to the doctor, who cannot go one step farther because it is being torn and convulsed by its own shrieks of terror. Her hands were up over her breasts, and she was menacing Ulrich with her nails while frantically pressing her long thighs together. This revolt of her body against herself was frightful. She perceived it with utmost clarity as a kind of theater, but she was also the audience sitting alone and desolate in the dark auditorium and could do nothing to prevent her fate from being acted out before her, in a screaming frenzy; nothing to keep herself from taking the lead in the performance.
Ulrich stared in horror into the tiny pupils of her veiled eyes, with their strangely unbending gaze, and watched, aghast, those weird motions in which desire and taboo, the soul and the soulless, were indescribably intertwined. His eye caught a fleeting glimpse of her pale fair skin and the short black hairs that shaded into red where they grew more densely. It occurred to him that he was facing a fit of hysteria, and he had no idea how to handle it. He was afraid that these horribly distressing screams might get even louder, and remembered that such a fit might be stopped by an angry shout or even by a sudden, vicious slap. Then the thought that this horror might have been avoided somehow led him to think that a younger man might persist in going further with Gerda even in these circumstances. “That might be a way of getting her over it,” he thought, “perhaps it’s a mistake to give in to her, now that the silly goose has let herself in too deep.” He did nothing of the sort; it was only that such irritable thoughts kept zigzagging through his mind while he was instinctively whispering an uninterrupted stream of comforting words, promising not to do anything to her, assuring her that nothing had really happened, asking her to forgive him, at the same time that all his words, swept up like chaff in his loathing of the scene she was making, seemed to him so absurd and undignified that he had to fight off a temptation to grab an armful of pillows to press on her mouth and choke off these shrieks that wouldn’t stop.
At long last her fit began to wear off and her body quieted down. Her eyes brimming with tears, she sat up in the bed, her little breasts drooping slackly from a body not yet under the mind’s full control. Ulrich took a deep breath, again overcome with repugnance at the inhuman, merely physical aspects of the experience. Gerda was regaining normal consciousness; something bloomed in her eyes, like the first actual awakening after the eyes have been open for some time, and she stared blankly ahead for a second, then noticed that she was sitting up stark naked and glanced at Ulrich; the blood came in great waves back to her face. Ulrich couldn’t think of anything better to do than whisper the same reassurances to her again; he put his arm around her shoulder, drew her to his chest, and told her to think nothing of it. Gerda found herself back in the situation that had driven her to hysteria, but now everything looked strangely pale and forlorn: the tumbled bed, her nude body in the arms of a man intently whispering to her, the feelings that had brought her to this. She was fully aware of what it all meant, but she also knew that something horrible had happened, something she would rather not focus on, and while she could tell that Ulrich’s voice sounded more tender, all it meant was that he regarded her as a sick person, but it was he who had made her sick! Still, it no longer mattered; all she wanted was to be gone from this place, to get away without having to say a word.
She dropped her head and pushed Ulrich away, felt for her camisole, and pulled it over her head like a child or someone who did not care how she looked. Ulrich helped her to dress, he even pulled her stockings up over her legs, and he also felt as though he were dressing a child. Gerda was a bit unsteady on her feet when she stood up. She thought of how she had felt earlier in the day when she left home, the home to which she was about to return, and felt, in deep misery and shame, that she had not passed the test. She did not utter a word in answer to anything Ulrich was saying. A very distant memory came back to her, of Ulrich once saying, as a joke on himself, that solitude sometimes led him into excess. She did not feel angry at him. She simply wanted never again to hear him say anything whatsoever. When he offered to get her a cab she only shook her head, pulled her hat on over her ruffled hair, and left him without a glance. Seeing her walk away with her veil now sadly trailing from
her hand, he felt awkward as a schoolboy. He probably should not have let her go in this state, but he could think of no way to stop her, half-dressed as he was because he had been attending to her, unprepared even to confront the serious mood in which he was left, as though he would have to get fully dressed before he could decide what to do with himself.
120
THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN CAUSES A STIR
When Walter reached the center of town he sensed something in the air. There was no visible difference in the way people moved on the sidewalks or in the carriages and streetcars, and if there was something unusual here and there it faded out before one could tell what it was; nevertheless, everything seemed to be carrying a little sign pointing in one direction, and Walter had barely walked a few steps before he felt such a sign on himself as well. He followed the indicated direction and felt that the Department of Fine Arts official he was, as well as the struggling painter and musician, and even Clarisse’s tormented husband, were all giving way to a person who was none of the above. The very streets, with all their bustle and their ornate, pompous buildings, seemed to be in an analogous “expectant state,” as though the hard facets of a crystal were being dissolved in some liquid medium and about to fall back into an earlier, more amorphous condition. However conservative he was in rejecting innovations, he was also always ready in his own mind to condemn the present, and the dissolution of the existing order that he was now sensing was positively stimulating. As in his recent daydream, the crowds he ran into had an aura of mobility and haste, and a unity that seemed more unforced than the usual group spirit based on intellect, morality, and sound security measures; more that of a free, informal community. They made him think of a huge bunch of flowers just after it has been untied, opening freely without, however, falling apart; and of a body unclothed, standing free, smiling, naked, having no need of words. Nor was he troubled when, quickening his pace, he ran into a large contingent of police standing by; he enjoyed the sight, like that of a military camp in readiness for the alarm to be given; all those red uniform collars, dismounted riders, movements of small units reporting their arrival or departure, stirred his senses into a warlike mood.
Beyond this point, where a cordon was about to be drawn across the street, the scene was more somber. There were hardly any women on the sidewalks, and even the colorful uniforms of the army officers who normally were seen hereabouts when off duty had somehow been swallowed up by the prevailing uncertainty. There were still many pedestrians like himself coming downtown, but the impression they gave was more that of chaff and litter in the wake of a strong gust of wind. Soon he saw the first groups forming, apparently held together not only by curiosity but just as much by indecision whether to follow the unusual attraction farther or to turn around and go home.
Walter’s questions elicited a variety of answers. Some said that there was a great patriotic parade; others thought they had heard of a protest march against certain dangerously nationalistic activists, and opinions were equally split as to whether the general uproar was caused by the Pan-Germans protesting against the government’s coddling of the Slavic minorities, as most people thought, or by loyal supporters of the government urging all patriotic Kakanians to march shoulder-to-shoulder in its defense against such continual disorders. They were all tagalongs like himself and knew nothing more than he had already heard rumored at the office, but an irrepressible itch to gossip led Walter on to speak to people, and even though they mostly admitted to having no idea, or laughed the whole thing off as a joke, including their own curiosity, the farther he went the more everyone seemed to be in agreement that it was high time something was done, though no one volunteered to tell him just what that should be. As he kept on, he noticed more often on the faces he met something senseless that overflowed and drowned out reason itself, something that told him that no one cared any longer what was happening, wherever they were being drawn to, as long as it was something unusual that would “take them out of themselves,” if only in the attenuated form of a common general excitement, suggesting a remote kinship with long-forgotten states of communal ecstasy and transfiguration, a sort of developing unconscious readiness to leap out of their clothes, and even their skins.
Trading speculations and saying things that were not at all in character, Walter fell in with the rest, who were gradually transforming themselves from small crumbling groups of people, just waiting, and other people walking aimlessly along, into a procession that advanced toward the supposed scene of events, still without any definite intent yet visibly growing in density and energy. Emotionally they were still at the stage where they were like rabbits scampering about outside their burrows, ready to scurry back inside at the slightest sign of danger, when from the front of the disordered procession, far ahead and out of sight, a more definite sort of excitement came rippling back toward the rear. Up there a group of students, young men anyway, who had already taken some sort of action and had returned from “the battlefield,” joined the vanguard, and sounds of talking and shouting too far away to be understood, garbled messages, and waves of excitement were running through the crowd and, depending on the listeners’ temperaments or what scraps of information they snatched up, spread indignation or fear, the itch to fight or some moral imperative, causing the gathering mob to thrust forward in a mood guided by the kind of commonplace notions that take a different form inside every head but are of so little significance, despite being uppermost in the consciousness, that they join in a single vital force that affects the muscles more than the brain. In the midst of this moving throng Walter also became infected and soon found himself in that stimulated but vacuous state rather like the early stages of drunkenness. Nobody really knows the exact nature of the change that turns individuals with a will of their own into a mob with a single will, capable of going to the wildest extremes of good or evil and incapable of stopping to think anything through, even if most of the individuals involved have spent their lives dedicated to moderation and prudence in the conduct of their private affairs. A mob in a state of mounting excitement for which it has no outlet will probably discharge all that energy into the first available channel, and those among its participants who are the most excitable, sensitive, and most vulnerable to pressure, those at the extreme ends of the spectrum who are primed to commit sudden acts of violence or rise to unprecedented levels of sentimental generosity, are most likely to set the example and lead the way; they are the points of least resistance in the mass, but the shout that is uttered through them rather than by them, the stone that somehow finds its way into their hands, the emotion into which they burst, is what opens the way along which the others, who have been generating excitement among themselves to the point where it must be discharged, then come surging in a frenzy, giving to what happens the character of mob action, which is experienced by those involved in it as both compulsion and liberation.
What makes such agitated behavior interesting, incidentally, observable as it is among spectators of any sporting event or among crowds listening to speeches, is not so much the psychology of the emotional release it affords as the question of what it is that primes people to get themselves into such a state in the first place. Assuming that life makes sense, even its senseless manifestations would have some meaning and would not necessarily look like mere demonstrations of mental deficiency. Walter happened to know this better than most and could think of all sorts of remedies for it, so that he was constantly struggling against being swept along by this tidal wave of communal passion, which, demeaning as it was, nevertheless raised his spirits sky-high. The thought of Clarisse flashed through his mind. What a good thing she isn’t here, he thought; she’d be crushed flat. A stab of grief kept him from pursuing his thought of her—with it had come the all-too-distinct impression she had given him of being raving mad. Maybe I’m the one that’s mad, he thought, because it’s taken me so long to notice it. I soon will be, if I go on living with her. I don’t believe it, he thought, but there’s no do
ubt about it. Right between my hands her darling face turned into a hideous mask, he thought. But he couldn’t think it all through properly; his mind was awash with despair. He could only feel that despite his helpless anguish for her, it was incomparably finer to love Clarisse than to be running with the pack here—and to escape his fears, he pressed himself deeper into the ranks of the marchers.
Meanwhile Ulrich had arrived at the Palais Leinsdorf, though by another route. As he turned into the gate he noticed a double guard at the entrance and a large detachment of police stationed inside the courtyard. His Grace welcomed him with composure, while apparently aware of having become a target of popular disfavor.
“I think I once told you that anything favored by a good many people is sure to turn out to be worthwhile. Well, I have to take that back. Of course, there are exceptions,” he said.