by Robert Musil
Dr. Friedenthal stopped in front of an iron door and took a flat key from his pants pocket. When he opened the door they stepped out from the shelter of the building and were blinded by the brightness. At the same moment Clarisse heard a frightful shriek such as she had never heard before in her life. For all her pluckiness, she winced.
“Just a horse!” Dr. Friedenthal said, smiling.
And in fact they were on a road that led from the front gate, along the side of the administration building, and around to the kitchen yard of the institution. It was no different from other such roads, with old wheel tracks and homely weeds on which the sun was blazing hotly. And yet all the others too, with the exception of Dr. Friedenthal, felt oddly disconcerted and—in a startled, confused fashion—almost indignant, to find themselves on a wholesome and ordinary road after having already survived a long, arduous passage. Freedom, at first blush, had something disconcerting about it, even though it was incredibly comforting; it actually took some getting used to again. With Clarisse, who was more vulnerable to the clash of contrasts, the tension shattered in a loud giggle.
Still smiling, Dr. Friedenthal strode ahead across the road and on the other side opened a small but heavy iron door in the high wall of a park. “This is where it begins,” he said gently.
And now they really found themselves inside that world to which Clarisse had felt herself inexplicably attracted for weeks, not only with the shudder at something incommensurable and impenetrable, but as though she were fated to experience something there that she could not imagine beforehand. At first there was nothing to differentiate this world from any other big old park, with the greensward sloping up in one direction toward groups of tall trees, among which small white villa-like buildings could be seen. The sweep of the sky behind them gave promise of a lovely view, and from one such lookout point Clarisse saw patients with attendants standing and sitting in groups, looking like white angels.
General Stumm took this as the right moment to resume his conversation with Ulrich. “Now, let me prime you a bit more for this evening,” he began. “The Italians, the Russians, the French, and the English too, you know, are all arming, and we—”
“You want your artillery; I know that already,” Ulrich interrupted.
“Among other things!” the General continued. “But if you don’t ever let me finish, we’ll soon be among the loonies and won’t be able to talk in peace. So, as I was saying, we’re in the middle of all this, in a very risky position from the military point of view. And in this fix we’re being badgered—I’m referring to the Parallel Campaign—to think of nothing but the goodness of man!”
“And your people are against it! I understand.”
“Not at all, on the contrary!” Stumm protested. “We’re not against it! We take pacifism very seriously! But we must get our artillery budget through. And if we could do that hand in hand with pacifism, so to speak, it would be the best safeguard against all those imperialistic misunderstandings that are so quick to assert that we’re endangering world peace! It’s true, if you like, that we’re in bed with La Drangsal, just a little. But we also have to proceed with caution because her opposition, the nationalist movements, who now have their people inside the Campaign too, are against pacifism and in favor of getting our army up to scratch!”
The General had to cut himself short, with an expression of bitterness, for they had almost reached the top of the incline, where Dr. Friedenthal was awaiting his troop. The angels’ gathering place turned out to be lightly fenced in; their guide crossed it without paying it much attention, as a mere prelude. “A ‘quiet’ ward,” he explained.
They were all women; their hair hung loose down to their shoulders, and their faces were repellent, with fat, blurred, puffy features. One of them came rushing up to the doctor and forced a letter on him. “It’s always the same thing,” Dr. Friedenthal explained to his visitors and read aloud: “‘Adolf, my love! When are you coming to see me? Have you forgotten me?’” The woman, about sixty, stood there with an apathetic face and listened. “You’ll send it out right away, won’t you?” she begged. “Of course!” Dr. Friedenthal promised, then he tore the letter into pieces in front of her eyes and smiled at the nurse. Clarisse instantly challenged him: “How could you do this?” she asked. “These patients must be taken seriously!”
“Come along,” Dr. Friedenthal said. “There’s no point in wasting our time here. If you like, I’ll show you hundreds of such letters later. You must have noticed that the old woman didn’t react at all when I tore it up?”
Clarisse was disconcerted, because what Dr. Friedenthal said was true, but it confused her thoughts. And before she could straighten them out again, they were further disturbed when, on their way out, another old woman, who had been lying in wait for them, lifted up her skirt and exposed to the passing gentlemen her ugly old-woman’s thighs up to her belly, above coarse woolen stockings.
“The old sow,” Stumm von Bordwehr muttered, sufficiently outraged and disgusted to forget politics for a while.
But Clarisse had discovered a resemblance between the thigh and the face. The thigh probably showed the same stigmata of fatty physical degeneration as the face, but this gave Clarisse for the first time an impression of strange correspondences and a world that worked differently from what one could grasp with the usual categories. She also now realized that she had not noticed the transformation of the white angels into these women, and indeed that even while walking through their midst she had not been able to distinguish the patients from the nurses. She turned around and looked back, but because the path had curved behind a building, she could no longer see anything and stumbled after the others like a child that turns its head away. From this point on, her impressions no longer formed the transparent flow of events that one accepts life to be, but became a foaming torrent with only occasional smooth patches that stuck in the memory.
“Another quiet ward, this time for men,” Dr. Friedenthal announced, gathering his flock at the entrance to a building, and when they paused at the first bed he presented its occupant to them in a considerately lowered voice as a case of “depressive dementia paralytica.”
“An old syphilitic. Delusions of sin and nihilistic obsessions,” Siegmund whispered, translating the terms for his sister. Clarisse found herself face-to-face with an old gentleman who, to all appearances, had once belonged to the upper reaches of society. He sat upright in bed, was perhaps in his late fifties, and had a very white skin. His well-cared-for and highly intelligent face was framed in thick white hair and looked as improbably distinguished as the faces one finds described only in the cheapest novels.
“Couldn’t one do a portrait of him?” Stumm von Bordwehr asked. “The very model of intellectual beauty! I’d love to give the portrait to your cousin!” he said to Ulrich.
Dr. Friedenthal gave a sad smile and commented: “The noble expression is caused by a slackening of tension in the facial muscles.” He demonstrated with a quick movement the unresponsive fixity of the man’s pupils, then led them onward. There was not enough time for all the available material. The old gentleman, who had nodded mournfully to everything said at his bedside, was still muttering in a low, troubled voice when the five of them stopped again, several beds farther on, to consider the next case Dr. Friedenthal had chosen for them.
This time it was someone who was himself engaged in art, a cheerful, fat painter whose bed stood close to a sunny window. He had paper and many pencils on his blanket, and busied himself with them all day long. Clarisse was immediately struck by the happy restlessness of his movements. “That’s the way Walter should be painting!” she thought. Friedenthal, seeing her interest, quickly snatched a sheet of paper from the fat man and handed it to Clarisse; the painter snickered and behaved like a serving girl who’d just been pinched. But Clarisse was amazed to see a sketch for a large composition, drawn with sure, accomplished strokes, entirely sensible to the point of banality, with many figures woven together i
n accurate perspective and a large hall, everything executed in meticulous detail, so that the whole effect was of something so salutary and professorial that it could have come from the National Academy. “What amazing craftsmanship !” she cried impulsively.
Dr. Friedenthal responded with a flattered smile.
The artist gleefully made a rude noise at him.
“You see, that gentleman likes it! Show him some more, go on! Amazing how good it is, he said! Go on, show him! I know you’re only laughing at me, but he likes it!” He spoke good-humoredly, holding out the rest of his drawings to the doctor, with whom he seemed to be on easy terms although the doctor didn’t appreciate his work.
“We don’t have time for you today,” Dr. Friedenthal told him and, turning to Clarisse, summed up the case by saying: “He’s not schizophrenic; sorry he’s the only one we have here at the moment. Schizophrenics are often fine artists, quite modern.”
“And insane?” Clarisse said dubiously.
“Why not?” Dr. Friedenthal answered sadly.
Clarisse bit her lip.
Meanwhile Stumm and Ulrich were already on the threshold to the next ward, and the General was saying: “Looking at this, I’m really sorry I called my orderly an idiot this morning. I’ll never do it again!” For the ward they were facing was a room with extreme cases of idiocy.
Clarisse had not yet seen this and was thinking: “So even academic art, so respectably and widely recognized, has a sister in Bedlam—a sister denied, deprived, and yet so much a twin one can barely tell the difference!” This almost impressed her more than Friedenthal’s remark that another time he might be able to show her expressionist artists. She made up her mind to take him up on it. Her head was down, and she was still biting her lip. There was something wrong with all this. It seemed to her clearly wrong to lock up such gifted people; the doctors might know about diseases, she thought, but probably did not understand art and all it stood for. Something would have to be done, she felt. But it was not clear to her what. Yet she did not lose heart, for the fat painter had immediately called her “that gentleman”—it seemed to her a good omen.
Friedenthal scrutinized her with curiosity.
When she felt his gaze she looked up with her thin-lipped smile and moved toward him, but before she could say anything an appalling sight made her mind a blank. In this new ward a series of horrible apparitions crouched and sat in their beds, everything about their bodies crooked, unclean, twisted, or paralyzed. Decayed teeth. Waggling heads. Heads too big, too small, totally misshapen. Slack, drooping jaws from which saliva was dribbling, or brutish grinding motions of the mouth, without food or words. Yard-wide leaden barriers seemed to lie between these souls and the world, and after the low chuckling and buzzing in the other room, the silence here, broken only by obscure grunting and muttering sounds, was oppressive. Such wards for severe mental deficiency are among the most horrifying sights to be found in the hideousness of a mental institution, and Clarisse felt herself plunged headlong into a ghastly darkness that blotted out all distinctions.
But their guide, Friedenthal, could see even in the dark, and pointing to various beds, he explained: “That’s idiocy over there, and over here you have cretinism.”
Stumm von Bordwehr pricked up his ears. “A cretin is not the same as an idiot?” he asked.
“No,” the doctor said, “there’s a medical distinction.”
“Interesting,” Stumm said. “In ordinary life one would never think of such a thing.”
Clarisse moved from bed to bed. Her eyes bored into the patients, as she tried with all her might to understand, without succeeding in the least in gleaning anything from these faces that took no cognizance of her. All thought in them was extinguished. Dr. Friedenthal followed her softly and explained: “congenital amaurotic idiocy”; “tubercular hypertrophic sclerosis”; “idiotia thymica . . .”
The General, who meanwhile felt that he had seen enough of these “morons” and assumed that Ulrich felt the same way, glanced at his watch and said: “Now, where were we? We mustn’t waste time!” And rather unexpectedly he resumed: “So, if you’ll bear in mind: the War Ministry finds itself flanked by the pacifists on one side and the nationalists on the other. . . .”
Ulrich, not so quick to tear his mind away from his surroundings, gave him a blank stare.
“This is no joke, my friend!” Stumm explained. “I’m talking politics! Something’s got to be done. We’ve come to a stop once before already. If we don’t do something soon, the Emperor’s birthday will be upon us before we know it, and we’ll look like fools. But what is to be done? It’s a logical question, isn’t it? And summing up rather bluntly what I told you, we’re being pushed by one crowd to help them love mankind, and by the other to let them bully the rest of the world so that the nobler blood will prevail, or however you want to call it. There’s something to be said for both sides. Which is why, in a word, you should somehow bring them together so there’ll be no damage!”
“Me?” Ulrich protested at his friend’s bombshell, and would have burst out laughing in other circumstances.
“Certainly you—who else?” the General replied decisively. “I’ll do all I can to help, but you’re the campaign’s secretary and Leinsdorf’s right hand!”
“I can get you admitted here!” Ulrich announced firmly.
“Fine!” The General knew from the art of war that it was best to avoid unexpected resistance in the most unruffled manner possible. “If you get me in here I might meet someone who has found the Greatest Idea in the world. Outside they seem to have lost their taste for great ideas anyway.” He glanced at his watch again. “I hear they’ve got some people here who are the Pope, or the universe. We haven’t met a single one, and they’re the ones I was most looking forward to getting acquainted with. Your little friend’s terribly conscientious,” he complained.
Dr. Friedenthal gently eased Clarisse away from the defectives.
Hell is not interesting, it is terrifying. If it has not been humanized—as by Dante, who populated it with writers and other prominent figures, thereby distracting attention from the technicalities of punishment—but an attempt has been made to represent it in some original fashion, even the most fertile minds never get beyond childish tortures and unimaginative distortions of physical realities. But it is precisely the bare idea of an unimaginable and therefore inescapable everlasting punishment and agony, the premise of an inexorable change for the worse, impervious to any attempt to reverse it, that has the fascination of an abyss. Insane asylums are also like that. They are poorhouses. They have something of hell’s lack of imagination. But many people who have no idea of the causes of mental illness are afraid of nothing so much, next to losing their money, as that they might one day lose their minds; an amazing number of people are plagued by the notion that they could suddenly lose themselves. It is apparently an overestimation of their self-worth that leads to the overestimation of the horror with which the sane imagine mental institutions to be imbued. Even Clarisse suffered a faint disappointment, which stemmed from some vague expectation implanted by her upbringing. It was quite the contrary with Dr. Friedenthal. He was used to these rounds. Order as in a military barracks or another mass institution, alleviation of conspicuous pains or complaints, prevention of avoidable deterioration, a slight improvement or a cure: these were the elements of his daily activity. Observing a good deal, knowing a good deal, without having a sufficient explanation for the overall problems, was his intellectual portion. These rounds through the wards, prescribing a few sedatives besides the usual medications for coughs, colds, constipation, and bedsores, were his daily work of healing. He felt the ghostly horror of the world he lived in only when the contrast was awakened through contact with the normal world, which did not happen every day, but visits are such occasions, and that was why what Clarisse got to see had been prepared not without a certain sense of theatrical production, so that no sooner had he aroused her from her absorption with on
e phenomenon that he immediately went on to something new and even more dramatic.
They had hardly left this ward when they were joined by several large men in crisp white uniforms, with hulking shoulders and jovial corporals’ faces. It happened so silently that it had the effect of a drum roll.
“Now we’re coming to a disturbed ward,” Dr. Friedenthal announced, and they approached a screaming and squawking that seemed to issue from an immense birdcage. They stood in front of a door that had no handle, which had to be opened with a special key by one of the attendants. Clarisse started to enter first, as she had done up until now, but Dr. Friedenthal pulled her back roughly.
“Wait!” he said with emphasis, wearily, without apology.
The attendant who had opened the door had opened it only a crack, while covering the open space with his powerful body; after first listening and then peering inside, he hastily slipped in, followed by a second attendant, who took up a position at the other side of the entrance. Clarisse’s heart started to pound.
“Advance guard, rear guard, cover flank!” the General said appreciatively. And thus covered, they walked in and were escorted from bed to bed by the two attending giants. What were sitting in the beds thrashed about, agitated and screaming, with arms and eyes, as if each of them was shouting into some private space that was for himself alone, and yet they all seemed to be caught up in a raging conversation, like alien birds locked in the same cage, each speaking the dialect of its own island. Some of them sat without restraints, while others were tied down to their beds with straps that allowed only limited movement of the hands.
“To keep them from attempting suicide,” the doctor explained, and listed the diseases: paralysis, paranoia, manic depression, were the species to which these strange birds belonged.