Five Women

by Robert Musil

  X

  It was, oddly enough, a period in which his scientific work went remarkably well. He had solved the main problems involved in his project, and it could not be long now before he got results. There were already people coming to see him, and even if it was chemistry that they talked about, they brought him some emotional reassurance. They all believed that he was going to succeed. The probability of it already amounted to ninety-nine per cent! And he drugged himself with work.

  But even although his social existence was now taking on firmer outlines and entering, so to speak, the state of worldly maturity, the moment he stopped working his thoughts no longer ran along in definite grooves. The faintest reminder of Tonka's existence would start a drama going in his mind: figures in a play, one taking over from the other, none of them revealing its meaning, all of them like strangers daily encountering each other in the same street. There was that commercial traveller of a tenor whom he had once suspected of being the man with whom Tonka had betrayed him. And there were all the others to whom he had ever pinned his certainty. It was not that they did anything. They were merely there. Or even if they did do that frightful thing, it no longer meant much. And since they were sometimes two or even more persons rolled into one, it was no straightforward matter being jealous of them. The whole situation became as transparent as the clearest air, and yet clearer still, until it reached that state of freedom and emptiness which was void of all egoism, and under this immovable dome the accidents of terrestrial life pursued their microscopic course.

  And sometimes all this turned into dreams. Or perhaps it had all begun in dreams, in a pallid shadowy realm from which he emerged the instant he shed the weight of his working hours, as though it were all meant as a warning to him that this work was not his true life.

  These real dreams were on a deeper level than his waking existence; they were warm as low-ceilinged, bright-coloured rooms. In these dream-rooms Tonka would be harshly scolded by her aunt for not having shed any tears at Grand-mamma's funeral; or an ugly man acknowledged himself to be the father of Tonka's child, and she, when he looked at her queryingly, for the first time did not deny it, but stood there, motionless, with an infinite smile. This had happened in a room with green plants in it, with red rugs on the floor and blue stars on the walls. But when he turned his eyes away from that infinity the rugs were green, the plants had big ruby-red leaves, the walls had a yellow glimmer as of soft human skin, and Tonka, still standing there, was transparently blue, like moonlight.

  He almost fled into these dreams as into some simple-hearted happiness. Perhaps it was all mere cowardice. Perhaps all they meant was that if only Tonka would confess, all would be well. He was much confused by their frequency, and yet they had not the intolerable tension of the half-waking state, which was gradually bearing him higher and higher, away out of it all.

  In these dreams Tonka was always as great as love itself, and no longer the care-worn little shop-girl she was in real life. And she looked different every time. Sometimes she was her own younger sister (not that she had ever had a sister) and often she was merely the rustling of skirts, the ring and cadence of another voice, the most unfamiliar and surprising of movements, all the intoxicating charm of unknown adventures, which came to him, the way such things come only in dreams, out of the warm familiarity of her name—and they gave him the floating sense of joy that lies in anticipation, even though still tense with unfulfilment. These ambiguous images made him feel a seemingly undefined, disembodied affection and more than human intensity of emotion, and it was hard to say whether these feelings were gradually detaching themselves from Tonka or only now really beginning to be associated with her. When he reflected on this he guessed that this enigmatic capacity for transference and independence that love had must also manifest itself in waking life. It is not that the woman loved is the origin of the emotions apparently aroused by her; they are merely set behind her like a light. But whereas in dreams there is still a hair's-breadth margin, a crack, separating the love from the beloved, in waking life this split is not apparent; one is merely the victim of doppelgänger-trickery and cannot help seeing a human being as wonderful who is not so at all. He could not bring himself to set the light behind Tonka.

  The fact that he so often thought of horses at this time must have been somehow connected with this, and obviously was a sign of something significant. Perhaps it was Tonka and the sweepstake in which they drew blanks. Or perhaps it was his childhood—those beautiful brown and dappled horses, their heavy harness decorated with brass and fur. And then sometimes there would be a sudden glowing of the child's heart in him, the heart for which magnanimity, kindness, and faith were not yet obligations that one disregarded, but knights in an enchanted garden of adventures and liberations. Yet perhaps too this was merely the last flaring up of a flame about to die, the itching of a scar that was beginning to form. For it was like this. The horses were always hauling timber, and the bridge was always echoing under their hooves, a muffled wooden sound, and the timbermen wore their short, checkered jackets, purple and brown. They all doffed their hats as they passed the tall cross, with the tin Christ on it, halfway across the bridge. Only a little boy who stood there by the bridge, looking on, in the winter, refused to doff his hat, for he was a clever little boy and didn't believe in such things any more. And then he suddenly couldn't button up his coat. He couldn't do it. The frost had numbed his little fingers, they grasped a button and tugged at it, hard, but just as they were pushing it into the button-hole, it jumped out again, and his fingers were left helpless and amazed. However hard they tried, they always ended up in paralysed bewilderment.

  And it was this memory that came back to him so often.

  XI

  Amid all these uncertainties Tonka's pregnancy took its course, revealing the harshness of reality.

  There was the shambling gait, with Tonka seeming in need of a supporting arm, the heavy body that was mysteriously warm, the manner of sitting down, with legs apart, unwieldy and touchingly ugly: all the changing aspects of the miraculous process, steadily transforming the girlish body into a seed-pod, altering all its proportions, broadening the hips and pressing them down, taking the sharpness from the knees, thickening the neck, making the breasts into udders, streaking the skin of the belly with fine red and blue veins, so that it was startling to see how close to the outer world the blood circulated—as though that were a sign of death. All this unshapeliness was in fact a new shape, moulded as much by passivity as by main force; and the same distortion of human normality was reflected in her eyes:they now had a blank look, and her gaze would linger on things for a long time, shifting only with an effort. It would often rest for a long time on him. She was now keeping house for him again, waiting on him laboriously, as though she wanted to prove to him in these last days that she lived only for him. She showed no trace of shame for her ugliness and deformation, only the desire to do as much as she could for him in spite of her awkwardness.

  They were now spending nearly as much time together as in earlier days. They did not talk much, but they liked to be near each other, for her pregnancy was advancing like the hand of a clock, and they were helpless in the face of it. They ought to have talked the whole thing out together, but they did nothing about it, and time moved on. The shadowy being, the unreal element on him, sometimes struggled for words, and the realisation that everything ought to be measured by quite different standards almost broke surface —but, like all understanding, even this was ambiguous and without certainty. And time was running on, time was running away, time was running out. The clock on the wall had more to do with reality than their thoughts had.

  It was a suburban room where nothing of importance could happen. There they sat, and the clock on the wall was a round kitchen clock, telling kitchen time. And his mother bombarded him with letters proving everything up to the hilt. Instead of sending money to him, she spent it on getting opinions from doctors, in the hope of making him see reason. He quit
e understood this and no longer resented it. Once she sent him a medical statement that made it really clear to him that Tonka must have been unfaithful to him at that time. But far from upsetting him, it was almost a pleasant surprise. As though it had nothing to do with him, he wondered how it had happened, and all he felt was : Poor Tonka, she has had to pay so dearly for a single passing aberration! Yes, sometimes he had to pull himself up short, on the point of saying quite cheerfully: ‘Listen, Tonka—I've only just realised what we've been forgetting about—who it was you were unfaithful to me with, that time!' So everything petered out. Nothing new happened. There was only the clock. And the old familiar bond between them.

  And even although they had not talked about it, this brought back the moments when the bodies desired each other. They came like old friends who, returning after long absence, will simply walk into the room. The windows on the far side of the narrow courtyard were eyeless in the shadow, the people were all out at work; down below the yard was dark as a well; and the sun shone into the room as though through frosted glass, making each object stand out sharply, in a dead gleam. And there, for instance, lay a little old calendar, open as though Tonka had just been going through it, and on the wide expanse of one leaf, like a memorial erected to that one day, there was a small red exclamation-mark. All the other leaves were covered with everyday domestic entries, shopping-lists, sums, and the like, and only this one was empty except for the one sign. Not for an instant did he doubt that this betokened the memory of the incident that Tonka denied. The time just about fitted. His certainty was like a rush of blood to the head. Yet certainty itself merely lay in this vehemence, and in the next instant it had again dwindled into nothingness. If one was going to believe in what this exclamation-mark might signify, then one might just as well believe in the miraculous. What was so appalling was, after all, the very fact of believing in neither.

  There was a startled glance exchanged between them. Tonka had obviously seen him looking at that page in the calendar.

  In the queer indoor light all the things in the room now looked like mummies of their former selves. The bodies grew cold, the fingertips became icy, the intestines were hot coils of tubing in which all vital warmth was contained.

  True, the doctor had said that Tonka must be spared any sort of stress if complications were to be avoided. But at this moment doctors were the very people whom he must not trust. And yet all his efforts to trust in something else were also futile. Perhaps Tonka was not strong enough? She remained a half-born myth.

  "Come here," Tonka said gently.

  And they shared their anguish and their warmth, in mournful resignation.

  XII

  Tonka had gone into hospital. The turn for the worse had come. He was allowed to see her at visiting-hours. So the time had slipped away, irrevocably.

  On the day she left the house he had his beard shaved off. Now he was more like himself again.

  Later on he discovered that that very day she had lost patience, lost her head, in fact, and had gone and done something she had been putting off all this time for the sake of saving money: as though making a last gesture of independence before going into hospital, she went and had a decayed molar extracted. Her cheek must now be sadly sunken, and all because she would never let herself be properly looked after.

  Now his dreams began to intensify again.

  One dream recurred in many forms. A fair, plain girl with a pale complexion was telling him that his new girl—some invented figure in the dream—had left him, at which he became curious to hear more and exclaimed: "And do you think Tonka was any better?" He shook his head, with an expression of doubt on his face, to provoke the girl into making some equally vehement protestation of Tonka's virtues, and he already had a foretaste of the relief he would get from her decisive answer. But then he saw a frightful slow smirk gradually spreading over the girl's face. And she said: "Oh, her! But she was a dreadful liar! She was quite nice, of course, but you couldn't believe a word she said. She always wanted to be a smart woman of the world." What caused him most anguish in this dream was not that dreadful smile, which was like a knife cutting into his flesh, but the fact that he could never ward off the eager platitudes at the end of it : powerless in his sleep, he heard them being uttered as though out of the depths of his own mind.

  And so when he went to visit Tonka, he would often sit at her bedside with nothing to say. He would gladly have been as magnanimous as in certain dreams he had had earlier, and he might actually have brought himself to be so if he had devoted to Tonka some of the energy with which he was working on his invention.

  Although the doctors had never been able to find any trace of the disease in him, he was linked with Tonka by the possibility of some mysterious connection : he only had to believe her, and instantly he would be diseased. And perhaps (he told himself) that would have been possible in some other age. He was beginning to enjoy letting his imagination rove back into the past, telling himself such things as that in some other age Tonka's fame might have spread far and wide and that princes would not have disdained to woo her. But nowadays? This was something he really ought to think about at length some day.

  So he would sit at her bedside, being kind and affectionate to her, but never uttering the words: ‘I believe you.' And this although he had long believed in her. For he believed her only in such a way that he was no longer able to be unbelieving and angry, and not in such a way that he could face the rational consequences of it. This not believing kept him immune and safely anchored to the earth.

  The things that went on in the hospital tormented his imagination: it was all doctors, examinations, routine. The world had snatched Tonka away and strapped her to the table. Yet he was almost beginning to regard this as her own fault; if she was indeed something of deeper significance, under the surface of what the world was doing to her, then everything in the world ought to be different too, so that one would want to fight for it. And he was already beginning to surrender. Only a few days after their separation she was already a little remote from him, for he was no longer able to make daily amends for the strangeness of her all too simple life, that strangeness which he had always felt, in however slight degree.

  And because he usually had so little to say when he visited Tonka in hospital, he wrote letters to her, saying a great deal that he otherwise kept to himself. He wrote to her almost as seriously as to some great love. Yet even these letters stopped short of ever declaring: ‘I believe in you.' He was quite disconcerted to receive no answers from Tonka, until he realised that he had never posted these letters. The fact was, he could not be sure that he meant what he wrote; it was simply a state of mind that he could do nothing about except write it out of his system. That made him realise how lucky he was, despite everything—he could express himself. Tonka could not do that. And the moment he saw that, he saw Tonka for just what she was; a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer's day. But the very next moment this no longer explained anything. Perhaps it all amounted to no more than that she was a dear, good girl. And time was passing too quickly. One day he was horribly overtaken by the news that she would not last much longer. He reproached himself bitterly for having been so careless, for not having looked after her properly, and he did not attempt to hide this from her.

  Then she told him of a dream she had had a few nights earlier. For Tonka also had dreams.

  "In my dream I knew I was going to die soon," she said. "And it's a funny thing, you know, but I was very glad. I had a bag of cherries, and I said to myself: ‘Never mind, you just gobble them up quick before you go."'

  The next day they would not let him in to see her.

  XIII

  Then he said to himself: ‘Perhaps Tonka wasn't really so good as I imagined.' But that again only went to prove how mysterious her goodness was. It was the kind of goodness that a dog might have had.

  He was overwhelmed by a dry, raging grief that swept through him like a storm. It went howling round th
e solid walls of his existence, crying: ‘I can't write to you any more, I can't see you any more.' ‘But I shall be with you like God Himself,' he consoled himself, without even knowing what this was supposed to mean. And sometimes he could simply have cried out : ‘Help me, help me! Here I am kneeling before you!' Sadly he said to himself: ‘Think of it, a man walking all alone with a dog in the mountains of the stars, in the sea of the stars!' And he was agonised with tears that became as big as the globe of the sky and would not come out of his eyes.

  Wide awake, he now dreamt Tonka's dreams for her.

  Once, he dreamed to himself, when all Tonka's hope had gone he would suddenly come into the room again and be there with her. He would be wearing his large-checked, brown tweed travelling-coat. And when he opened it, underneath it he would be quite naked, nothing on his slender white body but a thin gold chain, with tinkling pendants on it. And everything would be like one single day, she would be quite sure of that.

  This was how he longed for Tonka, as she had longed for

  him. Oh, she was never a loose woman! No man tempted her. If someone pays court to her, she will rather give him to understand, with slightly awkward mournfulness, that such affairs are likely to come to a bad end. And when she leaves the shop in the evening, she is quite full of all the noisy, jolly, annoying events of her day, her ears are full of it all, inwardly she goes on talking of it all, and there is no scrap of room for any stranger. But she knows too that there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this : there is a realm where she is grand, noble, and good, where she is not a little shop-girl, but his equal, deserving of a great destiny. And this was why, in spite of all the difference between them, she always believed she had a right to him. What he was concerned with achieving was something of which she understood nothing at all; it did not affect her. But he belonged to her because at bottom he was good; for she too was good, and somewhere, after all, there must be the palace of goodness where they would live united and never part again.