Five Women

by Robert Musil

  "They are things beyond the horizon of consciousness," he said thoughtfully, "things that can be seen gliding past, along the horizon of our consciousness—or rather, it is only a new horizon, tense with strangeness, inscrutable, no more than a possibility, a sudden intimation, and there is nothing on it yet."

  And even in those days he spoke of these intimations as ideals. They were not a clouding of the mind, he said, or signs of a morbid condition; they were premonitions of some wholeness that it was still too soon to apprehend. And if it were only possible to fit them together in their right order, then suddenly, in a blaze of lightning, something would appear, reaching outwards from the most delicate ramifications of thought to the tops of the trees, and it would be there in one's slightest gesture like the wind taking hold of sails. And he jumped to his feet and flung out his arms in a movement of almost physical desire.

  And after that she did not say anything for a long while. Then at last she replied: "There is something in me too... . You see: Demeter...." She faltered and was silent. After that they talked of Demeter. It was for the first time.

  At first Johannes could not understand why they should speak of him at all. She said that once she had been standing at a window, looking down into a poultry-yard, watching the rooster, simply watching and thinking of nothing at all. It was only after some time that Johannes realised she was speaking of the poultry-yard at their own home. Demeter came (she recounted) and stood beside her. And she began to realise that she had been thinking of something all that time, thinking it as it were in deep darkness, and now she began to know what it was. There was Demeter quite close, she said—"you do understand, don't you?"—it was in a sort of darkness that she had begun to know what it was all about—and his closeness to her at once helped her to know what it was and made her feel constrained. And after a while she knew it was the rooster she had been thinking about. Yet perhaps she had not been thinking at all, only watching, watching, and what she had been gazing at remained like an alien body, hard, within her, and no thinking about it would dissolve it. And it seemed to remind her vaguely of something else, but she could not discover what that other thing could be. And the longer Demeter stood there beside her, the more distinctly and strangely, frighteningly, did she feel the empty shape of that image within her.

  And Veronica looked at Johannes as if to ask whether he understood.

  "I saw it again and again," she said, "that unutterably indifferent way that animal slid down." And she was still seeing what she had seen then, seeing it happening so quite simply and yet beyond comprehension: that unutterably indifferent sliding downward at that sudden release from all excitement and that way he stood there for a while, as though stupefied, all sensation gone, as though far away in thought, somewhere in a stagnant, putrefying light. "Sometimes, on dead afternoons," she went on, "when I went for a walk with Aunt, there was a light like that on everything. I could feel it bodily, as though the very notion of that ghastly, nauseating light were radiating from my stomach."

  There was a pause, and Veronica seemed to be groping for words.

  But then she came back to the same thing. "Afterwards I could always see it coming from a long way off," she said, "a wave rolling on, catching him, flinging him up, and then letting him go again."

  And once more there was silence.

  At last her words tiptoed through the silence, as if they were trying to hide mysteriously in that big, sombre room, crouching down very close to Johannes' face. "And at a moment like that Demeter took hold of my head and pressed it down against his breast," she whispered. "He didn't say anything. He only pressed my head down, hard." And again there was that silence.

  For Johannes it was as though in the obscurity a stealthy hand had touched him, and he trembled when Veronica went on talking.

  "I don't know how to explain what happened to me at that moment. It suddenly came to me that Demeter must be like that rooster, living in some terrible enormous emptiness and suddenly leaping forth out of it."

  Johannes felt her eyes on him. It tormented him that she should speak of Demeter, at the same time saying things that he dimly felt concerned himself. An incomprehensibly frightening suspicion rose in his mind: a suspicion that whatever was abstract in him, whatever it was that could not aim straight at God—like visions of the Self stretched taut over sleepless nights, visions that were all uncertainty and lack of purpose, like empty frames of feeling—was precisely what Veronica might be exhorting, exhorting him to act. And it seemed to him that as she went on talking her voice took on a note at once of cruelty and of pity and of lust; and he was defenceless against it.

  "That time," she said, "I cried out: ‘Johannes would never do such a thing!' But all Demeter said was: ‘Johannes —bah!' And he put his hands in his pockets. And after that, when you came back to us for the first time—do you remember how Demeter challenged you? ‘Veronica says you're a better man than I am,' he said, sneering at you. ‘But you're just a coward!' And in those days you hadn't yet learned to take that sort of thing lying down, and you retorted: ‘Go on then, prove it!' And he struck you in the face with his fist. And then—wasn't it so?—you wanted to hit back. But when you saw how threatening he looked, and felt the pain growing more intense, you were suddenly terribly afraid of him, oh, I know, it was an almost docile, friendly kind of fear, and all at once you smiled. Wasn't it so?—you didn't know why, but you smiled and smiled, and there was a twist in your face that I could feel in myself, a timid smile for his angry eyes, and yet with such a warm sweetness in it too, and a sureness that went seeping deeper into you until all at once the insult was levelled out and found its proper place in you.... And then later you told me you were going to become a priest.... So it was that I suddenly realised: It isn't Demeter, it's you who are the animal...."

  Johannes jumped to his feet. He could not understand.

  "How can you say such a thing?" he exclaimed. "What is going on in your mind?"

  But in her disappointment Veronica defended what she had said. "Why didn't you become a priest? In a priest there is something of an animal! There's that emptiness at the point where other people possess themselves. That meekness—their very clothes reek of it. That empty meekness like a sieve that things may heap up in for an instant—and then it runs empty! That's what one ought to make something of! I was so glad when I realised that...."

  Then he realised how unfitting the loudness of his expostulation had been, and he became very quiet. He was aware too that musing on what she had said was beginning to divert his attention from himself. And he grew hot and clammy with the effort of keeping his own imaginings distinct from hers, which seemed to merge with them somewhere as in a deep fog and which was nevertheless much more real, and constricted as a little room shared with another person.

  ... When they were both calmer, Veronica said: "It's the thing that I somehow haven't quite understood yet, the thing we both ought to search for together."

  She opened the door and gazed down the stairs. Each of them felt that the other was looking to see if they were alone, and now the dark and empty house id become a great bell lowered upon them, enclosing them.

  "I've tried to say it," Veronica went on, "but all I've said still isn't it at all.... I don't know what it is myself. But tell me, tell me what went on in you that time, tell me what that smiling sweet fear is like.... That time when Demeter struck you. It seemed to me then you were quite impersonal, stripped right down to something naked, warm, and soft."

  But Johannes could not explain it. A multitude of possibilities flashed through his mind. It was as if he could hear someone talking in an adjoining room and gathered, from what he could catch of it, that the talk was about him. At one point he asked: "And so you talked to Demeter about it too?"

  "But that was much later," Veronica said. She hesitated and then added: "Only once." And after a while she went on: "It was a few days ago. I don't know what made me do it."

  Somewhere in Johannes there was a dull sens
ation like a far-off shock : this must be what jealousy was like.

  It was only after a long time that he realised Veronica was speaking again. He heard her say: "... it was such an odd feeling, I understood her so well."

  Mechanically he asked: "Her?"

  "The peasant woman. Up on the hill."

  "Oh, yes, I see. The peasant woman."

  "The one the village lads talk about," Veronica went on. "Can you imagine it? She never had a lover again, only those two big dogs of hers. Of course it's perfectly horrible what they say, but just try to imagine it: those two huge beasts, sometimes standing up on their hind-legs, their teeth bared, insistent, masterful, as though you were just the same as they are—and somehow you are. You're terrified of them, with their hairiness, it's all terror except for a tiny point in you where you're still yourself. Yet you know—it needs no more than a single gesture and it'll all be gone in a flash, they'll be servile, they'll crouch, they'll just be animals again. So it's not just animals: this thing is yourself and a solitude, it's you and once again you and an empty, hairy room. It's not an animal's desire, but a desire coming from something else that I can't find any name for. And I don't know how it is that I can understand it so well."

  Johannes said imploringly: "But all this is sin! Such talk is filthy."

  But Veronica would not let it go at that. "You meant to become a priest, didn't you? Why? I thought it was—because then you wouldn't be a man for me. Listen—listen to what I'm going to tell you. Demeter said to me, out of the blue: ‘That one won't marry you, nor that one either. You'll stay here for ever, growing old like Aunt....' Oh can't you understand that I began to be frightened? Isn't it just the same for you? I'd never have thought of Aunt as a person. For me she wasn't anything like a man or a woman. And when Demeter said that I was suddenly frightened at the thought that she was something I too might some day become, and I felt something had to happen. And it suddenly seemed to me that for a long time she didn't grow any older, but then all at once she became very old and has stayed like that ever since. And Demeter said: ‘We can do as we please. Even if we've no money, we're the oldest family in the province. We live in our own way. Johannes didn't go into the government service and I didn't go into the Army. He didn't even become a priest. People look down on us a little because we aren't rich, but we don't need money and we don't need them either.' And perhaps it was because I was still aghast at the thought of being like Aunt—what he had said was almost uncanny, it had startled me obscurely, like a door faintly sighing—it gave me a feeling, somehow, of this house of ours. But you know how it is, you've always felt the same way yourself—about the garden and the house .. . oh, the garden.... Sometimes in the very height of summer I would think it must be like this lying deep in snow, so mournfully voluptuous and not as on solid ground at all, but floating between heat and cold, and you want to leap up and yet swoon away, as if dissolving, into some sweet oblivion. If you think about the garden, don't you feel that blank unremitting beauty? It must be the light ... a paralysing excess of light, light that leaves you dumb, that's senselessly pleasant on your skin, and a moaning and scraping in the bark of the trees, and an unceasing soft whirring among the leaves.... Don't you feel that life, coming to a standstill here in this garden of ours, has a beauty that is somehow flat and endless, surrounding us on all sides like a sea, isolating us, and that we would sink and drown if ever we tried to set foot on it?"

  Veronica had leapt to her feet and was standing face to face with Johannes. And the fingers of her hands, shimmering in some last forlorn gleam of light, seemed to be anxiously plucking the words out of darkness.

  "And then I often feel, in this house of ours," she said, fumbling with the words, "the gloomy darkness of it, with the creaking stairs and whimpering windows, all the nooks and crannies and the towering cupboards, and sometimes, somewhere, at some high small window, there's light trickling through, as though slowly pouring from a tilted pail, and spreading on the floor.... And there's fear, as though someone were standing there with a lantern. And Demeter said : ‘I am not a man of words. Johannes is the one who can talk. But you must believe me if I tell you that sometimes there's something in me that rears up senselessly, a sort of swaying as of a tall tree, a terrible inhuman sound, a battering, clattering, rub-a-dub as from those wooden rattles that children go round with at Easter. ... I need only bow down to the ground and I feel myself an animal.... Sometimes I could almost bedaub my face....'

  "It seemed to me, then, that our house is a world where we're all alone, a dim world where everything's weird and askew as under water, and it seemed almost natural that I should yield to Demeter's desire. He said : ‘No one will know of it but you and me, and since no one knows, it will scarcely be real at all, it has no relation to the real world, no means of getting out, into it....'

  "Johannes, you must not think that he meant anything to me. It was just that he opened up before me like a huge mouth bristling with teeth, preparing to devour me. As a man he remained as much a stranger to me as all other men. But in my imagination it was like being poured into him, a falling, falling over his lips, drop by drop, it was like being swallowed by an animal drinking, it was so utterly without feeling ... numb.... Sometimes one would wish to experience something if only one could experience it merely as an act, as a thing in itself, with no one else involved. But suddenly I thought of you, and without having any clear intention I said no to Demeter.... There must be a way of doing that thing as you would do it, a good way...."

  "What are you talking of?" Johannes said thickly.

  She said: "I have a vague notion of what people might be to each other. Aren't we all afraid of one another? Even you, sometimes when you talk, are as hard and solid as a stone flung at me. But what I mean is a way of dissolving and becoming wholly what each is for the other, so that nothing is left to stand outside, eavesdropping, estranged... . I don't know how to put it. What you sometimes call God is like the thing I mean...."

  And then she went on to say things that Johannes could not fathom.

  "He whom you must surely mean is nowhere, because He is in everything. He is a vile fat woman who makes me kiss her breasts and at the same time He is myself, a person who sometimes, when she is alone, lies down flat on the floor before a cupboard and thinks such things. And perhaps you are like that too. Sometimes you are as impersonal and withdrawn as a candle in the darkness, which is itself nothing and only makes the darkness bigger and more tangible. Since that time when I saw you being so frightened it's as if now and then you dropped away out of my thoughts, as if there were nothing remaining but the fear, like a dark speck with a warm, soft rim round it. And, after all, the only thing that matters is that one should be like the act and not like the person enacting it. Each of us ought to be alone with what is going on, and then again we ought to be together, mutely united as the inside of four windowless walls that form a room where everything can really happen, and yet in such a way that what is in the one does not affect the other, but is as if it were happening only in one's thoughts.. .."

  But Johannes did not understand.

  Then she suddenly began to change, like something sinking away from him, and even her features seemed to blur, growing smaller here and larger there. Although it seemed there was something else she might have said, it was as if she no longer felt herself to be the person who had just been speaking. And only hesitantly, as if down some long and unaccustomed road, her words then came: " ... What do you think? . . . To me it seems no human being could be so impersonal... . Only an animal could.... Oh, help me! Why does it always make me think of an animal...?"

  And Johannes tried to find some way of recalling her to herself. All at once he began to speak, for now he wanted to know more about it.

  But she only shook her head.

  From that time on Johannes realised how terrifyingly easy it would be to stretch out his hand for what he wanted and miss it by a hair's breadth. Sometimes a man does not recognise what it is h
e wants in the darkness, only knowing that he will fail to grasp it; and then he lives his life as in a locked room, alone with fear. At times Johannes was afraid, as though he might suddenly begin to whimper and run on all fours and sniff at Veronica's hair. Such impulses assailed him. But nothing happened. They passed each other by. They looked at each other. They spoke to each other about trifles, or sometimes spoke as though questingly. So it was day after day.

  Yet once he suddenly felt this to be like an encounter in the midst of solitude, when a vague, haphazard proximity all at once arches like a solid vault. Veronica was coming down the stairs, and he was waiting at the foot: there they paused, each standing alone in the twilight. It was not that he wanted anything of her, it was merely as if the two of them, standing there separately, were no more than a delirious fantasy in a sick person's brain. So it was a sense of quite another necessity that made him say to her: "Come, let's go away together."

  But of what she said in reply he understood only: "... no love ... not marry ... I can't go away and leave Aunt." And once again he tried, saying: "Veronica, a human being—sometimes indeed a word, a sudden warmth, a breath of air—is like a pebble in an eddy, revealing the centre on which you turn.... If we set about it together, perhaps we might find it...."

  Yet her voice had an even deeper sensual undertone now than it had had that other time when she gave him the same answer: "Surely no human being can be so impersonal, only an animal ... yes, perhaps if you were going to die...." And then she said: "No." And at that he was once again overwhelmed by something that was not so much a resolve as a vision, something that had no bearing on reality but was self-contained, like music. And he said: "I am going away. Certainly—perhaps I shall die." But even while saying this he knew it was not what he had meant to say.