Five Women

by Robert Musil

  She jumped up and walked a few steps. And suddenly all was silence. She called out, and nothing answered. She called out once again, and she could scarcely hear herself. She gazed around her questingly, and there was everything standing in its place as always, motionless. And all she could feel was that she herself existed.

  What came next was first of all a few short days through which she lived as in a swoon. Sometimes she made a desperate attempt to remember what it had been that she had felt, that one time, as if it were something real, and what it could have been that she had felt, that one time, as if it were something real, and what it could have been that she had done to make everything happen the way it had.

  In these days Veronica roamed uneasily about the house; sometimes she rose at night and wandered upstairs and downstairs. But all she sensed was, now and then, the whitewashed bareness as room after room mounted before her in her candle's flickering light, with rags and tatters of darkness still clinging to it; she sensed it as something that stood tall and immobile against the walls and seemed to scream with lust. When she imagined how the floor ran along under her bare feet she would stop and for minutes on end stand quite still, thinking, as though she were trying to focus on a definite spot in a fast-running stream just below her. Then her head would spin with all the thoughts that she could no longer grasp. And only when her toes curled as in a cramp, locking into the cracks between the floorboards and coming into contact with the fine soft dust that lay there, or when her soles felt the small rough patches of dirt on the floor, she felt relieved, as if someone had slapped her naked body.

  Gradually she came to feel only what was present around her, and the memory of that night was of something she did not expect to experience again. The memory was only that shadow she had gained, a shadow of pure delight that fell on the reality in which she lived. Sometimes she would tiptoe to the door of the house, when it was locked for the night, and listen until she could hear the footsteps of a man walking past outside. The thought that she was standing there in nothing but a nightdress, almost naked in this loose garment that was open below, while outside a man walked past, so close, separated from her only by the thickness of a wooden board—this thought almost convulsed her. But what was for her most mysterious of all was that even out there there was some part of her too : for a ray of light from her candle fell through the narrow key-hole, and surely the trembling of her hand must send it quivering and flickering over the clothes of the passer-by.

  And once, as she was standing like this, she suddenly thought of how she was now alone in the house with Demeter and his embrangled vices. It startled her. After this it happened that they would more often encounter each other on the stairs. They would pass the time of day and exchange a few non-committal words. Only once he stopped, close to her, and each of them searched for something else to say. Veronica looked at his knees, in his tight riding-breeches, and at his lips, which were like a short, wide, bleeding incision, and she wondered what Johannes would be like now that he would surely be coming back again. And at that very moment she saw the tip of Demeter's beard outlined—immeasurably huge—against a pallid window-pane. And after a while they went their separate ways, still without having spoken.