by Robert Musil
Claudine sat motionless as the train ran, quietly rocking, through the countryside. Her fellow passengers engaged in conversation, she heard it only as a distant murmur. And while her mind was on her husband and her thoughts were enveloped in a soft and tired blanket of contentment as if in a flurry of snow, all its softness notwithstanding, almost imprisoned her in its grip, or like a convalescent in a room of warm familiar bodies hesitating before taking the first steps outside, it was a kind of contentment that brings everything to a halt and almost hurts; and beneath it she still kept hearing that nondescript, vacillating undertone she could not quite place, distant, half-forgotten, like a lullaby, like an indeterminate ache, as she…The sound drew her thoughts in tottering rings around it, subverting every futile attempt to look it in the eye.
She leaned back and peered out the window. The persistent thought of it exhausted her; her senses were perfectly alert and susceptible, but some nervous undercurrent sought to muffle her perception, to take hold and render her oblivious to all, and let the world just glide by….Telegraph poles tumbled past at a tilt, the fields with their dark brown, snow-free ruts turned away, bushes stood, as if upside down, with hundreds of splayed little legs open and from which thousands of water droplets hung and dripped, ran, sparkled and glistened, there was something merry and light in it, a turning outward as if the walls gave way, a detachment and unburdening, ever gentle. She even sensed the soft heaviness lifting from her body, in her ears it left a feeling of thawing snow, and then little by little nothing but a lingering tinkle. At that moment it was as if she lived with her husband in the bulb of the world in a frothy jumble of pearls and bubbles and whooshing feather-light little clouds. She closed her eyes and gave herself over entirely to that pleasant illusion.
But after a while she started thinking again. The light, steady rocking of the train, the spectacle of nature thawing outside – it was as if a pressure lifted from Claudine, and she suddenly realized she was alone. Instinctively she looked up; her senses were still adrift in quiet, rustling, intangible eddies; it was like finding a door suddenly flung open that she had never previously pictured as any other way than shut. Perhaps she had long harbored the desire, perhaps something hidden swayed back and forth in the love between her and her husband, all she knew was that it had heretofore drawn them ever closer together, but now all of a sudden it felt as if something long locked away inside her had burst forth; inside her she sensed a slow, incessant drip of thoughts and feelings, as if emanating from a hardly visible but rather deep lesion, ever widening the wound.
There are so many questions raised in the love relationship between two people around which a shared life must be built before the question itself can be thought through to the end, and later in the face of the fait accompli there’s no strength left to imagine the outcome in any other way. Then somewhere along the way a curious signpost crops up, a face, a scent, a never trodden path beckons over grass and pebbles; you know you ought to turn back, look around, but everything propels you forward, except for a slight hesitation in your step, like the trembling of a spider’s web, like a dream, like a rustling branch, and the intangible fabric of an unrealized idea fosters a quiet paralysis. Sometimes of late, perhaps a bit more often than before, this thinking back involved a more strenuous back bending embrace of the past. Claudine’s fidelity to her husband offered resistance, precisely because she did not feel it as a control but rather as a liberating force, a reciprocal support, an equilibrium achieved by the constant forward motion. A running hand in hand, but sometimes she was gripped by the sudden temptation to stop midway, just her alone, to stop and look around. It was then that she felt her passion as something compulsive, coercive, overwhelming; and no sooner did she manage to subdue that cloying feeling than she was overcome with remorse and yet again infused with the consciousness of the beauty of her love, the yearning still lingered stiff and heavy like a frenzy, and she rapturously and fearfully sensed every movement she firmly entwined in its potent grip as if in a mesh of gold brocade; but something kept beckoning from somewhere, it lay still and pale as March shadows on the bare, broken ground of spring.
Sometimes even in her bliss Claudine was struck by a sudden consciousness of the matter of fact, that life was almost a matter of happenstance; at other times she thought that maybe she was meant for another, more distant way of living. Perhaps it was only the husk of an old thought still cluttering her mind, not a truly intended notion, but merely the lingering trace of a feeling that may once have swept it along, a hollow, interminable squinting and peering outwards – flinching and never fulfilled – an empty idea that lingered like the mouth of a dark passageway in her dreams.
But perhaps it was a solitary sort of happiness more wondrous than any other. Something loose, sprightly, and darkly voluptuous at a delicate spot in their relationship, a bony and soulless scaffolding in the romantic entanglements of others. A quiet turmoil stirred in her, and an almost morbid longing for the most extreme tension, the inkling of a last climax. And sometimes it seemed to her as if she were destined to endure some undisclosed sadness in love.
Every now and then while listening to music, this intimation touched her soul, furtively, like a whisper from a distant somewhere; it scared her then to suddenly sense her soul in unrecognizable surroundings. But every year there came a time around winter solstice when she felt closer than usual to these most tenuous borders of self. During these naked days, dangling, debilitated, between life and death, she felt a kind of melancholy, not at all like the ordinary longing for love, but rather almost a compulsion to abandon the great love she possessed, as if beckoning before her lay the pathway of a last captivity no longer drawing her back to her beloved, but rather leading her forward, and defenseless, into the soft, dry, dissolution of a painful yonder. And she sensed that it came from a far distant place where her love was no longer just a force binding two people together, but the pale root of an uncertain yearning reaching out into the world. When they walked together their shadows were so thinly tinted and attached so limply to each step, as if not wanting to bind them to the ground, and the sound of contact with the hard-packed earth under their feet was so curt and sinking, and bare shrubs gaped at the sky, that at such charged moments of acute visibility it was suddenly as if the dumb, obedient things broke loose and took on a droll allure, standing tall and erect in the twilight, like intrepid strangers, unreal specters consumed by a sense of their fading nature, infused with fragments of the incomprehensible answering to nothing, broken off bits of bric-a-brac, their glimmer falling helter-skelter, flaring up either in some cast-off object or some fleeting notion.
Then she fancied that she might just as well belong to another, and it did not feel to her like infidelity, but rather like a last betrothal somewhere other than where they were, a realm where they only resembled music, where they embodied notes heard by no one reverberating against nothing. It was then that she felt her being as nothing but a grinding line that dug her under so as to hear itself singing in the tangled silence, in a state in which one moment demands the next and she became what she did – inexorably and inconsequentially – and yet there were certain things that she never dared do. And while it suddenly seemed to her as if it might well be that they only really loved each other in their refusal to acknowledge the clang of that one, quiet, almost maddeningly intimate sound, she suddenly fathomed the deeper entanglements and immense convolutions in the pauses in between, the mute moments of awakening from the swell into the limitless expanse, to face and feel the unconscious onslaught of life; and with the solitary pain of sinking into the maelstrom side by side – compared to which all other actions amounted to nothing more than a noisy benumbing, sleep-inducing narcotic – she loved him even as she contemplated how to hurt him in the worst way possible.
For weeks her love held to this murky hue; then it passed. But oftentimes it returned in muffled tremors, particularly when she sensed the proximity of another. An offhand rema
rk from an indifferent person sufficed to make her feel needled by the stranger’s gazed…stunned…thinking, why are you still here? She never actually craved contact with these strange creatures; it was painful to think of them; the very thought of it disgusted her. But all at once she felt the oscillating, bodiless silence pressing in around her; and she no longer knew if she was rising or falling.
Now Claudine looked out the window. Everything outside was the same as before. But – whether as a consequence of her train of thought or for whatever reason – it was all blanketed by a dull, unforgiving layer of resistance, as if filtered through a thin, milky antipathy. That restive, overly light, thousand-footed mire of mirth was rendered intolerably tense; it scurried and flowed, frenzied and delusory, as if carried along on dwarflike, albeit overly animated steps, and so seemed to her to be dumb and dead; here, there, flinging itself forward like a hollow clatter, it dragged ever onwards, grating something awful against her eyes.
It grieved her to gaze at this agitation, in the wake of which her feelings had been left behind. This life that just moments before was still flowing through her, transformed into feeling, she still saw it out there, suffused with itself and in its own giddy grip, but as soon as she tried to bring it closer the whole thing crumbled and fell apart. Repulsive now, it drilled into her eyes, as if her soul were dangling, prone, in its path, stretched and taut, reaching for something, grasping at the void…
And all of a sudden it struck her that she too – just like all that she glimpsed out the window – was trapped in herself and bound to live out her life in one place, in one particular city, in a house, in an apartment, consumed by a single sense of self, to dwell for years in that minuscule enclosure, and then it seemed to her, were she to stop and wait for the blink of an eye, as if all her happiness could pull away like that clutter of clamorous things.
But this didn’t just strike her as a random thought, there was something in it of that boundless barren expanse in which her feelings sought in vain to gain a foothold, and something took a quiet hold of her like a rock climber hugging the escarpment, and then came an icy cold, quiet moment in which she heard the sound of self, a faint, incomprehensible creak in the vast expanse of creation, and in the sudden silence that followed she fathomed how quietly we trickle away, and in contrast how vast and fraught with terrible forgotten sounds is the stony brow of nothingness.
And while pulling back like a thin skin, and reflecting on herself, she felt a quiet terror in her fingertips, and her sensations clung to her like tiny grains, like sifted sand, that curious sound rose up again; like a fleck, like a bird it seemed to hover in the void.
And all of a sudden everything felt as if it were fated. That she had set out on a journey, that nature fell back before her, that right at the very start of this trip she had felt so skittish and fearful, of herself, of the others, for her happiness, and her past suddenly seemed to her like the incomplete consummation of something yet to come. She kept peering fearfully out the window. But little by little, deep in her heart she began to feel ashamed of all resistance and any efforts at self-defense before such an onslaught of strangeness, and it was as if her spirit reconsidered, quietly gripped by that subtlest, final, submissive impulse of weakness, and her resolve grew flimsier and thinner than a child and softer than a sheet of faded silk; and it only now dawned on her with a hint of delight what a deep and utterly resigned human pleasure she took in the face of the unfamiliar, knowing full well that she could not ease her way in, that all resolve was useless in this muddle of emotions, pressed against the periphery of life, all she could do was embrace the moment of her inevitable tumble into the blind immensity of the void.
And suddenly she felt a dark longing for her life before, that time of mistreatment and exploitation by strangers, a longing of the kind that comes over you in the pale, weak awakening in the grip of a sickness, when the noises you hear pass from one apartment to another, no longer feeling like she belonged anywhere, relieved of the burden of her own being, letting life lead where it will.
The landscape clamored silently outside. While others felt their thoughts crystallizing, growing louder and ever more certain in transit, she sought refuge in herself, feeling nothing but her non-being, her weightlessness, a drifting toward something. And soon, swaying silently with a soft, long undulating motion, the train pulled into a region still buried in snow, the sky sank ever lower, and a little later they passed through dark gray curtains of drifting snowflakes striking the ground in its path. The light dimmed to a pale yellow in the compartment, the profiles of her fellow passengers were only still faintly differentiated, slowly and insubstantially they swayed back and forth. No longer conscious of what she was thinking, she felt silently gripped by a longing for solitude to confront the unknown; it was like a toying with the slightest, most intangible disturbance so as thereby to bestir a palpable, shadowy flutter of the soul. She tried at that moment to bring her husband to mind, but all she could conjure up was a faint inkling of a love almost lapsed, like a room with windows long since shut. She tried to shake herself free of it, but the troubling image hardly budged and dangled somewhere on the edge of consciousness. And the world felt so pleasantly cool, like a bed in which you’ve been left to loll about alone…Then it seemed to her as if she faced an imminent decision, and not knowing why, and being neither glad nor rattled by it, she felt only that she wanted to do nothing to advance or hinder its outcome, and her idle musings ambled ever farther out in the snow, without looking back, like when you’re too tired to turn around and just keep walking and walking.
Toward the end of the ride the gentleman remarked: “Looks like an idyll, a magic island, like a lovely fairy tale enchantress in white lingerie and lace…” and he made a gesture toward the landscape.
How trite, thought Claudine, but she could not immediately find the right repartee.
It was as if someone tapped at the window and a big, dark face came swimming up close behind a pale pane of glass. She had no idea who this person was; she couldn’t care less; she sensed only that he was standing there before her and wanted something. And that now something started to become real.
Like when a quiet wind stirs between clouds, arranging them in a row and then slowly pulls away, she felt the force of this incursion of the real colliding with the inert soft cloud of her feelings, encountering no resistance, and blowing on by…And as some sensitive people do, she cherished the non-cerebral, the absence of self, the swooning, the shame and the sorrow spawned by the unfathomable pull of the real, like when you gently strike fragility, a girl, a woman, and then in the darkness long to be the dress that drapes her pain.
So they arrived in late afternoon in an all but vacant train, from which, one by one, the passengers had trickled out; station after station had sifted out the last stragglers, and now something swept them together with swift strokes, only three sleighs stood ready to receive the remaining passengers for the hour-long ride from the station to the town, and they had to be shared. When Claudine once again came to her senses she already found herself seated with four other people in one of the small conveyances. The unfamiliar smell of the horses steaming in the cold and scattered waves of light from the carriage lanterns came wafting from the fore, but from time to time the darkness came flooding in and tearing through the sleigh; then Claudine saw that they drove through two rows of tall trees as if down a dark passageway that grew ever narrower toward an elusive destination.
On account of the cold she sat with her back to the horses, before her sat that man from the train, big, broad-shouldered, draped in his fur coat. His presence blocked the path of her thoughts that wanted to retreat. Every glance was suddenly filled with his dark person, as if a gate had fallen shut before her. She realized that she had glanced at him a couple of times to know what he looked like, in such a manner as if that were all that still mattered and everything else was already decided. But she was glad to feel that he remained a blur, an
arbitrary presence, just a dark swathe of unfamiliarity. And sometimes it seemed to draw near like a wandering woods with a tangle of tree trunks, its branches brushing against her.
Meanwhile the conversation spanned like a web between the passengers in the little sleigh. He, too, took part in it, and gave commonplace clever replies with a hint of that spice, like a sharp, certain scent, of the sort that peppers a man’s advances to a woman. At these moments she became flustered in the face of such a self-assured manly claim to power, and remembered that she had not strenuously enough rebuffed his innuendos in the train. And when it was her turn to speak it seemed to her that the words came out too easily, and she suddenly felt overcome by a sense of powerlessness, of being dismantled, reduced to the flailing stump of an arm.
Then it struck her how helplessly she was hurled back and forth, and at every bend in the road brushed by the arm, by the knees, sometimes with her entire torso touching a stranger, and by some remote similitude she felt as if this little sleigh were a darkened room and these strangers sat panting hot and pressing against her, and she fearfully suffered brazen indecencies, smiling as if pretending not to notice, and keeping her gaze fixed straight ahead.
But all this she fathomed as if in the half-slumber of a leaden dream, the unreality of which hovers on the edge of consciousness, and she only wondered that the stranger’s presence should weigh so heavily upon her, until he leaned out, looked up at the sky and said: “We will be snowed in.”
