by Robert Musil
The undersecretary did not come again; so she fell asleep, peacefully, with the unlocked door, like a tree standing prone in the meadow.
The following morning heralded a mild, mysterious day. She awakened as if behind bright curtains that hold off the reality of light. She went for a stroll, the undersecretary accompanied her. There was something wobbly in her walk, as if inebriated by the blueness of the air and the whiteness of the snow. They came to the edge of town and peered in the distance, the white surface sparkled with a certain festive air.
They stood beside a fence that closed off a little country road, a peasant woman strewed feed for the chickens, a little fleck of yellow moss glistened brightly against the sky. “How long, do you think…” asked Claudine, looking back down the lane into the light blue air, not finishing her sentence, and adding after a while: “how long do you think that wreath will go on hanging over there? I wonder if the air embraces it? How does it live?” She said nothing else, and didn’t even know why she had said what she did; the undersecretary smiled. It seemed to her as if everything were incised in metal and still quivering under the pressure of the stylus. She stood beside this man, and as she sensed him looking her over, whatever it was that struck his fancy, something complied in her inner self and lay bright and wide like a field under the gaze of a circling bird.
This life, all blue and dark and with a little yellow fleck…what does it really want? This cluck of chickens and quiet rustle of spilling feed through which life suddenly passes like a clock striking the hour,…for whose ears does it sound? This wordless flux that eats its way into the distance and only from time to time, channeled through the narrow hiatus of a few seconds, flares up into a fleeting something, and otherwise lies fallow…what is it up to? She looked it all over with a silent gaze and sensed the things without thinking them, the way hands sometimes remain resting on a brow when there’s nothing more to say.
And then she only still listened with a smile. The undersecretary thought he had managed to meticulously draw the threads of his web more tightly around her to pull her toward him, she let him have his way. As he talked, it was for her as if she were walking between houses in which people are talking, and in the fabric of her thinking at times another train of thought got tangled up, tugging her thoughts along with it in that direction, over there, she gladly following, then for a time quietly sinking back into herself, still half attentive – it felt like a quiet, confused entrapment.
And all the while she sensed, as if it were her own feeling, how much the man loved himself. Imagining his tenderness toward himself stirred a quiet arousal in her. A silence swelled around desire, as if entering a realm in which someone else’s quiet decisions take vicarious precedence over your own. She felt herself forced by the undersecretary and felt herself conceding, but that’s not what bothered her. Something just sat there in her like a bird sitting on a branch and singing.
She had a light meal that evening and went to bed early. All the inner turmoil had already died down a little, the sensual thrill had worn off. Nevertheless, she awakened after a short slumber, aware that he was seated downstairs and waited. She grabbed her clothes and got dressed, nothing more; no feeling, no thought, just a distant inkling of wrongdoing, perhaps also as she finished getting ready, a naked, not sufficiently checked burst of raw emotion. So she came down. The room was empty, table and chairs stood there a bit like inanimate night watchmen. In a corner sat the undersecretary.
She muttered something or other, maybe something like: I feel so alone upstairs; she knew in what way he would misunderstand. After a while he took hold of her hand; she got up. Hesitated. Then she ran out. She felt herself acting like a dumb little broad and it gave her a rise. On the stairs she heard footsteps following behind, conjuring up the specter of a distant, abstract menace that made her body tremble like an animal being stalked in the woods.
Then, once he was seated in her room, the undersecretary said in passing: “You love me, don’t you? I may not be an artist or a philosopher, but I’m all there, I think, all there.” To which she replied: “What do you mean by all there?”
“What a peculiar question,” the undersecretary got flustered, but she said: “I didn’t mean it that way, what I meant was how strange that one should like someone just because one likes him, his eyes, his tongue, not the words, but the sound itself…”
Then the undersecretary kissed her: “So do you love me?”
And Claudine still found the strength to retort: “No, I love the fact that I’m with you, the coincidence of being here with you. I could just as well be seated among the Eskimos. In fur pants. And have long pendulous breasts. And find that attractive. Are there not plenty of other people all there in this world?”
But the undersecretary said: “You’re wrong. You love me. You just can’t justify it to yourself and that precisely is the proof of true passion.”
Instinctively, just as she felt him looming over her, something in her drew back. But he said: “Do be quiet!”
And Claudine kept quiet; only once more did she speak; while they were undressing; she started rambling, incongruously, perhaps senselessly, it was really nothing more than a pained aside: “…it’s like walking along a narrow trail; animals, people, flowers, everything changes; you yourself become altogether different. You ask yourself: if I’d been living here from the start, what would I think about this, how would I feel it? How strange that all you have to do is cross a line. I’d like to kiss you and then leap right back and look; and then kiss you again. And every time I cross that line I’d have to feel it more distinctly. I’d grow ever more pale; the people would die around me, no, just shrivel up; and the trees and animals too. And all that there’d be left in the end would be a thin trail of smoke…and then nothing but a melody…passing through thin air…trailing over the emptiness…”
And she spoke one more time: “Please, sir, be so kind as to leave,” she said, “I feel disgusted.”
To which he just smiled. Then she said: “Hey you, please leave!” To which he sighed contented: “At last, at last, you dear little dreamer, you let down your guard!”
And then with a shudder she felt, despite all, her body fill up with lust. But as it happened it was as if she were thinking about something she had once felt in a long distant spring: that being there as if for everyone’s pleasure, and yet just for one. And very vaguely, the way children picture God, that He’s great, she had an intimation of her love.
The Temptation of Silent Veronica
TWO VOICES EMANATING from somewhere sound in your ears. Maybe they’re just lying there silently, side by side, entwined in one another on the pages of a diary, the dark, deep voice of the woman lifting itself with a sudden start, as situated on the page, encircled by the soft, broad, drawling voice of the man, the latter knotted with the former, her as yet unfinished voice left lying there, and in between, that which they did not have time to hide peering forth. Or maybe it isn’t so. But maybe somewhere in the world there is a point at which these two voices, hardly otherwise distinguishable from the lackluster muddle of mundane sounds, shoot out and then merge like two beams intertwined, somewhere, and who knows, maybe we might want to search for such a point, the proximity of which we can only sense here by a certain unrest, like a movement of music not yet heard, yet already formulated in the heavy, woolly folds of the a distant curtain still intact. Maybe these fragments of sound will then collide and burst out of the shell of their sickness and weakness into clear, steadfast, upright declarations.
“Muddled!” In retrospect, in those days when a terrible decision had to be made, to opt either with an indiscernable decisiveness, like a thin thread stretched taut, for the imagination, or for the run of the mill reality, in those days of a desperate last ditch effort to stretch the limits of the unfathomable into this reality – and then to let go and fling yourself into the simply lived as if into a tousled heap of warm feathers, he addressed his dilemm
a as one might a person. In those days he spoke hourly to himself and raised his voice, because he was afraid. Something had sunk in and settled in him with that incomprehensible, unstoppable imminence with which somewhere in the body a pain suddenly wells up, billows into swollen tissue, and keeps becoming more and more real, evolving into an illness that slowly takes hold of the body with the mild ambiguous smile of a torturer.
“Oh you miserable muddle of emotions,” Johannes begged, “if only you were outside of me!” And: “If only you were a skirt, and I could grab you by the pleats. Talk to you. Then I could say, You are God, and hold a pebble under my tongue when talking of you, to tap a higher truth! After which I could say, I put myself at your mercy, bid you to help me, to watch over me, whatever I do; there is something dead center and motionless inside me, and it’s you.”
But he just lay there with his mouth in the dust and his heart trying to catch up like a child. All he knew was that he needed its dumb thump, because he was a coward, that’s all he knew. But it happened all the same, as if deriving strength from his weakness, a hidden strength that he gleaned and to which he was attracted, the way things had sometimes enticed him in his youth, drawn now by the powerful, still entirely faceless head of an obscure force, and convinced that he could grow into it and plunk it onto his shoulders and infuse it with his own face.
And one time he said to Veronica: It’s God. Still fearful and devout, it had been his first attempt to grasp the indefinable something which they both felt; they glided past each other in the dark house; upwards, downwards, past each other. But as soon as he said it, it came out like a hollow phrase and bespoke nothing of what he meant.
But what he meant at the time was perhaps just something like those telling images that sometimes form in stone, nobody knows where they come from, what they signify, or what to make of them in their complete reality, in walls, in clouds, in swirling eddies of water, what he meant was perhaps only the incomprehensible manifestation of something still absent, like those occasional looks that peak forth in a face that, in fact, have nothing whatsoever to do with that face, but rather belong to some other suddenly sensed face far removed from all present perception, happenstance, something like faint melodies discerned in extraneous sounds, like feelings in people, indeed he harbored feelings that when he sought to put them into words proved not to be feelings at all, but only the outward manifestations, as if something had prolonged itself in him, already poking its tips into the well of emotion, moistening meaning, stoking his fear, his reticence, the silent depths of self, the way things sometimes stretch themselves out on feverishly bright spring days when shadows crawl out of the things that cast them, stopped dead in their stealthy advance like reflections in a stream.
And he often said to Veronica that it really was not fear or weakness that he felt in him, but just a presentiment of something, the way fear sometimes mimics anticipation before a never before seen, as yet faceless experience, or the way you sometimes know for a fact and altogether inexplicably that fear is fathoming a trace of the female in yourself, or that weakness will one day erupt one morning in a country house serenaded by the chirp of birds. It was in this strange state of mind that such half-baked, inexpressible notions came to mind.
But one time Veronica looked at him with her big, quietly bristling eyes – they sat all alone in one of the half-dark rooms – and she asked, “So is there also something in you that you can’t clearly feel and fathom, and you simply call God, an entity outside yourself and rationalized by you as a reality, as if it would then take you by the hand? And maybe it’s what you never want to call cowardice or going soft, a state of mind embodied by a figure that could take you under the folds of its dress? And lacking purpose, so to speak, you just make use of such words as God to suit certain purposes, to drive certain movements without yourself being moved, as it were, to foster visions that you never permit to attain a real life form, since draped in their dark clothes with an otherworldly aura they fade away with the certainty of strangers from a great, well-ordered land, like the living? Admit it, because they’re like the living and because you’d give anything to feel them as real?”
“They’re things,” he contended, “veiled behind the horizon of consciousness, things that glide by perceptibly behind the horizon of our consciousness, or, in fact, behind a strange, inscrutable, possibly even newfangled horizon of consciousness, a horizon suddenly insinuated in which no things are yet made manifest.” They are ideals, he already insisted back then, not blurry nebulae or signs of some sort of mental distress, but rather premonitions of a whole, prematurely hatched, and if only you could succeed in splicing it all together there would be something standing there before you, something all in splinters as if struck by a cosmic blow from the bottommost roots to the towering treetops of thought something that would in the most minute of its movements be like the wind surging in the sails of a schooner. And he jumped up and made a sweeping movement of almost physical longing.
And at the time she said nothing for a long while, and then she replied, “There is something in me, too…you see: Demeter…” and then she fell silent, and that was the first time she mentioned Demeter.
Johannes did not initially understand why she did so. She said that she once stood at a window looking out at a barnyard with her eyes fixed on the rooster, looking and thinking of nothing, and only after a while did Johannes realize that she meant the barnyard in their house. Then Demeter came and stood beside her. And she became aware that she had indeed been thinking of something the whole time, only in a dark haze, and now it rose to consciousness. And Demeter’s proximity, she told him – you understand, her thoughts came together in the dark – Demeter’s proximity both helped her and hemmed her in. And after a while she realized that she’d been thinking of the rooster. But it might well be that she was thinking nothing, but had just been idly gazing, and what she gazed at remained lying inside her like a strange, hard body, since no thought dissolved it. And it seemed to remind her in some indefinable way of something else that she could not put her finger on. And the longer Demeter stood there beside her the more clearly, strangely and fearfully did she begin to feel the empty outline of it in her. And Veronica gave Johannes a questioning look as to whether he got it. “Again and again I sensed this unfathomably indifferent downward glide of the creature,” she said, what she saw before her she can still see clearly today, like something that just happens, something not meant to be understood, that unfathomably indifferent downward glide, and then suddenly to be free of all arousal and stand there a while, insensate, like a fool, and as if far removed in your musings, under a dim insipid light. Then she said, “Sometimes on long languid afternoons when I went walking with my aunt, it all seemed to hover above me; I thought I could feel it, and it was as if the memory of that noxious light came streaming from my stomach.”
There was a pause, Veronica swallowed in search of the next word.
But she came right back to the same subject. “Afterwards I always sensed from afar when a wave like that was about to come over me,” she added, “and over him, and fling him down and then let go again.”
And again she fell silent.
But suddenly her words slid out of her mouth as if they had to hide in the big, dark room, huddling close to Johannes’ face. “At just such a moment, Demeter grabbed my head and held it down hard against his breast, said nothing, but just kept holding it down,” Veronica whispered; and then she fell silent again.
But Johannes felt as if a secret hand had touched him in the dark, and he trembled as Veronica continued: “I don’t know how to characterize what happened to me at that moment, I suddenly fathomed that Demeter must be like that rooster, living in a terrible expanse of emptiness from which he suddenly burst forth.” Johannes felt that she was looking at him. It troubled him to hear her talk about Demeter, all the while talking about things which he vaguely sensed had something to do with him. He had a dark inkling that Vero
nica wanted to transform what to him remained something abstract, a passing notion of God, like those obscure semblances of self that infiltrate the emotional void in the vague volition of sleepless nights, into imperative action. And feeling defenseless, it seemed to him that her voice now took on a pitying and wanton tone as she continued: “At the time I cried out: ‘Johannes would never do such a thing!’ But Demeter just said: ‘To hell with Johannes!’ and put his hands in his pockets. And then – do you remember? – when you came back to see us for the first time in a while, how Demeter confronted you? ‘Veronica says you’re better than me,’ he sneered at you, ‘but you’re nothing but a coward!’ And at the time you wouldn’t let him talk to you like that, and fired back, ‘Prove it!’ And then he punched you in the face. And then – remember? – you wanted to strike back, but when you saw his threatening look and felt the first sting of the pain he’d inflicted, you were suddenly overwhelmed by a terrible fear of him, say it isn’t so, an almost respectful, friendly fear, and then suddenly you broke out in a smile, without knowing why, but just kept smiling and smiling with a somewhat twisted mouth, giving him an almost sheepish grin in response to his angry gaze, a warm look infused with such sweetness and certainty that it suddenly evened the score and you took it all in…You told me afterwards that you wanted to become a priest…That’s when I suddenly realized: You, not Demeter, are the animal…”
