Five Women

by Robert Musil

  On the contrary, he loved these defects as he loved her deformed finger-nail, the result of an injury at work. He sent her to evening classes and was amused by the absurd commercial copperplate that she learnt to write there. Even the wrong-headed notions that she came home with were something he found endearing. She would bring them home, as it were, in her mouth, without eating them. There was something nobly natural in her helplessness, her inability to reject whatever was vulgar and worthless, even while with an obscure sense of rightness she did not adopt it as her own. It was astonishing with what sureness she rejected everything crude, coarse, and uncivilised in whatever guise it came her way, although she could not have explained why she rejected it. And yet she lacked any urge to rise beyond her own orbit into a higher sphere. She remained pure and unspoilt, like Nature herself. But loving this simple creature was by no means so simple.

  And at times she would startle him by knowing about things that must be almost outside her ken, such as chemistry. When, preoccupied with his work, he would talk of it, more to himself than to her, he would suddenly find that this or that was something she had heard of before. The first time this happened he had been amazed and had asked her about it. She told him that her mother's brother, who had lived with them in the little house where the brothel was, had been a student.

  "And what's he doing now?"

  "He died. Right after the exam."

  "And how did you pick it up from him?"

  "Well, I was quite small, of course," Tonka recounted, "but when he was studying he used to get me to hear his lessons for him. I didn't understand a word of it, but he used to write the questions out for me, on a piece of paper."

  That was all. And for ten years all that had been hidden, like pretty stones whose names one does not know, kept in a box! That was the way it was now, too. Sitting quietly in the same room with him while he worked was all she needed to make her happy. She was Nature adjusting itself to Mind, not wanting to become Mind, but loving it and inscrutably attaching itself to it. She was like one of those animals that actually seek man's company.

  His relationship to her was at that time in a queer state of tension, equally remote from infatuation and from any wish for a casual affair. Actually they had got on for a remarkably long time at home, without the temptations of sex entering into their relationship. They had been in the way of seeing each other in the evenings, going for walks together, telling each other of the day's little happenings and little annoyances, and it had all been as pleasant as eating bread and salt. True, after a time he had rented a room, but only because that was part of the whole thing and, anyway, one can't go walking about the streets for hours on end in the winter. There they had kissed for the first time—rather stiffly, more as though to set the seal on something than for the pleasure of it, and Tonka was very agitated and her lips were rough and hard. Even at that time they had talked of ‘entirely belonging to each other'. That is to say, he had talked and Tonka had listened in silence. With that painful clarity in which one's bygone follies insist on recurring to one's memory, he recalled his very juvenile and didactic exposition of why it would have to come to that. It was only then, he had explained, that two people really opened up to each other. And so they had remained suspended between emotion and theory. Tonka merely begged a few times that it might be postponed for some days. Finally, he was rather affronted and asked if she thought it too great a sacrifice. So then a day was fixed.

  And Tonka had come: in her little moss-green jacket, in the blue hat with the black bobbles, her cheeks pink from the brisk walk through the evening air. She laid the table, she made the tea. The only difference was that she bustled a little more than usual and kept her eyes fixed on the things she was handling. And he himself, although he had been waiting impatiently all day long, now sat on the sofa, watching her, immobilised by the icy stiffness of his youth. He realised that Tonka was trying not to think of the inevitable, and he was sorry he had insisted on fixing a day for it—it made him feel like a bailiff. But it only now occurred to him that he ought to have taken her by surprise, that he ought to have enticed her into it.

  How remote he felt from any joy! On the contrary, he shrank from taking the bloom off that freshness which was wafted to him like a cool breeze every evening they spent together. But it had to be, sooner or later. He clutched at the necessity of it, and while he watched Tonka rather mechanically bustling about, it seemed to him that his intention was like a rope tied round her ankle, shortening at every turn.

  After the meal, which they ate almost without speaking, they sat down side by side. He attempted a joke, and Tonka attempted a laugh. But her mouth twisted, her lips were tight, and the next instant she was grave again.

  All at once he asked her: "Tonka, are you sure it's all right? Have we really made up our minds?"

  Tonka lowered her head, and it seemed to him that her eyes were veiled for a moment. But she did not say yes, and she did not say that she loved him.

  He bent down to her, speaking softly, trying to encourage her, though he himself was embarrassed. "You know, at first it's all rather strange, perhaps even rather unromantic. After all, you know, we have to be careful. I mean, it isn't just... . So you'd better shut your eyes. And so?"

  The bed was already turned down, and Tonka went over to it. But suddenly irresolute again, she sat down on the chair beside it.

  "Tonka!" he called out to her.

  She stood up again and, with averted face, began to unfasten her clothes.

  An ungrateful thought remained associated with this sweet moment.

  Was Tonka giving herself of her own free will? He had not promised her any love. Why did she not rebel against a situation that excluded the highest hopes? She acted in silence, as though she were subdued by the authority of ‘the master'. Perhaps she would also obey another who was equally determined?

  There she stood in all the awkwardness of her maiden nakedness. It was moving to see how the skin enclosed her body like too tight a garment.

  His flesh was wiser and more humane than his youthfully pseudo-sophisticated thoughts, and he made a move towards her.

  As though she were trying to escape from him, Tonka slipped into bed, with a movement that was oddly clumsy and unlike her.

  All he remembered of what happened after that was that in passing the chair he had felt the thing he was most intimate and familiar with had been left behind on that chair, with the clothes he knew so well. When he came by, there rose from them the dear fresh smell that he was always first aware of whenever they met. What awaited him in the bed was something unknown and strange. He hesitated a moment longer.

  Tonka lay there, with her eyes shut and her face turned to the wall, for an endless age, in terrible lonely fear. When at last she felt him beside her, her eyes were wet with warm tears. Then came a new wave of fear, dismay at her ingratitude, a senseless word uttered as though in search of help, as though stumbling out of some infinitely long, lonely corridor, to transform itself into his name—and then she was his. He hardly grasped how magically, and with how much childlike courage, she stole into his being, what simpleminded strategy she had worked out in order to take possession of all she admired in him: it was only necessary to belong to him entirely and then she would be part of it all.

  Later, he could not in the least remember how it had all happened.

  VI

  And then in a single day, in a single morning, it was all transformed into a tangle of thorns.

  They had been living together for some years when Tonka one day realised that she was pregnant. It was not just any ordinary day. Heaven had so ordained it that if one counted back from that day it appeared that the conception must have taken place during a period when he was away on a journey. Tonka, however, claimed to have noticed her condition only when it was no longer quite possible to establish the beginning of it with certainty.

  In such a situation there are certain obvious ideas that will occur to anyone. On the other hand,
there was no man far and wide whom one could reasonably suspect.

  Some weeks later destiny manifested itself still more plainly: Tonka fell ill. It was a disease that the mother's blood had been infected with, either by the child she had conceived or directly by the child's father. It was a horrible, dangerous, insidious disease. But whatever way she had been infected, the curious thing was that in either case there was a discrepancy between the various dates. Apart from this, as far as could be medically established with certainty he was not suffering from the disease himself. So there was either some mystical bond linking him with Tonka or she was guilty on an ordinary human level. There were, of course, also other possible explanations—at least theoretically, ideally speaking—but practically speaking their probability was as good as nil. On the other hand, from the practical point of view the probability that he was neither the father of Tonka's child nor the cause of her illness amounted to a certainty.

  If one considers the situation for a moment, one can see how difficult it was for him to grasp this. ‘From the practical point of view....' If you go to a business man, not with a commercial proposition that will appeal to his profit-making instincts, but to harangue him about the spirit of the times and the moral obligations of the rich, he will know you have come to get money out of him. On that point he will never be mistaken, although there is of course always the possibility that you might have come quite unselfishly, just to give him some good advice. Similarly, a judge will not have a moment's doubt when the accused tells him that the incriminating article found on his person was given to him by ‘a man he had never seen before'. And yet there is no reason why this should not really happen once in a while. But the management of human affairs rests on the fact that there is no need to reckon with all the possibilities, because the most extreme cases practically never do occur. But theoretically? The old doctor to whom he had first taken Tonka, and whom he had seen alone afterwards, had shrugged his shoulders. Was it possible? Well, of course one couldn't say that it was entirely impossible.... There was a kindly, mournful look in his eyes, and what he evidently meant was: Don't let us waste time talking about that—it's much too improbable to be worthy of serious consideration. A doctor is, after all, a human being, and rather than assume that he is dealing with something that is medically quite improbable, he will assume the cause to be a human lapse. For freaks of Nature are rare.

  So the next phase was that of a kind of medical litigiousness. He went to doctor after doctor. The second doctor came to the same conclusion as the first, and the third to the same conclusion as the second. He argued with them. He tried to play off against each other the views of various medical schools of thought. The physicians listened to him in silence, sometimes with a tolerant smile, as though he were a lunatic or a blockhead past praying for. And of course he himself knew, even while he was arguing, that he might just as well have asked : ‘Is there such a thing as immaculate conception?' And they would only have been able to tell him: ‘We have no medical evidence of it.' They would not even have been able to produce a law excluding the possibility. All they knew was : There was no evidence. And yet if he were to accept this, he would be a cuckold past praying for!

  Perhaps, indeed, one of the doctors whom he had gone to see had told him so to his face. Or perhaps he himself had thought of it; after all, there was no reason why he should not have thought of it. But it was as if one were to exert oneself thinking out all the possible combinations and permutations of relevant finger-movements just because one could not fix a collar-stud—for all this time, while he was producing theory after theory, he was confronted by the irrefutable experience of Tonka's face. It was all a walking through cornfields, a sense of the air, the swallows dipping and darting, and in the distance the spires of the town, girls singing ... remote from all truth, in a world that does not know the concept ‘truth'. Tonka was now living in the deep world of fairy-tale. It was the world of the Anointed, of the Virgin, and of Pontius Pilate, and the doctors said that Tonka would need to be nursed and cared for if she was to survive.

  VII

  Still, he went on trying, of course, every now and again to wring a confession out of Tonka. After all, he was a man, and he was no fool. At this time she was working in a big, trashy shop in a working-class district. She had to be there at seven in the morning and could not leave before half-past nine in the evening—kept there often merely for the sake of some belated customer's few pence. She never saw the sun. She did not sleep at his place, and there was no time to thrash out their emotional problems. They could not count on even this scanty source of income for any length of time, for sooner or later her pregnancy would be noticed. And they were already in financial difficulties. He had used up the money provided for his studies, and he was not capable of earning anything; this is always particularly difficult at the beginning of a scientific career, and besides, he had come so near to solving the problem he had set himself—though the solution still just escaped him—that he felt he had to concentrate all his energies on this work.

  Living like this, never seeing the daylight and perpetually in anxiety, Tonka began to fade. Poor Tonka, of course she did not fade beautifully, as some women do, radiating an intoxicating splendour in decay; she wilted like some dim little herb in a kitchen garden that turns an ugly yellow and shrivels away as soon as it loses the freshness of its green. Her cheeks grew pale and hollow, and this made her nose look too big and prominent, her mouth seemed too wide, and even her ears seemed to stick out. Her body grew gaunt, and the full, curving flesh wasted away, letting the peasant skeleton peer through the skin.

  He, whose well-bred face wore better under hardship and whose store of good clothes lasted longer, noticed, whenever he went out with her, that passers-by would sometimes cast an astonished glance at them. And because he was not without vanity, he bore Tonka a grudge for not having the pretty clothes that he could not buy her. He was angry with her for being so shabby, although it was his own fault. But actually, if he could have afforded it, he would have bought her pretty, floating maternity-clothes and would only then have charged her with her infidelity.

  Every time he tried to extract a confession from her, Tonka would utter the same denial. She said she did not know how it had happened. When he implored her, in the name of their old affection, not to lie to him, an anguished look would come over her face. And when he stormed at her, she merely said she was not lying. And what was anyone to do then? Should he have beaten her and sworn at her? Should he have abandoned her in her dreadful plight? He no longer slept with her. But even on the rack she would not have confessed, if only because she could not talk to him since she had realised that he mistrusted her. And this dumb obstinacy was all the more frustrating for him because his loneliness was no longer alleviated by any element of grace. He had to be tenacious, to watch and wait.

  He had made up his mind to ask his mother for financial help. But his father had for a long time been hovering on the brink of death, and this meant there was no money to spare. He had no means of checking this, though he did know his mother was frightened of the possibility that he might intend marrying Tonka some day. Indeed, she was worried by the thought that any other marriage would be made impossible because Tonka was in the way. And when it all dragged on for so long, his studies still unfinished, success not yet achieved, his father still lingering on his death-bed, and all the domestic cares she had to cope with into the bargain, it seemed in some way or another to be all Tonka's fault. Tonka seemed to be not merely the cause of all that was going wrong now, but positively something like an ill omen, a herald of misfortune, in that it was she who had first disturbed the normal tenor of their life. This obscure conviction of his mother's had become apparent to him, both from her letters and during his visits home. What it came to fundamentally was that she felt it was a blot on the family honour for her son to be more attached to a girl ‘of that sort' than was generally the case with young men.

  Hyacinth was made to give him a
talking to on the subject. And when the young man, taken aback by the implicit superstitiousness of this attitude, which reminded him of his own painful, irrational experiences, put up vehement opposition Tonka was referred to as ‘an ungrateful creature' who had had no consideration for a family's peace of mind. Awkward allusions were then made to ‘amorous arts' by means of which she kept ‘a hold on him'. In short, what came to light was every respectable mother's entire ignorance of real life. The same thing was manifest in the answer that he got now, as though every single coin that helped to keep him with Tonka could only contribute to his undoing.

  At this point he decided to write again and acknowledge himself to be the father of Tonka's child.

  By way of answer his mother came in person, ‘to straighten the whole thing out'.

  She did not come to his lodgings, as though she were afraid of encountering something intolerable there. She summoned him to her hotel. By taking refuge in her sense of duty she had rid herself of a certain amount of embarrassment, and she spoke of the great concern he was causing them all, of the added danger to his ailing father's life, and bonds that would last a lifetime. With clumsy cunning she pulled out all the stops of proper feeling. Yet a note of indulgence pervading all she said kept her listener, bored though he was by the maternal tactics he could so easily see through, in a state of mistrustful curiosity.

  "You see," she said, "this misfortune might make everything turn out for the best, even now, and that would be a lucky escape for all concerned. The main thing is to prevent any recurrence of such incidents in future."

  To this end she had managed to persuade Father to provide a certain sum of money. So—she explained, as though it were a great benefaction—all the girl's claims could be settled and the child provided for.

  To her surprise her son, having calmly asked how much was being offered and having heard the answer, shook his head and merely said, in the same calm tone: "It can't be done."