Five Women

by Robert Musil

  Clinging to her hopes, she retorted: "It must be done! Don't go on deluding yourself. Many young men commit similar follies, but they let it be a lesson to them. This is really your chance to free yourself. Don't miss it out of a misguided sense of honour. You owe it to yourself and to us."

  "How do you mean, it's my chance?"

  "It's quite obvious. The girl will show more good sense than you are doing. She knows very well that such relationships always come to an end when a child arrives."

  He asked for time to think about it—until the next day. Something had flashed upon him.

  His mother, the doctors with all their smiling reasonableness, the smooth running of the underground train by which he made his way back to Tonka, the steady movements of the policeman's arms regulating the traffic, the city's roar like the thundering of a waterfall: it was all one and the same thing. He stood in the lonely hollow space under the cascade of it—untouched by even a splash, but utterly cut off.

  He asked Tonka if she would agree.

  Tonka said : "Yes." How terribly ambiguous this Yes of hers was! In it there lay all the good sense his mother had predicted, but round the mouth that uttered it there was the twitching of bewilderment.

  The next day he told his mother point-blank, before she could ask him any questions, that he was perhaps not the father of Tonka's child, that Tonka was ill, and that for all this he would rather consider himself ill and himself the father of the child than abandon Tonka.

  His mother smiled in defeat, confronted with such wilful self-deception, bestowed a last, fond glance on him, and left. He realised she would dedicate herself to saving her flesh and blood from shame, and he now had a powerful enemy in league with him.

  VIII

  Finally, Tonka lost her job. He had been growing almost uneasy over the fact that this misfortune was so long delayed. The shopkeeper for whom Tonka worked was a small, ugly man, but in their distress he had seemed to them like some superhuman power. For weeks they had been guessing: "He must know by now.... Well, obviously he's a decent sort and doesn't hit someone who's down...." and then again: "He hasn't noticed, thank heaven he hasn't noticed anything yet!" And then one day Tonka was called into the office and asked, point-blank, about her condition. She could not get any answer out, her eyes merely filled with tears. And this practical man was quite unmoved by the fact that she was too upset to speak. He gave her a month's wages and dismissed her on the spot. He was so furious that he shouted at her, complaining that it was all her fault if he was now shorthanded and that it had been dishonest of her to conceal her condition when she took the job. He did not even send the typist out of the room before saying such things to her.

  Afterwards, Tonka felt very wicked, and even he secretly admired that sordid nameless little tradesman, who had not hesitated for a minute but had sacrificed Tonka to his business sense, and with her her tears, a child, and heaven alone knew what inventions, what souls, what human destinies—things of which the man had no notion, things in which he had no interest.

  Now they had to have their meals in small, working-class places, amid dirt and incivility, where for a few pence they got a kind of food that did not agree with him. He would call for Tonka punctually and fulfil his duty by taking her to have these meals. He cut a strange figure, in his well-made clothes, among the labourers and market-porters; grave, taciturn, and constant at the side of his pregnant companion. Many sneering glances were cast at him, and many respectful ones, which were no less painful. It was a strange life he was leading, with his invention in his head, and with his conviction of Tonka's infidelity, amid the flotsam and jetsam of the great city. He had never before felt the common beastliness of mankind so intensely: wherever he walked through the streets, there it went, yapping and growling like a pack of hounds, each person alone in his greed, but all of them together one pack—and only he had no one to whom he could turn for help or to whom he could even have told his story.

  He had never had time for friends, doubtless indeed had taken little interest in them, nor had he himself been attractive to others. He went though life burdened with his ideas, and that is a burden dangerous to the very life of him who bears it, so long as people have not realised there is something in it that they can turn to their own advantage. He did not even know in what direction he might have searched for help. He was a stranger in the world. And what was Tonka? Spirit of his spirit? No—perhaps a symbol, some cryptic correspondence to himself, an alien creature who had attached herself to him, with her secret locked within her.

  There was a little chink, a far-off gleam towards which his thoughts were beginning to move. The invention he was working at would in the end turn out to be of great importance for others as well as himself, and it was clear that something else was involved besides the intellectual processes—a courage, a confidence, an intuitive sense of the future, that never deceived him, a healthy urge to live, like a star that he followed. And in all this he too was only pursuing the greater probabilities, and always in one of them he would find what he wanted. What he relied on was that everything would turn out to be the way it always was, so that he could hit upon the one thing in which he could discover the desired otherness. If he had set out to test every possible doubt, as he was doing with Tonka, he would never have come to the end of it. Thinking means not thinking too much, and no invention can be made without sacrificing something of the boundlessness of the inventive talent. This half of his life seemed to be under the influence of the star of a happiness or a mystery beyond proving. And the other half lay in darkness.

  Now he and Tonka bought sweepstake tickets. On the day of the draw he met Tonka and they went and bought the list of results. It was a miserable little sweepstake with a first prize of only a few thousand marks; but that did not matter, it would have tided them over the immediate future. Even if it had been only a few hundred marks, he could have bought Tonka what she most needed in the way of clothes and underclothes, or have moved her out of the unhealthy garret where she lived. And if it had been only twenty marks, it would have been some encouragement, and he would have bought more sweepstake tickets. Indeed, even if they had won no more than five marks, it would have been a sign that the attempt to restore contact with life was regarded with favour in unknown regions.

  But with all their three tickets they drew blanks. Then, of course, he had to pretend he had only bought them for fun. Even while he had been waiting for Tonka there had been an emptiness in him that heralded failure. The truth probably was that he had been wavering between hope and despair all the time. In his circumstances even a few pennies wasted on a newspaper meant a real loss. He suddenly felt there was an invisible power that wished him ill, and he felt himself to be surrounded by hostility.

  After that he became downright superstitious. The man who became so was the one who called for Tonka in the evenings, while the other man he was went on working like a scientist.

  He had two rings, which he wore alternately. Both were valuable, but one was a piece of fine old workmanship, and the other was only a present from his parents, which he had never particularly cherished. Then he noticed that on days he was wearing the newer one—which was only an ordinary expensive ring—he seemed to be spared further deterioration of his situation rather more than on days when he was wearing the good, old one; and from that time on he could not bring himself to put it on again, but wore the other, like a yoke laid upon him.

  Again, one day when he happened not to have shaved, he had good luck. The next day, when he did shave in spite of having observed the omen, he was punished for his transgression by another of those trivial sordid misfortunes that would not have amounted to anything more than absurdity in a situation less desperate than his. From then on he could not bring himself to shave any more. He grew a beard, doing no more than carefully trimming it to a point, and he continued to wear it through all the sad weeks that followed.

  This beard disfigured him, but it was like Tonka: the uglier it looked, the
more anxiously it was tended. Perhaps his feeling for her became all the more affectionate the more profoundly it was disappointed; for like the beard it was inwardly so good because of the outward ugliness. Tonka did not like the beard and did not know what it meant to him. And without her he would never have known how ugly this beard was, for one knows little of oneself unless one has someone else in whom one is reflected. And since what one knows is really nothing, might it not be that at times he wished Tonka dead so that this intolerable existence might be over and done with? And perhaps he liked the beard simply because it was like a mask, concealing everything.

  IX

  There were still times when he would, as it were, try to ambush her: he would ask what seemed to be a perfectly harmless question, hoping that the smooth sound of the words would take her off her guard. But more often it was he who was taken unawares and defeated.

  "Look, it's absolutely senseless going on denying it," he would say coaxingly. "Come on now, tell me. Then everything'll be just the way it used to be. How on earth did it happen?"

  But her answer was always the same: "Send me away if you won't believe me."

  That was, of course, her way of making the most of her own helplessness, but it was also the most genuine answer she could give. For she had no medical or philosophical arguments to defend herself with: all she could do was to vouch for the truth of her words with the truth of her whole being.

  Then he would go with her whenever she went out, because he did not dare to leave her alone. There was nothing definite that he feared, but it made him uneasy to think of her alone in the great alien streets of the city. And when he would meet her somewhere in the evenings, and they walked along, and in the dusk they would pass some man who gave no sign of knowing them, he would sometimes have the feeling that the man's face was familiar, and it seemed to him that Tonka blushed; and all at once he would remember that there had been an occasion when they had been together with this man. Instantly, then, and with a certainty equal to the certainty he felt when gazing into Tonka's innocent face, he would have the conviction: This is the one! Once it seemed to be a well-to-do young man who was learning the business in an export firm and whom they had met a few times. Once it was a tenor who had worked in a café chantant until he lost his voice and who had a room in the same lodging-house as Tonka. They were always such ludicrously marginal figures; they were like dirty parcels thrown into his memory, tied up with string, each parcel containing the truth—but at the first attempt to undo it, the package would disintegrate, leaving him with nothing but an agonising sense of helplessness and a heap of dust.

  These certainties of Tonka's infidelity had, indeed, something of the quality of dreams. Tonka endured them with all that touching, dumbly affectionate humility of hers. But how many different meanings that could have! And then, going through his memories, he began to see how ambiguous they all were. For instance, the very simplicity of the way she attached herself to him could equally well mean that she did not care one way or the other or that she was following her heart. The way she served him could indicate either apathy or a delight in doing it. Might that dog-like devotion of hers not mean that she would follow any master like a dog? This was something he had, after all, sensed in that first night. Had it in fact been her first night? He had only paid attention to her emotional reactions, and certainly there had been no very perceptible physical signs. Now it was too late. Her silence was now a blanket over everything, and might equally well indicate innocence or obduracy, it could equally well mean cunning or sorrow, remorse, or fear; but then too it might mean that she was ashamed on his behalf. Yet it would not have helped him even if he could have lived all of it all over again. Once a human being is mistrusted, the plainest signs of faithfulness will positively turn into signs of unfaithfulness. On the other hand, where there is trust, the most glaring evidence of unfaithfulness will seem to be signs of misunderstood faithfulness, crying like a child that the grown-ups have locked out. Nothing could be interpreted on its own merits alone, one thing depended on the other, one had to trust or mistrust the whole of it, love it or take it for deceit and delusion. If one was to understand Tonka, one had to respond to her in one definite way; one had, as it were, to call out to her, telling her who she was. What she was, depended almost entirely on him. And so Tonka would become a blur, mildly dazzling as a fairy-tale.

  And he wrote to his mother: ‘Her legs are as long from the foot to the knee as from the knee to the hip, long legs that walk like a pair of twins, without tiring. Her skin is not delicate, but it is white and without blemish. Her breasts are almost a little too heavy, and the hair in her armpits is dark and matted, which looks charmingly shameful on that slender white body. Her hair hangs down in loose strands over her ears, and at time she thinks she has to take the curling-tongs to it and do it up high, which makes her look like a servant-girl. And that, surely, is the only harm she has ever done in her life....'

  Or he would write in answer to his mother: ‘Between Ancona and Fiume, or perhaps it is between Middelkerke and some town whose name I don't remember, there is a lighthouse, the light of it flashing out over the sea at night like the flick of a fan. One flick, and then there is nothing. And then another flick. And edelweiss grows in the meadows of the Venna valley.

  ‘Is that geography or botany or nautical science? It is a face, it is something that is there, solitary, quite alone, eternally —and so in a way, too, it isn't there at all. Or what is it?'

  Naturally he never posted these senseless answers to his mother's letters.

  There was something impalpable missing, something that was needed to make his certainty complete.

  Once he had been travelling by night with his mother and Hyacinth, and in the small hours, out of the depths of that inexorable fatigue which makes the bodies in a train sway to and fro in search of some support, it seemed to him that his mother was leaning against Hyacinth, and that she knew she was, and that Hyacinth was holding her hand. His eyes had widened with anger at the time, for he was sorry for his father. But when he leaned forward, Hyacinth was sitting at some distance and his mother's head was inclined to the other side, away from him. Then after a while, when he had settled back in his seat, the whole thing happened all over again. That seeing and not seeing something was torment, and the torment itself was a darkness through which it was hard to see. Finally he told himself that now he was really sure, and he resolved to challenge his mother about it in the morning. But in broad daylight the whole thing had vanished like the darkness itself.

  And another time, again when they were on a journey, his mother fell ill. Hyacinth, who had to write to Father on her behalf, said irritably: "But I don't know what to say." This from Hyacinth, who wrote reams to Mother whenever he was away! Then there was a quarrel, for again the boy had grown angry, and his mother began to feel worse: she seemed to be seriously ill. Something had to be done for her, and Hyacinth's hands kept on getting in the way of his, and he kept on pushing them aside. At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: "Why do you keep on pushing me away?" The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

  That is not difficult to understand. Yet he was capable of sitting in his room, tortured by jealousy and telling himself that he was not jealous at all, that it was something quite different, something out of the ordinary, something oddly invented; and yet this was himself and his own feelings. When he raised his head and looked about him, everything seemed to be the same as usual. The wallpaper was green and grey. The doors were reddish brown, with faint gleams of light reflected on them. The hinges were dark, made of copper. There was a chair in the room, brown mahogany and wine-red plush. But all these things seemed to be somehow tilted, leaning to one side. There was a suggestion, in their very uprightness, that they were about to topple over. They seemed endless and meaningless.

  He rubbed his eyes and then looked round again. But it was not his eyes. It was the things. Th
e fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world's eyes, the world already in one's own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky. He only needed to look out of the window to see how the world of, say, a cab-driver waiting in the street below was suddenly intersected by the world of a clerk walking past. The result was something slashed open, a disgusting jumble, an inside-out and side-byside of things in the street, a turmoil of focal points moving along their tracks, and around each of them there extended a radius of complacency and self-confidence, all aids to walking upright through a world in which there was no such thing as above and below. Volition, cognition, and perception were like a tangled skein. One noticed this only when one tried to find the end of the thread. But perhaps there was some other way of going through the world, other than following the thread of truth? At such moments, when a veneer of coldness separated him from everything, Tonka was more than a fairy-tale: she was almost a visitation.

  ‘Either I must make Tonka my wife,' he told himself; ‘or I must give her up and give up these thoughts.'

  But no one will blame him for doing neither one nor the other, despite these reasonings of his. For although all such thoughts and feelings may well be justified, nobody nowadays doubts that they are very largely figments of the imagination. And so he went on reasoning, without taking his reasoning seriously. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was being sorely tried, but when he came to himself again and spoke to himself again, as it were, man to man, he had to tell himself that this ordeal consisted, after all, only of the question whether he would force himself to believe in Tonka against the ninety-nine per cent probability that she had been unfaithful to him and that he was simply a fool. Admittedly this humiliating possibility had by now lost much of its importance.