Young Torless (19 page)

“Did they say anything more about it-how they think they can do it? I mean, that about me.”

“More? No. They only said they'd see to it all right.”

And yet. . . there was danger now. .. somewhere lying in wait .. . lying in ambush for Törless.. . every step could run him into a gin-trap, every night might be the last before the fight. There was tremendous insecurity in this thought. Here was no more idle drifting along, no more toying with enigmatic visions-this had hard corners and was tangible reality.

Törless spoke again:

“And what do they do with you?”

Basini was silent.

“If you're serious about reforming, you have to tell me everything.”

“They make me undress.”

“Yes, yes, I see that for myself. . . And then?”

A little time passed, and then suddenly Basini said: “Various things.” He said it with an effeminate, coy expression.

“So you're their-mi-mistress?”

“Oh no, I'm their friend!”

“How can you have the nerve to say that!”

“They say so themselves.”

“What!”

“Yes, Reiting does.”

“Oh, Reiting does?”

“Yes, he's very nice to me. Mostly I have to undress and read him something out of history-books-about Rome and the emperors, or the Borgias, or Timur ....... oh well, you know, all that sort of big, bloody stuff. Then he's even affectionate to me. And then afterwards he generally beats me.”

“After what? Oh, I see!”

“Yes. He says, if he didn't beat me, he wouldn't be able to help thinking I was a man, and then he couldn't let himself be so soft and affectionate to me. But like that, he says, I'm his chattel, and so then he doesn't mind.”

“And Beineberg?”

“Oh, Beineberg's beastly. Don't you think too his breath smells bad?”

“Shut up! What I think is no business of yours! Tell me what Beineberg does with you!”

“Well, the same as Reiting, only. . . But you mustn't go yelling at me again....”

“Get on with it.”

“Only... he goes about it differently. First of all he gives me long talks about my soul. He says I've sullied it, but so to speak only the outermost forecourt of it. In relation to the innermost, he says, this is something that doesn't matter at all, it's only external. But one must kill it. In that way many people have stopped being sinners and become saints. So from a higher point of view sin isn't bad, only one must carry it to the extreme, so that it breaks off its own accord, he says. He makes me sit and stare into a prism. .”

“He hypnotises you?”

“No, he says it's just that he must make all the things floating about on the surface of my soul go to sleep and become powerless. It's only then he can have intercourse with my soul itself.”

“And how, may I ask, does he have intercourse with it?”

“That's an experiment he hasn't ever brought off yet. He sits there, and I have to lie on the ground so that he can put his feet on me. I have to get quite dull and drowsy from staring into the glass. Then suddenly he orders me to bark. He tells me exactly how to do it-quietly, more whimpering-the way a dog whines in its sleep.”

“What's that good for?”

“Nobody knows what it's good for. And he also makes me grunt like a pig and keeps on and on telling me there's something of a pig about me, in me. But he doesn't mean it offensively, he just keeps on repeating it quite softly and nicely, in order-this is what he says-in order to imprint it firmly on my nerves. You see, he says it's possible one of my former lives was that of a pig and it must be lured out so as to render it harmless.”

“And you believe all that stuff?”

“Good lord, no! I don't think he believes it himself. And then in the end he's always quite different, anyway. How on earth should I believe such things? Who believes in a soul these days anyway? And as for transmigration of souls-! I know quite well I slipped.

But I've always hoped I'd be able to make up for it again. There isn't any hocus-pocus needed for that. Not that I spend any time racking my brains about how I ever came to go wrong. A thing like that comes on you so quickly, all by itself. It's only afterwards you notice that you've done something silly. But if he gets his fun out of looking for something supernatural behind it, let him, for all I care. For the present, after all, I've got to do what he wants. Only I wish he'd leave off sticking pins in me. ...

“What?”

“Pricking me with a pin-not hard, you know, only just to see how I react-to see if something doesn't manifest itself at some point or other on the body. But it does
hurt.
The fact is, he says the doctors don't understand anything about it. I don't remember now how he proves all this, all I remember is he talks a lot about fakirs and how when they see their souls they're supposed to be insensitive to physical pain.”

“Oh yes, I know those ideas. But you yourself say that's not all.”

“No, it certainly isn't all. But I also said I think this is just a way of going about it. Afterwards there are always long times-as much as a quarter of an hour-wh
en he doesn't say anything and I
don't know what's going on in him. But after that he suddenly breaks out and demands services from me-as if he were possessed-much worse than Reiting.”

“And you do everything that's demanded of you?”

“What else can I do? I want to become a decent person again and be left in peace.”

“But whatever happens in the meantime won't matter to you at all?”

“Well, I can't help it, can I?”

“Now pay attention to me and answer my questions. How could you steal?”

“How? Look, it's like this, I needed money urgently. I was in debt to the tuck-shop man, and he wouldn't wait any longer. Then I really did believe there was money coming for me just at that time. None of the other fellows would lend me any. Some of them hadn't got any themselves, and the saving ones are always just glad if someone who isn't like that gets short towards the end of the month. Honestly, I didn't want to cheat anyone. I only wanted to borrow it secretly. . .

“That's not what I mean,” Törless said impatiently, interrupting his story, which it was obviously a relief for Basini to tell. “What I'm asking is how-how were you able to do it, what did you feel like? What went on in you at that moment?”

“Oh well-nothing, really. After all, it was only a moment, I didn't feel anything. I didn't think about anything, simply it had suddenly happened.”

“But the first time with Reiting? The first time he demanded those things of you? You know what I mean....”

“Oh, I didn't like it, of course. Because it had to be done just like that, being ordered to. Otherwise-well, just how many of the fellows do such things of their own accord, for the fun of it, without the others knowing anything? I dare say it's not so bad then.”

“But you did it on being ordered to. You debased yourself. Just as if you had crawled into the muck because someone else wanted you to.”

“Oh, I grant that. But I had to.”

“No, you didn't have to.”

“They would have beaten me and reported me. Think how I would have got into disgrace.”

“All right then, let's leave that. There's something else I want to know. Listen. I know you've spent a lot of money with Bozena. You've boasted to her and thrown your weight about and made out what a man you are. So you want to be a man? Not just boasting and pretending to be-but with your whole soul? Now look, then suddenly someone demands such a humiliating service from you, and in the same moment you feel you're too cowardly to say no-doesn't it make a split go through your whole being? A horror-something you can't describe-as though something unutterable had happened inside you?”

“Lord! I don't know what you mean. I don'
t know what you're getting at. I
can't tell you anything-anything at all-about that.”

“Now attend. I'm going to order you to get undressed again.”

Basini smiled.

“And to lie down flat on the floor there in front of me. Don't laugh! I'm really ordering you to! D'you
hear
me? If you don't obey instantly, you'll see what you're in for when Reiting comes back! . . That's right. So now you're lying naked on the ground in front of me. You're trembling, too. Are you cold? I could spit on your naked body now if I wanted to. Just press your head right on to the floor.

Doesn't the dust on the boards look queer? Like a landscape full of clouds and lumps of rock as big as houses? I could stick pins into you. There are still some over there in the corner, by the lamp. D'you feel them in your skin even now? .. . But I don't mean to do that. I could make you bark, the way Beineberg does, and make you eat dust like a pig, I could make you do movements-oh, you know-and at the same time you would have to sigh: 'Oh, my dear Mother!' “ But Törless broke off abruptly in the midst of this sacrilege. “But I don't mean to-don't mean to-do you understand?”

Basini wept. “You're tormenting me. .

“Yes, I'm tormenting you. But that's not what I'm after. There's just one thing I want to know: when I drive all that into you like knives, what goes on in you? What happens inside you? Does something burst in you? Tell me! Does it smash like a glass that suddenly flies into thousands
of
splinters before there's been even a little crack in it? Doesn't the picture you've made of yourself go out like a candle? Doesn't something else leap into its place, the way the pictures in the magic-lantern leap out of the darkness? Don't you
understand
what I mean? I can't explain it for you any better. You must tell me yourself!”

Basini wept without stopping. His girlish shoulders jerked. All he could get out was to the same effect: “I don't know what you're after, I can't explain anything to you, it happens just in a moment, and then nothing different can happen, you'd do just the same as me.”

Törless was silent. He remained leaning against the wall, exhausted, motionless, blankly staring straight in front of him.

'If you were in my situation, you would do just the same,' Basini had said. Seen thus, what had happened appeared a simple necessity, straightforward and uncomplicated.

Törless's self-awareness rebelled in blazing contempt against the mere suggestion. And yet this rebellion on the part of his whole being seemed to offer him no satisfactory guarantee … 'yes,
I
should have more character than he has,
I
shouldn't put up with such outrageous demands-but does it really matter? Does it matter that I should act differently, from firmness, from decency, from-oh, for all sorts of reasons that at the moment don't interest me in the least? No, what counts is not how I should act, but the fact that if I were ever really to act as Basini has done, I should have just as little sense of anything extraordinary about it as he has. This is the heart of the matter: my feeling about myself would be exactly as simple and clear of ambiguity as his feeling about himself. .'

This thought-flashing through his mind in half-coherent snatches of sentences that ran over into each other and kept beginning all over again-added to his contempt for Basini a very private, quiet pain that touched his inmost balance at a much deeper point than any moral consideration could. It came from his awareness of a sensation he had briefly had before and which he could not get rid of. The fact was that when Basini's words revealed to him the danger potentially menacing him from Reiting and Beineberg, he had simply been startled. He had been startled as by a sudden assault, and without stopping to think had in a flash looked round for cover and a way of parrying the attack. That had been in the moment of a real danger; and the sensation it had caused him-those swift, unthinking impulses-exasperated and stimulated him. He tried, all in vain, to set them off again. But he knew they had immediately deprived the danger of all its peculiarity and ambiguity.

And yet it had been the same danger that he had had a foreboding of only some weeks previously, in this same place-that time when he had felt so oddly startled by the lair itself, which was like some forgotten scrap of the Middle Ages lying remote from the warm, bright-lit life of the class-rooms, and by Beineberg and Reiting, because they seemed to have changed from the people they were down there, suddenly turning into something else, something sinister, blood-thirsty, figures in some quite different sort of life. That had been a transformation, a leap, for Törless, as though the picture of his surroundings had suddenly loomed up before other eyes-eyes just awakened out of a hundred years of sleep.

And yet it had been the same danger.... He kept on repeating this to himself. And ever and again he tried to compare the memories of the two different sensations. . .

Meanwhile Basini had got up. Observing his companion's blank, absent gaze, he quietly took his clothes and slipped away.

Törless saw it happening-as though through a mist-but he uttered no word and let it go at that.

His attention was wholly concentrated on this straining to rediscover the point in himself where the change of inner perspective had suddenly occurred.

But every time he came anywhere near it the same thing happened to him as happens to someone trying to compare the close-at-hand with the remote: he could never seize the memory images of the two feelings together. For each time something came in between. It was like a faint click in the mind, corresponding more or less to something that occurs in the physical realm-that scarcely perceptible muscular sensation which is associated with the focusing of the gaze. And each time, precisely in the decisive moment, this would claim all his attention: the activity of making the comparison thrust itself before the objects to be compared, there was an almost unnoticeable jerk-and everything stopped.