Young Torless (26 page)

And the thing that had been there even before passion seized him, the thing that had only been overgrown by that passion-the real thing, the problem itself-was still firmly lodged in him. It was this mental perspective that he had experienced, which alternated according to whether he was considering what was distant or what was near by; it was this incomprehensible relationship that according to our shifts of standpoint gives happenings and objects sudden values that are quite incommensurable with each other, strange to each other.

All this, and the rest besides, he saw remarkably clear and pure-and small. It was as one sees things in the morning, when the first pure rays of sunlight have dried the sweat of terror, when table and cupboard, enemy and fate, all shrink again, once more assuming their natural dimensions.

But just as then there remains a faint, brooding lassitude, so too it was with Törless. He now knew how to distinguish between day and night; actually he had always known it, and it was only that a monstrous dream had flowed like a tide over those frontiers, blotting them out. He was ashamed of the perplexity he had been in. But still there was also the memory that it could be otherwise, that there were fine and easily effaced boundary-lines around each human being, that feverish dreams prowled around the soul, gnawing at the solid walls and tearing open weird alleys-and this memory had sunk deep into him, sending out its wan and shadowy beams.

He could not quite have explained this. But his inability to find words for it, this near-dumbness, was in itself delightful, like the certainty of a teeming body that can already feel in all its veins the faint tugging of new life. Confidence and weariness intermingled in Törless. .

So it was that he waited quietly and meditatively for the moment of departure.

His mother, who had expected to find an overwrought and desperately perplexed boy, was struck by his cool composure.

When they drove out to the railway station, they passed, on the right, the little wood with the house in it where Bozena lived. It looked utterly insignificant and harmless, merely a dusty thicket of willow and alder.

And Törless remembered how impossible it had been for him then to imagine the life his parents led. He shot a sidelong glance at his mother.

“What is it, my dear boy?”

“Nothing, Mamma. I was just thinking.”

And, drawing a deep breath, he considered the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother's corseted waist.

Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser