Five Women by Robert Musil

Author:Robert Musil [Musil, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Then he said to himself: ‘Perhaps Tonka wasn't really so good as I imagined.' But that again only went to prove how mysterious her goodness was. It was the kind of goodness that a dog might have had.

He was overwhelmed by a dry, raging grief that swept through him like a storm. It went howling round the solid walls of his existence, crying: ‘I can't write to you any more, I can't see you any more.' ‘But I shall be with you like God Himself,' he consoled himself, without even knowing what this was supposed to mean. And sometimes he could simply have cried out : ‘Help me, help me! Here I am kneeling before you!' Sadly he said to himself: ‘Think of it, a man walking all alone with a dog in the mountains of the stars, in the sea of the stars!' And he was agonised with tears that became as big as the globe of the sky and would not come out of his eyes.

Wide awake, he now dreamt Tonka's dreams for her.

Once, he dreamed to himself, when all Tonka's hope had gone he would suddenly come into the room again and be there with her. He would be wearing his large-checked, brown tweed travelling-coat. And when he opened it, underneath it he would be quite naked, nothing on his slender white body but a thin gold chain, with tinkling pendants on it. And everything would be like one single day, she would be quite sure of that.

This was how he longed for Tonka, as she had longed for

him. Oh, she was never a loose woman! No man tempted her. If someone pays court to her, she will rather give him to understand, with slightly awkward mournfulness, that such affairs are likely to come to a bad end. And when she leaves the shop in the evening, she is quite full of all the noisy, jolly, annoying events of her day, her ears are full of it all, inwardly she goes on talking of it all, and there is no scrap of room for any stranger. But she knows too that there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this : there is a realm where she is grand, noble, and good, where she is not a little shop-girl, but his equal, deserving of a great destiny. And this was why, in spite of all the difference between them, she always believed she had a right to him. What he was concerned with achieving was something of which she understood nothing at all; it did not affect her. But he belonged to her because at bottom he was good; for she too was good, and somewhere, after all, there must be the palace of goodness where they would live united and never part again.

What then was this goodness? It did not lie in action, nor yet in being. It was a gleam when the travelling-coat opened. And time was moving much too fast. He

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