Robert Musil - Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Well, maybe there are more nightingales in Berlin than I thought — Atwo continued. At the time I believed that there were none in this stony preserve, and that this one must have flown to me from far away. To me! — I felt it and sat up with a smile. A bird of paradise! So it does indeed exist! — At such a moment, you see, it seems perfectly natural to believe in the supernatural; it is as if you’d spent your childhood in an enchanted kingdom. And I immediately decided: I’ll follow the nightingale. Farewell, my beloved! — I thought — farewell, my beloved, my house, my city. .! But before I had even gotten up out of bed, and before I had figured out whether to climb up to the nightingale on the rooftop, or to follow it on the street down below, the bird had gone silent and apparently flown away.

Now he’s singing from some other rooftop for the ears of another sleeper, Atwo mused. — You’re probably thinking that this was the end of the story? — But it was only the beginning, and I have no idea what end it will take!

I’d been abandoned, left behind with a heavy heart. That was no nightingale, it was a blackbird, I said to myself — just as you’d like to say to me right now. Everyone knows that such blackbirds imitate other birds. By this time I was wide awake and the silence bored me. I lit a candle and considered the woman who lay next to me. Her body had the color of pale bricks. The white border of the blanket lay over her skin like a lip of snow. Wide shadow lines of mysterious derivation ringed her body — mysterious even though they must of course have had something to do with the candle and the position of my arms. So what, I thought, so what if it really was only a blackbird! The very fact that an ordinary blackbird could have such a crazy effect on me: that makes the whole thing all the more extraordinary! For as you well know: While a single disappointment may elicit tears, a repeated disappointment will evoke a smile. And meanwhile I kept looking at my wife. This was all somehow connected, but I didn’t know how. For years I’ve loved you — I thought to myself — like nothing else in this world, and now you lie there like a burnt-out husk of love. You’re a stranger to me now, and I’ve arrived at the other end of love. Had I grown tired of her? I can’t remember ever having felt sated. Let me put it like this, it was as if a feeling could drill its way through the heart as though through a mountain, and find another world on the other side, a world with the same valley, the same houses and the same little bridge. In all honesty, I simply had no idea what was happening. And I still don’t understand it today. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to tell you this story in connection with two others that happened afterwards. I can only tell you how I saw it during the experience: as a signal from afar — so it seemed to me at the time.

I lay my head beside her body that slept on unawares, and took no part in all this. Then her bosom seemed to rise and fall more strenuously than before, and the walls of the room lapped up against this sleeping form like waves against a ship far out at sea. I would probably never have been able to bring myself to say goodbye; but if I were to slip away right now, I told myself, then I’d stay the little lost boat, past which a great sturdy ship would sail unnoticing. I kissed her sleeping form, she didn’t feel it. I whispered something in her ear, and maybe I did it so quietly that she wouldn’t hear it. Then I ridiculed myself and sneered at the very thought of the nightingale; but quietly nonetheless I got dressed. I think that I cried, but I really did leave. I felt giddy, lighthearted, even though I tried to tell myself that no decent human being would do such a thing; I remember that I was like a drunkard rebuking the sidewalk beneath his feet to reassure himself that he’s sober.

Of course, I often thought of returning; at times I would have liked to cross half the world to get back to her, but I never did. She had become untouchable to me; in short — I don’t know if you understand — he who has committed an injustice and feels it down to the bone, can no longer set it aright. I am not, by the way, asking for absolution. I just want to tell you my stories to find out if they ring true. For years I haven’t been able to tell them to anyone, and had I heard myself talking to myself, I would quite frankly have questioned my sanity.

Please be assured then that my reason is still the equal of your enlightened mind.

Then, two years later, I found myself in a tight fix, at the dead angle of a battle in the south Tyrol, a line that wound its way from the bloody trenches of the Cima di Vezzena all the way to Lake Caldonazzo. There, like a wave of sunshine, the battle line dove deep into the valley, skirting two hills with beautiful names, and surfaced again on the other side, only to lose itself in the stillness of the mountains. It was October; the thinly-manned trenches were covered with leaves, the lake shimmered a silent blue, the hills lay there like huge withered wreaths; like funeral wreaths, I often thought to myself without even a shudder of fear. Halting and divided, the valley spilled around them; but beyond the edge of our occupied zone, it fled such sweet diffusion and drove like the blast of a trombone: brown, broad and heroic out into the hostile distance.

At night, we pushed ahead to an advanced position, so prone now in the valley that they could have wiped us out with an avalanche of stones from above; but instead, they slowly roasted us on steady artillery fire. The morning after such a night all our faces had a strange expression that took hours to wear off: Our eyes were enlarged, and our heads tilted every which way on the multitude of shoulders, like a lawn that had just been trampled on. Yet on every one of those nights I poked my head up over the edge of the trench many times, and cautiously turned to look back over my shoulder like a lover: and I saw the Brenta Mountains light blue, as if formed out of stiff-pleated glass, silhouetted against the night sky. And on such nights the stars were like silver foil cutouts glimmering, fat as glazed cookies; and the sky stayed blue all night; and the thin virginal moon crescent lay on her back, now silvery, now golden, basking in the splendor. You must try to imagine just how beautiful it was: for such beauty exists only in the face of danger. And then sometimes I could stand it no longer, and giddy with joy and longing, I crept out for a little nightcrawl around, all the way to the golden-green blackness of the trees, so enchantingly colorful and black, the like of which you’ve never seen.

But things were different during the day; the atmosphere was so easygoing that you could have gone horseback riding around the main camp. It’s only when you have the time to sit back and think and to feel terror that you first learn the true meaning of danger. Every day claims its victims, a regular weekly average of so-and-so many out of a hundred, and already the divisional general staff officers are predicting the results as impersonally as an insurance company. You do it too, by the way. Instinctively you know the odds and feel insured, although not exactly under the best of terms. It is a function of the curious calm that you feel, living under constant crossfire. Let me add the following, though, so that you don’t paint a false picture of my circumstances. It does indeed happen that you suddenly feel driven to search for a particular familiar face, one that you remember seeing several days ago; but it’s not there anymore. A face like that can upset you more than it should, and hang for a long time in the air like a candle’s afterglow. And so your fear of death has diminished, though you are far more susceptible to all sorts of strange upsets. It is as if the fear of one’s demise, which evidently lies on top of man forever like a stone, were suddenly to have been rolled back, and in the uncertain proximity of death an unaccountable inner freedom blossoms forth.