The well-groomed, clean, unapproachable faces that had often instilled a certain awe in him during dinner parties at home. The elegant, cool hands, which never seemed to lose any of their dignity, even at dinner. Many such details came into his mind, and he was ashamed to be here in a foul-smelling little room, trembling as he replied to the humiliating words of a whore. The memory of the perfect manners of that society, which never failed to observe the proprieties, had a more powerful effect on him than any moral considerations. His dark, nagging passions struck him as ludicrous. With visionary vividness he saw a cool, dismissive gesture, a shocked smile, like that with which one would shoo away a small and unclean animal. None the less he remained in his seat as though unable to move.

With each remembered detail, shame welled up in him, and with it a series of ugly thoughts. It had begun when Beineberg supplied an explanation of Božena’s conversation, and it had made Törless blush.

At that moment he had suddenly found himself thinking of his own mother, and that thought had taken hold of him and would not be shifted. It had just shot through the boundaries of his consciousness - as fast as lightning or too distant to be distinguished — on the edge — as if seen in flight — it could barely be called a thought. And a series of questions had rapidly followed, in an attempt to cover it over: ‘How can this Božena compare her vile existence to that of my mother? How can she rub shoulders with her within the confines of a single thought? Why does she not touch her forehead to the ground merely to speak of her? Why is she not forced to admit, as though separated by a great abyss, that they have nothing in common? For what is the true state of affairs? This woman is, for me, a tangle of everything that is sexually desirable; and my mother is a creature who has until now walked through my life at a cloudless distance, clear and without depth, like a star beyond all desire.’

But these questions were not the core of the matter. They barely touched it. They were something secondary; something that had occurred to Törless only in retrospect. They proliferated only because none of them identified the question at hand. They were only excuses, paraphrases of the fact that on the preconscious level, suddenly, instinctively, there was a spiritual connection that had given them all a disagreeable answer. Törless feasted on Božena with his eyes, and at the same time he was unable to forget his mother; the two of them were connected through him: everything else was merely squirming around under that twisted loop of ideas. That was the only fact. But because he was unable to shake off its compulsion, it assumed a terrible, vague significance, which accompanied all his efforts like a perfidious smile.

 

Törless looked around the room in order to rid his mind of all this. But everything had now absorbed that one relationship. The little iron stove with the rust patches on its plate, the bed with the rickety posts and the headboard with its paint flaking off, the dirty blankets peeping through the holes of the worn cover; Božena, her shift that had slipped from one shoulder, the vulgar, florid scarlet of her petticoat, her broad, cackling laugh; finally Beineberg, whose behaviour now, compared with his normal demeanour, seemed like that of a depraved priest who has lost his reason and weaves innuendoes into the solemn forms of a prayer ... everything headed in a single direction, invaded him and twisted his thoughts violently back again and again.

Only in one place did his eyes, which fled in terror from Božena to Beineberg, find peace. That was above the little curtain. There the clouds looked in from the sky, and, motionless, the moon.

It was as though he had suddenly stepped out into the fresh, peaceful night air. For a while all his thoughts grew quite still. Then a pleasant memory came to him. The house in the country where they had spent the previous summer. Nights in the silent park. A velvet-dark firmament quivering with stars. His mother’s voice from the depths of the garden, where she was walking with Papa on the faintly shimmering gravel paths. Songs that she sang quietly to herself. But again ...