I’d given Reiting the key to the other entrance. Then I came here, carefully opened the hole and crept across to them.’

A gap had been made in the thin partition wall separating the storeroom from the attic, just wide enough for a human body to push through. It was supposed to serve as an emergency exit in the event of a surprise, and it was usually blocked shut with bricks.

There was a long pause, in which all that could be seen was the glow of tobacco.

Törless couldn’t think; he saw ... All of a sudden he saw a mad swirl of events behind his closed eyes ... People; people harshly lit, lights and deep-etched, agitated shadows; faces ... a face; a smile ... an opening eye ... a quivering of the skin; he saw people as he had never seen them before, never felt about them before: but he saw them without seeing, without thoughts, without images; as though his soul alone could see them; they were so distinct that he was pierced through by their intensity, but, as though coming to a halt at a threshold that they could not cross, they retreated as soon as he sought words to get them under control.

He couldn’t keep from asking more questions. His voice trembled. ‘And ... did you see?’

‘Yes?’

‘And ... how was Basini?’

But Beineberg said nothing, and again all that could be heard was the unquiet crackling of the cigarettes. Only after a long time did Beineberg begin to speak again.

‘I have given the matter a great deal of thought, and you know I have very particular ideas about the subject. First of all, I don’t think Basini matters one bit. Whether we report him now, or beat him, or torture him half to death just for the pleasure of it. Because I can’t imagine such a person having any significance in the wonderful mechanism of the world. He seems to me just to have been created at random, apart from the usual way of things. That is — even he must mean something, but only something vague, like a worm or a stone in our path, which we don’t know whether to step on or kick aside. And that’s as good as nothing. Because if the world-soul wishes one of its parts to be preserved, it says so more clearly. It says no, and creates an obstacle, it makes us walk around the worm, it makes the stone so hard that we can’t break it without a hammer. Because by the time we go and get one it will have interposed a host of small, stubborn considerations, and if we can overcome them, then the whole business meant something else from the start.

‘Where a human being is concerned, that hardness is in his character, in his consciousness as a person, in his sense of responsibility, being a part of the world-soul. If a person loses that sense, he loses himself. But if a person has lost himself and abandoned himself, he has lost the particular, the actual thing for which nature created him as a person. And one could never be more certain than one is in this case that one is dealing with something unnecessary, with an empty form, with something that was abandoned by the world-soul long ago.’

Törless felt no inclination to contradict. He wasn’t paying any great attention. He had never had use for such metaphysical notions, and had never wondered how someone of Beineberg’s intelligence could become addicted to this kind of nonsense. The whole issue had never yet fallen within his life’s horizon.

Accordingly, he didn’t take any trouble to examine the meaning of Beineberg’s remarks; he was only half listening.

He just didn’t understand how anyone could find such a drawn-out way of approaching a subject like that. Everything in him trembled, and the detailed formality with which Beineberg brought back his ideas from God knows where struck him as ridiculous and inappropriate, it tried his patience. But Beineberg continued in a composed manner: ‘The business with Reiting, however, is quite different.