When he had been very small - yes, yes, that was it — when he had still worn little dresses and before he went to school, there were times when he felt a quite inexpressible longing to be a girl. And that longing wasn’t in his head - oh no - and it wasn’t in his heart - it tingled throughout his whole body and ran all over his skin. Yes, there were times when he felt so vividly like a girl that he thought he must really be one. Because in those days he knew nothing of the meaning of physical differences, and he couldn’t understand why everyone kept telling him that he had to remain a boy for ever. And when he was asked why he thought he would rather be a girl, he had felt that there was no way of expressing it ...

Today for the first time he felt something similar. Again, all around him, beneath his skin.

Something that seemed to be at once body and soul. Something rushing and hurrying, beating against his body as though with the velvety antennae of butterflies. And at the same time there was that defiant way that little girls have, of running away when they feel that grown-ups don’t understand them, the arrogance with which they then giggle about the grown-ups, that terrible arrogance, always poised to dash off, as though it could at any moment retreat into some terribly deep hiding place in the little body ...

Törless laughed quietly to himself, and again he stretched out comfortably along the covers.

That plump little manikin he had dreamed about, how greedily it had chased the pages beneath its fingers. And that rectangle down there? Ha, ha. Have clever little manikins ever noticed such a thing in their lives? He felt boundlessly protected against those clever people, and he felt for the first time that there was something in his sensuality — because he had known for ages that that was what it was - that no one could take from him, that no one could even copy, something that protected him against any form of alien cleverness like a very high, a very hidden wall.

‘Had such clever little manikins ever in their lives,’ he thought, taking the idea further, ‘lain beneath a lonely wall and been startled by every trickle behind the mortar, as though something dead was trying to find the words to talk to them? Had they ever felt the music that the wind stirs up in the autumn leaves - felt to the very core that something terrifying suddenly lurked behind it ... something that was slowly, slowly transforming itself into sensuality? But into such a strange sensuality, something more like flight and then like mocking laughter. Oh, it’s easy to be clever if you aren’t aware of all those questions ...’

But again and again, in the meantime, the little mannikin seemed by stages to be growing into a giant, with a pitilessly stern expression, and each time it did so something like an electric shock twitched painfully out of Törless’s brain and ran through his body. All that pain at still being made to stand outside a locked door - the very thing which had, a moment before, been swept away by the warm pulse of his blood - reawakened, and a wordless lament flowed through Törless’s soul, like the howling of a dog quivering over wide fields at night.

So he fell asleep. A few times, in his half-sleep, he looked over to the patch by the window, as one might mechanically reach for a supporting rope to feel whether it was still stretched taut. Then there loomed indistinctly in his mind the resolution that the next morning he would think very carefully about himself — ideally with pen and paper — and then, right at the end, there was only pleasant, tepid warmth - like a bath and a sensual stirring - which, although he was not at all aware of it being so, was in some entirely unrecognizable but very emphatic way associated with Basini.

Then he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

 

And yet that was his first thought when he woke up the next day. Now he would have been very glad to know what it really was, since he had been half thinking and half dreaming about Basini towards the end, but he wasn’t capable of remembering that.

So all that remained was a mood of tenderness, like that which prevails in a house at Christmas when the children know the presents are there, but still locked up behind the mysterious door, and all that can be seen, here and there, is a glint of light through the cracks.

In the evening Törless stayed in the classroom; Beineberg and Reiting had disappeared off somewhere, probably to the attic hideaway; Basini sat in his seat at the front, hunched over a book with his head resting on his hands.

Törless had bought himself a notebook, and carefully arranged his pen and ink. Then he wrote on the first page, after some hesitation: De natura hominum. He thought he owed the philosophical subject-matter a Latin title. Then he drew a large, artistic flourish around the heading and leaned back in his chair to wait for it to dry.

But it had dried long since, and he had still not picked up his pen again. Something kept him fixed motionless to the spot. It was the hypnotic atmosphere of the big, hot lamps, the animal warmth emanating from that mass of people. He had always been receptive to that state, which could intensify to a feverish physical feeling that was always connected with an extraordinary level of mental sensitivity. And the same was true today. In the course of the day he had worked out what he actually wanted to write down; that whole series of experiences, from the evening at Božena’s to the indistinct sensuality that had recently come upon him. If it was all set down in an orderly fashion, one fact after another, he hoped that the correct, intellectually legitimate version would yield itself of its own accord, just as an outline emerges from the confusion of a hundred intersecting curves. And he wanted nothing more than that. But so far he had felt like a fisherman who might be able to tell from a twitching on his net that a heavy prey has fallen into his trap, but for all his efforts is unable to haul it into the light.

And now Törless did begin to write - but hastily, with no attention to form. ‘I feel,’ he wrote, ‘something within me, and don’t really know what it is.’ But then he quickly crossed the line out and wrote in its place: ‘I must be ill - insane!’ A shudder ran through him, because the word felt agreeably dramatic. ‘Insane - or what else could it be, when things that seem quite normal to other people seem so strange to me? That this strangeness should torment me? That it inspires lewd’ — he deliberately chose that word, with its connotations of biblical unction, because it seemed darker and more freighted with meaning - ‘feelings in me? I have faced this before, like all young men, like all my classmates ...’ But here he came to a standstill. ‘Isn’t that true?’ he thought to himself. ‘At Božena‘s, for example, that was so peculiar; so when did it actually begin? ...