‘But I don’t want to, do you understand?’

Basini was crying. ‘You’re tormenting me.’

‘Yes, I’m tormenting you. But that’s not the important thing for me; I just want to know one thing: if I push all that into you like knives, what is inside you? What is happening inside you? Does something explode in you? Tell me! Suddenly, like a piece of glass that suddenly explodes into a thousand splinters before it’s shown so much as a crack? The image you’ve made of yourself, isn’t it extinguished by a breath? Doesn’t another one leap to appear in its place, as magic-lantern pictures leap out of the darkness? Do you not understand me at all? I can’t explain it any better than that; you have to tell me yourself... !’

Basini wept incessantly. His girlish shoulders shuddered; he was able only to say a single thing, over and over again: ‘I don’t know what you want; I can’t explain anything to you. It happens on the spur of the moment; it can’t happen any other way; you would do exactly the same as I do.’

Törless said nothing. He leaned against the wall, exhausted and motionless, staring straight ahead.

‘If you were in my situation, you’d do exactly the same,’ Basini had said. What had happened was presented as a simple necessity, peaceful and undistorted.

Törless’s self-confidence revolted in sheer contempt against the mere presumption. And yet that rebellion by his entire being seemed to offer no satisfactory guarantee. ‘... Yes, I would have more character than he does, I wouldn’t stand for such outrageous demands - but does any of it matter? Does it matter that I would act differently out of firmness, out of respectability, for reasons that are now quite irrelevant to me? No, what matters isn’t how I would act, but the fact that if I really did act like Basini, I’d feel it was every bit as normal as he does. That’s the important thing: my sense of myself would be just as straightforward, just as unambiguous as his ...’

This thought - coming to him in scraps of sentences, superimposed on one another and constantly going back to the beginning - added to his contempt for Basini a very intimate pain, one which was quiet but which touched his innermost equilibrium more profoundly than any morality could do. It came from the memory of a sensation that had recently come to Törless, and which would not let go of him. When Basini had made him aware of the possible threat to himself from Reiting and Beineberg, he had been simply terrified. Simply terrified as though he had been ambushed, and without reflection he had rapidly sought a way of parrying the attack and covering himself. That had happened at a moment of real threat, and he was irritated by the sensation he had felt then. Those quick, thoughtless impulses. In vain he tried to unleash them once again. But he knew that they had within an instant taken away from the danger everything that was strange and ambiguous about it.

And yet it had been the same danger that he had sensed only a few weeks before, in the same place, when he had been so terrified by the storeroom which lay there like a forgotten corner of the Middle Ages, far from the warm, bright life of the classrooms, and by Beineberg and Reiting, because they seemed suddenly to have turned from the people they were down below, and to have become something quite different, something dark and bloodthirsty; characters from a quite different life. That had been a transformation, a leap for Törless, as though the image of his surroundings had suddenly appeared before different eyes, eyes that had awoken from a hundred years of sleep.

And yet the danger had been the same ... He kept on repeating that to himself. And again and again he tried to compare the memories of the two different sensations ...

Meanwhile Basini had been standingup for some time; he noticed his companion’s fixed, absent gaze, quietly picked up his clothes and crept away.

Törless saw him - as if through a fog - but let him go without a word.

All his attention was consumed with the effort of rediscovering that point within himself where the transformation in his inner perspective had suddenly occurred.

But every time he approached it, he felt like someone trying to compare something close to him with something far away: he could never capture the remembered images of the two feelings at the same time, but each time, like a quiet click, there came a feeling that corresponded to something in the physical realm, those barely perceptible muscular sensations that accompany the focusing of the eye. And each time, precisely at the crucial moment, it claimed all his attention, the activity of comparison interposed itself before the object being compared, there was a barely noticeable twinge — and everything stood still.

And Törless would start again from the beginning.

This mechanically regular procedure lulled him into a rigid, waking, ice-cold sleep that kept him fixed motionlessly in his place, and for an indefinite length of time.

A thought woke Törless like the quiet touch of a warm hand. A thought so apparently obvious that he was amazed not to have hit upon it ages before.

A thought that did nothing but record the experience he had just had: anything that looks big and mysterious from afar always arrives as something simple and undistorted, in natural, everyday proportions. It is as though an invisible frontier has been drawn around each human being. Something that has been prepared elsewhere and which approaches from afar, is like a misty sea full of giant, changing forms; what approaches the person, becomes action, impacts against one’s life, is small and distinct, with human dimensions and human features. And between the life that is lived and the life that is felt, sensed and seen from a long way off, that invisible frontier lies like a narrow door, through which the images of events must cram themselves together in order to enter the human being.

 

And yet, close as this was to his own experience, Törless reflectively lowered his head.

‘A curious thought...’ he felt.

 

Finally he was lying in his bed. He wasn’t thinking about anything now, because thought was so difficult and so fruitless. What he had learned of his friends’ secret intrigues ran through his mind, but as indifferently, as lifelessly as a news item read in a foreign newspaper.

There was nothing more to be hoped for from Basini. That was his problem, of course! But it was so uncertain, and he was so tired and so downcast.