Törless thought of his parents, of acquaintances, of life. At that time of day people were dressing for a party or deciding to go to the theatre. And afterwards they would go to the restaurant, listen to a band, visit a café. One would meet an interesting person. A romantic adventure would keep one in a state of expectation until the morning. Life keeps rolling out new and unexpected things like some marvellous wheel ...

Törless sighed at this thought, and with each step that brought him closer to the confinement of the institute something inside him twisted tighter and tighter.

Now the bell was ringing in his ears. He feared nothing as much as that bell, which announced the end of the day once and for all — like a brutal knife slash.

He wasn’t having any experiences, he reflected, and his life was fading away in perpetual apathy, but that bell added a note of mockery, and made him tremble with impotent fury about himself, his fate, the buried day.

From this point on you can experience nothing at all, for twelve hours you will experience nothing, for twelve hours you are dead .. That was what the bell meant.

 

When the party of young people reached the first low, hut-like houses, that dull brooding fled from Törless. As if seized by sudden interest, he raised his head and strained to see into the hazy interior of the dirty little buildings they were passing.

At the doors of most of them stood women, in aprons and coarse shirts, with broad, dirty feet and bare brown arms.

If they were young and sturdy, they called out some coarse Slavic jibe, nudged each other and giggled about the ‘young gentlemen’. Sometimes one of the girls cried out, if someone had brushed her breast too hard in passing, or replied with a laughing insult to a slap on the thigh. Some of them only watched after the rushing boys with serious and angry expressions; and if he happened to have joined them, the farmer would smile in embarrassment, half unsure of himself, half good-natured.

Törless didn’t join in with the high-spirited, precocious manliness of his friends.

The reason for that probably lay partly in a certain shyness where sexual matters were concerned, common to almost all only children, but it lay more in his particular kind of sensual temperament, which was more hidden, more powerful and darker in tone than that of his friends, more severe in its expression.

While the others pretended to be shameless with the women, almost more in order to appear ‘smart’ than out of any real desire, the soul of silent little Törless was churned up and lashed by genuine shamelessness.

He looked through the little windows and warped, narrow doorways into the interiors of the houses with such a burning gaze that it was as though a fine net was constantly dancing before his eyes.

Nearly naked children rolled about in the mud of the farmyards, here and there the skirt of a working woman revealed the backs of her knees, or a heavy breast pressed stiffly into the canvas folds of her shirt. And, as though all of this was taking place in a quite different, animal, oppressive atmosphere, there flowed from the hallways of the houses a sluggish, heavy air, which Törless greedily inhaled.

He thought of old paintings he had seen in museums without really understanding them. He was waiting for something, just as he had always waited, when looking at such paintings, for something that had never happened. For what ...?... Something surprising, something he had never seen; a terrible sight that he could not even imagine; something with a terrible, animal sensuality, something that would grip him as though with claws and tear him to pieces beginning with his eyes; an experience that must have something to do, in a way that was still far from clear to him, with the dirty pinafores of the women, with their rough hands, with their low-ceilinged rooms, with ... with the farmyard filth ... No, no ... the only thing he could feel now was the fiery net before his eyes; the words didn’t capture it; it isn’t nearly as bad as words make it seem; it’s something quite mute - a choking in the throat, a barely perceptible thought — and only if one really wanted to say it with words would it come out like that. But even then it bears only a remote resemblance, as though in a vast enlargement, in which one not only sees everything more clearly, but even things that aren’t there ... And yet it was something to be ashamed of.

 

‘Is the little one homesick?’ The sudden, mocking question came from von Reiting, tall and two years older, who had noticed Törless’s silence and gloomy eyes. Törless gave a false and embarrassed smile, and he felt as though the malicious Reiting had been listening in to what had been going on within him.

He didn’t reply. But by now they had reached the little town’s cobbled church square, where they parted.

Törless and Beineberg did not yet want to go back to the institute, while the others had no permit to stay out any longer and went home.

 

The two of them had stopped off at the café.

There they sat at a little round-topped table beside a window looking out on to the garden, beneath a gas chandelier whose lights hummed quietly behind their milky glass spheres.

They had made themselves comfortable, they had their glasses filled with different kinds of schnapps, smoked cigarettes, ate some pastries in between and enjoyed the contentment of being the only guests. For if there was anyone else there at all, it was someone sitting on his own over a glass of wine in one of the back rooms; here at the front it was quiet, and even the fat, elderly owner seemed to have fallen asleep behind her counter.

Törless looked — just vaguely - through the window - out into the empty garden, which was gradually getting darker.

Beineberg was telling stories. About India, as usual. Because his father, who was a general, had been there as a young officer in the service of the English. And he had not only, like other Europeans, brought back carvings, weavings and little manufactured idols, he had also sensed and retained something of the bizarre and mysterious half-sleep of esoteric Buddhism. Whatever he had learned there and later added to by reading he had passed on to his son, from his childhood onwards.

His way of reading was peculiar. He was a cavalry officer and had no great love of books in general, holding novels and philosophy equally in contempt. If he read, he did not want to read about opinions and contentious issues; rather, when he opened books he wanted to step as if through a secret portal into the midst of the rarest insights. They had to be books the mere possession of which was like the secret sign of an order, and like a guarantee of unearthly revelations.