Not that they said a word to the cook, but I heard plenty when I happened to be in the room and they happened to be talking about it. Your mother looked as if she felt like drinking nothing but eau-de-Cologne. And for all that it wasn't so long before your aunt herself had a belly on her so big it nearly touched her nose. . .

While Bozena was talking, Törless felt almost totally defenceless against her coarse innuendos.

He could see vividly before his eyes what she was describing Beineberg's mother turned into his own. He remembered the bright rooms at home; the well-cared-for, immaculate, unapproachable faces that often inspired him with a certain awe when his parents gave dinner-parties; the cultivated, cool hands that seemed to lose none of their dignity even while handling knife and fork. Many such details came back to his mind, and he was ashamed of being here in a malodorous little room, trembling whenever he replied to the humiliating words uttered by a prostitute. His memory of the perfected manners of that society, which never for an instant allowed itself any slip out of its own style, had a stronger effect on him than any moral considerations. The upheaval of his dark passions suddenly seemed ridiculous. With visionary intensity he saw the cool gesture of rejection, the shocked smile, with which those people would brush him off, like a small, unclean animal. Nevertheless he remained sitting where he was, as though transfixed.

For with every detail that he remembered riot only the shame grew greater in him, but with it a chain of ugly thoughts. It had begun when Beineberg explained what Bozena was talking about and Törless had blushed.

At that moment he had suddenly found himself thinking of his own mother, and this now held him in its grip and he could not shake it off. At first it had simply shot across the frontiers of his consciousness-a mere flash of something, too far away to be recognised, on the very edge of his mind-something that could scarcely be called a thought at all. And immediately it had been followed by a series of questions that were meant to cover it up: 'What is it that makes it possible for this woman Bozena to bring her debased existence into proximity with my mother's existence? To squeeze up against her in the narrow space of one and the same thought? Why does she not bow down and touch the ground with her forehead when she speaks of her, if she must speak of her at all? Why isn't it as plain as if there were an abyss between them that they have nothing whatsoever in common? How can it be like this?-this woman, who is for me a maze of all sexual lust, and my mother, who up to now moved through my life like a star, beyond the reach of all desire, in some cloudless distance, clear and without depths

But all these questions were not the core of the matter. They scarcely touched it. They were something secondary, something that occurred to Törless only afterwards. They multiplied only because none of them pointed to the real thing. They were only ways of dodging the real problem, circumlocutions for the fact that, all at once, preconsciously, instinctively, an association of feelings had come about that was an inimical answer to the questions even before they were formulated. Törless devoured Bozena with his eyes, and at the same time was unable to put his mother out of his mind. It

was his being that linked them one with another, inextricably; everything else was only a writhing under this convolution of ideas. This was the sole fad. But because he was unable to shake himself free of its tyranny, it assumed a terrible, vague significance that hovered over all his efforts like a perfidious smile.

* * *

Törless looked around the room, trying to rid himself of these thoughts. But by now everything had taken on the one aspect. The little iron stove with the patches of rust on the lid, the bed with the rickety posts and the paint peeling off the wooden frame, the dirty blankets showing through holes in the worn counterpane; Bozena with her shift slipping off one shoulder, the common, glaring red of her petticoat, and her broad, cackling laughter; and finally Beineberg, whose behaviour by contrast with other times struck Törless as like that of a lecherous priest who had taken leave of his senses and was weaving equivocal words into the solemn formulae of a prayer: all this was urgent in one and the same direction, invading him and violently turning his thoughts back again and again.

Only at one place did his gaze, which fled nervously from one thing to another, find rest. That was above the little curtain over the lower half of the window. There the sky looked in, with the clouds travelling across it, and the unmoving moon.

Then he felt as if he had suddenly stepped out of doors into the fresh, calm air of the night. For a while all his thoughts grew still. A pleasant memory came back to him: that of the house they had taken in the country the previous summer. . .