18
ROBERT MUSIL
when he was away. This peasant too, after a period of relaxation and
good living, set off with peddler's wares and did not return. This
happened a third and a fourth time in the district, until it was realized
that this was a swindler who had worked with the men over there
and questioned them thoroughly about their life at home. Somewhere
he was arrested and imprisoned, and none of the women saw
him
again. This, so the story went, they all were sorry about, for each
of them would have liked to have him for a few days more and to
have compared him with her memories, in order not to have to admit
she had been made a fool of; for each of them claimed to have noticed
something that did not quite correspond to what she remembered, but
none of them was sufficiently sure of it to raise the matter and make
difficulties for the husband who had returned to claim his rights.
That was what these women were like. Their legs were concealed
by brown woolen skirts with deep borders of red, blue, or orange, and
the kerchiefs they wore on their heads and crossed over the breast were
cheap printed cotton things with a factory-made pattern, yet somehow,
too, something about the colors or the way they wore these kerchiefs
suggested bygone centuries. There was something here that was much
older than any known peasant costume; perhaps it was only a gaze,
one that had come down through the ages and arrived very late,
faint now and already dim, and yet one felt it clearly, meeting one's
own gaze as one looked at them. They wore shoes that were like
primitive dugout canoes, and because the tracks were so bad they had
knife-sharp iron blades fitted into the soles, and in their blue or brown
stockings they walked on these as the women walk in Japan. When
they had to wait, they sat down, not on the edge of the path, but
right on the flat earth of the path itself, pulling up their knees like
Negroes. And when, as sometimes happened, they rode up the moun–
tains on their donkeys, they did not sit on their skirts, but rode astride
like men, their thighs insensitive to the sharp wooden edges of the
baggage-saddles, their legs again raised indecorously high and the
whole upper part of the body faintly swinging with the animal's
movement.
And they had, besides, a bewilderingly frank friendliness and
kindliness. "Do you come in," they would say, with all the dignity
of great ladies,
if
one knocked at their rustic doors. Or if one stood
chatting with them for a while in the open air, one of them might
