My dear Agathe, you have no idea what it's like," he
complained
moodily.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
You are perhaps the absolute opposite of the kind ofperson, such as I represent, who knows life and knows how to face it, but that is precisely why you should not lightly divest yourself of the support I offer you!
"
Actually, Hagauer had meant to write something else. For human intelligence is not a self·contained and unrelated faculty; its flaws in- volve moral flaws-we speak of moral idiocy-just as moral flaws, though so much less attention is paid to them, often misdirect or to- tally confuse the rational power in whatever direction they choose. And so Hagauer had fonned in his mind an image of a fixed type that he was now inclined, in the course of these reflections, to define as "an adequately intelligent variant of moral idiocy that expresses itself only in certain irregular fonns of behavior. " But he could not bring himself to use this illuminating phrase, partly to avoid provoking his runaway wife even more, and partly because a layperson usually mis- understands such tenns when applied to himself. Objectively, how- ever, it was now established that the fonns of behavior that Hagauer deprecated came under the great inclusive genus of the "subnor- mal," and in the end Hagauer hit upon a way out of this conflict be- tween conscience and chivalry: the irregularities in his wife's conduct could be classified with a fairly general pattern of female behavior and tenned "socially deficient. "
In this spirit he concluded his letter in words charged with feeling. With the prophetic ire of the scorned lover and pedagogue, he de- picted Agathe's asocial, solipsistic, and morbid temperament as a "minus factor" that never pennitted her to grapple vigorously and creatively with life's problems, as "our era" demands of"its people," but "shielded her instead from reality behind a pane of glass," mired in deliberate isolation and always on the edge of pathological peril. "If there was something about me you didn't like, you ought to have done something about it," he wrote, "but the truth is that your mind is not equipped to cope with the energies of our time, and evades its demands! Now that I have warned you about your character," he concluded, "I repeat: You, more urgently than most people, need someone strong to lean on. In your own interest I urge you to come
1034 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
back immediately, and I assure you that the responsibility I bear as your husband forbids me to accede to your wish. "
Before signing this letter Hagauer read it through once more. Al- though not satisfied with his description of the psychological type under discussion, he made no changes except at the end-expelling as a gusty sigh through his mustache the unaccustomed, proudly mastered strain of thinking hard about his wife as he pondered how much more still needed to be said about "our modem age"-where he inserted beside the word "responsibility" a chivalrous phrase about his venerated late father-in-law's precious bequest to him.
When Agathe had read all this, a strange thing happened: the content of these arguments did not fail to make an impression on her. After reading it word for word a second time, where she stood, without bothering to sit down, she slowly lowered the letter and handed it to Ulrich, who had been observing his sister's agitation with astonishment.
ULRICH AND AGATHE LOOK FOR A REASON AFTER THE FACT
While Ulrich was reading, Agathe dispiritedly watched his face. It was bent over the letter, and its expression seemed to be irresolute, as though he could not decide between ridicule, gravity, sadness, or contempt. Now a heavy weight descended on Agathe from all sides, as if the air that had been so unnaturally light and delicious were becoming unbearably dense and sultry; what she had done to her fa- ther's will oppressed her conscience for the first time. To say that she suddenly realized the full measure of her culpability would not be sufficient; what she realized rather was her guilt toward everything, even her brother, and she was overcome with an indescribable disil- lusionment. Everything she had done seemed incomprehensible to
IntotheMillennium(TheCriminals) · 1035
her. She had talked of killing her husband, she had falsified a will, and she had imposed herself on her brother without asking whether she would be disrupting his life: she had done this in a state of being drunk on her own fantasies. What she was most ashamed of at this moment was that it had never occurred to her to do the obvious, the most natural thing: any other woman who wanted to leave a husband she did not like would either look for a better man or arrange for something else, something equally natural. Ulrich himself had pointed this out often enough, but she had paid no attention. And now here she stood and did not know what he would say. Her behav- ior seemed to her so much that of a being who was not entirely men- tally competent that she thought Hagauer was right; he was only holding up the mirror to her in his own way. Seeing his letter in Ul- rich's hand struck her dumb in the same way a person might be struck dumb who had been charged with a crime and on top of that receives a letter from a former teacher excoriating him. She had of course never allowed Hagauer to have any influence over her; never- theless, it now looked as ifhe had the right to say: ''I'm disappointed in you! " or else: ''I'm afraid I've never been disappointed in you but always had the feeling you'd come to a bad end! " In her need to shake off this absurd and distressing feeling she impatiently inter- rupted Ulrich, who was still absorbed in reading the letter without giving any sign of coming to the end, by saying: "His description of me is really quite accurate. " She spoke in an apparently casual tone but with a note of defiance, clearly betraying some hope of hearing the opposite. "And even if he doesn't say it in so many words, it's true; either I was not mentally competent when I married him for no compelling reason, or I am not so now, when I'm leaving him for just as little reason. "
Ulrich, who was rereading for the third time those passages that made his vivid imagination an involuntary witness of her close rela- tions with Hagauer, absently muttered something she did not catch.
"Do please listen to me! " Agathe pleaded. "Am I the up-to-date woman, active somehow either economically or intellectually? No. Am I a woman in love? No again. Am I the good, nest-building wife and mother who simplifies things and smooths over the rough spots? That least of all. What else is there? Then what in the world am I good for? The social life we're caught up in, I can tell you frankly,
1036 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
basically means nothing at all to me. And I almost think I could get along without whatever it is in music, art, and literature that sends the cognoscenti into raptures. Hagauer, for instance, is different: he needs all that, ifonly for his quotations and allusions. He at least has the pleasure and satisfaction of a collector. So isn't he right when he accuses me of doing nothing at all, of rejecting the 'wealth of the beautiful and moral,' and tells me that it's only with Professor Hagauer that I can find any sympathy and tolerance? ''
Ulrich handed the letter back to her and replied with composure. "Let's face it, the term for you is 'socially retarded,' isn't it? '' He smiled, but there was in his tone a hint ofirritation left from his hav- ing been made privy to this intimate letter.
But her brother's answer did not sit well with Agathe. It made her feel worse. Shyly she tried to turn the tables on him: "In that case why did you insist, if that is what you did, without telling me any- thing, that I must get a divorce and lose my only protector? ''
'Well," he said evasively, "probably because it is so delightfully easy to adopt a firm, manly tone in our exchanges. I bang my fist on the table, he bangs his fist on the table; so of course I have to bang mine twice as hard the next time around. That's why I think I did it. "
Up to. now-although her dejection kept her from realizing it her- self-Agathe had been really glad, ovexjoyed in fact, at her brother's secretly doing the opposite ofwhat he had outwardly advocated dur- ing the time oftheir humorous brother-sister flirtation, since offend- ing Hagauer could only have the effect of erecting a barrier to her ever returning to him. Yet even in the place of that secret joy there was now only a hollow sense ofloss, and Agathe fell silent.
'W e mustn't overlook," Ulrich went on, "how well Hagauer suc- ceeds in misunderstanding you so accurately, if I may say so. Just wait, you'll see that in his own way-without hiring detectives, just by cogitating over the weaknesses of your attachment to the human race-he'll find out what you did to Father's will. How are we going to defend you then? ''
So it happened that for the first time since they had been together again the subject came up of the blissful but horrible prank Agathe had played on Hagauer. She fiercely shrugged her shoulders, with a vague gesture of waving it aside.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1037
"Hagauer is in the right, of course," Ulrich offered, with gentle emphasis, for her consideration.
"He's not in the right! " she answered vehemently.
"He's partly right," Ulrich compromised. "In so risky a situation we must start off by facing things openly, including ourselves. What you've done can put us both in jail. "
Agathe stared at him with startled eyes. She had known this, of course, but it had never been so straightforwardly stated.
Ulrich responded with a reassuring gesture. "But that's not the worst of it," he continued. "How do we keep what you've done, and the way you did it, from being perceived as"-he groped for the right word and failed to find it-"well, let's just say that to some extent it's the way Hagauer sees it, that it's all a bit on the shadowy side, the side of abnormality and the kind of flaw that comes from something already flawed. Hagauer voices what the world thinks, even though it sounds ridiculous coming from him. "
"Now we're getting to the cigarette case," Agathe said in a small voice.
"Right, here it comes," Ulrich said firmly. "I have to tell you some- thing that's been on my mind for a long time. "
Agathe tried to stop him. 'Wouldn't it be better to undo the whole thing? " she asked. "Suppose I have a friendly talk with him and make some sort of apology? ''
"It's already too late for that. He might use it to blackmail you into coming back to him," Ulrich declared.
Agathe was silent.
Ulrich returned to his hypothetical cigarette case, stolen on a whim by a man who is well off. He had worked out a theory that there could be only three basic motivations for such a theft of prop- erty: poverty, profession, or, ifit was neither ofthese, a damaged psy- che. "You pointed out when we talked about it once that it might be done out of conviction too," he added.
"I said one might just do it! " Agathe interjected.
"Right, on principle. "
"No, not on principle! "
"But that's just it! " Ulrich said. "If one does such a thing at all,
there has to be at least some conviction behind it! There's no getting
1038 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
away from that. Nobody 'just does' anything; there has to be a reason, either an external or an internal one. It may be hard to know one from the other, but we won't philosophize about that now. I'm only saying that ifone feels one is doing the right thing with absolutely no basis for it, or some decision arises out of the blue, then there's good reason to suspect some sickness, something constitutionally wrong. "
This was certainly far more and much worse than Ulrich had meant to say; it merely converged with the drift of his qualms.
"Is that all you have to say to me about it? " Agathe asked very quietly.
"No, it's not all," Ulrich replied grimly. "When one has no reason, one must look for one! "
Neither-of them was in any doubt where to look for it. But Ulrich was after something else, and after a slight pause he continued thoughtfully: "The moment you fall out of step with the rest of the world, you can never ever know what's good and what's evil. If you want to be good you have to be convinced that the world is good. And neither one of us is. We're living at a time when morality is either dissolving or in convulsions. But for the sake of a world yet to come, one should keep oneself pure. "
"Do you really think that will have any effect on whether it comes or not? " Agathe asked skeptically.
"No, I'm afraid I don't think that. Or at most I think like this: If even those people who understand don't act as they should, it cer- tainly won't come at all, and there's no way to stop everything from falling apart! "
"And what do you care whether it's any different five hundred years from now or not? "
Ulrich hesitated. ''I'm doing my duty, don't you see? Maybe like a soldier. "
Probably because on that miserable morning Agathe needed a more comforting, more affectionate kind of answer than Ulrich was giving, she said: "No different from your General, then? "
Ulrich said nothing.
Agathe was not inclined to stop. "You don't even know for sure whether it's your duty," she went on. "You do it because that's how you are and because you enjoy it. And that's all I did! "
Suddenly she lost her self-control. Something was terribly sad.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1039
Tears sprang to her eyes, and a violent sob rose in her throat. To hide it from her brother's eyes, she threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against his shoulder. Ulrich felt her crying and the trem- bling of her back. A burdensome embarrassment came over him: he was aware of turning cold. At this moment, when he should have been sympathetic, all the tender and happy feelings he thought he had for his sister deserted him; his sensibility was disturbed and wouldn't function. He stroked Agathe's back and whispered some comforting words, but it went against his grain. Since he did not share her agitation, the contact of their two bodies seemed to him like that of two wisps of straw. He put an end to it by leading Agathe to a chair and himself sitting down in another, some distance away. Then he gave her his answer: "You're not enjoying this business with the will at all. And you never shall, because it's all been a disorderly mess! "
"Order? " Agathe exclaimed through her tears. "Duty? ''
She was really quite beside herself because Ulrich had behaved so coldly. But she was already smiling again. She realized that she would have to work things out for herself. She felt that the smile she had forced seemed to be hovering somewhere out there, far from her icy lips. Ulrich meanwhile had shaken off his embarrassment; he was even pleased not to have felt the usual physical stirring; he realized that this, too, would have to be different between them. But he did not have time to think about that now, because he could see that Agathe was deeply troubled, and so he began to talk.
"Don't be upset by the words I used," he pleaded, "and don't hold them against me. I suppose I'm wrong to use words such as 'order' and 'duty'-they sound too much like preaching. But why"-he now went off at a tangent-"why the devil is preaching contemptible? It really ought to be our greatest joy! "
Agathe had no desire to answer this.
Ulrich let it drop.
"Please don't think I'm trying to set myself up as morally supe-
rior! " he begged. "I didn't mean to say that I never do anything bad. What I don't like is having to do it in secret. I like the good highway robbers of morality, not the sneak thieves. I'd like to make a moral robber out of you," he joked, "and not let you err out of weakness. "
I040 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"It's not a point of honor with me," his sister said from behind her distantly hovering smile.
"It's really extremely funny that there are times like ours, when all young people are infatuated with whatever's bad," he said with a laugh, to distance the conversation from the personal level. "This current preference for the morally gruesome is a weakness, of course. Probably middle-class gorging on goodness; being all sucked dry. I myself originally thought one had to say no to everything; ev- eryone thinks so who is between twenty-five and forty-five today; but of course it was only a kind of fashion. I can imagine a reaction set- ting in soon, and with it a new generation that will again stick moral- ity instead of immorality in its buttonhole. The oldest donkeys, who never in their lives felt any moral fervor, who merely uttered moral platitudes when the occasion called for them, will then suddenly be hailed as precursors and pioneers of a new character! "
Ulrich had risen to his feet and was restlessly pacing the room.
'We might put it this way," he suggested. "Good has become a cliche almost by its very nature, while evil remains criticism. The im- moral achieves its divine right by being a drastic critique of the moral! It shows us that life has other possibilities. It shows us up for liars. For this we show our gratitude by a certain forbearance. That there are truly delightful people who forge wills should prove that there is something amiss with the sanctity of private property. Even ifthis doesn't need proving, it is where our task begins: for every kind of crime, we must be able to conceive of criminals who can be ex- cused, even including infanticide or whatever other horrors there maybe. . . . "
He had been trying in vain to catch his sister's eye, even though he was teasing her by bringing up the will. Now she made an involuntary gesture of protest. She was no theoretician; the only crime she re- garded as excusable was her own, and she was insulted all over again by his comparison.
Ulrich laughed. "It looks like an intellectual game, but this kind of juggling does mean something," he assured her. "It goes to show that there's something amiss in the way we judge our conduct. And there really is, you know. In a company ofwill-forgers you would certainly stand up for the inviolability of the legal regulations; it's only in the company of the righteous that it all gets blurred and perverted. If
IntotheMillennium(TheCriminals) · 1 0 4 1
only Hagauer were a rogue, you would be flamingly just; it's too bad he's such a decent fellow! That's the seesaw we're on. "
He waited for a response but none came, so he shrugged his shoul- ders and came back to the point:
"We're looking to justify what you did. We have established that respectable people are deeply attracted to crime, though of course only in their imagination. We might add that criminals, to hear them talk, would almost without exception like to be regarded as respect- able people. So we might arrive at a definition: Crimes are the con- centrated form, within sinners, ofeverything other people work offin little irregularities, in their imagination and in innumerable petty ev- eryday acts and attitudes of spite and viciousness. W e could also say: Crimes are in the air and simply seek the path of least resistance, which leads them to certain individuals. We could even say that while they are the acts ofindividuals who are incapable ofbehaving morally, in the main they're the condensed expression of some kind of general human maladjustment where the distinction between good and evil is concerned. This is what has imbued us from our youth with the criti- cal spirit our contemporaries have never been able to get beyond! "
"But what is good and evil? " Agathe tossed off the question, while Ulrich remained oblivious to the pain his banter was causing her.
"Well, how would I know? " he answered with a laugh. "''ve only just noticed for the first time that I loathe evil. Until today I really didn't know how much.
My dear Agathe, you have no idea what it's like," he complained moodily. "Take science, for instance! For a mathematician, to put it very simply, minus five is no worse than plus five. A scientist researching a problem mustn't recoil in horror from anything, and under certain conditions he might get more excited by a lovely cancer than a lovely woman. A man ofknowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will be revealed only at the end of time. Science is amoral. All our glorious thrusting of ourselves into the Unknown gets us out of the habit of being personally con- cerned with our conscience; in fact, it doesn't even give us the satis- faction of taking our conscience entirely seriously. And art? Doesn't it amount to a creation ofimages that don't correspond to the reali- ties of life? I'm not talking about bogus idealism, or the paintings of voluptuous nudes in a period when everyone goes around covered up to the eyeballs," he joked again. "But think of a real work of art: have
1042 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you're whetting on a grindstone? It's a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny! "
This was the only point at which Agathe interrupted him with real interest: "Didn't you once write poetry yourself? '' she asked him.
"You still remember that? When did I let you in on it? '' Ulrich asked. "Yes; we all write verses at one time or another. I even went on doing it when I was a mathematician," he admitted. "But the older I got, the worse they became; not so much because of lack of talent, I think, as from a growing aversion to the disorderly and bohe- mian romanticism ofthat sort ofemotional excess. . . . "
His sister shook her head almost imperceptibly, but Ulrich noticed it. "Yes," he insisted, "a poem should be no more of an exceptional phenomenon than an act of goodness! But what, if I may ask, be- comes of the moment of inspiration the moment after? You love po- etry, I know; but what I'm saying is that it isn't enough to breathe out one great puff of fire and let it fade away. This kind of sporadic per- formance is the counterpart of the kind of morality that exhausts it- self in half-baked criticism. " And abruptly returning to his main subject, he said to his sister: "If I were to behave in this Hagauer matter the way you're expecting me to today, I would have to be skeptical, casual, and ironic. The exemplary children you or I might yet have would then be able to say truthfully of us that we belonged to a very secure period of middle-class values that was never plagued by doubts, or plagued at most by superficial doubts. But in fact you and I have already gone to such trouble over our philosophy . . . ! "
Ulrich probably wanted to say a great deal more; he was actually only leading up to some way of coming down on his sister's side, which he had already worked out, and it would have been good ifhe had revealed it to her. For she suddenly stood up and on some vague pretext got her outdoor things.
"So we're leaving it that I'm morally retarded? '' she asked with a forced attempt at humor. "I can't keep up with all you've been saying to the contrary! "
"We're both morally retarded! " Ulrich gallantly assured her. "Both of us! " And he was rather proud of the haste with which his sister left him without saying when she would return.
31
AGA THE W ANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND MAKES A GENTLEMAN'S ACQUAINTANCE
In truth she had rusheq offto spare her brother the sight ofthe tears she could barely hold back. She was as sad as a person who has lost everything. She did not know why. It had come over her while Ulrich was talking. Why? She didn't know that either. He should have done something other than talk. What? She didn't know. He was right, of course, not to take seriously the "stupid coincidence" of her being upset and the arrival of that letter, and to go on talking as he always did. But Agathe had to get away.
At first she felt only the need to walk. She rushed headlong from their house. Where the layout ofthe streets forced her to detour, she always kept to the same general direction. She fled, in the way peo- ple and animals flee from a catastrophe. Why, she did not ask herself. It was only when she grew tired that she realized what she intended to do: never go back!
She would keep walking until dusk. Farther from home with every step. She assumed that by the time she came up against the barricade of evening her decision would be made. The decision was to kill her- self. It was not an actual decision to kill herself, but the expectation that by evening it would be. Behind this expectation was a desperate seething and whirling inside her head. She did not even have any- thing with her to kill herselfwith. Her little poison capsule lay some- where in a drawer or in a suitcase. The only clear thing about her death was the longing never to have to go back again. She wanted to walk out of life. That was where the walking came from. It was as if every step she took was already a step out of life.
As she tired she began to long for green fields and woods, for walk- ing in silence and the open air. She could not get there on foot. She took a streetcar. She had been brought up to control herself in pub- lic. So her voice betrayed no emotion when she bought her ticket and asked for directions. She sat straight-backed and impassive, with not
1043
I044 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
a finger twitching. And as she sat there the thoughts started coming. She would of course have felt better had she been able to let herself go; with her limbs fettered as they were, these thoughts came in large bundles that she vainly tried to force through an opening. She bore Ulrich a grudge for what he had said. She didn't want to hold it against him. She gave up her right to. What had she done for him? She was only taking up his time, and doing nothing for him in return; she was in the way of his work and his habits. When she thought of his habits she felt a pang. It seemed that no woman had entered his house in all the time she'd been there. Agathe was convinced that her brother always had to have a woman in his life. So he was depriving himself for her sake. At this moment she would have liked to turn back and tenderly beg his forgiveness. As there was no way she could make it up to him, she was being selfish and bad. But then she re- membered again how cold he had been. He was obviously sorry he had taken her in. To think of all he had planned and said before he got tired of her! Now he no longer mentioned any of it. Agathe's heart was again tormented with the great disillusionment her hus- band's letter had brought her. She was jealous. Senselessly and com- monly jealous. She would have liked to force herself on her brother; she felt the passionate and helpless friendship ofthe person throwing himself against his own rejection. "I could steal or walk the streets for him! " she thought, knowing this was ridiculous but not able to help it. Ulrich's conversations, with their humor and sovereign air of being above the battle, made a mockery ofthis idea. She admired his superiority and all his intellectual needs, which surpassed her own. But she didn't see why every idea always had to be equally true for everyone! In her humbled state she needed some personal comfort- ing, not edifying sermons! She did not want to be brave! And after a while, she reproached herself for being the way she was, and en- larged her pain by imagining that she deserved nothing better than Ulrich's indifference.
This self-denigration, for which neither Ulrich's conduct nor even Hagauer's upsetting letter was sufficient cause, was a temperamental outburst. Ever since Agathe had outgrown her childhood, not so very long ago, everything she regarded as her failure in the face of soci- ety's demands had had to do with her sense of not living in accord with her own deepest inclinations, or even in opposition to them. She
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1045
inclined to devotion and trustfulness, for she had never become so much at home in solitude as her brother; and if she had found it im- possible to yield herself heart and soul to a person or a cause, it was because she had the capacity for some greater devotion, whether it reached out to the whole world or to God. There is the well-known path of devotion to all mankind that begins with an inability to get along with one's neighbor, and just so may a deep latent yearning for God arise in an antisocial character equipped with a great capacity for love; in that sense, the religious criminal is no greater paradox than the religious old woman who never found a husband. Agathe's behavior toward Hagauer, which had the absurd appearance of a selfish action, was as much the outburst of an impatient will as was the intensity with which she accused herself of losing life by her own weakness just when she had been awakened to it by her brother.
She soon lost patience with the slow, rumbling streetcar. When the buildings along the way grew lower and more rural, she got off and continued the rest of the way on foot. The courtyards were open; through archways and over low fences came glimpses of handymen at their chores, animals, children at play. The air was filled with a peace in whose distances voices sounded and tools banged; sounds moved in the bright air with the irregular, gentle motions of a butter- fly, while Agathe felt herself gliding like a shadow past them toward the rising ground of vineyards and woodland. Just once she paused, in front of a yard where coopers were at work and there was the good noise of mallets hammering on barrel staves. She had always liked watching such honest work and taken pleasure in the modest, sensi- ble, well-considered labor of the workmen. This time, too, she could not get enough of the rhythm of the mallets and the men's moving round and round the barrel. For a few moments it made her forget her misexy and plunged her into a pleasant, unthinking oneness with the world. She always admired people who could do this kind of task, with skills developed so variously and naturally out of a generally ac- knowledged need. But there was nothing she wanted to do herself, although she had all kinds of mental and practical aptitudes. Life was complete without her. And suddenly, before she saw the connection, she heard church bells ringing, and could barely restrain herself from bursting into tears again. Both bells of the little local church had probably been chiming the whole time, but Agathe just now noticed
I046 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
it and was instantly overcome by how these useless chimes, excluded from the good, lavish earth and flying passionately through the air, were related to her own existence.
She hastily resumed walking, and accompanied by the chimes, which now would not leave her ears, she passed swiftly between the last of the houses and emerged where the road climbed the hillside with its vineyards and scattered bushes lining the paths below, while above, the bright green of the woods beckoned. Now she knew where she was going, and it was a beautiful feeling, as though with every step she were sinking more deeply into nature. Her heart pounded with joy and effort when she sometimes stopped and found the bells still accompanying her, though now hidden high in the air and scarcely audible. It seemed to her she had never heard bells chiming like this in the midst of an ordinary day, for no apparent festive reason, mingling democratically with the natural and self-suf- ficient affairs of men. But of all the tongues of this thousand-voiced city, this was the last to speak to her, and something in it seized hold of her as if to lift her high and swing her up the hill, only to drop her again as it faded into a slight metallic sound no better than all the chirping, rumbling, and rustling sounds of the countryside. So Agathe climbed and walked upward for perhaps another hour, until she suddenly found herself facing the little shrubby wilderness she had carried in her memory. It enclosed a neglected grave at the edge of the woods, where nearly a hundred years before a poet had killed himself and where, in accordance with his last wish, he had also been laid to rest. Ulrich had said that he was not a good poet, even if he was famous. Ulrich was sharply critical of the rather shortsighted po- etics that expressed a longing to be buried high up with a view. But Agathe had loved the inscription on the big stone slab since the day they had come this way and together deciphered the beautiful, rain- worn Biedermeier lettering, and she leaned over the black chain fence with its great angular links, which marked off the rectangle of death from life.
"I meant nothing to all of you" were the words the disgruntled poet had had inscribed on his gravestone, and Agathe thought that this could equally well be said of herself. This thought, here on the edge of the wooded pulpit above the greening vineyards and the alien, immeasurable city that was slowly waving its trails of smoke in
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1047
the morning sun, moved her afresh. Impulsively she knelt down to press her forehead against one ofthe stone posts that held the chains; the unaccustomed position and the cool touch of the stone feigned the rather stiffand passive tranquillity of the death that was awaiting her. She tried to pull herself together, but was not immediately suc- cessful; bird calls intruded on her ear, so many and such various bird calls that it surprised her; branches stirred, and since she did not feel the wind she had the impression that the trees were waving their branches of their own accord. In a sudden hush, a faint pattering could be heard; the stone she was resting against, touching, was so smooth that she felt that a piece of ice between it and her forehead was keeping her from quite touching it. Only after a while did she realize that what distracted her was precisely what she was trying to hold on to, that fundamental sense of being superfluous which, re- duced to its simplest terms, could be expressed only in the words that life was so complete without her that she had no business being in it. This cruel feeling contained, at bottom, neither despair nor offense, but was rather a listening and looking on that Agathe had always known; it was just that she had no impulse, indeed no possibility, of taking a hand in her own fate. This state of exclusion was almost a shelter, just as there is a kind of astonishment that forgets to ask questions. She could just as well go away. Where to? There really must be a Somewhere. Agathe was not one of those people who can find satisfaction in their conviction of the emptiness of all illusions, which, as a way of accepting a disappointing fate, is equivalent to a militant and spiteful asceticism. She was generous and uncritical in such matters, unlike Ulrich, who subjected all his feelings to the most relentless scrutiny in order to outlaw any that did not pass the test. She was simply stupid! That's what she told herself. She didn't want to think things over! Defiantly she pressed her forehead against the iron chains, which gave a little and then stiffened in resistance. During these last weeks she had somehow begun to believe in God again, but without thinking of Him. Certain states of mind, in which she perceived the world differently from what it appeared to be, in such a way that even she lived no longer shut out but completely enveloped in a radiant certainty, had been brought, under Ulrich's influence, to something akin to an inward metamorphosis, a total transformation.
1048 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
She would have been willing to imagine a God who opens up His world like a hiding place. But Ulrich said that this was not necessary, it could only do harm to imagine more than one could experience. And it was for him to decide in these matters. But then, it was also for him to guide her without abandoning her. He was the threshold be- tween two lives, and all her longing for the one and all her flight from the other led first to him. She loved him as shamelessly as one loves life. When she opened her eyes in the morning, he awoke in every limb of her body. He was looking at her even now, from the dark mirror of her anguish: which made Agathe remember that she wanted to kill herself. She had a feeling that it was to spite him that she had run away to God when she had left home to kill herself. But that intention now seemed exhausted, to have sunk back to its source, which was that Ulrich had hurt her feelings. She was angry with him, she still felt that, but the birds were singing, and now she heard them again. She was just as confused as before, but it was now a joyful confusion. She wanted to do something, but it should strike out at Ulrich, not just at herself. The endless stupor in which she had been kneeling gave way to the warmth of the blood streaming back into her limbs as she rose to her feet.
When she looked up, a man was standing beside her. She was em- barrassed, not knowing how long he had been watching her. As her glance, still dark with agitation, met his, she saw that he was looking at her with unconcealed sympathy, manifestly hoping to inspire her with wholehearted confidence. The man was tall and lean and wore dark clothes, and a short blond beard covered his cheeks and chin. Beneath his mustache one could easily make out full, soft lips, which were in remarkably youthful contrast to the many gray hairs already scattered among the blond ones, as if age had forgotten them in the growth of hair. It was altogether not an easy face to read. The first impression led one to think of a secondary-school teacher; the sever- ity in this face was not carved in hardwood but rather resembled something soft that had hardened under petty daily frustrations. But if one started with this softness, on which the manly beard seemed to have been planted in order to adjust it to a system with which the wearer concurred, then one realized that this originally rather ef- feminate face showed hard, almost ascetic details, clearly the work of a relentlessly active will upon the soft basic material.
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Agathe did not know what to make of this face, which left her sus- pended between attraction and repulsion; all she understood was that this man wanted to help her.
"Life offers us just as much opportunity to strengthen the will as to weaken it," the stranger said, wiping his glasses, which had been misted over, in order to see her better. "One should never run away from problems, but try to master them! " Agathe stared at him in sur- prise. He had obviously been watching her for quite some time, be- cause his words were emerging from the middle of some interior monologue. Startled by his own voice, he raised his hat, his manners belatedly catching up with this essential gesture of courtesy, then quickly regained his composure and went straight on: "Do forgive my asking whether I may be of some help," he said. "It seems to me that it is truly easier to speak of one's pain to a stranger, even con- cerning a grave shock to the self, such as I believe I am witnessing here? "
Evidently it was not without effort that the stranger spoke to her; apparently he had felt called upon to do so out of duty, as an act of charity; and now that he found himself walking beside this beautiful woman, he was literally struggling for words. For Agathe had simply stood up and begun slowly to walk with him away from the grave and out from under the trees into the open space at the edge ofthe hills, neither of them deciding whether they wanted to choose one of the paths leading downward, or which one. Instead, they walked along the hilltop for quite a distance, talking, then turned back, and then turned back to walk in the original direction once more; neither of them knew where the other had meant to go originally, and neither wanted to interfere with the other's plans.
'Won't you tell me why you were crying? " the stranger persisted, in the mild tones of a physician asking where it hurts.
Agathe shook her head. "It wouldn't be easy to explain," she said, and suddenly asked him: "But tell me something else: What makes you so sure you can help me without knowing me? I'd be inclined to think that one can't help anyone! " .
Her companion did not answer right away. He opened his mouth to speak several times, but seemed to force himself to hold back. Fi- nally, he said: "One can probably only help someone who is suffering from something one has experienced oneself. "
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He fell silent. Agathe laughed at the thought that this man could suppose himself to have been through what she was suffering, which would have been repellent to him had he known what it was. But her companion seemed not to hear this laugh, or to regard it as a rude- ness born of nerves. After a pause, he said calmly: "Of course, I don't mean that anyone has a right to imagine that he can tell anyone else what to do. But you see, fear in a catastrophe is infectious-and suc- cessful escape is also infectious! I mean just having escaped as from a fire, when everyone has lost his head and run into the flames: what an immense help when a single person stands outside, waving, does nothing but wave and shout incomprehensibly that there is a way out.
Actually, Hagauer had meant to write something else. For human intelligence is not a self·contained and unrelated faculty; its flaws in- volve moral flaws-we speak of moral idiocy-just as moral flaws, though so much less attention is paid to them, often misdirect or to- tally confuse the rational power in whatever direction they choose. And so Hagauer had fonned in his mind an image of a fixed type that he was now inclined, in the course of these reflections, to define as "an adequately intelligent variant of moral idiocy that expresses itself only in certain irregular fonns of behavior. " But he could not bring himself to use this illuminating phrase, partly to avoid provoking his runaway wife even more, and partly because a layperson usually mis- understands such tenns when applied to himself. Objectively, how- ever, it was now established that the fonns of behavior that Hagauer deprecated came under the great inclusive genus of the "subnor- mal," and in the end Hagauer hit upon a way out of this conflict be- tween conscience and chivalry: the irregularities in his wife's conduct could be classified with a fairly general pattern of female behavior and tenned "socially deficient. "
In this spirit he concluded his letter in words charged with feeling. With the prophetic ire of the scorned lover and pedagogue, he de- picted Agathe's asocial, solipsistic, and morbid temperament as a "minus factor" that never pennitted her to grapple vigorously and creatively with life's problems, as "our era" demands of"its people," but "shielded her instead from reality behind a pane of glass," mired in deliberate isolation and always on the edge of pathological peril. "If there was something about me you didn't like, you ought to have done something about it," he wrote, "but the truth is that your mind is not equipped to cope with the energies of our time, and evades its demands! Now that I have warned you about your character," he concluded, "I repeat: You, more urgently than most people, need someone strong to lean on. In your own interest I urge you to come
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back immediately, and I assure you that the responsibility I bear as your husband forbids me to accede to your wish. "
Before signing this letter Hagauer read it through once more. Al- though not satisfied with his description of the psychological type under discussion, he made no changes except at the end-expelling as a gusty sigh through his mustache the unaccustomed, proudly mastered strain of thinking hard about his wife as he pondered how much more still needed to be said about "our modem age"-where he inserted beside the word "responsibility" a chivalrous phrase about his venerated late father-in-law's precious bequest to him.
When Agathe had read all this, a strange thing happened: the content of these arguments did not fail to make an impression on her. After reading it word for word a second time, where she stood, without bothering to sit down, she slowly lowered the letter and handed it to Ulrich, who had been observing his sister's agitation with astonishment.
ULRICH AND AGATHE LOOK FOR A REASON AFTER THE FACT
While Ulrich was reading, Agathe dispiritedly watched his face. It was bent over the letter, and its expression seemed to be irresolute, as though he could not decide between ridicule, gravity, sadness, or contempt. Now a heavy weight descended on Agathe from all sides, as if the air that had been so unnaturally light and delicious were becoming unbearably dense and sultry; what she had done to her fa- ther's will oppressed her conscience for the first time. To say that she suddenly realized the full measure of her culpability would not be sufficient; what she realized rather was her guilt toward everything, even her brother, and she was overcome with an indescribable disil- lusionment. Everything she had done seemed incomprehensible to
IntotheMillennium(TheCriminals) · 1035
her. She had talked of killing her husband, she had falsified a will, and she had imposed herself on her brother without asking whether she would be disrupting his life: she had done this in a state of being drunk on her own fantasies. What she was most ashamed of at this moment was that it had never occurred to her to do the obvious, the most natural thing: any other woman who wanted to leave a husband she did not like would either look for a better man or arrange for something else, something equally natural. Ulrich himself had pointed this out often enough, but she had paid no attention. And now here she stood and did not know what he would say. Her behav- ior seemed to her so much that of a being who was not entirely men- tally competent that she thought Hagauer was right; he was only holding up the mirror to her in his own way. Seeing his letter in Ul- rich's hand struck her dumb in the same way a person might be struck dumb who had been charged with a crime and on top of that receives a letter from a former teacher excoriating him. She had of course never allowed Hagauer to have any influence over her; never- theless, it now looked as ifhe had the right to say: ''I'm disappointed in you! " or else: ''I'm afraid I've never been disappointed in you but always had the feeling you'd come to a bad end! " In her need to shake off this absurd and distressing feeling she impatiently inter- rupted Ulrich, who was still absorbed in reading the letter without giving any sign of coming to the end, by saying: "His description of me is really quite accurate. " She spoke in an apparently casual tone but with a note of defiance, clearly betraying some hope of hearing the opposite. "And even if he doesn't say it in so many words, it's true; either I was not mentally competent when I married him for no compelling reason, or I am not so now, when I'm leaving him for just as little reason. "
Ulrich, who was rereading for the third time those passages that made his vivid imagination an involuntary witness of her close rela- tions with Hagauer, absently muttered something she did not catch.
"Do please listen to me! " Agathe pleaded. "Am I the up-to-date woman, active somehow either economically or intellectually? No. Am I a woman in love? No again. Am I the good, nest-building wife and mother who simplifies things and smooths over the rough spots? That least of all. What else is there? Then what in the world am I good for? The social life we're caught up in, I can tell you frankly,
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basically means nothing at all to me. And I almost think I could get along without whatever it is in music, art, and literature that sends the cognoscenti into raptures. Hagauer, for instance, is different: he needs all that, ifonly for his quotations and allusions. He at least has the pleasure and satisfaction of a collector. So isn't he right when he accuses me of doing nothing at all, of rejecting the 'wealth of the beautiful and moral,' and tells me that it's only with Professor Hagauer that I can find any sympathy and tolerance? ''
Ulrich handed the letter back to her and replied with composure. "Let's face it, the term for you is 'socially retarded,' isn't it? '' He smiled, but there was in his tone a hint ofirritation left from his hav- ing been made privy to this intimate letter.
But her brother's answer did not sit well with Agathe. It made her feel worse. Shyly she tried to turn the tables on him: "In that case why did you insist, if that is what you did, without telling me any- thing, that I must get a divorce and lose my only protector? ''
'Well," he said evasively, "probably because it is so delightfully easy to adopt a firm, manly tone in our exchanges. I bang my fist on the table, he bangs his fist on the table; so of course I have to bang mine twice as hard the next time around. That's why I think I did it. "
Up to. now-although her dejection kept her from realizing it her- self-Agathe had been really glad, ovexjoyed in fact, at her brother's secretly doing the opposite ofwhat he had outwardly advocated dur- ing the time oftheir humorous brother-sister flirtation, since offend- ing Hagauer could only have the effect of erecting a barrier to her ever returning to him. Yet even in the place of that secret joy there was now only a hollow sense ofloss, and Agathe fell silent.
'W e mustn't overlook," Ulrich went on, "how well Hagauer suc- ceeds in misunderstanding you so accurately, if I may say so. Just wait, you'll see that in his own way-without hiring detectives, just by cogitating over the weaknesses of your attachment to the human race-he'll find out what you did to Father's will. How are we going to defend you then? ''
So it happened that for the first time since they had been together again the subject came up of the blissful but horrible prank Agathe had played on Hagauer. She fiercely shrugged her shoulders, with a vague gesture of waving it aside.
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"Hagauer is in the right, of course," Ulrich offered, with gentle emphasis, for her consideration.
"He's not in the right! " she answered vehemently.
"He's partly right," Ulrich compromised. "In so risky a situation we must start off by facing things openly, including ourselves. What you've done can put us both in jail. "
Agathe stared at him with startled eyes. She had known this, of course, but it had never been so straightforwardly stated.
Ulrich responded with a reassuring gesture. "But that's not the worst of it," he continued. "How do we keep what you've done, and the way you did it, from being perceived as"-he groped for the right word and failed to find it-"well, let's just say that to some extent it's the way Hagauer sees it, that it's all a bit on the shadowy side, the side of abnormality and the kind of flaw that comes from something already flawed. Hagauer voices what the world thinks, even though it sounds ridiculous coming from him. "
"Now we're getting to the cigarette case," Agathe said in a small voice.
"Right, here it comes," Ulrich said firmly. "I have to tell you some- thing that's been on my mind for a long time. "
Agathe tried to stop him. 'Wouldn't it be better to undo the whole thing? " she asked. "Suppose I have a friendly talk with him and make some sort of apology? ''
"It's already too late for that. He might use it to blackmail you into coming back to him," Ulrich declared.
Agathe was silent.
Ulrich returned to his hypothetical cigarette case, stolen on a whim by a man who is well off. He had worked out a theory that there could be only three basic motivations for such a theft of prop- erty: poverty, profession, or, ifit was neither ofthese, a damaged psy- che. "You pointed out when we talked about it once that it might be done out of conviction too," he added.
"I said one might just do it! " Agathe interjected.
"Right, on principle. "
"No, not on principle! "
"But that's just it! " Ulrich said. "If one does such a thing at all,
there has to be at least some conviction behind it! There's no getting
1038 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
away from that. Nobody 'just does' anything; there has to be a reason, either an external or an internal one. It may be hard to know one from the other, but we won't philosophize about that now. I'm only saying that ifone feels one is doing the right thing with absolutely no basis for it, or some decision arises out of the blue, then there's good reason to suspect some sickness, something constitutionally wrong. "
This was certainly far more and much worse than Ulrich had meant to say; it merely converged with the drift of his qualms.
"Is that all you have to say to me about it? " Agathe asked very quietly.
"No, it's not all," Ulrich replied grimly. "When one has no reason, one must look for one! "
Neither-of them was in any doubt where to look for it. But Ulrich was after something else, and after a slight pause he continued thoughtfully: "The moment you fall out of step with the rest of the world, you can never ever know what's good and what's evil. If you want to be good you have to be convinced that the world is good. And neither one of us is. We're living at a time when morality is either dissolving or in convulsions. But for the sake of a world yet to come, one should keep oneself pure. "
"Do you really think that will have any effect on whether it comes or not? " Agathe asked skeptically.
"No, I'm afraid I don't think that. Or at most I think like this: If even those people who understand don't act as they should, it cer- tainly won't come at all, and there's no way to stop everything from falling apart! "
"And what do you care whether it's any different five hundred years from now or not? "
Ulrich hesitated. ''I'm doing my duty, don't you see? Maybe like a soldier. "
Probably because on that miserable morning Agathe needed a more comforting, more affectionate kind of answer than Ulrich was giving, she said: "No different from your General, then? "
Ulrich said nothing.
Agathe was not inclined to stop. "You don't even know for sure whether it's your duty," she went on. "You do it because that's how you are and because you enjoy it. And that's all I did! "
Suddenly she lost her self-control. Something was terribly sad.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1039
Tears sprang to her eyes, and a violent sob rose in her throat. To hide it from her brother's eyes, she threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against his shoulder. Ulrich felt her crying and the trem- bling of her back. A burdensome embarrassment came over him: he was aware of turning cold. At this moment, when he should have been sympathetic, all the tender and happy feelings he thought he had for his sister deserted him; his sensibility was disturbed and wouldn't function. He stroked Agathe's back and whispered some comforting words, but it went against his grain. Since he did not share her agitation, the contact of their two bodies seemed to him like that of two wisps of straw. He put an end to it by leading Agathe to a chair and himself sitting down in another, some distance away. Then he gave her his answer: "You're not enjoying this business with the will at all. And you never shall, because it's all been a disorderly mess! "
"Order? " Agathe exclaimed through her tears. "Duty? ''
She was really quite beside herself because Ulrich had behaved so coldly. But she was already smiling again. She realized that she would have to work things out for herself. She felt that the smile she had forced seemed to be hovering somewhere out there, far from her icy lips. Ulrich meanwhile had shaken off his embarrassment; he was even pleased not to have felt the usual physical stirring; he realized that this, too, would have to be different between them. But he did not have time to think about that now, because he could see that Agathe was deeply troubled, and so he began to talk.
"Don't be upset by the words I used," he pleaded, "and don't hold them against me. I suppose I'm wrong to use words such as 'order' and 'duty'-they sound too much like preaching. But why"-he now went off at a tangent-"why the devil is preaching contemptible? It really ought to be our greatest joy! "
Agathe had no desire to answer this.
Ulrich let it drop.
"Please don't think I'm trying to set myself up as morally supe-
rior! " he begged. "I didn't mean to say that I never do anything bad. What I don't like is having to do it in secret. I like the good highway robbers of morality, not the sneak thieves. I'd like to make a moral robber out of you," he joked, "and not let you err out of weakness. "
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"It's not a point of honor with me," his sister said from behind her distantly hovering smile.
"It's really extremely funny that there are times like ours, when all young people are infatuated with whatever's bad," he said with a laugh, to distance the conversation from the personal level. "This current preference for the morally gruesome is a weakness, of course. Probably middle-class gorging on goodness; being all sucked dry. I myself originally thought one had to say no to everything; ev- eryone thinks so who is between twenty-five and forty-five today; but of course it was only a kind of fashion. I can imagine a reaction set- ting in soon, and with it a new generation that will again stick moral- ity instead of immorality in its buttonhole. The oldest donkeys, who never in their lives felt any moral fervor, who merely uttered moral platitudes when the occasion called for them, will then suddenly be hailed as precursors and pioneers of a new character! "
Ulrich had risen to his feet and was restlessly pacing the room.
'We might put it this way," he suggested. "Good has become a cliche almost by its very nature, while evil remains criticism. The im- moral achieves its divine right by being a drastic critique of the moral! It shows us that life has other possibilities. It shows us up for liars. For this we show our gratitude by a certain forbearance. That there are truly delightful people who forge wills should prove that there is something amiss with the sanctity of private property. Even ifthis doesn't need proving, it is where our task begins: for every kind of crime, we must be able to conceive of criminals who can be ex- cused, even including infanticide or whatever other horrors there maybe. . . . "
He had been trying in vain to catch his sister's eye, even though he was teasing her by bringing up the will. Now she made an involuntary gesture of protest. She was no theoretician; the only crime she re- garded as excusable was her own, and she was insulted all over again by his comparison.
Ulrich laughed. "It looks like an intellectual game, but this kind of juggling does mean something," he assured her. "It goes to show that there's something amiss in the way we judge our conduct. And there really is, you know. In a company ofwill-forgers you would certainly stand up for the inviolability of the legal regulations; it's only in the company of the righteous that it all gets blurred and perverted. If
IntotheMillennium(TheCriminals) · 1 0 4 1
only Hagauer were a rogue, you would be flamingly just; it's too bad he's such a decent fellow! That's the seesaw we're on. "
He waited for a response but none came, so he shrugged his shoul- ders and came back to the point:
"We're looking to justify what you did. We have established that respectable people are deeply attracted to crime, though of course only in their imagination. We might add that criminals, to hear them talk, would almost without exception like to be regarded as respect- able people. So we might arrive at a definition: Crimes are the con- centrated form, within sinners, ofeverything other people work offin little irregularities, in their imagination and in innumerable petty ev- eryday acts and attitudes of spite and viciousness. W e could also say: Crimes are in the air and simply seek the path of least resistance, which leads them to certain individuals. We could even say that while they are the acts ofindividuals who are incapable ofbehaving morally, in the main they're the condensed expression of some kind of general human maladjustment where the distinction between good and evil is concerned. This is what has imbued us from our youth with the criti- cal spirit our contemporaries have never been able to get beyond! "
"But what is good and evil? " Agathe tossed off the question, while Ulrich remained oblivious to the pain his banter was causing her.
"Well, how would I know? " he answered with a laugh. "''ve only just noticed for the first time that I loathe evil. Until today I really didn't know how much.
My dear Agathe, you have no idea what it's like," he complained moodily. "Take science, for instance! For a mathematician, to put it very simply, minus five is no worse than plus five. A scientist researching a problem mustn't recoil in horror from anything, and under certain conditions he might get more excited by a lovely cancer than a lovely woman. A man ofknowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will be revealed only at the end of time. Science is amoral. All our glorious thrusting of ourselves into the Unknown gets us out of the habit of being personally con- cerned with our conscience; in fact, it doesn't even give us the satis- faction of taking our conscience entirely seriously. And art? Doesn't it amount to a creation ofimages that don't correspond to the reali- ties of life? I'm not talking about bogus idealism, or the paintings of voluptuous nudes in a period when everyone goes around covered up to the eyeballs," he joked again. "But think of a real work of art: have
1042 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you're whetting on a grindstone? It's a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny! "
This was the only point at which Agathe interrupted him with real interest: "Didn't you once write poetry yourself? '' she asked him.
"You still remember that? When did I let you in on it? '' Ulrich asked. "Yes; we all write verses at one time or another. I even went on doing it when I was a mathematician," he admitted. "But the older I got, the worse they became; not so much because of lack of talent, I think, as from a growing aversion to the disorderly and bohe- mian romanticism ofthat sort ofemotional excess. . . . "
His sister shook her head almost imperceptibly, but Ulrich noticed it. "Yes," he insisted, "a poem should be no more of an exceptional phenomenon than an act of goodness! But what, if I may ask, be- comes of the moment of inspiration the moment after? You love po- etry, I know; but what I'm saying is that it isn't enough to breathe out one great puff of fire and let it fade away. This kind of sporadic per- formance is the counterpart of the kind of morality that exhausts it- self in half-baked criticism. " And abruptly returning to his main subject, he said to his sister: "If I were to behave in this Hagauer matter the way you're expecting me to today, I would have to be skeptical, casual, and ironic. The exemplary children you or I might yet have would then be able to say truthfully of us that we belonged to a very secure period of middle-class values that was never plagued by doubts, or plagued at most by superficial doubts. But in fact you and I have already gone to such trouble over our philosophy . . . ! "
Ulrich probably wanted to say a great deal more; he was actually only leading up to some way of coming down on his sister's side, which he had already worked out, and it would have been good ifhe had revealed it to her. For she suddenly stood up and on some vague pretext got her outdoor things.
"So we're leaving it that I'm morally retarded? '' she asked with a forced attempt at humor. "I can't keep up with all you've been saying to the contrary! "
"We're both morally retarded! " Ulrich gallantly assured her. "Both of us! " And he was rather proud of the haste with which his sister left him without saying when she would return.
31
AGA THE W ANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND MAKES A GENTLEMAN'S ACQUAINTANCE
In truth she had rusheq offto spare her brother the sight ofthe tears she could barely hold back. She was as sad as a person who has lost everything. She did not know why. It had come over her while Ulrich was talking. Why? She didn't know that either. He should have done something other than talk. What? She didn't know. He was right, of course, not to take seriously the "stupid coincidence" of her being upset and the arrival of that letter, and to go on talking as he always did. But Agathe had to get away.
At first she felt only the need to walk. She rushed headlong from their house. Where the layout ofthe streets forced her to detour, she always kept to the same general direction. She fled, in the way peo- ple and animals flee from a catastrophe. Why, she did not ask herself. It was only when she grew tired that she realized what she intended to do: never go back!
She would keep walking until dusk. Farther from home with every step. She assumed that by the time she came up against the barricade of evening her decision would be made. The decision was to kill her- self. It was not an actual decision to kill herself, but the expectation that by evening it would be. Behind this expectation was a desperate seething and whirling inside her head. She did not even have any- thing with her to kill herselfwith. Her little poison capsule lay some- where in a drawer or in a suitcase. The only clear thing about her death was the longing never to have to go back again. She wanted to walk out of life. That was where the walking came from. It was as if every step she took was already a step out of life.
As she tired she began to long for green fields and woods, for walk- ing in silence and the open air. She could not get there on foot. She took a streetcar. She had been brought up to control herself in pub- lic. So her voice betrayed no emotion when she bought her ticket and asked for directions. She sat straight-backed and impassive, with not
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a finger twitching. And as she sat there the thoughts started coming. She would of course have felt better had she been able to let herself go; with her limbs fettered as they were, these thoughts came in large bundles that she vainly tried to force through an opening. She bore Ulrich a grudge for what he had said. She didn't want to hold it against him. She gave up her right to. What had she done for him? She was only taking up his time, and doing nothing for him in return; she was in the way of his work and his habits. When she thought of his habits she felt a pang. It seemed that no woman had entered his house in all the time she'd been there. Agathe was convinced that her brother always had to have a woman in his life. So he was depriving himself for her sake. At this moment she would have liked to turn back and tenderly beg his forgiveness. As there was no way she could make it up to him, she was being selfish and bad. But then she re- membered again how cold he had been. He was obviously sorry he had taken her in. To think of all he had planned and said before he got tired of her! Now he no longer mentioned any of it. Agathe's heart was again tormented with the great disillusionment her hus- band's letter had brought her. She was jealous. Senselessly and com- monly jealous. She would have liked to force herself on her brother; she felt the passionate and helpless friendship ofthe person throwing himself against his own rejection. "I could steal or walk the streets for him! " she thought, knowing this was ridiculous but not able to help it. Ulrich's conversations, with their humor and sovereign air of being above the battle, made a mockery ofthis idea. She admired his superiority and all his intellectual needs, which surpassed her own. But she didn't see why every idea always had to be equally true for everyone! In her humbled state she needed some personal comfort- ing, not edifying sermons! She did not want to be brave! And after a while, she reproached herself for being the way she was, and en- larged her pain by imagining that she deserved nothing better than Ulrich's indifference.
This self-denigration, for which neither Ulrich's conduct nor even Hagauer's upsetting letter was sufficient cause, was a temperamental outburst. Ever since Agathe had outgrown her childhood, not so very long ago, everything she regarded as her failure in the face of soci- ety's demands had had to do with her sense of not living in accord with her own deepest inclinations, or even in opposition to them. She
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inclined to devotion and trustfulness, for she had never become so much at home in solitude as her brother; and if she had found it im- possible to yield herself heart and soul to a person or a cause, it was because she had the capacity for some greater devotion, whether it reached out to the whole world or to God. There is the well-known path of devotion to all mankind that begins with an inability to get along with one's neighbor, and just so may a deep latent yearning for God arise in an antisocial character equipped with a great capacity for love; in that sense, the religious criminal is no greater paradox than the religious old woman who never found a husband. Agathe's behavior toward Hagauer, which had the absurd appearance of a selfish action, was as much the outburst of an impatient will as was the intensity with which she accused herself of losing life by her own weakness just when she had been awakened to it by her brother.
She soon lost patience with the slow, rumbling streetcar. When the buildings along the way grew lower and more rural, she got off and continued the rest of the way on foot. The courtyards were open; through archways and over low fences came glimpses of handymen at their chores, animals, children at play. The air was filled with a peace in whose distances voices sounded and tools banged; sounds moved in the bright air with the irregular, gentle motions of a butter- fly, while Agathe felt herself gliding like a shadow past them toward the rising ground of vineyards and woodland. Just once she paused, in front of a yard where coopers were at work and there was the good noise of mallets hammering on barrel staves. She had always liked watching such honest work and taken pleasure in the modest, sensi- ble, well-considered labor of the workmen. This time, too, she could not get enough of the rhythm of the mallets and the men's moving round and round the barrel. For a few moments it made her forget her misexy and plunged her into a pleasant, unthinking oneness with the world. She always admired people who could do this kind of task, with skills developed so variously and naturally out of a generally ac- knowledged need. But there was nothing she wanted to do herself, although she had all kinds of mental and practical aptitudes. Life was complete without her. And suddenly, before she saw the connection, she heard church bells ringing, and could barely restrain herself from bursting into tears again. Both bells of the little local church had probably been chiming the whole time, but Agathe just now noticed
I046 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
it and was instantly overcome by how these useless chimes, excluded from the good, lavish earth and flying passionately through the air, were related to her own existence.
She hastily resumed walking, and accompanied by the chimes, which now would not leave her ears, she passed swiftly between the last of the houses and emerged where the road climbed the hillside with its vineyards and scattered bushes lining the paths below, while above, the bright green of the woods beckoned. Now she knew where she was going, and it was a beautiful feeling, as though with every step she were sinking more deeply into nature. Her heart pounded with joy and effort when she sometimes stopped and found the bells still accompanying her, though now hidden high in the air and scarcely audible. It seemed to her she had never heard bells chiming like this in the midst of an ordinary day, for no apparent festive reason, mingling democratically with the natural and self-suf- ficient affairs of men. But of all the tongues of this thousand-voiced city, this was the last to speak to her, and something in it seized hold of her as if to lift her high and swing her up the hill, only to drop her again as it faded into a slight metallic sound no better than all the chirping, rumbling, and rustling sounds of the countryside. So Agathe climbed and walked upward for perhaps another hour, until she suddenly found herself facing the little shrubby wilderness she had carried in her memory. It enclosed a neglected grave at the edge of the woods, where nearly a hundred years before a poet had killed himself and where, in accordance with his last wish, he had also been laid to rest. Ulrich had said that he was not a good poet, even if he was famous. Ulrich was sharply critical of the rather shortsighted po- etics that expressed a longing to be buried high up with a view. But Agathe had loved the inscription on the big stone slab since the day they had come this way and together deciphered the beautiful, rain- worn Biedermeier lettering, and she leaned over the black chain fence with its great angular links, which marked off the rectangle of death from life.
"I meant nothing to all of you" were the words the disgruntled poet had had inscribed on his gravestone, and Agathe thought that this could equally well be said of herself. This thought, here on the edge of the wooded pulpit above the greening vineyards and the alien, immeasurable city that was slowly waving its trails of smoke in
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the morning sun, moved her afresh. Impulsively she knelt down to press her forehead against one ofthe stone posts that held the chains; the unaccustomed position and the cool touch of the stone feigned the rather stiffand passive tranquillity of the death that was awaiting her. She tried to pull herself together, but was not immediately suc- cessful; bird calls intruded on her ear, so many and such various bird calls that it surprised her; branches stirred, and since she did not feel the wind she had the impression that the trees were waving their branches of their own accord. In a sudden hush, a faint pattering could be heard; the stone she was resting against, touching, was so smooth that she felt that a piece of ice between it and her forehead was keeping her from quite touching it. Only after a while did she realize that what distracted her was precisely what she was trying to hold on to, that fundamental sense of being superfluous which, re- duced to its simplest terms, could be expressed only in the words that life was so complete without her that she had no business being in it. This cruel feeling contained, at bottom, neither despair nor offense, but was rather a listening and looking on that Agathe had always known; it was just that she had no impulse, indeed no possibility, of taking a hand in her own fate. This state of exclusion was almost a shelter, just as there is a kind of astonishment that forgets to ask questions. She could just as well go away. Where to? There really must be a Somewhere. Agathe was not one of those people who can find satisfaction in their conviction of the emptiness of all illusions, which, as a way of accepting a disappointing fate, is equivalent to a militant and spiteful asceticism. She was generous and uncritical in such matters, unlike Ulrich, who subjected all his feelings to the most relentless scrutiny in order to outlaw any that did not pass the test. She was simply stupid! That's what she told herself. She didn't want to think things over! Defiantly she pressed her forehead against the iron chains, which gave a little and then stiffened in resistance. During these last weeks she had somehow begun to believe in God again, but without thinking of Him. Certain states of mind, in which she perceived the world differently from what it appeared to be, in such a way that even she lived no longer shut out but completely enveloped in a radiant certainty, had been brought, under Ulrich's influence, to something akin to an inward metamorphosis, a total transformation.
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She would have been willing to imagine a God who opens up His world like a hiding place. But Ulrich said that this was not necessary, it could only do harm to imagine more than one could experience. And it was for him to decide in these matters. But then, it was also for him to guide her without abandoning her. He was the threshold be- tween two lives, and all her longing for the one and all her flight from the other led first to him. She loved him as shamelessly as one loves life. When she opened her eyes in the morning, he awoke in every limb of her body. He was looking at her even now, from the dark mirror of her anguish: which made Agathe remember that she wanted to kill herself. She had a feeling that it was to spite him that she had run away to God when she had left home to kill herself. But that intention now seemed exhausted, to have sunk back to its source, which was that Ulrich had hurt her feelings. She was angry with him, she still felt that, but the birds were singing, and now she heard them again. She was just as confused as before, but it was now a joyful confusion. She wanted to do something, but it should strike out at Ulrich, not just at herself. The endless stupor in which she had been kneeling gave way to the warmth of the blood streaming back into her limbs as she rose to her feet.
When she looked up, a man was standing beside her. She was em- barrassed, not knowing how long he had been watching her. As her glance, still dark with agitation, met his, she saw that he was looking at her with unconcealed sympathy, manifestly hoping to inspire her with wholehearted confidence. The man was tall and lean and wore dark clothes, and a short blond beard covered his cheeks and chin. Beneath his mustache one could easily make out full, soft lips, which were in remarkably youthful contrast to the many gray hairs already scattered among the blond ones, as if age had forgotten them in the growth of hair. It was altogether not an easy face to read. The first impression led one to think of a secondary-school teacher; the sever- ity in this face was not carved in hardwood but rather resembled something soft that had hardened under petty daily frustrations. But if one started with this softness, on which the manly beard seemed to have been planted in order to adjust it to a system with which the wearer concurred, then one realized that this originally rather ef- feminate face showed hard, almost ascetic details, clearly the work of a relentlessly active will upon the soft basic material.
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Agathe did not know what to make of this face, which left her sus- pended between attraction and repulsion; all she understood was that this man wanted to help her.
"Life offers us just as much opportunity to strengthen the will as to weaken it," the stranger said, wiping his glasses, which had been misted over, in order to see her better. "One should never run away from problems, but try to master them! " Agathe stared at him in sur- prise. He had obviously been watching her for quite some time, be- cause his words were emerging from the middle of some interior monologue. Startled by his own voice, he raised his hat, his manners belatedly catching up with this essential gesture of courtesy, then quickly regained his composure and went straight on: "Do forgive my asking whether I may be of some help," he said. "It seems to me that it is truly easier to speak of one's pain to a stranger, even con- cerning a grave shock to the self, such as I believe I am witnessing here? "
Evidently it was not without effort that the stranger spoke to her; apparently he had felt called upon to do so out of duty, as an act of charity; and now that he found himself walking beside this beautiful woman, he was literally struggling for words. For Agathe had simply stood up and begun slowly to walk with him away from the grave and out from under the trees into the open space at the edge ofthe hills, neither of them deciding whether they wanted to choose one of the paths leading downward, or which one. Instead, they walked along the hilltop for quite a distance, talking, then turned back, and then turned back to walk in the original direction once more; neither of them knew where the other had meant to go originally, and neither wanted to interfere with the other's plans.
'Won't you tell me why you were crying? " the stranger persisted, in the mild tones of a physician asking where it hurts.
Agathe shook her head. "It wouldn't be easy to explain," she said, and suddenly asked him: "But tell me something else: What makes you so sure you can help me without knowing me? I'd be inclined to think that one can't help anyone! " .
Her companion did not answer right away. He opened his mouth to speak several times, but seemed to force himself to hold back. Fi- nally, he said: "One can probably only help someone who is suffering from something one has experienced oneself. "
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He fell silent. Agathe laughed at the thought that this man could suppose himself to have been through what she was suffering, which would have been repellent to him had he known what it was. But her companion seemed not to hear this laugh, or to regard it as a rude- ness born of nerves. After a pause, he said calmly: "Of course, I don't mean that anyone has a right to imagine that he can tell anyone else what to do. But you see, fear in a catastrophe is infectious-and suc- cessful escape is also infectious! I mean just having escaped as from a fire, when everyone has lost his head and run into the flames: what an immense help when a single person stands outside, waving, does nothing but wave and shout incomprehensibly that there is a way out.
