But at this moment he shrank back, because the
doorbell
rang, and both recog- nized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Philosophical prejudices then take care of the rest.
Agathe replied: - I understand nothing of philosophy.
But let's just stop eating!
Let's see what comes of that?
Ulrich noticed that in the bright childishness of this proposal there was a fine black line.
-W hat would come of that? He answered in detail: -First hunger, then exhaustion, then hunger again, raging fantasies about eating, and finally either eating or dying!
- Y o u can't know without having tried it!
- B u t , Agathe! It's been tried and tested a thousand times!
-By professors! Or by bankrupt speculators. Do you know, dying
must be not at all like one says. I nearly died once: it was different. Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea how close together in Agathe the two feelings were, to impulsively ignore all her lost years or, if that failed, to want to stop. She had never, like Ulrich, felt the need of making the world better than it is; she was happy lying around some- where, while Ulrich was always on the go. This had been a difference between them since childhood, and it remained a difference until death. Ulrich did not so much fear death as regard it as a disgrace that is set as a final price on all striving. Agathe had always been afraid of death when she imagined it, as every young and healthy person does, in the unbeara- ble and incomprehensible form: Now you are, but at some point you will no longer be! But at the same time she had, in her early youth, already become acquainted with the gradual process of separation that is capa- ble ofinserting itselfinto the tiniest span oftime, that hurtlingly rapid-
1428 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
in spite of all its slowness-being turned away from life and becoming tired of and indifferent to it, and striving trustingly into the approaching nothingness that sets in when the body is grievously harmed by an illness without the senses being affected. She had confidence in death. Perhaps it's not so bad, she thought. It's always, in any case, natural and pleasant to stop, in everything one does. But decay, and the rest of those horrible things: for heaven's sake, isn't one used to everything happening to one while one has nothing to do with it? You know, Ulrich-she terminated the conversation-you're like this: ifyou're given leaves and branches, you always sew them together into a tree; but I would like to see what would happen if we would once, for instance, sew the leaves finnly onto ourselves.
And yet Ulrich, too, felt they had nothing else to do but be together. Whenever Agathe called through the rooms: -Leave the light onl-a quick call, before Ulrich on his way out darkened the room to which Agathe wished to return once more, Ulrich thought: A request, hasty, what more? Oh, what more? No less than Buddha running to catch a tram. An impossible gait! A collapse of absurdity. But still, how lovely Agathe's voice was! What trust lay in the brief request, what happiness that one person can call out something like that to another without being misunderstood. Of course, such a moment was like a piece of earthly thread running among mysterious flowers, but it was at the same time moving, like a woolen thread that one places around one's beloved's neck when one has nothing else to give her. And when they then stepped out into the street and, walking side by side, could not see much of each other but only felt the tender force of unintended contact, they be- longed together like an object that stands in an immense space.
It lies in the nature of such experiences that they urge their own tell- ing. Within the tiniest amount of happening they contain an extreme of inner processes that needs to break a path for itself to the outside. And as in music or a poem, at a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what can be uttered in such circumstances is peculiarly circumscribed. Not, as one might believe, through solemnity or some other subjective mood, but through something that has far more the appearance of an objective thing. This can be compared with the remarkable process through which one assimilates intellectual influences in one's youth; there, too, one takes in not every truth that comes along but really only a truth that comes to meet it from one's own mind, a truth that therefore, in a cer- tain sense, has only to be awakened, so that one already knows it in the moment one comes across it. There are at that age the truths that are destined for us and those that aren't; bits of knowledge are true today and false tomorrow, ideas light up or go out-not because we change
From the Posthumous Papers · 1429
our minds but because with our thoughts we are still connected to our life as a whole and, fed by the same invisible springs, rise and sink with them. They are true when we feel ourselves rising at the moment of thinking them, and they are false when we feel ourselves falling. There is something inexpressible in ourselves and the world that is increased or diminished in the process. In later years this changes; the disposition of the emotions becomes less flexible, and the understanding becomes that extraordinarily flexible, firm, doughty tool which we know it to be when we refuse to allow ourselves to be swayed by emotion. At this point the world has already divided itself: on the one side into the world of things and dependable sensations of them, of judgments and, as it can also be put, recognized emotions or will; on the other side into the world ofsub- jectivity, that is of caprice, of faith, taste, intimation, prejudices, and all those uncertainties, taking an attitude in regard to which, whatever it may be, there remains a kind of private right of the individual, without any claims to public status. When that happens, individual industry may sniff out and take in everything or nothing;-it rarely happens in the steeled soul that in the fire of the impression the walls, too, stretch and move.
But does this attitude really permit one to feel as secure in the world as it might lead one to think? Does not the whole solid world, with all our sensations, buildings, landscapes, deeds, drift on countless tiny clouds? Beneath every perception lies music, poem, feeling. But this feeling is tied down, made invariable, excluded, because we want to per- ceive things truly, that is, without emotion, in order to let them guide us, instead of our guiding them, which, as one knows, amounts to meaning that we finally, quite suddenly, have really learned to fly instead of merely dreaming about flying, as the millennia before us did. To this emotion imprisoned in objects there corresponds, on the individual side, that spirit of objectivity which has pushed all passion back into a condi- tion where it is no longer perceptible, so that in every person there slum- bers a sense ofhis value, his usefulness, and his significance that cannot be touched, a basic feeling of equilibrium between himself and the world. Yet this equilibrium need only be disturbed at any point, and ev- erywhere the imprisoned little clouds escape. A little fatigue, a little poi- son, a little excess of excitement, and a person sees and hears things he doesn't want to believe; emotion rises, the world slides out of its mid- dling condition into an abyss or rises up energetically, solitary, like a vi- sion and no longer comprehensible!
Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being
1430 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect ma- chines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange- yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was differ- ent, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow ab- surd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.
But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Him- self, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had hap- pened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling ofa current that flowed through their arms.
And sometimes there were violent rebellions.
Let's make an assumption-[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later-and let's suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be tender toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeel- ingly, in order to move it to some other place in unsentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be some- thing, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor
From the Posthumous Papers · 1431
lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it's nothing other than festive. For that's the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister. o "I" and "you" are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth be- tween us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don't want to exaggerate, I have no in- tention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodi- gality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy as- sumes that one wishes to tum love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive af- fect oflove from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that's the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
"Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condi- tion. -TRANs.
1432 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every move- ment finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more . . .
To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this par- adise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one's wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the selfwanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But ifwe are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me. . . .
When Agathe next entered Lindner's house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
-Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. -What's the mat;ter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1433
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father's fu- ture wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret ap- plause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside. She understood that so well. What could wisdom, faith, miracles, and princi- ples mean to a young person who is still locked up in himself and not yet opened up by life to assimilate such things! She had a strange sympathy for him; for his being undisciplined and recalcitrant, for his being young, and apparently, too, simply for the badness of his way of thinking. She would gladly have been his playmate, at least here; these surroundings gave her this childish thought, but she sadly noticed that he usually treated her like an old woman.
-Peter! Peter! What's the matter? he aped her. -He'll tell you any- how. You soul-sister of his!
Agathe laughed even more and caught him by the hand.
- D o you like that? Peter went after her unabashedly. - D o you like me to howl? How old are you anyway? Not so much older than I am, I should think: but he treats you the way he treats the sublime Plato! He had disengaged himself and examined her, looking for an advantage.
- W h a t has he really done to you? Agathe asked.
-What's he done? He's punished me! I'm not at all ashamed in front of you, as you see. Soon he's going to pull down my pants, and you'll be allowed to hold me!
-Peter! For shame! Agathe warned innocently. -D id he really beat you?
- D i d he? Peter? Maybe you'd like that?
-Shame on you, Peter!
- N o t at all! Why don't you call me Herr Peter? Anyway, what do you
think: there! He stretched out his tensed leg and grasped his upper thigh, strengthened from playing soccer. -Have a look for yourself; I could murder him with one hand. He doesn't have as much strength in both legs as I have in one arm. It's not me, it's you who ought to be ashamed, instead of prattling wisdom with him! Do you want to know what he's done to me?
- N o , Peter, you can't talk to me that way.
-Why not?
-Because your father's heart is in the right place. And because- But
here Agathe could not find the right way to proceed; she was no good at
1434 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
preaching, although the youth was indeed in the wrong, and she sud- denly had to laugh again. - S o what did he do to you?
- H e took away my allowance!
-Wait! Agathe asked. Without stopping to think, she fished out a banknote and handed it to Peter. She herself did not know why she did this; perhaps she thought the first thing to do was to get rid of Peter's anger before she could have an effect on him, perhaps it only gave her pleasure to thwart Lindner's pedagogy. And with the same suddenness she had addressed Peter with the familiar Du. Peter looked at her in astonishment. Behind his lovely misted eyes something quite new awoke. -The second thing he imposed on me-he continued, grinning cynically, without thanking her-is also broken: the school of silence! Do you know it? Man learns through silence to remove his speech from all inner and outer irritations and make it the handmaid ofhis innermost personal considerations!
- Y o u surely said some improper things, said Agathe, falling back on the normal pronoun of address.
-This is how it was! "The first response of man to all interventions and attacks from without happens by means of the vocal cords," he quoted his father. -That's why he's ruined today and my day off from school tomorrow with room arrest, observes total silence toward me, and has forbidden me to speak a single word with anybody in the house. The third thing-he mocked-is control ofthe instinct for food-
-But, Peter, you must now really tell me-Agathe interrupted him, amused-what did you do to set him off?
The conversation in which he was mocking his father through his fu- ture mother had put the youth in the best ofspirits. -That's not so sim- ple, Agathe, he replied shamelessly. -There is, you ought to know, something that the old man fears the way the devil fears holy water: jokes. The tickling ofjokes and humor, he says, comes from idle fantasy and malice. I always have to swallow them. That's exemplary for one's character. Because, ifwe look at the joke more closely-
-Enough! Agathe commanded. -What was your forbidden joke about?
- A b o u t you! said Peter, his eyes boring into hers in challenge.
But at this moment he shrank back, because the doorbell rang, and both recog- nized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner. Before Agathe could make any reproaches, Peter pressed his fingernails with painful violence into her hand and stole out of the room.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1435
There were also violent rebellions.
Agathe owned a piano. She was sitting at it in the twilight, playing.
The uncertainty of her frame of mind played along with the notes. Ul- rich came in. His voice sounded cold and mute as he greeted her. She interrupted her playing. When the words had died away, her fingers went a few steps further through the boundless land of music.
-Stay where you are! ordered Ulrich, who had stepped back, draw- ing a pistol from his pocket. -Nothing's going to happen to you. He spoke altogether differently, a stranger. Then he fired at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The first bullet cut through the dry, tender wood and howled across the strings. A second churned up leaping sounds. As shot followed shot, the keys began to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drove with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. When the magazine was empty, Ulrich let it drop to the carpet-he only noticed it when he futilely tried to get off two more shots. He gave the impression of a madman, pale, his hair hanging down over his fore- head; a fit had seized him and carried him far away from himself. Doors slammed in the house, people were listening; slowly, in such impres- sions, reason again took possession of him.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive piano or flee the danger. She felt no fear, and although the beginning of her brother's outbreak could have seemed insane, this thought did not frighten her. She accepted it as a pleasant end. The strange cries of the wounded instrument aroused in her the idea that she would have to leave the earth in a swarm of fantasti- cally fluttering birds.
Ulrich pulled himself together and asked if she was angry with him; Agathe denied it with radiant eyes. His face again assumed its usual ex- pression. - I don't know-he said-why I did it. I couldn't resist the impulse.
Agathe reflectively tried out a few isolated strings that had survived.
- I feel like a fool . . . , Ulrich pleaded, and cautiously ran his hand through his sister's hair, as if his fingers could find refuge from them- selves there. Agathe withdrew them again by the wrist and pushed them away. - W h a t came over you? she asked.
- I have no idea, Ulrich said, making an unconscious motion with his arms as if he wanted to brush off the embrace of something tenacious and kick it away.
Agathe said: If you wished to repeat that, it would turn into a quite
I436 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ordinary target practice. Suddenly she stood up and laughed. -Now you'll have to have the piano completely rebuilt. What won't that all lead to: orders, explanations, bills . . . ! For that reason alone something like this can't happen again.
- 1 had to do it, Ulrich explained shyly. - 1 would just as gladly have shot at a mirror ifyou'd happened to be looking in it.
- A n d now you're upset that one can't do such a thing twice. But it was beautiful just as it was. She pushed her arm in his and drew close to him. - T h e rest of the time you're never willing to do anything unless you know where it will lead!
On the same evening, Ulrich had to put in an appearance at a garden party. He could not very well beg off, although he would have done so had not his despair I depression impelled him to go. But he arrived late; it was near midnight. The greater part of the guests had already laid aside their masks. Among the trees of the old grounds torches flamed, rammed into the ground like burning spears or fastened with brackets to the trunks of trees. Gigantic tables had been set up, covered with white cloths. A flickering fire reddened the bark of the trees, the silently sway- ing canopy of leaves overhead, and the faces of countless people crowded together, which from a little distance seemed to consist only of such red and black spots. It seemed to have been the watchword among the ladies to appear in men's costumes. Ulrich recognized a Frau Maya Sommer as a soldier from the army of Maria Theresa, the painter von Hartbach as a Tyrolean with bare knees, and Frau Clara Kahn, the wife ofthe famous physician, in a Beardsley costume. He also discovered that even among the younger women of the upper nobility, so far as he knew them by sight, many had chosen a mannish or boyish disguise; there were jockeys and elevator boys, half-mannish Dianas, female Hamlets, and corpulent Turks. The fashion of slacks for women, advocated just recently, seemed, although no one had followed it, to have had some effect upon the imagination nonetheless; for that time, in which women belonged to the world at most from ground level to halfway up their calves, but between there and the neck only to their husbands and lov- ers, to be seen like that at a party where one might expect to see mem- bers of the Imperial House was something unheard of, a revolution, even if only a revolution of caprice, and the precursor of the vulgar cus- toms that the older and stouter ladies were already privileged to predict, while the others noticed nothing but exuberance. Ulrich thought he
From the Posthumous Papers · 1437
could excuse himself from greeting the old prince, around whom as mas- ter of the house a group of people was in constant attendance, while he- barely knew him; he looked for [his valet] Tzi to ask him to do some- thing, but when he could not find him anywhere assumed that the indus- trious man had already gone home, and sauntered away from the center of activity to the edge of a grove of trees, from which, over an enormous grass lawn, one could catch a glimpse of the castle. This magnificent old castle had had fastened to it long rows of electric lights like footlights, which shone from under cornices or ran up pillars and liquefied, as it were, the forms of the architecture from out of the shadows, as if the stem old master who had devised them was among the guests and a little tipsy beneath a blanched paper hat. Below, one could see the servants running in and out through the dark door openings, while above, the ugly reddish-gray night sky of the city arched forward like an umbrella into the other, pure dark night sky, which one glimpsed, with its stars, whenever one lifted one's eyes. Ulrich did so, and was as if drunk from a combination of disgust and joy. As he let his glance fall, he perceived a nearby figure that had previously escaped his notice.
It was a tall woman in the costume of a Napoleonic colonel, and she was wearing a mask; by which Ulrich recognized immediately that it was Diotima. She acted as if she did not notice him, looking at the shining castle, sunk in thought. -Good evening, cousin! he addressed her. -Don't try to deny it; I recognize you unmistakably because you're the only person still wearing a mask.
- W h a t do you mean? the mask asked.
-Very simple: You feel ashamed. Tell me why so many women showed up in trousers?
Diotima vehemently shrugged her shoulders. -The word went around beforehand. My God, I can understand it: the old ideas are al- ready so worn out. But I really must confess to you that I'm annoyed; it was a tactless idea; you think you've stumbled into a theatrical fancy- dress ball.
-The whole thing is impossible, Ulrich said. -Such parties don't work anymore because their time is past.
-Hmph! Diotima answeredperfunctorily. She found the sight ofthe castle romantic.
-W ould the Colonel command where one might find a better opin- ion? Ulrich asked, with a challenging look at Diotima's body.
- O h , my dear friend, don't call me Colonel!
There was something new in her voice. Ulrich stepped close to her. She had taken off her mask. He noticed two tears that fell slowly from her eyes. This tall, weeping officer was totally ridiculous, but also very
1438 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
beautiful. He seized her hands and gently asked what the matter was. Diotima could not answer; a sob she was trying to suppress stirred the bright sheen of the white riding breeches that reached far up beneath her flung-back coat. They stood thus in the half-darkness of the light sinking into the lawns. - W e can't talk here, Ulrich whispered. - C o m e with me somewhere else. If you permit, I'll take you to my house. Di- otima tried to draw her hand away from his, but when this didn't work she let it be. Ulrich felt by this gesture what he. could hardly believe, that his hour with this woman had come. He grasped Diotima respectably around the waist and led her, supporting her tenderly, deeper into the shadows and then around to the exit. I A kiss right here?
Before they again emerged into the light, Diotima had ofcourse dried her tears and mastered her excitement, at least outwardly. -You've never noticed, Ulrich-she said in a low voice-that I've loved you for a long time; like a brother. I don't have anyone I can talk to. Since there were people nearby, Ulrich only murmured: -Come, we'll talk. But in the taxi he did not say a word, and Diotima, anxiously holding her coat closed, moved away from him into the comer. She had made up her mind to confess her woes to him, and when Diotima resolved to do something it was done; although in her whole life she had never been with another man at night than Section ChiefTuzzi, she followed Ulrich because before she had run into him she had made up her mind to have a long talk with him if he was there, and felt/had a great, melancholy longing for such a talk. The excitement ofcarrying out this firm resolve had an unfortunate physical effect on her; it was literally true that her resolve lay in her stomach like some indigestible food, and when (in ad- dition) the excitement suppressed all the juices that could dissolve it, Diotima felt cold sweat on her forehead and neck as iffrom nausea. She was diverted from herself only by the impression that arriving at Ulrich's made on her; the small grounds, where the electric bulbs on the tree trunks formed an alley, seemed to her charming as they strolled through; the entry hall with the antlers and the small baroque staircase reminded her of hunting horns, packs of hounds, and horsemen, a n d - since nighttime reinforces such impressions and conceals their weak- nesses-out of admiration for her cousin she could not understand why he had never showed off this house but had, as it always seemed, only made fun of it.
Ulrich laughed, and got something warm to drink. -Looked at more closely, it's a stupid frivolity-he said-but let's not talk about me. Tell me what's been happening to you. Diotima could not utter a word; this had never happened to her before; she sat in her uniform and felt il- luminated by the many lights that Ulrich had turned on. It confused her.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1439
- S o Arnheim has acted badly? Ulrich tried to help.
Diotima nodded. Then she began. Arnheim was free to do as he pleased. Nothing had ever happened between her and him that would, in the ordinary sense, have imposed any obligations on him or given him any privileges.
-But ifI've observed rightly, the situation between you had already gone so far that you were to get a divorce and many him? Ulrich inter- jected.
- O h , many? the Colonel said. - W e might perhaps have got mar- ried, ifhe had behaved himselfbetter; that can come like a ring that one finally slips on loosely, but it ought not to be a band that binds!
- B u t what did Arnheim do? Do you mean his escapade with Leona? - D o you know this person?
-Barely.
- I s she beautiful?
-One might call her that.
-Does she have charm? Intelligence? What sort ofintelligence does she have?
-But, my dear cousin, she has no intelligence of any kind whatso- ever!
Diotima crossed one leg over the other and allowed herself to be handed a cigarette; she had gathered a little courage. -W as it out of protest that you appeared at the party in this outfit? Ulrich asked. - A m I right? Nothing else would have moved you to do such a thing. A kind of Overman in you enticed you, after men failed you: I can't find the right words.
-But, my dear friend, Diotima began, and suddenly behind the smoke of the cigarette tears were again running down her face. - I was the oldest of three daughters. All my youth I had to play the mother; we had no mother; I always had to answer all the questions, know every- thing, watch over everything. I married Section ChiefTuzzi because he was a good deal older than I and already beginning to lose his hair. I wanted a person I could finally subject myself to, from whose hand my brow would receive grace or displeasure. I am not unfeminine. I am not so proud as you know me. I confess to you that during the early years I felt bliss in Tuzzi's arms, like a little girl that death abducts to God the father. But for . . . years I've had to despise him. He's a vulgar utilitarian. He doesn't see or understand anything about anything else. Do you know what that means!
Diotima had jumped up; her coat remained lying in the chair; her hair hung over her cheeks like a schoolgirl's; her left hand rested now in manly fashion on the pommel of her saber, now in womanly fashion
1440 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
went through her hair; her right arm made large oratorical flourishes; she advanced one leg or closed her legs tightly together, and the round belly in the white riding breeches had-and this lent a remarkably comic effect-not the slightest irregularity such as a man betrays. Ulrich now first noticed that Diotima was slightly drunk. In her doleful mood she had, at the party, tossed off several glasses of hard spirits one after an- other, and now, after Ulrich, too, had offered her alcohol, the tipsiness had been freshly touched up. But her intoxication was only great enough to erase the inhibitions and fantasies of which she normally consisted, and really only exposed something like her natural nature: not all ofit, to be sure, for as soon as Diotima came to speak of Arnheim, she began to talk about her soul.
She had given her entire soul to this man. Did Ulrich believe that in such questions an Austrian has a finer sensibility, more culture?
-No.
-But perhaps he does! - Arnheim was certainly an important per- son. But he had failed ignominiously. Ignominiouslyi-I gave him ev- erything, he exploited me, and now I'm miserable!
It was clear that the suprahuman and suggestive love play with Arn- heim, rising physically to no more than a kiss but mentally to a bound- less, floating duet of souls (a love play that had lasted many weeks, during which Diotima's quarrel with her husband had kept it pure), had so stirred up Diotima's natural fire that, to put it crudely, someone ought to be kicking it out from under the kettle to prevent some kind of acci- dent of exploding nerves. This was what Diotima, consciously or not, wanted from Ulrich. She had sat down on a sofa; her sword lay across her knees, the sulfurous mist of gentle rapture over her eyes, as she said: -Listen, Ulrich: you're the only person before whom I'm not ashamed. Because you're so bad. Because you're so much worse than I am.
Ulrich was in despair. The circumstances reminded him of the scene with Gerda that had taken place here weeks ago, like this one the result of a preceding overstimulation. But Diotima was no girl overstimulated by forbidden embraces. Her lips were large and open, her body damp and breathing like turned-up garden soil, and under the veil of desire her eyes were like two gates that opened into a dark corridor. But Ulrich was not thinking of Gerda at all; he saw Agathe before him, and wanted to scream with jealousy at the sight ofthis feminine inability to resist any longer, although he felt his own resistance fading from second to sec- ond. His expectation was already a mirror in which he saw the breaking of these eyes, their growing dull, as only death and love can achieve, the parting in a faint of lips between which the last breath steals away, and he could hardly still expect to feel this person sitting there before him
From the Posthumous Papers · I 44 I
collapsing completely and looking at him as he turned away in decay, like a Capuchin monk descending into the catacombs. Apparently his thoughts were already heading in a direction in which he hoped to find salvation, for with all his strength he was fighting his own collapse. He had clenched his fists and was drilling his eyes, from Diotima's view- point, into her face in a horrible way. At this moment she felt nothing but fear and approval of him. Then a distorted thought occurred to Ul- rich, or he read it from the distortion of the face into which he was look- ing. Softly and emphatically he replied: - Y o u have no idea how bad I am. I can't love you; I'd have to be able to beat you to love you!
Diotima gazed stupidly into his eyes. Ulrich hoped to wound her pride, her vanity, her reason; but perhaps it was only his natural feelings of animosity against her that had mounted up in him and to which he was giving expression. He went on: - F o r months I haven't been able to think of anything but beating you until you howl like a little child! And he suddenly seized her by the shoulders, near the neck. The imbecility ofsacrifice in her face grew. Beginnings ofwanting to say something still twitched in this face, to save the situation through some kind of de- tached comment. Beginnings of standing up twitched in her thighs, but reversed themselves before reaching their goal. Ulrich had seized her saber and half drawn it from its scabbard. - F o r God's sake! he felt. - I f nothing intervenes I'll hit her over the head with it until she gives no more signs of her damned life! He did not notice that in the meantime a decisive change had been taking place in the Napoleonic colonel.
Ulrich noticed that in the bright childishness of this proposal there was a fine black line.
-W hat would come of that? He answered in detail: -First hunger, then exhaustion, then hunger again, raging fantasies about eating, and finally either eating or dying!
- Y o u can't know without having tried it!
- B u t , Agathe! It's been tried and tested a thousand times!
-By professors! Or by bankrupt speculators. Do you know, dying
must be not at all like one says. I nearly died once: it was different. Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea how close together in Agathe the two feelings were, to impulsively ignore all her lost years or, if that failed, to want to stop. She had never, like Ulrich, felt the need of making the world better than it is; she was happy lying around some- where, while Ulrich was always on the go. This had been a difference between them since childhood, and it remained a difference until death. Ulrich did not so much fear death as regard it as a disgrace that is set as a final price on all striving. Agathe had always been afraid of death when she imagined it, as every young and healthy person does, in the unbeara- ble and incomprehensible form: Now you are, but at some point you will no longer be! But at the same time she had, in her early youth, already become acquainted with the gradual process of separation that is capa- ble ofinserting itselfinto the tiniest span oftime, that hurtlingly rapid-
1428 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
in spite of all its slowness-being turned away from life and becoming tired of and indifferent to it, and striving trustingly into the approaching nothingness that sets in when the body is grievously harmed by an illness without the senses being affected. She had confidence in death. Perhaps it's not so bad, she thought. It's always, in any case, natural and pleasant to stop, in everything one does. But decay, and the rest of those horrible things: for heaven's sake, isn't one used to everything happening to one while one has nothing to do with it? You know, Ulrich-she terminated the conversation-you're like this: ifyou're given leaves and branches, you always sew them together into a tree; but I would like to see what would happen if we would once, for instance, sew the leaves finnly onto ourselves.
And yet Ulrich, too, felt they had nothing else to do but be together. Whenever Agathe called through the rooms: -Leave the light onl-a quick call, before Ulrich on his way out darkened the room to which Agathe wished to return once more, Ulrich thought: A request, hasty, what more? Oh, what more? No less than Buddha running to catch a tram. An impossible gait! A collapse of absurdity. But still, how lovely Agathe's voice was! What trust lay in the brief request, what happiness that one person can call out something like that to another without being misunderstood. Of course, such a moment was like a piece of earthly thread running among mysterious flowers, but it was at the same time moving, like a woolen thread that one places around one's beloved's neck when one has nothing else to give her. And when they then stepped out into the street and, walking side by side, could not see much of each other but only felt the tender force of unintended contact, they be- longed together like an object that stands in an immense space.
It lies in the nature of such experiences that they urge their own tell- ing. Within the tiniest amount of happening they contain an extreme of inner processes that needs to break a path for itself to the outside. And as in music or a poem, at a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what can be uttered in such circumstances is peculiarly circumscribed. Not, as one might believe, through solemnity or some other subjective mood, but through something that has far more the appearance of an objective thing. This can be compared with the remarkable process through which one assimilates intellectual influences in one's youth; there, too, one takes in not every truth that comes along but really only a truth that comes to meet it from one's own mind, a truth that therefore, in a cer- tain sense, has only to be awakened, so that one already knows it in the moment one comes across it. There are at that age the truths that are destined for us and those that aren't; bits of knowledge are true today and false tomorrow, ideas light up or go out-not because we change
From the Posthumous Papers · 1429
our minds but because with our thoughts we are still connected to our life as a whole and, fed by the same invisible springs, rise and sink with them. They are true when we feel ourselves rising at the moment of thinking them, and they are false when we feel ourselves falling. There is something inexpressible in ourselves and the world that is increased or diminished in the process. In later years this changes; the disposition of the emotions becomes less flexible, and the understanding becomes that extraordinarily flexible, firm, doughty tool which we know it to be when we refuse to allow ourselves to be swayed by emotion. At this point the world has already divided itself: on the one side into the world of things and dependable sensations of them, of judgments and, as it can also be put, recognized emotions or will; on the other side into the world ofsub- jectivity, that is of caprice, of faith, taste, intimation, prejudices, and all those uncertainties, taking an attitude in regard to which, whatever it may be, there remains a kind of private right of the individual, without any claims to public status. When that happens, individual industry may sniff out and take in everything or nothing;-it rarely happens in the steeled soul that in the fire of the impression the walls, too, stretch and move.
But does this attitude really permit one to feel as secure in the world as it might lead one to think? Does not the whole solid world, with all our sensations, buildings, landscapes, deeds, drift on countless tiny clouds? Beneath every perception lies music, poem, feeling. But this feeling is tied down, made invariable, excluded, because we want to per- ceive things truly, that is, without emotion, in order to let them guide us, instead of our guiding them, which, as one knows, amounts to meaning that we finally, quite suddenly, have really learned to fly instead of merely dreaming about flying, as the millennia before us did. To this emotion imprisoned in objects there corresponds, on the individual side, that spirit of objectivity which has pushed all passion back into a condi- tion where it is no longer perceptible, so that in every person there slum- bers a sense ofhis value, his usefulness, and his significance that cannot be touched, a basic feeling of equilibrium between himself and the world. Yet this equilibrium need only be disturbed at any point, and ev- erywhere the imprisoned little clouds escape. A little fatigue, a little poi- son, a little excess of excitement, and a person sees and hears things he doesn't want to believe; emotion rises, the world slides out of its mid- dling condition into an abyss or rises up energetically, solitary, like a vi- sion and no longer comprehensible!
Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being
1430 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect ma- chines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange- yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was differ- ent, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow ab- surd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.
But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Him- self, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had hap- pened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling ofa current that flowed through their arms.
And sometimes there were violent rebellions.
Let's make an assumption-[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later-and let's suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be tender toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeel- ingly, in order to move it to some other place in unsentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be some- thing, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor
From the Posthumous Papers · 1431
lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it's nothing other than festive. For that's the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister. o "I" and "you" are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth be- tween us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don't want to exaggerate, I have no in- tention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodi- gality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy as- sumes that one wishes to tum love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive af- fect oflove from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that's the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
"Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condi- tion. -TRANs.
1432 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every move- ment finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more . . .
To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this par- adise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one's wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the selfwanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But ifwe are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me. . . .
When Agathe next entered Lindner's house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
-Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. -What's the mat;ter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1433
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father's fu- ture wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret ap- plause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside. She understood that so well. What could wisdom, faith, miracles, and princi- ples mean to a young person who is still locked up in himself and not yet opened up by life to assimilate such things! She had a strange sympathy for him; for his being undisciplined and recalcitrant, for his being young, and apparently, too, simply for the badness of his way of thinking. She would gladly have been his playmate, at least here; these surroundings gave her this childish thought, but she sadly noticed that he usually treated her like an old woman.
-Peter! Peter! What's the matter? he aped her. -He'll tell you any- how. You soul-sister of his!
Agathe laughed even more and caught him by the hand.
- D o you like that? Peter went after her unabashedly. - D o you like me to howl? How old are you anyway? Not so much older than I am, I should think: but he treats you the way he treats the sublime Plato! He had disengaged himself and examined her, looking for an advantage.
- W h a t has he really done to you? Agathe asked.
-What's he done? He's punished me! I'm not at all ashamed in front of you, as you see. Soon he's going to pull down my pants, and you'll be allowed to hold me!
-Peter! For shame! Agathe warned innocently. -D id he really beat you?
- D i d he? Peter? Maybe you'd like that?
-Shame on you, Peter!
- N o t at all! Why don't you call me Herr Peter? Anyway, what do you
think: there! He stretched out his tensed leg and grasped his upper thigh, strengthened from playing soccer. -Have a look for yourself; I could murder him with one hand. He doesn't have as much strength in both legs as I have in one arm. It's not me, it's you who ought to be ashamed, instead of prattling wisdom with him! Do you want to know what he's done to me?
- N o , Peter, you can't talk to me that way.
-Why not?
-Because your father's heart is in the right place. And because- But
here Agathe could not find the right way to proceed; she was no good at
1434 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
preaching, although the youth was indeed in the wrong, and she sud- denly had to laugh again. - S o what did he do to you?
- H e took away my allowance!
-Wait! Agathe asked. Without stopping to think, she fished out a banknote and handed it to Peter. She herself did not know why she did this; perhaps she thought the first thing to do was to get rid of Peter's anger before she could have an effect on him, perhaps it only gave her pleasure to thwart Lindner's pedagogy. And with the same suddenness she had addressed Peter with the familiar Du. Peter looked at her in astonishment. Behind his lovely misted eyes something quite new awoke. -The second thing he imposed on me-he continued, grinning cynically, without thanking her-is also broken: the school of silence! Do you know it? Man learns through silence to remove his speech from all inner and outer irritations and make it the handmaid ofhis innermost personal considerations!
- Y o u surely said some improper things, said Agathe, falling back on the normal pronoun of address.
-This is how it was! "The first response of man to all interventions and attacks from without happens by means of the vocal cords," he quoted his father. -That's why he's ruined today and my day off from school tomorrow with room arrest, observes total silence toward me, and has forbidden me to speak a single word with anybody in the house. The third thing-he mocked-is control ofthe instinct for food-
-But, Peter, you must now really tell me-Agathe interrupted him, amused-what did you do to set him off?
The conversation in which he was mocking his father through his fu- ture mother had put the youth in the best ofspirits. -That's not so sim- ple, Agathe, he replied shamelessly. -There is, you ought to know, something that the old man fears the way the devil fears holy water: jokes. The tickling ofjokes and humor, he says, comes from idle fantasy and malice. I always have to swallow them. That's exemplary for one's character. Because, ifwe look at the joke more closely-
-Enough! Agathe commanded. -What was your forbidden joke about?
- A b o u t you! said Peter, his eyes boring into hers in challenge.
But at this moment he shrank back, because the doorbell rang, and both recog- nized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner. Before Agathe could make any reproaches, Peter pressed his fingernails with painful violence into her hand and stole out of the room.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1435
There were also violent rebellions.
Agathe owned a piano. She was sitting at it in the twilight, playing.
The uncertainty of her frame of mind played along with the notes. Ul- rich came in. His voice sounded cold and mute as he greeted her. She interrupted her playing. When the words had died away, her fingers went a few steps further through the boundless land of music.
-Stay where you are! ordered Ulrich, who had stepped back, draw- ing a pistol from his pocket. -Nothing's going to happen to you. He spoke altogether differently, a stranger. Then he fired at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The first bullet cut through the dry, tender wood and howled across the strings. A second churned up leaping sounds. As shot followed shot, the keys began to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drove with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. When the magazine was empty, Ulrich let it drop to the carpet-he only noticed it when he futilely tried to get off two more shots. He gave the impression of a madman, pale, his hair hanging down over his fore- head; a fit had seized him and carried him far away from himself. Doors slammed in the house, people were listening; slowly, in such impres- sions, reason again took possession of him.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive piano or flee the danger. She felt no fear, and although the beginning of her brother's outbreak could have seemed insane, this thought did not frighten her. She accepted it as a pleasant end. The strange cries of the wounded instrument aroused in her the idea that she would have to leave the earth in a swarm of fantasti- cally fluttering birds.
Ulrich pulled himself together and asked if she was angry with him; Agathe denied it with radiant eyes. His face again assumed its usual ex- pression. - I don't know-he said-why I did it. I couldn't resist the impulse.
Agathe reflectively tried out a few isolated strings that had survived.
- I feel like a fool . . . , Ulrich pleaded, and cautiously ran his hand through his sister's hair, as if his fingers could find refuge from them- selves there. Agathe withdrew them again by the wrist and pushed them away. - W h a t came over you? she asked.
- I have no idea, Ulrich said, making an unconscious motion with his arms as if he wanted to brush off the embrace of something tenacious and kick it away.
Agathe said: If you wished to repeat that, it would turn into a quite
I436 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ordinary target practice. Suddenly she stood up and laughed. -Now you'll have to have the piano completely rebuilt. What won't that all lead to: orders, explanations, bills . . . ! For that reason alone something like this can't happen again.
- 1 had to do it, Ulrich explained shyly. - 1 would just as gladly have shot at a mirror ifyou'd happened to be looking in it.
- A n d now you're upset that one can't do such a thing twice. But it was beautiful just as it was. She pushed her arm in his and drew close to him. - T h e rest of the time you're never willing to do anything unless you know where it will lead!
On the same evening, Ulrich had to put in an appearance at a garden party. He could not very well beg off, although he would have done so had not his despair I depression impelled him to go. But he arrived late; it was near midnight. The greater part of the guests had already laid aside their masks. Among the trees of the old grounds torches flamed, rammed into the ground like burning spears or fastened with brackets to the trunks of trees. Gigantic tables had been set up, covered with white cloths. A flickering fire reddened the bark of the trees, the silently sway- ing canopy of leaves overhead, and the faces of countless people crowded together, which from a little distance seemed to consist only of such red and black spots. It seemed to have been the watchword among the ladies to appear in men's costumes. Ulrich recognized a Frau Maya Sommer as a soldier from the army of Maria Theresa, the painter von Hartbach as a Tyrolean with bare knees, and Frau Clara Kahn, the wife ofthe famous physician, in a Beardsley costume. He also discovered that even among the younger women of the upper nobility, so far as he knew them by sight, many had chosen a mannish or boyish disguise; there were jockeys and elevator boys, half-mannish Dianas, female Hamlets, and corpulent Turks. The fashion of slacks for women, advocated just recently, seemed, although no one had followed it, to have had some effect upon the imagination nonetheless; for that time, in which women belonged to the world at most from ground level to halfway up their calves, but between there and the neck only to their husbands and lov- ers, to be seen like that at a party where one might expect to see mem- bers of the Imperial House was something unheard of, a revolution, even if only a revolution of caprice, and the precursor of the vulgar cus- toms that the older and stouter ladies were already privileged to predict, while the others noticed nothing but exuberance. Ulrich thought he
From the Posthumous Papers · 1437
could excuse himself from greeting the old prince, around whom as mas- ter of the house a group of people was in constant attendance, while he- barely knew him; he looked for [his valet] Tzi to ask him to do some- thing, but when he could not find him anywhere assumed that the indus- trious man had already gone home, and sauntered away from the center of activity to the edge of a grove of trees, from which, over an enormous grass lawn, one could catch a glimpse of the castle. This magnificent old castle had had fastened to it long rows of electric lights like footlights, which shone from under cornices or ran up pillars and liquefied, as it were, the forms of the architecture from out of the shadows, as if the stem old master who had devised them was among the guests and a little tipsy beneath a blanched paper hat. Below, one could see the servants running in and out through the dark door openings, while above, the ugly reddish-gray night sky of the city arched forward like an umbrella into the other, pure dark night sky, which one glimpsed, with its stars, whenever one lifted one's eyes. Ulrich did so, and was as if drunk from a combination of disgust and joy. As he let his glance fall, he perceived a nearby figure that had previously escaped his notice.
It was a tall woman in the costume of a Napoleonic colonel, and she was wearing a mask; by which Ulrich recognized immediately that it was Diotima. She acted as if she did not notice him, looking at the shining castle, sunk in thought. -Good evening, cousin! he addressed her. -Don't try to deny it; I recognize you unmistakably because you're the only person still wearing a mask.
- W h a t do you mean? the mask asked.
-Very simple: You feel ashamed. Tell me why so many women showed up in trousers?
Diotima vehemently shrugged her shoulders. -The word went around beforehand. My God, I can understand it: the old ideas are al- ready so worn out. But I really must confess to you that I'm annoyed; it was a tactless idea; you think you've stumbled into a theatrical fancy- dress ball.
-The whole thing is impossible, Ulrich said. -Such parties don't work anymore because their time is past.
-Hmph! Diotima answeredperfunctorily. She found the sight ofthe castle romantic.
-W ould the Colonel command where one might find a better opin- ion? Ulrich asked, with a challenging look at Diotima's body.
- O h , my dear friend, don't call me Colonel!
There was something new in her voice. Ulrich stepped close to her. She had taken off her mask. He noticed two tears that fell slowly from her eyes. This tall, weeping officer was totally ridiculous, but also very
1438 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
beautiful. He seized her hands and gently asked what the matter was. Diotima could not answer; a sob she was trying to suppress stirred the bright sheen of the white riding breeches that reached far up beneath her flung-back coat. They stood thus in the half-darkness of the light sinking into the lawns. - W e can't talk here, Ulrich whispered. - C o m e with me somewhere else. If you permit, I'll take you to my house. Di- otima tried to draw her hand away from his, but when this didn't work she let it be. Ulrich felt by this gesture what he. could hardly believe, that his hour with this woman had come. He grasped Diotima respectably around the waist and led her, supporting her tenderly, deeper into the shadows and then around to the exit. I A kiss right here?
Before they again emerged into the light, Diotima had ofcourse dried her tears and mastered her excitement, at least outwardly. -You've never noticed, Ulrich-she said in a low voice-that I've loved you for a long time; like a brother. I don't have anyone I can talk to. Since there were people nearby, Ulrich only murmured: -Come, we'll talk. But in the taxi he did not say a word, and Diotima, anxiously holding her coat closed, moved away from him into the comer. She had made up her mind to confess her woes to him, and when Diotima resolved to do something it was done; although in her whole life she had never been with another man at night than Section ChiefTuzzi, she followed Ulrich because before she had run into him she had made up her mind to have a long talk with him if he was there, and felt/had a great, melancholy longing for such a talk. The excitement ofcarrying out this firm resolve had an unfortunate physical effect on her; it was literally true that her resolve lay in her stomach like some indigestible food, and when (in ad- dition) the excitement suppressed all the juices that could dissolve it, Diotima felt cold sweat on her forehead and neck as iffrom nausea. She was diverted from herself only by the impression that arriving at Ulrich's made on her; the small grounds, where the electric bulbs on the tree trunks formed an alley, seemed to her charming as they strolled through; the entry hall with the antlers and the small baroque staircase reminded her of hunting horns, packs of hounds, and horsemen, a n d - since nighttime reinforces such impressions and conceals their weak- nesses-out of admiration for her cousin she could not understand why he had never showed off this house but had, as it always seemed, only made fun of it.
Ulrich laughed, and got something warm to drink. -Looked at more closely, it's a stupid frivolity-he said-but let's not talk about me. Tell me what's been happening to you. Diotima could not utter a word; this had never happened to her before; she sat in her uniform and felt il- luminated by the many lights that Ulrich had turned on. It confused her.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1439
- S o Arnheim has acted badly? Ulrich tried to help.
Diotima nodded. Then she began. Arnheim was free to do as he pleased. Nothing had ever happened between her and him that would, in the ordinary sense, have imposed any obligations on him or given him any privileges.
-But ifI've observed rightly, the situation between you had already gone so far that you were to get a divorce and many him? Ulrich inter- jected.
- O h , many? the Colonel said. - W e might perhaps have got mar- ried, ifhe had behaved himselfbetter; that can come like a ring that one finally slips on loosely, but it ought not to be a band that binds!
- B u t what did Arnheim do? Do you mean his escapade with Leona? - D o you know this person?
-Barely.
- I s she beautiful?
-One might call her that.
-Does she have charm? Intelligence? What sort ofintelligence does she have?
-But, my dear cousin, she has no intelligence of any kind whatso- ever!
Diotima crossed one leg over the other and allowed herself to be handed a cigarette; she had gathered a little courage. -W as it out of protest that you appeared at the party in this outfit? Ulrich asked. - A m I right? Nothing else would have moved you to do such a thing. A kind of Overman in you enticed you, after men failed you: I can't find the right words.
-But, my dear friend, Diotima began, and suddenly behind the smoke of the cigarette tears were again running down her face. - I was the oldest of three daughters. All my youth I had to play the mother; we had no mother; I always had to answer all the questions, know every- thing, watch over everything. I married Section ChiefTuzzi because he was a good deal older than I and already beginning to lose his hair. I wanted a person I could finally subject myself to, from whose hand my brow would receive grace or displeasure. I am not unfeminine. I am not so proud as you know me. I confess to you that during the early years I felt bliss in Tuzzi's arms, like a little girl that death abducts to God the father. But for . . . years I've had to despise him. He's a vulgar utilitarian. He doesn't see or understand anything about anything else. Do you know what that means!
Diotima had jumped up; her coat remained lying in the chair; her hair hung over her cheeks like a schoolgirl's; her left hand rested now in manly fashion on the pommel of her saber, now in womanly fashion
1440 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
went through her hair; her right arm made large oratorical flourishes; she advanced one leg or closed her legs tightly together, and the round belly in the white riding breeches had-and this lent a remarkably comic effect-not the slightest irregularity such as a man betrays. Ulrich now first noticed that Diotima was slightly drunk. In her doleful mood she had, at the party, tossed off several glasses of hard spirits one after an- other, and now, after Ulrich, too, had offered her alcohol, the tipsiness had been freshly touched up. But her intoxication was only great enough to erase the inhibitions and fantasies of which she normally consisted, and really only exposed something like her natural nature: not all ofit, to be sure, for as soon as Diotima came to speak of Arnheim, she began to talk about her soul.
She had given her entire soul to this man. Did Ulrich believe that in such questions an Austrian has a finer sensibility, more culture?
-No.
-But perhaps he does! - Arnheim was certainly an important per- son. But he had failed ignominiously. Ignominiouslyi-I gave him ev- erything, he exploited me, and now I'm miserable!
It was clear that the suprahuman and suggestive love play with Arn- heim, rising physically to no more than a kiss but mentally to a bound- less, floating duet of souls (a love play that had lasted many weeks, during which Diotima's quarrel with her husband had kept it pure), had so stirred up Diotima's natural fire that, to put it crudely, someone ought to be kicking it out from under the kettle to prevent some kind of acci- dent of exploding nerves. This was what Diotima, consciously or not, wanted from Ulrich. She had sat down on a sofa; her sword lay across her knees, the sulfurous mist of gentle rapture over her eyes, as she said: -Listen, Ulrich: you're the only person before whom I'm not ashamed. Because you're so bad. Because you're so much worse than I am.
Ulrich was in despair. The circumstances reminded him of the scene with Gerda that had taken place here weeks ago, like this one the result of a preceding overstimulation. But Diotima was no girl overstimulated by forbidden embraces. Her lips were large and open, her body damp and breathing like turned-up garden soil, and under the veil of desire her eyes were like two gates that opened into a dark corridor. But Ulrich was not thinking of Gerda at all; he saw Agathe before him, and wanted to scream with jealousy at the sight ofthis feminine inability to resist any longer, although he felt his own resistance fading from second to sec- ond. His expectation was already a mirror in which he saw the breaking of these eyes, their growing dull, as only death and love can achieve, the parting in a faint of lips between which the last breath steals away, and he could hardly still expect to feel this person sitting there before him
From the Posthumous Papers · I 44 I
collapsing completely and looking at him as he turned away in decay, like a Capuchin monk descending into the catacombs. Apparently his thoughts were already heading in a direction in which he hoped to find salvation, for with all his strength he was fighting his own collapse. He had clenched his fists and was drilling his eyes, from Diotima's view- point, into her face in a horrible way. At this moment she felt nothing but fear and approval of him. Then a distorted thought occurred to Ul- rich, or he read it from the distortion of the face into which he was look- ing. Softly and emphatically he replied: - Y o u have no idea how bad I am. I can't love you; I'd have to be able to beat you to love you!
Diotima gazed stupidly into his eyes. Ulrich hoped to wound her pride, her vanity, her reason; but perhaps it was only his natural feelings of animosity against her that had mounted up in him and to which he was giving expression. He went on: - F o r months I haven't been able to think of anything but beating you until you howl like a little child! And he suddenly seized her by the shoulders, near the neck. The imbecility ofsacrifice in her face grew. Beginnings ofwanting to say something still twitched in this face, to save the situation through some kind of de- tached comment. Beginnings of standing up twitched in her thighs, but reversed themselves before reaching their goal. Ulrich had seized her saber and half drawn it from its scabbard. - F o r God's sake! he felt. - I f nothing intervenes I'll hit her over the head with it until she gives no more signs of her damned life! He did not notice that in the meantime a decisive change had been taking place in the Napoleonic colonel.
