No More Learning

Agathe now saw that her brother had not really chosen this secluded house without inter- est or feeling, as he pretended, and from its ancient walls emerged a language of passion that was not quite mute, but yet not quite audi- ble. But neither she nor Ulrich admitted to anything more than en- joying its casualness. They lived in some disarray, had their meals sent in from a hotel, and derived from everything a sort ofwild fun that comes with eating a meal more awkwardly on the grass at a pic- nic than one would have had to do at one's table.
In these circumstances they also did not have the right domestic help. The well-trained servant Ulrich had taken on temporarily when he moved in-an old man about to retire and only waiting for some technicality to be settled first----could not be expected to do more than the minimum Ulrich expected of him; the part of lady's maid fell to Ulrich himself, since the room where a regular. maid might be lodged was, like everything else, still in the realm of good intentions, and a few efforts in that direction had not brought good results. In- stead, Ulrich was making great strides as a squire arming his lady knight to set forth on her social conquests. In addition, Agathe had done some shopping to supplement her wardrobe, and her acquisi- tions were strewn all over the house, which was nowhere equipped for the demands of a lady. She had acquired the habit of using the entire house as a dressing room, so that Ulrich willy-nilly took part in her new purchases. The doors between rooms were left open, his
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 0 1 7
gymnastic apparatus seJVed as clotheshorse and coatrack, and he would be called away from his desk for conferences like Cincinnatus from his plow. This interference with his latent but at least potential will to work was something he put up with not merely because he thought it would pass but because he enjoyed it; it was something new and made him feel young again. His sister's vivacity, idle as it might appear to be, crackled in his loneliness like a small fire in a long-unused stove. Bright waves of charming gaiety, dark waves of warm trustfulness, filled the space in which he lived, taking from it the nature of a space in which he up till then had moved only at the dictates of his own will. But what was most amazing about this inex- haustible fountain of another presence was that the sum of the countless trifles ofwhich it consisted added up to a non-sum that was of a quite different kind: his impatience with wasting his time, that unquenchable feeling that had never left him since he could remem- ber, no matter what he had taken up that was supposed to be great and important, was to his astonishment totally gone, and for the first time he loved his day-to-day life without thinking.
He even overdid it a little, gasping in delight when Agathe, with the seriousness women feel in these matters, offered for his admira- tion the thousand charming things she had been buying. He acted as if the quaint workings of a woman's nature--which, on the same level of intelligence, is more sensitive than the male and therefore more susceptible to the suggestion of dressing up to a point of crass self-display that is even further removed from the ideal of a cul- tivated humanity than the man's nature--irresistibly compelled his participation. And perhaps it really was so. For the many small, ten- der, absurd notions he became involved with-tricking oneself out with glass beads, crimping the hair, the mindless arrangements of lace and embroidery, the ruthless seductive colors: charms so akin to the tinfoil stars at the fairgrounds that every intelligent woman sees right through them without in the least losing her taste for them- began to entangle him in the network of their glittering madness. For the moment one begins to take anything, no matter how foolish or tasteless, seriously and puts oneself on its level, it begins to reveal a rationale of its own, the intoxicating scent of its love for itself, its innate urge to play and to please. This was what happened to Ulrich when he helped equip Agathe with her new outfits. He fetched and
1018 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
carried, admired, appraised, was asked for advice, helped with trying on. He stood with Agathe in front of the mirror. Nowadays, when a woman's appearance suggests that of a well-plucked fowl ready for the oven, it is hard to imagine her predecessor's appearance in all its charm of endlessly titillated desire, which has meanwhile become ri- diculous: the long skirt, to all appearances sewn to the floor by the dressmaker and yet miraculously in motion, enclosing other, secret gossamer skirts beneath it, pastel-shaded silk flower petals whose softly fluttering movements suddenly turned into even finer tissues of white, which were the first to touch the body itself with their soft foam. And ifthese clothes resembled waves in that they drew the eye seductively and yet repulsed it, they were also an ingenious contriv- ance of way stations and intermediate fortifications around expertly guarded marvels and, for all their unnaturalness, a cleverly curtained theater of the erotic, whose breathtaking darkness was lit only by the feeble light of the imagination. It was these quintessential prelimi- naries that Ulrich now saw removed daily, taken apart, as it were from the inside. Even though a woman's secrets had long since lost their mystery for him, or just because he had always only rushed through them as anterooms or outer gardens, they had quite a differ- ent effect on him now that there was no gateway or goal for him. The tension that lies in all these things struck back. Ulrich could hardly have said what changes it wrought. He rightly regarded himself as a man of masculine temperament, and he could understand being at- tracted by seeing what he so often desired from its other side, for once, but at times it was almost uncanny, and he warded it offwith a laugh.
"As if the walls of a girls' boarding school had sprouted all around me in the night, completely locking me in! " he protested.
"Is that so terrible? " Agathe asked.
"I don't know," he replied.
Then he called her a flesh-eating plant and himself a miserable
insect that had crawled into her shimmering calyx. "You've closed it around me," he said, "and now I'm sitting surrounded by colors, per- fume, and radiance, already a part of you in spite of myself, waiting for the males we're going to attract! "
And it really was uncanny for him to witness the effect his sister had on men, considering his concern to "get her a husband. " He was
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 0 1 9
not jealous-in what capacity could he have been? -and put her in- terests ahead of his, hoping that the right man would soon come along to release her from this interim phase in which leaving Hagauer had placed her; and yet, when he saw her surrounded by men paying her attentions, or when a man on the street, attracted by her beauty and ignoring her escort, gave her a bold stare, Ulrich did not know what to make of his feelings. Here too, natural male jeal- ousy being forbidden him, he often felt somehow caught up in a world he had never entered before. He knew from experience all about the male mating dance as well as the female's warier technique in love, and when he saw Agathe being treated to the one and re- sponding with the other, it pained him; he felt as if he were watching the courtship of horses or mice, the sniffing and whinnying, the pout- ing and baring ofteeth, with which strangers parade their self-regard and regard of the opposite sex; to Ulrich, observing this without em- pathy, it was nauseating, like some stupefaction welling up from within the body. And if he nevertheless tried to put himself in his sister's place, prompted by some deep-seated emotional need, it sometimes would not have taken much afterward for him to feel, not just bewilderment at such tolerance, but the sort of shame a normal man feels when deviously approached by one who is not. When he let Agathe in on this, she laughed.
"There are also several women among our friends who take an in- terest in you," she said.
What was going on here?
Ulrich said: "Basically it's a protest against the world! " And then he said: "You know Walter: It's been a long time since we've liked each other. But even when I'm annoyed with him and know that I irritate him too, I nevertheless often feel, at the mere sight of him, a certain warmth aS ifwe understood each other perfectly, as in fact we don't. Look, there's so much in life we understand without agreeing with it; that's why accepting someone from the beginning, before un- derstanding him, is pure mindless magic, like water in spring running down all the hillsides to the valley! "
What he felt was: "That's the way it is now! " And what he thought was: "Whenever I succeed in shedding all my selfish and egocentric feelings toward Agathe, and every single hateful feeling of indiffer- ence too, she draws all the qualities out of me the way the Magnetic
I0. 20 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Mountain draws the nails out of a ship! She leaves me morally dis- solved into a primary atomic state, one in which I am neither myself nor her. Could this be bliss? "
But all he said was: 'Watching you is so much fun! "
Agathe blushed deeply and said: 'Why is that 'fun'? "
"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes you're self-conscious with me in
the room," Ulrich said. "But then you remember that, after all, I'm 'only your brother. ' And at other times you don't seem to mind at all when I catch you in circumstances that would be most interesting for a stranger, but then it suddenly occurs to you that I shouldn't be looking at you, and you make me look the other way. . . . " ·
"And why is that fun? " Agathe asked.
"Maybe it's a form of happiness to follow another person with one's eyes for no reason at all," Ulrich said. "It's like a child's love for its possessions, without the child's intellectual helplessness. . . . "
"Maybe it's fun for you to play at brother-and-sister only because you've had more than enough of playing at man-and-woman? "
"That too," Ulrich said, watching her. "Love is basically a simple urge to come close, to grab at something that has been split into two poles, lady and gentleman, with incredible tensions, frustrations, spasms, and petversions arising in between. We've now had enough of this inflated ideology; it's become nearly as ridiculous as a science of eating. I'm convinced most people would be glad if this connec- tion between an epidermic itch and the entire personality could be revoked. And sooner or later there will be an era of simple sexual companionship in which boy and girl will stand in perfectly tuned incomprehension, staring at an old heap of broken springs that used to be Man and Woman. ''
"But if I were to tell you that Hagauer and I were pioneers of that era you would hold it against me! " Agathe retorted, with a smile as astringent as good dry wine.
"I no longer hold things against people," Ulrich said. He smiled. "A warrior unbuckled from his armor. For the first time since God knows when, he feels nature's air instead of hammered iron on his skin and sees his body growing so lax and frail that the birds might cany him off," he assured her.
And still smiling, simply forgetting to stop smiling, he contem- plated his sister as she sat on the edge of a table, swinging one leg in
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 0 2 1
its black silk stocking; aside from her chemise, she was wearing only short panties. But these were somehow fragmentary impressions, de- tached, solitary images, as it were. "She's my friend, in the delightful guise of a woman," Ulrich thought. "Though this is complicated by her really being a woman! "
And Agathe asked him: "Is there really no such thing as love? "
"Yes, there is," Ulrich said. "But it's the exception. You have to make distinctions. There is first of all a physical experience, to be classed with other irritations ofthe skin, a purely sensory indulgence without any requisite moral or emotional accessories. Second, emo- tions are usually involved, which become intensely associated with the physical experience, but in such a way that with slight variations they are the same for everyone; so that even the compulsory same- ness oflove's climax belongs on the physical-mechanical level rather than on that ofthe soul. Finally, there is also the real spiritual experi- ence of love, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the other two. One can love God, one can love the world; perhaps one can only love God and the world. Anyway, it's not necessary to love a person. But if one does, the physical element takes over the whole world, so that it turns everything upside down, as it were. . . . " Ulrich broke off.
Agathe had flushed a dark red. If Ulrich had deliberately chosen and ordered his words with the hypocritical intention of suggesting to Agathe's imagination the physical act oflove inevitably associated with them, he could not have succeeded better.
He looked around for a match, simply to undo the unintended ef- fect of his speech by some diversion. "Anyway," he said, "love, if that is love, is an exceptional case, and can't serve as a model for everyday action. "
Agathe had reached for the comers of the tablecloth and wrapped them around her legs. 'Wouldn't strangers, who saw and heard us, talk about a perverse feeling? " she asked suddenly.
"Nonsense! " Ulrich maintained. 'What each of us feels is the shadowy doubling ofhis own selfin the other's opposite nature. I'm a man, you're a woman; it's widely believed that every person bears within him the shadowy or repressed opposite inclination; at least each of us has this longing, unless he's disgustingly self-satisfied. So my counterpart has come to light and slipped into you, and yours into
10. 2. 2 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
me, and they feel marvelous in their exchanged bodies, simply be- cause they don't have much respect for their previous environment and the view from it! "
Agathe thought: "He's gone into all that more deeply before. Why is he attenuating it now? "
What Ulrich was saying did, of course, fit quite well with the life they were leading as two companions who occasionally, when the company of others leaves them free, take time to marvel at the fact that they are man and woman but at the same time twins. Once two people find themselves in such an accord their relations with the world as individuals take on the charm of an invisible game of hide- and-seek, each switching bodies and costumes with the other, prac- ticing their carefree two-in-one deception for an unsuspecting world behind two kinds of masks. But this playful and overemphatic fun- as children sometimes make noise instead ofbeing noisy-was not in keeping with the gravity that sometimes, from a great height, laid its shadow on the hearts of this brother and sister, making them fall unexpectedly silent. So it happened one evening, as they exchanged a few chance words more before going to bed, that Ulrich saw his sister in her long nightgown and tried to joke about it, saying: "A hundred years ago I would have cried out: 'My angel! ' Too bad the term has become obsolete! " He fell silent, disconcerted by the thought: "Isn't that the only word I should be using for her? Not friend, not wife! 'Heavenly creature! ' was another term they used. Ridiculously high-flown, of course, but nevertheless better than not having the courage of one's convictions. "
Agathe was thinking: "A man in pajamas doesn't look like an angel! " But he did look fierce and broad-shouldered, and she sud- denly felt ashamed of her wish that this strong face framed in tousled hair might cast its shadow over her eyes. In some physically innocent way she was sensually aroused; her blood was pulsing through her body in wild waves, spreading over her skin while leaving her drained and weak inside. Since she was not such a fanatical person as her brother, she simply felt what she felt. When she was tender, she was tender, not lit up with ideas or moral impulses, even though this was something she loved in him as much as she shrank from it.
Again and again, day after day, Ulrich summed it all up in the idea: Basically, it's a protest against life! They walked arm in arm through
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 0 2 3
the city: well matched in height, well matched in age, well matched in their attitude to things. Strolling along side by side, they could not see much of each other. Tall figures, pleasing to one another, they walked together for the sheer enjoyment of it, feeling at every step the breath of their contact in the midst of all the strangeness sur- rounding them. We belong together! This feeling, far from uncom- mon, made them happy, and half within it, half in resistance to it, Ulrich said: "It's funny we should be so content to be brother and sister. The world in general regards it as a commonplace relation- ship, but we're making something special of it! "
Perhaps he had hurt her feelings in saying this. He added: "But it's what I've always wished for. When I was a boy I made up my mind to marry only a woman I'd have adopted as a child and brought up my- self. I think plenty of men have such fantasies; they're pretty banal, I suppose. But as an adult I actually once fell in love with such a child, though it was only for two or three hours! " And he went on to tell her about it:
"It happened on a streetcar. A little girl of about twelve got on, with her very young father or her older brother. The way she got on, sat down, and casually handed the fare to the conductor for both of them, she was every inch a lady, without a trace of childish affecta- tion. It was the same when she talked to her companion, or quietly listened to him. She was extraordinarily beautiful: brunette, with full lips, strong eyebrows, a slightly turned-up nose; perhaps a dark- haired Polish girl, or a southern Slav. As I recall, the dress she was wearing suggested some national costume: long jacket, tight waist, laced bodice, and frills at the throat and wrists, all in its way as per- fect as the little person herself. Perhaps she was Albanian. I was sit- ting too far away to be able to hear what she was saying. It struck me that the features of her grave little face were mature beyond her years, so that she seemed fully adult; yet it was not the face of a dwarfishly tiny woman, but unquestionably that of a child. On the other hand, it was not at all the immature stage of an adult's face. It seems that a woman's face may sometimes be complete at the age of twelve, formed even spiritually like a perfect first sketch from the hand of a master, so that everything added later to develop the pic- ture only spoils its original greatness. One can fall passionately in love with such a phenomenon, mortally so, and really without any
1024 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
physical desire. I remember I glanced around nervously at the other passengers, because I felt as if I were falling apart. When she got off, I got off, too, but lost her in the crowded street," he ended his little story.
After giving it a moment or two, Agathe asked with a smile: "And how does that fit in with the time for love being over, leaving only sex and companionship? "
"It doesn't fit in at all! " Ulrich laughed.
His sister thought about it, and remarked with a noticeable harsh- ness-it seemed to be an intentional repetition of the words he had used the evening of her arrival: "All men like to play at little-brother- and-little-sister. There must really be some stupid idea behind it. These little brothers and sisters call each other 'father' and 'mother' when they're not quite sober. "
Ulrich was taken aback It was not merely that Agathe was right, for gifted women are merciless observers of the men they love in their lives; but not being inclined to theorize, they make no use of their discoveries except when provoked. He felt somewhat affronted.
"Of course they've got a psychological explanation for it," he said hesitantly. "It's pretty obvious that the two of us are psychologically suspect. Incestuous tendencies, demonstrable in early childhood, to- gether with antisocial dispositions and a rebellious attitude toward life. Possibly even a not sufficiently rooted gender identification, al- though I-"
"Nor I, either! " Agathe broke in, laughing, if possibly somewhat against her will. "I have no use for women at all! "
"It really doesn't matter anyway," Ulrich said. "Psychic entrails, in any case. You might also say that there's a sultanesque need to be the only one who adores and is adored, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. In the ancient Orient it produced the harem, and today we have family, love, and the dog. And I don't mind saying that the mania to possess another person so entirely that no one else can come anywhere near is a sign of personal loneliness within the human community, which even the socialists rarely deny. If you'd like to see it that way, we represent nothing but a bourgeois extrava- gance! Oh, look at that! How splendid! " He broke off, pulling on her arm.
They were standing at the edge of a small marketplace surrounded
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 0 2 5
by old houses. Around the neoclassical statue of some intellectual giant, colorful vegetables were spread out, the big canvas umbrellas of the market stands had been set up, fruits tumbled, baskets were being dragged along, dogs chased away from the outspread trea- sures, and one saw the red faces of rough men and women. The air throbbed and pounded with industriously loud voices and smelled of the sun that shines on the earthly hodgepodge.
"Can we help loving the world when we simply see it and smell it? " Ulrich asked spiritedly. "Yet we can't love it, because we don't agree with what's inside people's heads," he added.
This did not happen to be a reservation entirely to Agathe's taste, and she did not reply. But she pressed her brother's ann, and both of them understoodthatthiswasasifshehadgentlylaidherhandover his mouth.
Ulrich laughed, saying: "Not that I like myself either! That's what happens when one is always finding fault with other people. But even I have to be able to love something, and a Siamese sister who's nei- ther me nor herself, but just as much me as herself, is clearly the only point where everything comes together for me! "
He had cheered up again. And Agathe usually went along with his mood. But they never again talked as they had on the first night of their reunion, or before. That was gone, like castles in the clouds, which, when they hover over city streets teeming with life instead of over the deserted countryside, are hard to believe in. Perhaps the cause of this was only that Ulrich did not know what degree of sub- stantiality he should ascribe to the experiences that moved him, while Agathe often thought that he regarded them solely as excesses of fantasy. And she could not prove to him that it was not so; she always spoke less than he did, she could not hit the right note, and did not feel confident enough to try. She merely felt that he was avoiding coming to grips with it, and that he should not be doing that. So they were actually both hiding in their lighthearted happiness, which had no depth or weight, and Agathe became sadder day by day, although she laughed quite as often as her brother.
1026
PROFESSOR HAGAUER TAKES PEN IN HAND
But thanks to Agathe's disregarded husband, this changed.
On a morning that brought these joyful days to an end, Agathe received a fat, official-looking letter with a great round yellow seal imprinted with the white insignia ofthe Imperial and Royal Rudolfs- gymnasium in . Instantly, while she was still holding the letter unopened in her hand, there arose out of nothing two-story houses with the mute mirrors of well-polished windows; with white ther- mometers on the outside of their brown frames, one for each story, to tell what the weather was; with classical pediments and Baroque scallops above the windows, heads projecting from the walls, and other such mythological sentinels, which looked as if they had been produced in a wood-carving shop and painted as stone. The streets ran through the town brown and wet, just like the country roads they were on the way in, with deep ruts, and lined on both sides by shops with their brand-new display windows, looking for all that like gen- tlewomen of thirty years earlier who have lifted up their long skirts but cannot make up their mind to step from the sidewalk into the muddy street: the provinces in Agathe's head! Apparition in Agathe's head! Something incomprehensible still inside her, which she had been so sure of having shaken off forever! Even more incomprehen- sible: that she had ever been tied to it! She saw the way from her front door, past familiar housefronts, to the school, the way taken four times daily by her husband, Hagauer, which in the beginning she had often taken with him, accompanying him from his home to his work, in those days when she conscientiously did not let a drop of her bitter medicine escape. "Is Hagauer taking his lunches at the hotel these days? " she wondered. "Does he tear a page off the calen- der each morning, which I used to do? " It had all suddenly come back to life, so surreally vivid as ifit could never die, and with a mute shudder she recognized that familiar craven feeling awakening in her that consisted ofindifference, oflost courage, ofsaturation with ugli-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 0 2 7
ness, and of her own insecure volatility. With a kind of avidity, she opened the thick letter her husband had addressed to her.
When Professor Hagauer had returned to his home and workplace from his father-in-law's funeral and a briefvisit to the capital, his sur- roundings welcomed him exactly as they always did after one of his short trips: with the agreeable awareness of his having properly ac- complished his mission; and changing from his shoes into the house slippers in which a man works twice as well, he turned his attention to his environment. He went off to his school, was respectfully greeted by the porter, felt welcomed back when he met the teachers who were under him. In the administration office the files and prob- lems no one had dared to deal with in his absence awaited him. When he hastened through the corridors he was accompanied by the feeling that his steps lent wings to the whole building: Gottlieb Hagauer was somebody, and he knew it. Encouragement and good cheer beamed from his brow throughout the educational establish- ment under his wing, and when anyone outside school inquired after the health and whereabouts ofhis wife, he replied with the serenity of a man conscious of having married creditably. Everyone knows that the male of the species, so long as he is still capable of procre- ation, reacts to brief interruptions of his married life as if an easy yoke has been lifted from his shoulders, even when he does not think ofillicit associations in connection with it and at the end ofthis inter- lude, refreshed, resumes his happy lot. In this manner Hagauer at first accepted his wife's absence, and for a while did not even notice how long she was staying away.
What actually first drew his attention to it was that same wall cal- endar that had figured in Agathe's memory as such a hateful symbol oflife byits needing to have a page tom offevery morning. It hung in the dining room as a spot that did not belong on the wall, stranded there as a New Year's greeting from a stationery shop brought home from school by Hagauer, and because ofits dreariness not only toler- ated but actually cultivated by Agathe. It would have been quite true to form for Hagauer to have taken over the chore of ripping off the daily page in Agathe's absence, for it was not in keeping with his hab- its to let that part of the wall run wild, as it were. On the other hand, he was also a man who always knew precisely on what latitude of the week or month he found himself upon the ocean of infinity; more-
1028 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
over, he of course had a proper calendar in his office at school; and lastly, just as he was nevertheless about to lift his hand so as to prop- erly regulate the time in his household, and inwardly smiling, he felt something peculiar stop him-one ofthose impulses through which, as it would later turn out, fate declares itself, but which at the time he merely took for a tender, chivalrous sentiment that surprised him and made him feel pleased with himself: he decided to leave un- touched the page marking the day on which Agathe had left the house as a token of homage and a reminder, until her return.
So the wall calendar became in time a festering wound, reminding Hagauer at every glance how long his wife was avoiding her home. A man thrifty with his emotions as with his household, he wrote her postcards to let her know how he was and to ask her, with gradually increasing urgency, when she would be coming back. He received no answer. Now he no longer beamed in answer to sympathetic inqui- ries whether his wife would be away much longer in ful£llment of her sad duties. But luckily he always had a great deal to keep him busy, apart from his duties at school and the various clubs to which he belonged, since the mail daily brought him a pile of invitations, inquiries, letters from admiring readers, attacks, proofs, periodicals, and important books. Hagauer's human self might be living in the provinces, as an element in the unendearing impressions these might make on a stranger passing through, but his spirit called Europe its home, and this kept him for a long time from grasping the full signifi- cance of Agathe's prolonged absence. There came a day, however, when the mail brought him a letter from Ulrich, curtly informing him that Agathe no longer intended to return to him and asking him to agree to a divorce. Politely worded as it was, this letter was so la- conic and was written with such a lack of consideration as to make Hagauer feel indignantly that Ulrich cared about his, the recipient's, feelings about as much as if he were an insect to be flicked off a leaf. His first reaction of inner defense was: Don't take it seriously, a whim! There the letter lay, like a grinning specter in the bright daylight of pressing correspondence and showers of professional recognition.
It was not until evening, when Hagauer entered his empty house again, that he sat down at his desk and in dignified brevity wrote to Ulrich that it would be best to pretend his communication had never
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 0 2 9
been written. But he soon received a new letter from Ulrich, reject- ing this view of the matter, reiterating Agathe's request (without her knowledge), and merely asking Hagauer in somewhat more courte- ous detail to do all he could toward keeping the necessary legal steps simple as befitted a man of his high moral principles, and as was also desirable if the deplorable concomitants of a public dispute were to be avoided. Hagauer now grasped the seriousness of the situation, and allowed himself three days' time to compose an answer that would leave nothing to be either desired or regretted afterward.
For the first two days he felt as though someone had struck him a blow in the solar plexus. "A bad dream! " he said plaintively to himself several times, and it took great self-discipline not to let himself forget that he had really received such a request. He felt a deep discomfort in his breast very much like injured love, and an indefinable jealousy as well, which was directed not so much against a lover-which he assumed to be the cause of Agathe's behavior-as against some in- comprehensible Something that had shunted him aside. It was a kind of humiliation, similar to that of an extremely orderly man when he has broken or forgotten something; something that had had its fixed place in his mind since time immemorial and that he no longer no- ticed,. but on which much depended, was suddenly smashed. Pale and distraught, in real anguish-not to be underestimated merely because it was lacking in beauty-Hagauer made his rounds, avoid- ing people, shrinking from the explanations he would have to give and the humiliations to be borne. It was only on the third day that his condition finally stabilized. Hagauer's natural dislike for Ulrich was just as great as Ulrich's for him, and while this had never before come out into the open it did so now, all at once, when he intuitively imputed all the blame for Agathe's conduct to her will-o'-the-wisp gypsy brother, who must have turned her head. He sat down at his desk and demanded in a few words the immediate return of his wife, resolutely declaring that as her husband he would only discuss any- thing further with her.
From Ulrich came a refusal, equally terse and resolute.
Now Hagauer decided to work on Agathe herself; he made copies of his correspondence with Ulrich and added a long, carefully con- sidered letter; all of this was what Agathe saw before her when she opened the large envelope with the official seal.
1030 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Hagauer himself was unable to believe that these things were re- ally happening. Back from his daily obligations, he had sat that eve- ning in his "deserted home," facing a blank sheet of paper much as Ulrich had faced one, not knowing how to begin. But in Hagauer's experience the tried and true "buttons method" had worked more than once, and he resorted to it again in this case. It consists in taking a systematic approach to one's problems, even problems that cause great agitation, on the same principle on which a man has buttons sewn on his clothes to save the time that would be lost ifhe acted on the assumption that he could get out of his clothes faster without buttons. The English writer Surway, for example, whose work on the subject Hagauer now consulted, for even in his depressed state it was important for him to compare SUIWay's work with his own views, dis- tinguishes five such buttons in the process of successful reasoning: (a) close observation of an event, in which the observation immedi- ately reveals problems of interpretation; (b) establishing such prob- lems and defining them more narrowly; (c) hypothesis of a possible solution; (d) logically developing the consequences of this hypothe- sis; and (e) further observations, leading to acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis and thereby to a successful outcome of the thinking process. Hagauer had already profitably applied a similar method to so worldly an enterprise as lawn tennis when he was learning the game at the Civil Service Club, and it had lent considerable intellec- tual charm to the game for him; but he had never yet resorted to this method for purely emotional matters, since his ordinary inner life consisted mainly ofprofessional concerns, and for personal events he relied on that "sound instinct" which is a mix of all the possible feel- ings acceptable and customary to the Caucasian race in any given situation, with a certain bias toward the most proximate local, profes- sional, or class feelings. Applying the buttons to so extraordinary a situation as his wife's extraordinary demand was not going to be easy given his lack of practice, and in cases of personal problems even the "sound instinct" shows a tendency to split in two: It told Hagauer on the one hand that much obliges a man who moved with the times as he did to put no obstacles in the way of a proposal to dissolve a rela- tionship based on trust; but on the other hand, if this goes against the grain, much also absolves him of such an obligation, for the wide- spread irresponsibility in such matters nowadays should in no way be
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encouraged. In such a case, as Hagauer had learned, it behooves a modern man to "relax," i. e. , disperse his attention, loosen up physi- cally, and listen intently for whatever may be audible of his deepest inner self. So he cautiously stopped thinking, stared at the orphaned wall calendar, and hearkened to his inner voice; after a while it an- swered, coming from a depth beneath his conscious mind, and told him what he had already thought: the voice said that he had no rea- son whatsoever to put up with anything so unjustifiable as Agathe's preposterous demand.
But at this point Professor Hagauer's mind found itself set down willy-nilly in front of Swway's buttons a toe, or some equivalent se- ries of buttons, and he felt afresh all the difficulties of interpreting the event under his observation. "Can I, Gottlieb Hagauer, possibly be to blame for this embarrassing business? " he asked himself. He examined himself and could not find a single point on which he could be faulted. "Is the cause another man she is in love with? " was his second hypothesis toward a possible solution. It was an assumption he had difficulty accepting, for if he forced himself to look at the matter objectively, he could not really see what another man could offer Agathe that was better than what he did. Still, this problem was especially susceptible to being muddied by personal vanity, so he studied it in exacting detail; and here he found vistas opening up that he had never even thought of. Suddenly, from Surway's point c, Hagauer found himself on the track ofa possible solution via d and e: for the first time since his marriage, he was struck by a complex of phenomena reported, as far as he knew, only in women whose erotic response to the opposite sex was never deep or passionate. It pained him to find nowhere in his memories any indication of that com- pletely openhearted, dreamy surrender he had experienced earlier, in his bachelor years, with females about whose sensual bent there could be no doubt; but this offered the advantage of enabling him to rule out, with absolute scientific detachment, the destruction of his marital bliss by a third party. Agathe's conduct was reduced, in con- sequence, to a purely idiosyncratic rebellion against their happiness, all the more so because she had left without giving the slightest hint of such intentions, and there simply had not been enough time since then for her to develop a rational basis for changing her mind! Hagauer had to conclude, and this conviction never left him, that
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Agathe's incomprehensible behavior could only be understood as one of those slowly building temptations to turn one's back on life, known to occur in characters who do not know what they want.
But was Agathe really that sort ofperson? That still remained to be investigated, and Hagauer pensively weeded his whiskers with the end of his pen. Though she usually seemed companionable enough, easy to live with, as he put it, still, when it came to what most preoc- cupied him, she tended to show a marked indifference, not to say apathy! There was in fact something in her that did not fit in with himself or other people and their interests; not that she set herself up against them. She laughed along with them and looked serious in the right places, but she had always, now that he came to think of it, made a somewhat distracted impression through all these years. She seemed to be listening attentively to what she was told, yet never to believe it. There was something downright unhealthy about her in- difference, the more he thought about it. Sometimes one got the im- pression that she was not taking in what was going on around her at all. . . . And all at once, before he was aware of it himself, his pen had begun to race over the paper with his purposeful motion. "Who can guess what may be going on in your mind," he wrote, "if you think yourself too good to love the life I am in a position to offer you, which I can say in all modesty is a pure and full life; you've always handled it as ifwith fire tongs, as it now seems to me. You have shut yourself off from the riches of human and moral values that even an unassuming life has to offer, and even if I had to believe that you could somehow have felt justified in doing this, there is still your lack of the moral will to change; instead, you have chosen an artificial way out, a fantasy! "
He mulled it over once more. He mustered the schoolboys who had passed through his guiding hands, searching for a case that might be instructive. But even before he had got into this, there popped into his mind the missing bit that had been uneasily hovering in the back ofhis mind. At this point Agathe ceased to be a completely per- sonal problem for him, without any clues to its general nature, for when he thought how much she was ready to give up in life without being blinded by any specific passion he was led inescapably, to his joy, to that basic assumption so familiar to modern pedagogy, that she lacked the capacity for objective thought and for keeping in finn
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intellectual touch with the world of reality! Swiftly he wrote: "Proba- bly you are even at this moment far from being aware of what it is, exactly, that you are about to do; but I warn you, before you come to a decisive conclusion! 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
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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
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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
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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.