No More Learning

"I don't want to go back to that! It's surpris-
784 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
ing, but true, that objectively-historically, or in the development of science itself-it would have made no difference. I may have been ten years ahead of my time, but others got there without me, even if more slowly or by other means. The most I could have done was to lead them there more quickly, but it remains a question whether such a change in my life would have been enough to give me a fresh impetus that would take me beyond that goal. So there you have a bit of what one calls personal destiny, but what it finally amounts to is something remarkably impersonal.
"Anyway," he went on, "it happens that the older I get, the more often I see something I used to hate that subsequently and in round- about ways takes the same direction as my own road, so that I sud- denly can no longer dismiss its right to exist; or it happens that I begin to see what's wrong with ideas or events I used to get excited about. So in the long run it hardly seems to matter whether one gets excited or to what cause one commits one's existence. It all arrives at the same goal; everything serves an evolution that is both unfathom- able and inescapable. "
"That used to be ascribed to God's working in mysterious ways," Agathe remarked, frowning, with the tone of one speaking from her own experience and not exactly impressed. Ulrich remembered that she had been educated in a convent. She lay on her sofa, as he sat at its foot; she wore her pajama trousers tied at the ankle, and the floor lamp shone on them both in such a way that a large leaf of light formed on the floor, on which they floated in darkness.
"Nowadays," he said, "destiny gives rather the impression of being some overarching movement of a mass; one is engulfed by it and rolled along. " He remembered having been struck once before by the idea that these days every truth enters the world divided into its half-truths, and yet this nebulous and slippery process might yield a greater total achievement than ifeveryone had gone about earnestly trying to accomplish the whole task by himself. He had once even come out with this idea, which lay like a barb in his self-esteem and yet was not without the possibility of greatness, and concluded, tongue-in-cheek, that it meant one could do anything one pleased! Actually, nothing could have been further from his intention than this conclusion, especially now, when his destiny seemed to have set him down and left him with nothing more to do; and at this moment
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so dangerous to his ambition, when he had been so curiously driven to end, with this belated piece of work, the last thing that had still tied him to his past-precisely at this moment when he felt person- ally quite bare, what he felt instead of a falling off was this new ten- sion that had begun when he had left his home. He had no name for it, but for the present one could say that a younger person, akin to him, was looking to him for guidance; one could also just as well call it something else. He saw with amazing clarity the radiant mat of bright gold against the black-green ofthe room, with the delicate loz- enges of Agathe's clown costume on it, and himself, and the superlu- cidly outlined happenstance, cut from the darkness, of their being together.
"Can you say that again? " Agathe asked.
"What we still refer to as a personal destiny," Ulrich said, "is being displaced by collective processes that can finally be expressed in sta- tistical terms. "
Agathe thought this over and had to laugh. "I don't understand it, of course, but wouldn't it be lovely to be dissolved by statistics? " she said. "It's been such a long time since love could do it! "
This suddenly led Ulrich to tell his sister what had happened to him when, after finishing his work, he had left the house and walked to the center of town, in order to somehow fill the void left in him by the completion of his paper. He had not intended to speak of it; it seemed too personal a matter. For whenever his travels took him to cities to which he was not connected by business of any kind, he par- ticularly enjoyed the feeling of solitude this gave him, and he had rarely felt this so keenly as he did now. He noticed the colors of the streetcars, the automobiles, shop windows, and archways, the shapes of church towers, the faces and the fa~ades, and even though they all had the usual European resemblances, his gaze flew over them like an insect that has strayed into a field bright with unfamiliar colors and cannot, try as it will, find a place to settle on. Such aimless, pur- poseless strolling through a town vitally absorbed in itself, the keen- ness of perception increasing in proportion as the strangeness of the surroundings intensifies, heightened still further by the connection that it is not oneself that matters but only this mass of faces, these movements wrenched loose from the body to become armies of arms, legs, or teeth, to all of which the future belongs-all this can
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evoke the feeling that being a whole and inviolate strolling human being is positively antisocial and criminal. But if one lets oneself go even further in this fashion, this feeling may also unexpectedly pro- duce a physical well-being and irresponsibility amounting to folly, as if the body were no longer part of a world where the sensual self is enclosed in strands of nerves and blood vessels but belongs to a world bathed in somnolent sweetness. These were the words that Ul- rich used to describe to his sister what might perhaps have been the result of a state of mind without goal or ambition, or the result of a diminished ability to maintain an illusory individuality, or perhaps nothing more than that "primal myth of the gods," that "double face of nature," that "giving" and "taking vision," which he was after all pursuing like a hunter.
Now he was waiting curiously to see ifAgathe would show by some sign that she understood, that she, too, was familiar with such im- pressions, but when this did not happen he explained it again: "It's like a slight split in one's consciousness. One feels enfolded, em- braced, pierced to the heart by a sense of involuntary dependence; but at the same time one is still alert and capable of making critical judgments, and even ready to start a fight with these people and their stuffy presumptuousness. It's as though there were two relatively in- dependent strata of life within us that normally keep each other pro- foundly in balance. And we were speaking of destiny: it's as ifwe had two destinies--one that's all superficial bustle, which takes life over, and one that's motionless and meaningful, which we never find out about. "
Now Agathe, who had been listening for a long time without stir- ring, said out of the blue: "That's like kissing Hagauer! "
Laughing, she had propped herself up on one elbow, her legs still stretched out full length on the couch. And she added: "Ofcourse, it wasn't as beautiful as the way you describe it! "
Ulrich was laughing too. It was not really clear why they were laughing. Somehow this laughter had come upon them from the air, or from the house, or from the traces of bewilderment and uneasi- ness left behind by the solemnities of the last few days, which had touched so uselessly on the Beyond; or from the uncommon pleasure they found in their conversation. For every human custom that has reached an extreme of cultivation already bears within itself the
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seeds of change, and every excitement that surpasses the ordinary soon mists over with a breath of sorrow, absurdity, and satiety.
In this fashion and in such a roundabout way they finally end up, as if for relaxation, talking about less demanding matters, about Me and Us and Family, and arriving at the discovery, fluctuating between mockery and astonishment, that the two of them constitute a family. And while Ulrich speaks of the desire for community--once more with the zeal of a man out to mortify his own nature, without know- ing whether it is directed against his true nature or his assumed na- ture--Agathe is listening as his words come close to her and retreat again, and what he notices, looking at her lying quite defenseless in that bright island of light and in her whimsical costume, is that for some time now he has been searching for something about her that would repel him, as he regrettably tends to do, but he has not found anything, and for this he is thankful with a pure and simple affection that he otherwise never feels. And he is thoroughly delighted by the conversation. But when it is over, Agathe asks him casually: "Now, are you actuallyfor what you call the family or are you against it? "
Ulrich answers that this is beside the point, because he was talk- ing about an indecision on the part of the world, not his personal indecision.
Agathe thinks it over.
Finally, she says abruptly: "I have no way of judging that. But I wish I could be entirely at one and at peace with myself, and also . . . well, somehow be able to live accordingly. Wouldn't you like to try that too? "
9
AGATHE WHEN SHE CAN'T TALK TO ULRICH
The moment Agathe got on the train and began the unexpected jour- ney to her father something had happened that bore every resem- blance to a sudden rupture, and the two fragments into which the moment of departure exploded flew as far apart as if they had never belonged together. Her husband had seen her off, had raised his hat and held it, that stiff, round, black hat that grew visibly smaller and smaller, in the gesture appropriate to leave-taking, aslant in the air, as her train began to move, so that it seemed to Agathe that the sta- tion was rolling backward as fast as the train was rolling forward. At this moment, though an instant earlier she had still been expecting to be away from home no longer than circumstances absolutely re- quired, she made the decision never to return, and her mind became agitated like a heart that realizes suddenly that it has escaped a dan- ger of which it had been wholly unaware.
When Agathe thought it over afterward, she was by no means completely satisfied. What troubled her about her attitude was that its form reminded her of a curious illness she had had as a child, soon after she had begun going to school. For more than a year she had suffered from a not inconsiderable fever that neither rose nor sub- sided, and she had grown so thin and frail that it worried the doctors, who could not determine the cause. Nor was this illness ever ex- plained later. Actually, Agathe had rather enjoyed seeing the great physicians from the University, who at first entered her room so full of dignity and wisdom, visibly lose some of their confidence from week to week; and although she obediently swallowed all the medi- cines prescribed for her and really would have liked to get well, be- cause it was expected of her, she was still pleased to see that the doctors could not bring this about with their remedies and felt her- self in an unearthly or at least an extraordinary condition, as her physical self diminished. That the grownups' world had no power over her as long as she was sick made her feel proud, though she had
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no idea how her little body had brought this about. But in the end it recovered of its own accord, and just as mysteriously, too.
Almost all she knew about it today was what the servants had told her later: they maintained that she had been bewitched by a beggar woman who came often to the house but had once been rudely turned away from the door. Agathe had never been able to find out how much truth there was in this story, for although the servants freely dropped hints, they could never be pinned down to explana- tions and were obviously frightened of violating a strict ban her fa- ther was supposed to·have issued. Her own memory of that time held only a single, though indeed remarkably lively, image, in which she saw her father in front ofher, lashing out in a raging fury at a suspi- cious-looking woman, the flat of his hand repeatedly making contact with her cheek. It was the only time in her life she had seen that small, usually painfully proper man of reason so utterly changed and beside himself; but to the best ofher recollection this had happened not pefore but during her illness, for she thought she remembered lying in bed, and this bed was not in her nursery but on the floor below, "with the grownups," in one of the rooms where the servants would not have been allowed to let the beggar woman in, even if she had been no stranger to the kitchen and below stairs. Actually, Agathe believed this incident must have occurred rather toward the end of her illness and that she had suddenly recovered a few days later, roused from her bed by a remarkable impatience that ended this illness as unexpectedly as it had begun.
Of course, she could not tell how far these memories stemmed from facts or whether they were fantasies born of the fever. "Proba- bly the only curious thing about it is the way these images have stayed floating in my mind somewhere between reality and illu- sion," she thought moodily, "without my finding anything unusual about it. "
The jolting of the taxi that was driving them over badly paved streets prevented a conversation. Ulrich had suggested taking advan- tage of the dry winter weather for an outing, and even had an idea where to go, though it was not a specific destination so much as an advance into a half-remembered country of the mind. Now they found themselves in a car that was to take them to the edge of town. ''I'm sure that's the only odd thing about it! " Agathe kept saying to
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herself. This was how she had learned her lessons in school, so that she never knew whether she was stupid or bright, willing or unwill- ing: she had a facility for coming up with the answers that were de- manded of her without ever seeing the point of the questions, from which she felt protected by a deep-seated indifference. After she recovered from her illness she liked going to school as much as before, and because one of the doctors had hit upon the idea that it might help to remove her from the solitary life in her father's house and give her more company ofher own age, she had been placed in a convent school. There, and in the secondary school she was sent on to, she was regarded as cheerful and docile. Whenever she was told that something was necessary or true she accommodated herself to it, and she willingly accepted everything required of her, because it seemed the least trouble and it would have seemed foolish to her to do anything against an established system that had no relevance to herself but obviously belonged to a world ordained by fathers and teachers. However, she did not believe a word ofwhat she was learn- ing, and since despite her apparent docility she was no model pupil and, wherever her desires ran counter to her convictions, calmly did as she pleased, she enjoyed the respect of her schoolmates and even that admiring affection won in school by ! :hose who know how to make things easy for themselves. It could even be that her mysteri- ous illness had been such an arrangement, for with this one excep- tion she had really always been in good health and hardly ever high-strung. "In short, an idle, good-for-nothing character! " she con- cluded uncertainly. She remembered how much more vigorously than herself her friends had often mutinied against the strict disci- pline of the convent, and with what moral indignation they had justi- fied their offenses against the regulations; yet as far as she had been in a position to observe, the very girls who had been most passionate in rebelling against details had eventually succeeded admirably in coming to terms with the whole; they developed into well-situated women who brought up their children not very differently from the way they had been brought up themselves. And so, although dissatis- fied with herself as she was, she was not convinced that it was better to have an active and a good character.
Agathe despised the emancipation ofwomen just as she disdained the female's need for a brood in a nest supplied by the male. She
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remembered with pleasure the time when she had first felt her breasts tightening her dress and had borne her burning lips through the cooling air of the streets. But the fussy erotic busyness of the female sex, which emerges from the guise of girlhood like a round knee from pink tulle, had aroused scorn in her for as long as she could remember. When she asked herself what her real convictions were, a feeling told her that she was destined to experience some- thing extraordinary and of a rare order-even then, when she knew as good as nothing of the world and did not believe the little she had been taught. And it had always seemed to her like a mysterious but active response, corresponding to this impression, to let things go as they had to, without overestimating their importance.
Out of the corner of her eye Agathe glanced at Ulrich, sitting gravely upright, rocking to and fro in the jolting cab, and recalled how hard it had been on their first evening together to make him see why. she had not simply run away from her husband on their wedding night, although she didn't like him. She had been so tremendously in awe of her big brother while she was awaiting his arrival, but now she smiled as she secretly recalled her impression of Hagauer's thick lips in those first months, every time they rounded amorously under the bristles of his mustache; his entire face would be drawn in thick- skinned folds toward the corners ofhis mouth, and she would feel, as if satiated: Oh, what an ugly man he is! She had even suffered his mild pedagogic vanity and kindliness as a merely physical disgust, more outward than inward. After the first surprise was over, she had now and then been unfaithful to him. "Ifyou can call it that," she thought, "when an inexperienced young thing whose sensuality is dormant instantly responds to the advances of a man who is not her husband as iftheywere thunderclaps rattling her door! " But she had shown little talent for unfaithfulness; lovers, once she had got to know them a little, were no more masterful to her than husbands, and it soon seemed to her that she could take the ritual masks of African tribal dancers as seriously as the love masks put on by Euro- pean men. Not that she never lost her head; but even in the first attempts to repeat the experience the magic was gone. The world of acted-out fantasies, the theatricality of love, left her unenchanted. These stage directions for the soul, mostly formulated by men, which all came to the conclusion that the rigors of life now and then enti-
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tled one to an hour of weakness-with some subcategories of weak- ening: letting go, going faint, being taken, giving oneself, surrender- ing, going crazy, and so on-all struck her as smarmy exaggeration, since she had at no time ever felt herself other than weak in a world so superbly constructed by the strength of men.
The philosophy Agathe acquired in this way was simply that of the female person who refuses to be taken in but who automatically ob- serves what the male person is trying to put over on her. Of course, it was no philosophy at all, only a defiantly hidden disappointment, still mingled with a restrained readiness for some unknown release that possibly increased even as her outward defiance lessened. Since Agathe was well-read but not by nature given to theorizing, she often had occasion to wonder, in comparing her own experiences with the ideals in books and plays, that she had never fallen prey to the snares of her seducers, like a wild animal in a trap (which would have ac- corded with the Don Juanish self-image a man in those days assumed when he and a woman had an affair); nor had her married life, in accord with another fashion, turned into a Strindbergian battle ofthe sexes in which the imprisoned woman used her cunning and power- lessness to torment her despotic but inept overlord to death. In fact, her relations with Hagauer, in contrast with her deeper feelings about him, had always remained quite good. On their first evening together Ulrich had used strong terms for these relations, such as panic, shock, rape, which completely missed the mark. She was sorry, Agathe thought, rebellious even as she remembered this, but she could not pretend to be an angel; the fact was that everything about the marriage had taken a perfectly natural course. Her father had supported the man's suit with sensible reasons, she herself had decided to marry again; all right, then, it was done, one had to put up with whatever was involved. It was neither especially wonderful nor overly unpleasant! Even now she was sorry to be hurting Hagauer deliberately, though she absolutely wanted to do just that! She had not wanted love, she had thought it would work out somehow, he was after all a good man.
Well, perhaps it was rather that he was one of those people who always do the good thing; they themselves have no goodness in them, Agathe thought. It seems that goodness disappears from the human
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being to the same extent that it is embodied in goodwill or good deeds! How had Ulrich put it? A stream that turns factory wheels loses its gradient. Yes, he had said that too, but that wasn't what she was looking for. Now she had it: "It seems really that it's only the people who don't do much good who are able to preseiVe their good- ness intact! " But the instant she recalled this sentence, which must have sounded so illuminating when Ulrich said it, it sounded to her like total nonsense. One could not detach it from its now-forgotten context. She tried to reshuffle the words and replace them with simi- lar ones, but that only proved that the first version was the right one, for the others were like words spoken into the wind: nothing was left of them. So that was the way Ulrich had said it. "But how can one call people good who behave badly? " she thought. "That's really non- sense! " But she knew: while Ulrich was saying this, though it had no more real substance when he did so, it had been wonderful! Wonder- ful wasn't the word for it: she had felt almost ill with joy when she heard him say it. Such sayings illuminated her entire life. This one, for instance, had come up during their last long talk, after the funeral and after Hagauer had left; suddenly she had realized how carelessly she had always behaved, like the time she had simply thought things would "somehow" work out with Hagauer, because he was "a good person. " Ulrich often said things that filled her momentarily with joy or misery, although one could not "preseiVe" those moments. When was it, for example, that Ulrich had said that under certain circum- stances it might be possible for him to love a thiefbut never a person who was honest from habit? At the moment she couldn't quite recall, but then realized with delight that it hadn't been Ulrich but she her- selfwho had said it. As a matter offact, much ofwhat he said she had been thinking herself, only without words; all on her own, the way she used to be, she would never have made such bold assertions.
Up to now Agathe had been feeling perfectly comfortable be- tween the joggings and joltings as the cab drove over bumpy subur- ban streets, leaving them incapable of speech, wrapped as they were in a network of mechanical vibrations, and whenever she had used her husband's name in her thoughts, it was as a mere term of refer- ence to a period and its events. But now, for no particular reason, an infinite horror slowly came over her: Hagauer had actually been
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there with her, in the flesh! The way in which she had tried up to now to be fair to him disappeared, and her throat tightened with bitterness.
He had arrived on the morning of the funeral and had affection- ately insisted, late as he was, on seeing his father-in-law, had gone to the autopsy lab and delayed the closing of the coffin. In a tactful, honorable, undemonstrative fashion, he had been truly moved. After the funeral Agathe had excused herself on grounds of fatigue, and Ulrich had to take his brother-in-law out to lunch. As he told her afteiWard, Hagauer's constant company had made Ulrich as frantic as a tight collar, and for that reason he had done everything to get him to leave as soon as possible. Hagauer had intended to go to the capital for an educators' conference and there devote another day to calling on people at the Ministry and some sightseeing, but he had reserved the two days prior to this to spend with his wife as an atten- tive husband and to go into the matter ofher inheritance. But Ulrich, in collusion with his sister, had made up a story that made it seem impossible for Hagauer to stay at the house, and told him he had booked a room for him at the best hotel in town. As expected, this made Hagauer hesitant: the hotel would be inconvenient and expen- sive, and he would in all decency have to pay for it himself; instead, he could allot two days to his calls and sightseeing in the capital, and if he traveled at night save the cost of the hotel. So Hagauer ex- pressed fulsome regrets at being unable to take advantage of Ulrich's thoughtfulness, and finally revealed his plan, unalterable by now, to leave that very evening. All that was left to discuss was the question of the inheritance, and this made Agathe smile again, because at her instigation Ulrich had told her husband that the will could not be read for a few days yet. Agathe would be here, after all, he was told, to look after his interests, and he would also receive a proper legal statement. As for whatever concerned furniture, mementos, and the like, Ulrich, as a bachelor, would make no claims to anything his sis- ter might happen to want. Finally, he had asked Hagauer whether he would agree in case they decided to sell the house, which was of no use to them, without committing himself, of course, since none of them had yet seen the will; and Hagauer had agreed, without com- mitting himself, of course, that he could see no objection for the mo- ment, though he must of course reserve the right to determine his
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position in the light ofthe actual conditions. Agathe had suggested all this to her brother, and he had passed it on because it meant nothing to him one way or the other, and he wanted to be rid of Hagauer.
Suddenly Agathe felt miserable again, for after they had managed this so well, her husband had after all come to her room, together with her brother, to say goodbye to her. Agathe had behaved as coldly as she could and said that there was no way oftelling when she would be returning home. Knowing him as she did, she could tell at once that he had not been prepared for this and resented the fact that his decision to leave right away was now casting him in the role of the unfeeling husband; in retrospect he was suddenly offended at having been expected to stay at a hotel and by the cool reception accorded him. But since he was a man who did everything according to plan he said nothing, decided to have it out with his wife when the time came, and kissed her, after he had picked up his hat, dutifully on the lips.
And this kiss, which Ulrich had seen, now seemed to demolish Agathe. "How could it happen," she asked herself in consternation, "that I stood this man for so long? But then, haven't I put up with things all my life without resisting? " She furiously reproached her- self: " I f I were any good at all, things could never have gone this far! "
Agathe turned her face away from Ulrich, whom she had been watching, and stared out the window. Low suburban buildings, icy streets, muffied-up people-images of an ugly wilderness rolling past, holding up to her the wasteland of the life into which she felt she had fecklessly allowed herself to drift. She was no longer sitting upright but had let herself slide down into the cab's musty-smelling upholstery; it was easier to look out the window in this position, and she remained in this ungraceful posture, in which she was rudely jolted and shaken to the very bowels. This body of hers, being tossed about like a bundle of rags, gave her an uncanny feeling, for it was the only thing she owned. Sometimes, when as a schoolgirl she awak- ened in the gray light of dawn, she had felt as though she were drift- ing into the future inside her body as if inside the hull of a wooden skiff. Now she was just about twice as old as she had been then, and the light in the cab was equally dim. But she still could not picture her life, had no idea what it ought to be. Men were a complement to one's body, but they were no spiritual fulfillment; one took them as
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they took oneself. Her body told her that in only a few years it would begin to lose its beauty, which meant losing the feelings that, be- cause they arise directly out of its self-assurance, can only barely be expressed in words or thoughts. Then it would be all over, without anything having ever been there. It occurred to her that Ulrich had spoken in a similar vein about the futility of his athletics, and while she doggedly kept her face turned away to the window, she planned to make him talk about it.
10
FURTHER COURSE OF THE EXCURSION TO THE SWEDISH RAMPARTS. THE MORALITY OF THE NEXT STEP
Brother and sister had left the cab at the last, low, and already quite rural-looking houses on the edge of the town and set off along a wide, furrowed country road that rose steadily uphill. The frozen earth of the wheel tracks crumbled beneath their tread. Their shoes were soon covered with the miserable gray of this parquet for carters and peasants, in sharp contrast with their smart city clothes, and although it was not cold, a cutting wind blowing toward them from the top of the hill made their cheeks glow, and the glazed brittleness of their lips made it hard to talk.
The memory of Hagauer drove Agathe to explain herself to her brother. She was convinced that he could not possibly understand her bad marriage from any point ofview, not even in the simplest of social terms. The words were already there within her, but she could not make up her mind to overcome the resistance of the climb, the cold, and the wind lashing her face. Ulrich was striding ahead, in a broad track left by a dragging brake, which they were using as their path; looking at his lean, broad-shouldered form, she hesitated. She
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had always imagined him hard, unyielding, a bit wild, perhaps only because of the critical remarks she had heard from her father and occasionally also from Hagauer; thinking of her brother, estranged and escaped from the family, had made her ashamed of her own sub- servience. "He was right not to bother about me! " she thought, and her dismay at having continually submitted to demeaning situations returned. But in fact she was full of those same tempestuous, con- flicting feelings that had made her break out with those wild lines of poetry between the doorposts of her father's death chamber. She caught up with Ulrich, which left her out of breath, and suddenly questions such as this workaday road had probably never heard before rang out, and the wind was tom to ribbons by words whose sounds no other wind had ever carried in these rural hills.
"You surely remember . . . ,"she exclaimed, and named several well-known instances from literature: ''You didn't tell me whether you could forgive a thief, but do you mean you'd regard these mur- derers as good people? "
"Of course! " Ulrich shouted back. "No-wait. Perhaps they're just potentially good people, valuable people. They still are, even after- ward, as criminals. But they don't stay good! "
"Then why do you still like them after their crime? Surely not be- cause of their earlier potentiality but because you still find them at- tractive? "
"But that's always the way it is," Ulrich said. "It's the person who gives character to the deed; it doesn't happen the other way round. We separate good and evil, but in our hearts we know they're a whole! "
Agathe's wind-whipped cheeks flushed an even brighter red be- cause the passion of her questions, which words both revealed and hid, had forced her to resort to books for examples. The misuse of "cultural problems" is so extreme that one could feel them out of place wherever the wind blows and trees stand, as though human culture did not include all of nature's manifestations! But she had struggled bravely, linked her arm through her brother's, and now re- plied, close to his ear so as not to have to raise her voice anymore and with a flicker of bravado in her face: "I suppose that's why we exe- cute bad men but cordially serve them a hearty breakfast first. "
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Ulrich, sensing some of the agitation at his side, leaned down to speak in his sister's ear, though in a normal voice: "Everyone likes to think that he couldn't do anything evil, because he himself is good.
"
With these words they had reached the top, where the road no longer climbed but cut across a rolling, treeless plateau. The wind had suddenly dropped and it was no longer cold, but in this pleasant stillness the conversation stopped as if severed, and would not start up again.
"What on earth got you onto Dostoyevsky and Stendhal in the middle ofthat gale? " Ulrich asked a while later. "Ifanybody had seen us they'd have thought we were crazy. "
Agathe laughed. "They wouldn't have understood us anymore than the cries of the birds. . . . Anyway, you were talking to me the other day about Moosbrugger. "
They walked on.
After a while, Agathe said: "I don't like him at all! "
"And I'd nearly forgotten him," Ulrich replied.
After they had again walked on in silence, Agathe stopped. "Tell
me," she asked. "You've surely done some irresponsible things your- self. I remember, for instance, that you were in the hospital once with a bullet wound. You certainly don't always look before you leap . . . ? ''
"What a lot of questions you're asking today! " Ulrich said. "What do you expect me to say to that? "
"Are you never sorry for anything you do? " Agathe asked quickly. "I have the impression that you never regret anything. You even said something like that once. "
"Good God," Ulrich answered, beginning to walk on again. "There's a plus in every minus. Maybe I did say something like that, but you don't have to take it so literally. "
"A plus in every minus? ''
"Some good in everything bad. Or at least in much of the bad. A human minus-variant is likely to contain an unrecognized plus- variant-that's probably what I meant to say. Having something to regret may be just the thing to give you the strength to do something far better than you might ever have done otherwise. It's never what one does that counts, but only what one does next! "
"Suppose you've killed someone: what can you do next? ''
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Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He was tempted to answer, for the sake of the argument: "It might enable me to write a poem that would enrich the inner life of thousands of people, or to come up with a great invention! " But he checked himself. "That would never happen," he thought. "Only a lunatic could imagine it. Or an eigh- teen-year-old aesthete. God knows why, but those are ideas that con- tradict the laws of nature. On the other hand," he conceded, "it did work that way for primitive man. He killed because human sacrifice was a great religious poem! "
He said neither the one thing nor the other aloud, but Agathe went on: "You may regard my objections as silly, but the first time I heard you say that what matters isn't the step one takes but always the next step after that, I thought: So if a person could fly inwardly, fly morally, as it were, and could keep flying at high speed from one improvement to the next, then he would know no remorse! I was madly envious ofyou! "
"That's nonsense! " Ulrich said emphatically. "What I said was that one false step doesn't matter, only the next step after that. But then what matters after the next step? Evidently the one that follows after that. And after the nth step, the n-plus-one step! Such a person would have to live without ever coming to an end or to a decision, indeed without achieving reality. And yet it is still true that what counts is always only the next step. The truth is, we have no proper method of dealing with this unending series. Dear Agathe," he said abruptly, "I sometimes regret my entire life. "
"But that's just what you can't do! " his sister said.
"And why not? Why not that in particular? "
"I have never really done anything," Agathe replied, "and so I've
always had time to regret the little I have done. I'm sure you don't know what that's like: such a dim state of mind! The shadows come, and what was has power over me. It's present in the smallest detail, and I can forget nothing and understand nothing. It's an unpleasant state of mind. . . . "Her tone was unemotional, quite unassuming. Ulrich had in fact never known this backwash of life, since his own had always been oriented toward expansion, and it merely reminded him that his sister had several times already expressed dissatisfaction with herself in strong terms. But he failed to question her because they had meanwhile reached a hilltop that he had chosen as their
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destination and stepped toward its edge. It was a huge mound as- sociated by legend with a Swedish siege in the Thirty Years' War be- cause it looked like a fortification, even though it was far too big for that: a green rampart of nature, without bush or tree, that broke off to a high, bright rock face on the side overlooking the town. A low, empty world of hills surrounded this mound; no village, no house was to be seen, only the shadows ofclouds and gray pastures. Once again Ulrich felt the spell of this place, which he remembered from his youth: the town was still lying there, far below in the distance, anx- iously huddled around a few churches that looked like hens herding their chicks, so that one suddenly felt like leaping into their midst with one bound and laying about one, or scooping them up in the grip of a giant hand.
"What a glorious feeling it must have been for those Swedish ad- venturers to reach such a place after trotting relentlessly for weeks, and then from their saddles catch sight oftheir quarry," he said to his sister after telling her the story of the place. "It is only at such mo- ments that the weight of life, the burden of our secret grievance- that we must all die, that it's all been so brief and probably for nothing-is ever really lifted from us. "
"What moments do you mean? "
Ulrich did not know what to answer. He did not want to answer at all. He remembered that as a young man he had always felt the need in this place to clench his teeth and keep silent. Finally, he replied: "Those romantic moments when events run away with us-the senseless moments! " He felt as if his head were a hollow nut on his neck, full of old saws like "Death be not proud" or "I care for no- body, no, not I," and with them the faded fortissimo of those years when there was not yet a boundary between life's expectations and life itself. He thought: "What single-minded and happy experiences have I had since then? None. "
Agathe responded: ''I've always acted senselessly, and it only makes one unhappy. "
She had walked ahead, to the very edge. Her ears were deaf to her brother's words; she did not understand them, and saw a somber, barren landscape before her whose sadness harmonized with her own. When she turned around she said: "It's a place to kill oneself," and smiled. "The emptiness in my head could melt with sweet peace
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into the emptiness of this view! " She took a few steps back to Ulrich. "All my life," she went on, "''ve been reproached with having no willpower, with loving nothing, respecting nothing; in short, for being a person with no real will to live. Papa used to scold me for it, and Hagauer blamed me for it. So now I wish you would tell me, for God's sake, tell me at long last, in which moments does something in life strike us as necessary? ''
"When one turns over in bed! " Ulrich said gruffly.
"What does that mean? ''
"Excuse the mundane example," he said. "But it's a fact: You're in
an uncomfortable position; you incessantly think of changing it and decide on one move and then another, without doing anything; fi- nally, you give up; and then all at once you've turned over! One really should say you've been turned over. That's the one pattern we act on, whether in a fit of passion or after long reflection. " He did not look at her as he spoke; he was answering himself. He still had the feeling: Here I stood and longed for something that has never been satisfied.
Agathe smiled again, but the smile twisted her mouth as ifin pain. She returned to where she had been standing and stared silently into the romantic distance. Her fur coat made a dark outline against the sky, and her slender form presented a sharp contrast to the broad silence ofthe landscape and the shadows ofthe clouds flying over it. Looking at her, Ulrich had an indescribably strong sense that some- thing was happening. He was almost ashamed to be standing there in the company of a woman instead of beside a saddled horse. And al- though he was perfectly aware that the cause of this was the tranquil image emanating at this moment from his sister, he had the impres- sion that something was happening, not to him, but somewhere in the world, and he was missing it. He felt he was being ridiculous. And yet there had been something true in his blurting out that he regretted the way he had lived his life. He sometimes longed to be wholly involved in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were meaningless or criminal, as long as they were valid, absolute, without the everlasting tentativeness they have when a person is superior to his experiences. "Something an end in itself, authentic," Ulrich thought, seriously looking for the right expression, and, unawares, his thoughts stopped pursuing imaginary events and focused on the sight that Agathe herselfnow presented, as nothing but the mirror of
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her self. So brother and sister stood for quite a while, apart and soli- tary, immobilized by a hesitancy filled with conflicting feelings. Most curious of all, perhaps, was that it never occurred to Ulrich that something had indeed already happened when, at Agathe's behest and in his own desire to get rid of him, he had palmed off on his unsuspecting brother-in-law the lie that there was a sealed testament that could not be opened for several days, and had assured him, also against his better knowledge, that Agathe would look after his inter- ests: something Hagauer would subsequently refer to as "aiding and abetting. "
Eventually they did move away from this spot, where each had been sunk in thought, and walked on together without having talked things out. The wind had freshened again, and because Agathe seemed fatigued, Ulrich suggested stopping to rest at a shepherd's cottage he knew of nearby. They soon found the stone cabin, and they had to duck their heads as they went in, while the shepherd's wife, . staring, fended them off in embarrassment. In the mixture of German and Slavic that prevailed in this part of the country and that he still vaguely remembered, Ulrich asked ifthey might come in for a while to warm themselves and eat their provisions indoors, and sup- ported this request with a tip so generous that the involuntary host- ess broke out into horrified lamentations that her wretched poverty did not enable her to offer better hospitality to such "fine gentry. " She wiped off the greasy table by the window, fanned a fire of twigs on the hearth, and put on some goat's milk to heat. Agathe had im- mediately squeezed past the table to the window without paying any attention to these efforts, as if it were a matter of course that one would find shelter somewhere, no matter where. She looked out through the dim little square offour panes at the landscape here, on the far side ofthe rampart, which without the wide extent ofthe view they had had from the top was more reminiscent of what a swimmer sees, surrounded by green crests. Though it was not yet evening, the day had passed its zenith and the light was fading.
Suddenly Agathe asked: "Why don't you ever talk to me seri- ously? "
How could Ulrich have found a better answer to this other than to glance up at her with an air ofinnocence and surprise? He was busy
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laying out ham, sausage, and boiled eggs on a piece of paper between himself and his sister.
But Agathe continued: "If one accidentally bumps into you it hurts, and one feels a shock at the terrific difference. But when I try to ask you something crucial you dissolve into thin air! "
She did not touch the food he pushed toward her-indeed, in her aversion to winding up the day with a rural picnic, her back was so straight that she was not even touching the table. And now some- thing recurred that was like their climb up the country road. Ulrich shoved aside the mugs of goat's milk that had just been brought to the table from the stove and were emitting a very disagreeable smell to noses unaccustomed to it; the faint nausea it produced in him had a sobering, stimulating effect such as comes from a sudden rush of bitterness.
"I've always spoken seriously to you," he retorted. "If you don't like what I say, it's not my fault; what you don't like in my responses is the morality of our time. " He suddenly realized that he wanted to explain to his sister as completely as possible all she would have to know in order to understand herself, and to some extent her brother as well. And with the firmness of a man who will brook no idle inter- ruptions, he launched on a lengthy speech.
"The morality ofour time, whatever else may be claimed, is that of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are accept- able provided the fifth leads to a time of prosperity and patronage. Success can cause everything else to be forgotten. When you reach the point where your money helps win elections and buys paintings, the State is prepared to look the other way too. There are unwritten rules: ifyou donate to church, charities, and political parties, it needs to be no more than one tenth of the outlay required for someone to demonstrate his goodwill by patronizing the arts. And even success still has its limits; one cannot yet acquire everything in every way; some principles of the Crown, the aristocracy, and society can still to some extent restrain the social climber. On the other hand, the State, for its own suprapersonal person, quite openly countenances the principle that one may rob, steal, and murder ifit will provide power, civilization, and glory. Of course, I'm not saying that all this is ac- knowledged even in theory; on the contrary, the theory of it is quite
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obscure. I just wanted to sum up the most mundane facts for you. The moral argumentation is just one more means to an end, a weapon used in much the same way as lies. This is the world that men have made, and it would make me want to be a woman-if only women did not love men!
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere, but this is precisely what you just called the flying man without remorse, and what I've called a problem we have no method for solving. As a scientifically trained person I feel in every situation that my knowledge is incomplete, no more than a pointer, and that perhaps tomorrow I will have new knowledge that will cause me to think differently. On the other hand, even a person wholly gov- erned by his feelings, 'a person on the way up,' as you have depicted him, will see everything he does as a step upward, from which he is raised to the next step. So there is something in our minds and in our souls, a morality ofthe 'next-step'-but is that simply the morality of the five bankruptcies, is the entrepreneurial morality of our time so deeply rooted in our inner life? Or is there only the illusion of a con- nection? Or is the morality of the careerists a monstrosity prema- turely born from deeper currents? At this point I really don't know the answer! "
Ulrich's short pause for breath was only rhetorical, for he intended to develop his views further. Agathe, however, who had so far been listening with the curiously passive alertness that was sometimes characteristic of her, switched the conversation onto a totally differ- ent track with the simple remark that she wasn't interested in this answer because all she wanted to know was where Ulrich himself stood; she was not in a position to grasp what everyone might think.
"But ifyou expect me to accomplish anything in any form whatso- ever, I'd rather have no principles at all," she added.
"Thank God for that! " Ulrich said. "It's always a pleasure for me, every time I look at your youth, beauty, and strength, to hear from you that you have no energy at all! Our era is dripping with the en- ergy of action. It's not interested in ideas, only in deeds. This fearful activity stems from the single fact that people have nothing to do. Inwardly, I mean. But even outwardly, in the last analysis, everyone spends his whole life repeating the same thing over and over: he gets into some occupation and then goes on with it. I think this brings us
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back to the question you raised before, out there in the open air. It's so simple to have the energy to act, and so hard to make any sense of it! Almost nobody understands that these days. That's why our men of action look like men bowling; they manage to knock down their nine pins with all the gestures of a Napoleon. It wouldn't even sur- prise me to see them ending up by assaulting each other in a frenzy, because of their inability to comprehend why all action is inade- quate. . . . " He had spoken energetically at first but lapsed again, first into pensiveness, then into silence for a while. At last he just glanced up with a smile and contented himself with saying: "You say that if I expect any moral effort from you, you are bound to disappoint me. I say that if you expect any moral counsel from me, I am bound to disappoint you. I think that we have nothing definite to demand of one another-all of us, I mean; we really shouldn't demand action from one another; we should create the conditions that make action possible; that's how I feel about it. "
"But how is that to be done? " Agathe said. She realized that Ulrich had abandoned the big pronouncements he had begun with and had drifted into something closer to himself, but even this was too gen- eral for her taste. She had, as we know, no use for general analysis and regarded every effort that extended beyond her own skin, as it were, as more or less hopeless; she was sure of this for her own part, and believed it was probably true of the general assertions of others too. Still, she understood Ulrich quite well. She noticed that as he sat there with his head down, speaking softly against the energy of ac- tion, her brother kept absentmindedly carving notches and lines into the table with his pocketknife, and all the sinews of his hand were tense. The unthinking but almost impassioned motion of his hand, and the frank way he had spoken of Agathe's youth and beauty, made for an absurd duet above the orchestra of the other words; nor did she try to give it a meaning other than that she was sitting here watching.
"What's to be done? " Ulrich replied in the same tone as before. "At our cousin's I once proposed to Count Leinsdorf that he should found a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul, so that even the people who don't go to church would know what they had to do. Nat- urally, I only said it in fun, for while we created science a long time ago for truth, asking for something similar to cope with everything
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else would still appear so foolish today as to be embarrassing. And yet everything the two of us have been talking about so far would logi- cally call for such a secretariat! " He had dropped the speech and leaned back against his bench. "I suppose I'm dissolving into thin air again if I add: But how would that turn out today? ''
Since Agathe did not reply, there was a silence. After a while Ul- rich said: "Anyway, I sometimes think that I can't really stand believ- ing that myself! When I saw you before, standing on the rampart," he added in an undertone, "I suddenly had a wild urge to do some- thing! I don't know why. I really have done some rash things some- times. The magic lay in the fact that when it was over, there was something more besides me. Sometimes I'm inclined to think that a person could be happy even as a result of a crime, because it gives him a certain ballast and perhaps keeps him on a steadier course.