She smiled like an adolescent who has misbehaved with
deliberate
provocation.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
" He said it in a rush, which could be inter- preted as a sign of excitement.
This left Arnheim, who was staying on to wait for Diotima, rather disconcerted and worried that it might not be too easy to fmd a face-saving way of making Ulrich forget the offer.
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122
GOING HOME
Ulrich decided to walk home. It was a fine night, though dark. The houses, tall and compact, formed that strange space "street," open at the top to darkness, wind, and clouds. The road was deserted, as if the earlier unrest had left everything in a deep slumber. Whenever Ulrich did encounter a pedestrian, the sound of his footsteps had preceded him independently for a long time, like some weighty an- nouncement. The night gave one a sense ofimpending events, as in a theater. One had a notion of oneself as a phenomenon in this world, something that appears bigger than it. is, that produces an echo, and, when it passes·lighted surfaces, is accompanied by its shadow like a huge spastic clown, rising to full height and the next moment creep- ing humbly to heel. How happy one can bel he thought.
He walked through a stone archway in a passage some ten paces long, running parallel td the street and separated from it by heavy buttresses; darkness leapt from comers, ambush and sudden death flickered in the dim cloister; a fierce, ancient, grim joy seized the soul. Perhaps this was too much; Ulrich suddenly imagined with what smugness and inward self-dramatization Arnheim would be walking her~ in his place. It killed the pleasure in his shadow and echo, and the spooky music in the walls faded out. He knew that he would not accept Arnheim:s ·offer, but now he merely felt like a phantom stumbling through life's gallery, dismayed at being unable to find the body it should occupy, and was thoroughly relieved when before long he passed into a district less grand and less oppressive.
Wide streets and squares opened out in the blackness, and ,the commonplace buildings, peacefully starred with lighted rows ofwin- dows, laid no further spell on him. Comi,ng into the open, he breathed this peace and remembered for no special reason some childhood photographs he had recently been looking at, pictures showing him with his mother, who had died young; from what a dis-
tance he had regarded the little boy, with the beautiful woman in an old-fashioned dress happily smiling at him. There was that overpow- ering impression of the good, affectionate, bright little boy they all felt him to be; there were hopes for him that were in no way his own; there were the vague expectations of a distinguished, promising fu- ture, like the outspread wings ofa golden net opening to enfold him. And though all this had been invisible at the time, there it was for all to see decades afterward in those old photographs, and from the midst ofthis visible invisibility that could so easily have become real- ity, there was his tender, blank baby face looking back at him with the slightly forced expression of having to hold still. He had felt n? t a trace ofwarmth for that little boy, 'and even ifhe did take some pride in his beautiful mother, he had on the whole the impressi6n of hav- ing narrowly escaped a great horror.
Anyone who has had the experience of seeing some earlier incar- n a t i o n o f h i m s e l f g a z i n g a t him f r o m a n o l d p h o t o g r a p h , w r a p p e d i n a bygone moment of self-satisfaction, as if glue had dried up or fallen out, will understand 'Ulrich's asking himself what sort of glue it was that seemed to hold for other people. He had now reached one of those green spaces bordered by trees, a break in the Ringstrasse, which follows the line of the ancient city walls, and he might have crossed it in a few strides, but the broad strip of sky above the trees made him turn aside and follow where it was leading, seeming to come closer and closer to the festoons of lights so intent upon their privacy in the distant sky above that wintry park, without actually get- ting any nearer to them. It's a kind of foreshortening of the mind's perspective, he thought, that creates the tranquil sense of the eve- n i n g , w h i c h , f r o m o n e d a y t~ t h e n e x t , g i v e s o n e t h i s f i r m s e n s e o f l i f e being in full accord with itself. Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one's ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them. And just as the visual relationships of things always shift to make a coherent . picture for the eye, one in which the immediate and near at hand looks big, while even the big things at a distance look small and the gaps close up and the scene as a whole ends by rounding itself out, so it is with the invisible c(mnec- tions which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in
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such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in charge of o~raffairs. And just this is what I don't seem to be able to achieve the way I should, he said to himself.
A wide puddle blocked his way. Perhaps it was this puddle, or per- haps it was the bare, broonilike trees on either side, that conjured up a country road and a village, and awakened in him that monotonous state of the soul halfway between fulfillment and futility which comes with life in the country, a life that had tempted him more than once to repeat the "escape" he had made as a young man.
Everything becomes so simple, he felt. One's feelings get drowsy, one,'s thoughts drift offlike clouds after bad weather, and suddenly a clear sky breaks out of the soul, and under that sky a cow in the mid- dle of the path may begin· to blaze with meaning; things come in- tensely alive as if there were nothing else in the world. A single cloud drifting past may transform the whole region: the grass darkens, then shines with wetness; nothing else has happened, and yet it's been like a voyage from one seashore to another. Or an old man loses his last tooth, and this trifling event may become a landmark in the lives of his neighbors, from which they date their memories. Every evening the birds sing around the village in the same way, in the stillness of the setting sun, but it feels like something·new happening every time, as though·the world were not yet seven days old! In the coun- try, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life's notorious turning into abstraction.
But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this ab- straction extended a man's powers a thousandfold and how, even if from the point ofview of any given detail it diluted him tenfold, as a whole it expanded him a hundredfold, and there could be no ques- tion of turning the wheel backward. And in one of those apparently random and abstract thoughts ~at so often assumed importance in his life, it struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened. . . . " It is the simple sequence of events in which. the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a unidimensional order,
as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"! Terrible things ,nay have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as con- tented as ifthe sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried- and-true "foreshortening of the mind's perspective," were not al- ready part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional "because" or "in order that" gets knotted into the thread oflife, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has·the look of neces- sity, and the impression that their life has a "course" is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be. narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.
When he resumed his homeward progress, reflecting on this in- sight, he remembered Goethe writing in an essay on art that "Man is not a teaching animal but one that lives, acts, and influences. " He respectfully shrugged his shoulders. "These days," he thought, "a man can only allow himself to forget the uncertainties on which he must base his life and his actions as much as an actor who forgets the scenery and his makeup, and believes that he is really living his part. " The thought of Goethe, however, brought back the thought of Arn- heim, who was always misusing Goethe as an authority, and Ulrich su~denly remembered with distaste his extraordinary confusion when Arnheim had placed an arm on his shoulder. At this point he had emerged from under the trees and was back on the street, look- ing for the best way home. Peering upward for a street sign, he al- most ran full tilt into a shadowy figure emerging from the darkness,
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and had to pull up short to avoid knocking down the prostitute who had stepped in his way. She held her ground and smiled instead of revealing her annoyance at his having charged into her like a bull, and. Ulrich suddenly felt that her professional smile somehow cre- ated a little aura of warmth in the night. She spoke to him, using the threadbare words commonly thrown out as bait, which are like the dirty leavings of other men. She had a child's sloping shoulders, blond hair was showing under her hat, and her face looked pale, even indefmably appealing under the lamplight; beneath her nighttime makeup there was the suggestion of a young girl's freckled skin. She was much shorter than Ulrich and had to look up into his face, yet she said "baby" to him again, too numb to see anything out of place in this sound she uttered hundreds of times in a night.
Ulrich found it touching somehow. He did not brush her off but stopped and let her repeat her offer, as though he had not under- stood. Here he had unexpectedly found a friend who, for a slight charge, would put herselfentirely at his disposal, ready to do her best to please him and avoid anything to put him off. If he showed himself willing, she would slip her arm in his with a gentle trustfulness and faint hesitation, as when old friends meet again for the frrst time after a separation not of their own making. If he promised to double or
·treble her usual price, and put the money on the table beforehand, so that she need not think about it but could abandon herself to that carefree, obliging state of mind that goes with having made a good deal, it would be shown· that pure indifference has the merit of all pure feeling, which is without personal presumption and functions minus the needless confusion caused by interference from private emotions. Such thoughts went through his mind, half seriously, half flippantly, and he could not bring himself altogether to disappoint the little person, who was waiting for him to strike a deal; he even realized that he wanted her to like him, but clumsily enough, instead of simply exchanging a few words with her in the language of her profession, he fumbled in ~s pocket, slipped approximately the amount she would have asked into her hand, and walked on. For the space of a moment he had briefly pressed her hand-which had oddly resisted, in· her surprise-firmly in his, with a single friendly word. But as he left this willing volunteer behind, he knew that she would rejoin her colleagues, who were whispering nearby in the
dark, show them the money, and finally think of some gibe at him to give vent to feelings she could not understand.
The encounter lived on in his mind for a while as though it had been a tender idyll of a minute's duration. He did not romanticize the poverty of his fleeting friend or her debasement, but when he imagined how she would have turned up her eyes and given the fake little moan she had learned to deliver at the right moment, he couldn't help feeling without knowing why that there was something touching about this deeply vulgar, hopelessly inept private perform- ance for an agreed price; perhaps because it was a burlesque version of the human comedy itself. Even while he was still speaking to the girl he had thought fleetingly of Moosbrugger, the pathological co- median, the pursuer and nemesis of prostitutes, who had been out walking on that other, unlucky night just as Ulrich was this evening. When the housefronts on that street had stopped swaying like stage scenery for a moment, Moosbrugger had bumped into the unknown creature who had awaited him by the bridge the night ofthe murder. What a shock of recognition it must have been, going through him from head to toe: for an . instant, Ulrich thought he could feel it him- self. Something was lifting him off the ground like a wave; he lost his balance but didn't need it, the movement itself carried him along. His heart contracted, but his imaginings became confused and over- ran all bounds, until they dissolved in an almost enervating voluptu- ousness. He made an effort to calm down. He had apparently been living so long without some central purpose that he was actually en- vying a psychopath his obsessions and his faith in the part he was playing! But Moosbrugger was fascinating, after all, not just to him- selfbut to everyone else as well. Ulrich heard Amheim's voice asking him: 'Would you set him free? " and his own answer: "No! Probably not. " Never ever, he now said to himself, and yet he had the hal- lucinatory image of an act in which the movement of reaching out in some extreme state of excitement and that of being moved by it fused into an ineffable communion, in which desire was indistin- guishable from compulsion, meaning from necessity, and the most intense activity from blissful receptiveness. He fleetingly recalled the opinion that sm:h luckless creatures as Moosbrugger were the em- bodiments of repressed instincts common to all, of all the murders and rapes committed in fantasies. Let those who believed this make
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their own peace with Moosbrugger, let them justify him to reestab- lish their own morality, after they had satisfied their dark urges through him! UlriCh's conflict was different; he repressed nothing and could not help seeing that the image ofa murderer was no stran- ger to him than any other ofthe world's pictures; what they all had in common with hl~ own old images of himself: part crystallization of meaning, part resurgence ofthe nonsense beneath. A nimpant meta- phor oforder, that was what Moosbrugger meant for him. And sud- denly Ulrich said: "All of that-" and made a gesture as though thrusting something aside with the baclc of his hand. He had not merely thought it, he had said it out loud, and reacted to hearing himself speak by pressing his lips together and finishing his state- ment in silence: "All ofthat has to be settled, once and for alii" Never mind what "all of that" was in detail; it was everything he had been preoccupied with, tormented by, sometimes even delighted with, ever since he had taken his "sabbatical"-everything that had tied him up in knots, like a dreamer for whom all things are possible ex- cept getting up and moving about; all that had led him froq1 one im- possible thing to another, from t:P. e very b~ginning until these last minutes of his homeward walk. Ulrich felt that he would now at long last have to either live like everybody else, for some attainable goal, or come to grips with one of his imp<>. ssible possibilities. He had reached his own neighborhood, and he quickened his pace through the last street with a peculiar sense of hovering on some threshold. The feeling lent him wings, it moved him to take action, but as it was unspecific, again he was left with only an incomparable sense of freedom. ·
This might have passed off like so much else, but when he turned the comer into his own street he thought he saw all the windows of his house lit up, and shortly afterward, when he reached his garden gate, he could have no doubt about it. His old servant had asked for permission to spend the night with relatives somewhere; Ulrich had not been home since the episode with Gerda, when it was still day- light, and the gardener couple, who lived on the ground floor, never entered his rooms; yet there were lights on everywhere-intruders must be in the house, burglars he was about to take by surprise. Ul- rich was so bewildered, and so disinclined to shake off the spell he was under, that he walked straight up to the house without hesita-
tion. He had no idea what to expect. He saw shadows on the windows that seemed to indicate there was only one person moving about in- side, but there could be more, and he wondered whether he might be walking into a bullet as he entered-or should he be prepared to shoot first? In a different state of mind Ulrich would probably have gone looking for a policeman or at least investigated the situation before deciding what to do, but he wanted this adventure to himself, and did not even reach for the pistol he sometimes carried since the night he had been knocked down bythe hoodlums. He wanted . . . he didn't know what he wanted; he was willing to see what happened!
But when he pushed open the front door and entered the house, the burglar he had been looking forward to with such mixed feelings was only Clarisse.
12-3
-
THE TURNING POINT
Ulrich's recklessness might from the beginning have been motivated in part by an underlying faith in some harmless· explanation for ev- erything, that shying away from believing the worst that always leads one into danger; nevertheless, when his old servant unexpectedly came up to him in the hall, he almost knocked him down. Fortu- nately, he stopped himself in time, and was told that a telegram had come, which Clarisse had signed for and was now holding for him upstairs. The young lady had arrived about an hour ago, just as he, the old man, had been about to leave, and she would not let herself be turned away, so that he had preferred to stay in and give up his night out this once, for if he might be permitted to say so, the young lady seemed to be rather upset.
Ulrich thanked him and went up to his rooms, where he found Clarisse lying on the couch, on her side with her legs drawn up. Her straight, slim figure, her boyish haircut, and the charming oval of her
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face resting on . one hand as she looked at him when he· opened the door all made a most seductive picture. He told her that he had taken her for a burglar.
Clarisse's eyes flashed like rapid bursts of machine-gun fire. "Maybe I am a burglar! " she said. "That old fox your servant did his best to make me leave. I sent him off to bed, but I know he's been lurking out of sight downstairs somewhere. Your house is lovely! " She held out the telegram to him without getting up. "I was curious to see what you're like when you come home to be by yourself," she went on. 'Walter's gone to a concert. He won't be back till after mid- night. But I didn't tell him fwas coming to see you. "
Ulrich ripped open the telegram and read it while only half listen- ing to Clarisse's words. He turned suddenly pale and read the star- tling message over again, unable to take it in. Although he had failed to answer several letters from his father asking him about the prog- ress of the Parallel Campaign and the problem of "diminishe~ re- sponsibility," a longish interval had passed, without his noticing it, since any further reminders had come-and now this telegram, obvi- ously drafted in advance with meticulous care by his father hims~lf, informed him punctiliously, and in a funereal ~one that did not quite succeed in repressing all reproach, ofhis own death. There had been little enough affection between them; in fact, the thought of his fa- ther had almost always been rather disturbing to Ulrich, and yet, as he now read the quaintly sinister text over again, he was thinking: "Now I am all alone in the world. " He did not mean it literally, nor would that have made any sense, considering how things had been between them; what he meant was that he felt, with some amaze- ment, that he was floating free, as though some mooring rope had snapped, or that· his state of alienation from a world to which his fa- ther had been the last link had now become complete and final.
"My father's dead," he said to Clarisse, holding up the telegram with a touch of unintended solemnity.
"Oh! " Clarisse said. "Congratulations! " And after a slight, thoughtful pause she added: "I suppos,e you're going to be very rich now? " and looked around with interest.
"I don't believe he was more than moderatelywell off," Ulrich re- plied distantly. 'Tve been living here quite beyond his means. "
Clarisse acknowledged the rebuke with a tiny smile, a sort of little
curtsy of a smile; many of her expressi~e movements were as abrupt and disproportionate in a small space as the theatrical bow of a boy who must demonstrate before company how well he has been brought up. She was left alone, for a few moments while Ulrich ex- cused himselfto go and make preparations for the trip he would have to take. When she had left Walter after their violent scene she had not gone far; outside the door to their apartment there was a seldom- use~staircase leading up to the attic, and there she had sat, wrapped in a shawl, until she heard him leave the house. It made her think of the lofts in theaters for the stage machinery, where ropes run on pul- leys, and there she sat while Walter made his exit down the stairs. She imagined that actresses might sit on the rafters above the stage between calls, wrapped in shawls, watching the stage from above; en- joying a full view ofeverything that was going on, just as she was now. It fitted in with a favorite notion ofhers, that life was a dramatic role to be played. There was no need to understal)d one's part rationally, she thought; after all, what did anyone know about it, even those who might know tnore than she did? It was a matter of having the right instinct for life, like a storm bird. One simply spread out one's arms-and for her that included words, tears, ldsses-like wings and took off! This fantasy offered some compensation to her for being no longer able to believe in Walter's future. She looked down the steep staircase Walter had just descended, spread her arms, and kept them raised in that position as long as she could; perhaps she could help him in that way! A steep ascent and a steep descent are strong com- plementary opposites and belong together, she thought. "Joyful world aslant" was what she named her wingspread arms and her gaze down the stairwell. She changed her mind about snealdng out to watch the demonstrators in town; what did she care about the com- mon herd; the fantastic drama of the elect had begun! .
And so Clarisse had gone to see Ulrich. On the way a sly smile would sometimes appear on her face, whenever it occurred to her that Walter thought her crazy each time she let slip any sign of her greater insight into what was going on between them. It tickled her vanity to know that he was afraid of having a child by her even while he impatiently longed for it. "Crazy" to her meant being some- thing like summer lightning, or enjoying so extraordinary a degree of health that it frightened people; it was a quality her marriage had
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brought out in her, step by step, as her feelings of superiority and control grew. She did realize, all the same, that there were times when other people did not know what to make of her, and when Ul- rich reappeared she felt she ought to say something to him that would be in keeping with an event that cut so deeply into his life. She leapt up from the couch, paced through the room and the adjoining rooms, and then said: "Well, my sincere condolences, old fellow! "
Ulrich looked at her in astonishment, although he recognized _the tone she fell into when she was nervous. Sometimes she's so hope- lessly conventional, he thought; it;s like coming upon a page from another book bound in with what one is reading. She had not both- ered to watch her words with the appropriate expression but had flung them at him sideways, over her shoulder, which heightened the effect of hearing, not a false note exactly, but the wrong words to the tune, giving the uncanny impression that she herself consisted of many such misplaced texts. ,
When she received no answer from Ulrich, she stopped in front of him and said: "I have to talk with you! "
"May I offer you some refreshment? " Ulrich said.
Clarisse only fluttered her hand at shoulder height to signal no. She pulled her thoughts together and said: "Walter is dead set on having a child. Can you understand that? " She seemed to be waiting for an answer. But what could Ulrich have said to that?
"But I don't want to! " she cried out violently.
"Well, no need to fly into a rage," Ulrich said. "Ifyou don't want to, it can't happen. "
"But it's destroying him! "
"People who are always expecting to die generally live a long time! You and I will be shriveled ancients while Walter will still have his boyish face under his white mane as Director of his Archives. "
Clarisse turned pensively on her heel and walked away from Ul- rich; at a distance, she wheeled to face him again and "fixed him" with her eye.
"Have you ever seen an umbrella with its shaft removed? Walter falls apart when I tum away from him. I'm his shaft and he's . . . " She was about to say "my umbrella" but thought ofsomething much bet- ter: "my shield," she said. "He sees himself as my protector. And the fust thing that means is giving me a big belly. Next will be the lee-
tures on breast-feeding the infant because that is nature's way, and then he'll want to bring up the child in his own image. You know him well enough to know all that. All he wants is to have the rights to everything and a terrific excuse for making bourgeois conformists out of both of us. But if I go on saying no, as I have been, he'll be done for. I mean simply everything to him! "
Ulrich smiled incredulously at this sweeping claim. "He wants to kill you," Clarisse added quickly. "What? I thought that was your suggestion to him. " "I want the child from you! " Clarisse said.
Ulrich whistled through his teeth in surprise.
She smiled like an adolescent who has misbehaved with deliberate provocation.
"I wouldn't do something so underhanded to such an old friend," Ulrich said slowly. "It goes against my grain. " ·
"Oh? So you're a man of high scruple, are you? " Clarisse seemed to attach some special significance of her own to this that Ulrich didn't understand. She gave it some thought and. then retu~ed to the attack: "But if you are my lover, he's got you where he wants you. "
"How do you mean? "
. "It's obvious; I just don't know quite how to put it. You'll be forced
to treat him with consideration. We'll both be feeling sorry for him. You can't just go ahead and cheat on him, of course, so you'll have to try to make it up to him somehow. And so on and so forth. And most important of all, you'll be driving him to bring out the best that's in him. You know perfectly well that we are stuck inside ourselves like statues in a block ofstone. We have to sculpt ourway out! We have to force each other to do it. "
"Maybe so," Ulrich said, "but aren't you getting ahead ofyourself? What makes you think any of this will happen? "
Clarisse was smiling again. "Perhaps I am ahead of myself," she said. She sidled up to him and slipped her arm confidingly under his, which hung limply at his side and made no room for hers. "Don't you find me attractive? Don't you like me? " she asked. And when he did not answer, she went on: "But you do find me attractive, I know it; I've seen it often enough, the way you look at me, when you come to see us. Do you remember if I've ever told you that you're the Devil?
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That's how I feel. Try to understand, I'm not calling you a poor devil: that's the kind who wants to do evil because he doesn't know any better. You are a great devil: you know what's good and you do the opposite of what you'd like to dol You know the life we lead is abomi- nable, and so you say mockingly that we must go on with it. And you say, full ofyour high scruples, 'I won't cheat on a friend,' but you only say that because you've thought a hundred times, 'I'd like to have Clarisse. ' But just because you're a devil you have something ofa god inside you, Ulo! A great god. The kind who lies to try to 'keep from being recognized. You dowant me. . . . "
She had gripped both his arms now, standing before him with her face lifted up to his, her body curving back like a plant responding to a touch on its petals. In a moment her face will be drenched with that look, like the last time, Ulrich thought apprehensively. But nothing of the kind happened; her face remained beautiful. Instead of her usual tight smile there was an open one, which showed a little of her teeth between the rosy flesh ofher lips, as though about to bite. Her mouth took on the shape of a double Cupid's bow, a line echoed in the curve of her eyebrows and again in the translucent cloud of her hair. ·
"For a long time now you've been wanting to pick me up with those teeth in that lying mouth ofyours and carry me off, ifonlyyou could stand to let me see you as you really are," Clarisse had con- tinued. Ulrich gently freed himself from her grip. She dropped down on the couch as if he had put her there, and pulled him down after her.
"You really shouldn't let your imagination run away with you like this," Ulrich said in reproof. ·
Clarisse had let go of him. She closed her eyes and supported her head with both hands, her elbows resting on her knees; now that her second attack had been repelled, she decided to resort to icy logic.
"Don't be so literal-minded," she said. "When I speak of the Devil, or of God, it's only a figure of speech. But when I'm alone at home, or walking in the neighborhood, I often think: If I turn to the left, God will come; if I turn to the right, the Devil. Or when I'm about to pick something up with my hand, I have the same feeling about using the right or the left hand. When I tell Walter about it he puts his hands in his pockets, in real panic. He's happy to see a flower
in bloom, or even a snail, but don't you think the life we lead is terri- bly· sad? No God comes, or the Devil either. I've been waiting for years now, but what is there to wait for? Nothing. That's all there is, unless art can work a miracle and change everything. "
At this moment there was something so gentle and sad about her that Ulrich gave way to an impulse to touch her soft hair wi\:h his hand. "You may be right in the details, Clarisse," he said. "But I. can never follow your leaps from one point to another, or see how it all hangs together. "
"It's quite simple," she said, still in the same posture as before. "As time went on, an idea came to me. Listen! " She straightened up and was suddenly quite vivacious again. "Didn't you once say yourself that the way we live is full of cracks through which we can see the impossible state of affairs underneath, as it were? You needn't say anything, I've known about it for a long time. W e all want to have our lives in order, but nobody has! I play the piano or paint a picture, but it's like putting up a screen to hide a hole in the wall. You and Walter also have ideas, and I don't understand much ofthat, but that doesn't work either, and you said yourself that we avoid looking at the hole out of habit or laziness, or else we let ourselves be distracted from it by bad things. Well, there's a simple answer: That's the hole we have to escape through! And I know how! There are days when I can slip out of myself. Then it's like finding yourself-how shall I put it? - right in the center ofthings as ifpeeled out ofa shell, and the things have had their dirty ri~d peeled off too. Or else one feels connected by the air with everything there is, like a Siamese twin. It's an incred- ible, marvelous feeling; everything turns into music and color and rhythm, and I'm no longer the citizen Clarisse, as I was baptized, but perhaps a shining splinter pressing into some immense unfathom- able happiness. But you know all about that. That's what you meant when you said that there's something impossible about reality, and that one's experiences should not be turned inward, as something personal and real, but must be turned outward, like a song or a paint- ing, and so on and so forth. Oh, I could recite it all exactly the way you said it. " Her "so on and so forth" recurred like some wild refrain as Clarisse's torrent of words flowed on, regularly interspersed with her assertion "You can do it, but you won't, and I don't know why you won't, but I'm going to shake you up! "
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Ulrich had let her go on talking, only shaking his head from time to time when she attributed to him something too unlikely, but he could not bring himselfto argue with her and left his hand resting on her hair, where his fingertips could almost sense the confused pulsa- tion of the thoughts inside her skull. He had never yet seen Clarisse in such a state of sensual excitement and was amazed to see that even in her slim, hard young body there was room for all the loosening and soft expansion of a woman's glowing passion; this sudden, always sur- prising opening up of a woman one has known only as inaccessibly shut away in herself did not fail to have its effect on him. Although they defied all reason, her words did not repel him, for as they came close to touching him in the quick and then again angled off into ab- surdity, their constant rapid movement, like a buzzing or humming, drowned out the quality of the tone, beautiful or ugly, in the intensity of the vibrations. Listening to her seemed to help him make up his mind, like some wild music, and it was only when she seemed to have· lost her way in the maze ofher own words and could not find her way out that he shook her head a little with his outspread hand, as though to call her back and set her straight.
But the opposite ofwhat he intended happened, for Clarisse sud- denly made a physical assault on him. She flung an arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his so quickly that it_took him completely by surprise and he had no time to resist, as she pulled her legs up under her body and slid over to him so that she ended up kneeling in his lap, ~d he could feel the little hard ball 9f one breast pressing against his shoulder. He caught barely anything ofwhat she was say- ing; she stammered something about her power of redemption, his cowardice, and his being a "barba'rian," which was why she wanted to conceive the redeemer of the world from him and not from Walter. Actually, her words were no more than a raving murmur at his ear, a hasty muttering under her breath more concerned with itself than with communication, a rippling stream of sound in which he could only catch a word here and there, such as ''Moosbrugger" or "Devil's Eye. " In self-defense he had grabbed his little assailant by her upper arms and pushed her back on the couch, so that she was now strug- gling against him with her legs, pushing her hair into his face and trying to get her arms around his neck again.
'Til kill you if you don't give in," she said loud and clear. Like a
boy fighting in affection mixed with anger, who won't be put off, she struggled on in mounting excitement. The effort of restraining her left him with only a faint sense of the current of desire streaming through her body; even so, Ulrich had been strongly affected by it at the moment of putting his arm firmly around her and pressing her down. It was as if her body had penetrated his senses. He had after all known her for such a long time, and had often indulged in a bit of horseplay with her, but he had never been in such close, head-to-toe contact with this little creature, so familiar and yet so strange, its heart wildly ·bouncing, and when Clarisse's movements quieted down in the grip of his hands, and the relaxation of her muscles was reflected tenderly in the glow of her eyes, what he did not want to happen almost happened. But at this instant he thought of Gerda, as though it were only nmv that he was facing the challenge to come to terms with himself.
"I don't want to, Clarisse," he said, and let her go. "I need to be by myself now, and I have things to do before I leave. "
When Clarisse grasped his refusal, it was as though with a jolt her head had shifted gears. She saw Ulrich standing a few steps away, his face contorted with embarrassment, saw him saying things she did not seem to take in, but as she watched the movement of his lips she felt a growing revulsion. Then she noticed that her skirt was above herknees,andjumpedupoffthecouch. Beforesheunderstoodwhat had happened, she was on her feet, shaking her hair and her clothes into place, as ifshe had been lying on the grass, and said:
"Of course you have to pack now; I won't keep you any longer. " She was smiling again, her normal vaguely scoffing smile that was forced through a narrow slit, and wished him a good trip. "By the time you're back we'll probably have Meingast staying with us. He wrote to say he was coming, and that's actually what I came to tell you," she added casually.
Ulrich hesitantly held her hand. She was rubbing his playfully with a finger. She would have given anything to know what in the world she had been saying to him; she must have said all sorts of things, because she had been so worked up that now she had forgotten it all! She did have a general idea of what had happehed, and she didn't mind; for her feelings told her that she had been brave or ready to sacrifice herself, and Ulrich timid. She wanted only to part as good
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friends and not to leave him in any doubt about that. "Better not tell Walter about this visit, and keep what we were talking about be- tWeen ourselves for the time being. " she said lightly. She gave him her hand once more at the garden gate and declined his offer to ac- company her beyond it.
· When Ulrich went back into the house he was preoccupied. He had to write some letters to let Count Leinsdorf and Diotima know he was leaving and had to attend to various other details, because he foresaw that taking over his inheritance might keep him away for some time. He stuffed various personal articles and a few books into the traveling cases already packed by his servant, whom he had sent off to bed, but when he had finished he no longer felt like going to bed himself. He was both exhausted and overstimulated after his eventful day, yet instead ofcanceling each other out, these two states of feeling only heightened each other so that, tired as he was, he felt unable to sleep.
Not really thinking, but followirig the oscillations· of his memories, Ulrich began by acknowledging that he could no longer doubt his impression, at various times, that Clarisse was not merely an unusual person but probably already mentally unbalanced-and yet, during her attack just now, or whatever one might call it, she had said things that were too close for comfort to much ·that he had occasionally said himself. This should have started him really thinking hard, but it only brought the unwelcome reminder, in his half-drowsy state, that he still had much to do. Almost halfofthe year he had taken offto think was gone, without his having settled any of his problems. It flashed through his mind that Gerda had urged him to write a book about it. But he wanted to live without splitting himself into a real and a shadow self. He remembered speaking to Section Chief Tuzzi about writing. He saw himself and Tuzzi standing in Diotirna's drawing room, and there was something theatrical, something stagy, about the scene. He remembered saying casually that he would probably have to either write a book or kill himself. But the thought of death, thinking it over at close range, so to speak, did not in the least corre- spond to his present state of mind either; when he explored it a little and toyed with the notion of killing himself before morning instead of taking the train, it struck him as an improper conjunction at the moment he had received the news of his father's death! · Half asleep
as he was, the figures of his imagination raced through his mind; he saw himself peering down the dark barrel of a gun, where he saw a shadowy nothing, the darkness veiling the depths beyond, and mused on the rare coincidence that the same image of a loaded gun had been his favorite metaphor in his youth, when his will was all charged up, waiting to take aim and let fly at some unknown target. His mind was flooded with images such as the pistol and standing with Tuzzi. The look of a meadow in the early morning. A winding river valley filled with dense evening mists, as seen from a moving train. The place at the far end of Europe where he had parted from the woman he loved-he had forgotten what she looked like, but the image ofthe unpaved village streets and the thatched cottages was as fresh as yesterday. The hair under the arm of another loved woman, all that was left ofher. Snatches offorgotten melodies. A characteris- tic movement. The fragrance of flower beds, unnoticed at the time because ofthe charged words being forced out by the profound emo- tion of two souls, and coming back to him now when the words and the people were long forgotten. He saw a man on various paths, al- most painful to look at, left over like a row of puppets that had had their springs broken long ago. One would think that such images are the most transient things in the world, but there are moments when all one's life splits up into such images, solitary relics along the road oflife, as though the road led only away from them and back to them again, as though a man's fate were obeying not his ideas and his will but these mysterious, half-meaningless pictures.
But while he was moved almost to tears by the pointlessness, the uselessness, ofall the efforts he had ever taken pride in, his sleepless, exhausted state gave rise to a feeling, or perhaps one should say that a marvelous feeling diffused itself around him. The lights Clarisse had turned on in all the rooms while she was alone were still on, and an excess of light flowed back and forth between the walls and the objects, filling the space between with an almost living presence. It was probably the tenderness inherent in any painless state ofexhaus- tion that changed his total sense ofhis body; this ever-present though unheeded physical self-awareness, vaguely enough defined in any case, now passed over into a more yielding and expansive state. It was a loosening up as though a tourniquet were coming undone, and since neither the walls nor the objects underwent any real change
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and no god entered the rooms of this unbeliever, and since Ulrich himself by no means allowed his clear judgment to become clouded (unless his fatigue deceived him into thinking so), it could only be the relationship between himself and his surroundings that was under- going such a change. The transformation was not objective; it was a subjective expanse of feeling, deep as groundwater, on which the senses and the intelligence, those pillars ofobjective perception, nor- mally supported themselves but o~ which they now were gently separating or merging-the distinction lost its meaning almost as soon as he made it.
"It's a change in attitude; as I change, everything else involved changes too," Ulrich thought, sure that he had himself well under observation. But one could also say that his solitude-a condition that was present within him as well as around him, binding both his worlds-it could be said, and he felt it himself, that this solitude was growing greater or denser all the time. It flowed through the walls, flooded the city, ·then, without actually expanding, inundated the world. "What world? " he thought. "There is none! " The notion no longer seemed to have any meaning. But Ulrich's good judgment was still sufficiently in charge to make him recoil at once from such an exaggeration; he stopped hunting for more words and moved instead toward a state of full wakefulness, After a few seconds he gave a start. Day was breaking,. its gray pallor mingling with the swiftly withering brightness of the artificial light.
Ulrich jumped to his feet and stretched. Something remained in his body that he could not shake off. He passed a finger over his eye- lids, but something remained of that gentleness, that fusion of his vision and the things it beheld. And suddenly he recognized in a way hard to describe a sort of dr8. ining away of his strength, as though he had lost any power to go on denying that he was again standing ex- actly where he had stood years before. He shook his head, smiling. "An attack of 'the major's wife,' " he called it mockingly. There was no real danger of that, his rational mind told him, since there was no one with whom he could have repeated that old foolishness. He opened a window. The air outside was neutral, ordinary everyday morning air in which the first sounds of the city's life were·striking up. He let its coolness rinse his temples, as the civilized European's distaste for sentimentality began to fill him with its hard clarity and
he made up his mind to deal with the situation, ifnecessary, with the utmost precision. And yet, standing for a long time at the window, staring out into the morning without thinking ofanything, he still had a sense of all the feelings that were slipping gleamingly away.
His servant's sudden entrance, with the solemn expression of the early riser, to wake him' up, took Ulrich by surprise. He took a bath, rapidly did a few vigorous exercises, and left for the railroad station.
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122
GOING HOME
Ulrich decided to walk home. It was a fine night, though dark. The houses, tall and compact, formed that strange space "street," open at the top to darkness, wind, and clouds. The road was deserted, as if the earlier unrest had left everything in a deep slumber. Whenever Ulrich did encounter a pedestrian, the sound of his footsteps had preceded him independently for a long time, like some weighty an- nouncement. The night gave one a sense ofimpending events, as in a theater. One had a notion of oneself as a phenomenon in this world, something that appears bigger than it. is, that produces an echo, and, when it passes·lighted surfaces, is accompanied by its shadow like a huge spastic clown, rising to full height and the next moment creep- ing humbly to heel. How happy one can bel he thought.
He walked through a stone archway in a passage some ten paces long, running parallel td the street and separated from it by heavy buttresses; darkness leapt from comers, ambush and sudden death flickered in the dim cloister; a fierce, ancient, grim joy seized the soul. Perhaps this was too much; Ulrich suddenly imagined with what smugness and inward self-dramatization Arnheim would be walking her~ in his place. It killed the pleasure in his shadow and echo, and the spooky music in the walls faded out. He knew that he would not accept Arnheim:s ·offer, but now he merely felt like a phantom stumbling through life's gallery, dismayed at being unable to find the body it should occupy, and was thoroughly relieved when before long he passed into a district less grand and less oppressive.
Wide streets and squares opened out in the blackness, and ,the commonplace buildings, peacefully starred with lighted rows ofwin- dows, laid no further spell on him. Comi,ng into the open, he breathed this peace and remembered for no special reason some childhood photographs he had recently been looking at, pictures showing him with his mother, who had died young; from what a dis-
tance he had regarded the little boy, with the beautiful woman in an old-fashioned dress happily smiling at him. There was that overpow- ering impression of the good, affectionate, bright little boy they all felt him to be; there were hopes for him that were in no way his own; there were the vague expectations of a distinguished, promising fu- ture, like the outspread wings ofa golden net opening to enfold him. And though all this had been invisible at the time, there it was for all to see decades afterward in those old photographs, and from the midst ofthis visible invisibility that could so easily have become real- ity, there was his tender, blank baby face looking back at him with the slightly forced expression of having to hold still. He had felt n? t a trace ofwarmth for that little boy, 'and even ifhe did take some pride in his beautiful mother, he had on the whole the impressi6n of hav- ing narrowly escaped a great horror.
Anyone who has had the experience of seeing some earlier incar- n a t i o n o f h i m s e l f g a z i n g a t him f r o m a n o l d p h o t o g r a p h , w r a p p e d i n a bygone moment of self-satisfaction, as if glue had dried up or fallen out, will understand 'Ulrich's asking himself what sort of glue it was that seemed to hold for other people. He had now reached one of those green spaces bordered by trees, a break in the Ringstrasse, which follows the line of the ancient city walls, and he might have crossed it in a few strides, but the broad strip of sky above the trees made him turn aside and follow where it was leading, seeming to come closer and closer to the festoons of lights so intent upon their privacy in the distant sky above that wintry park, without actually get- ting any nearer to them. It's a kind of foreshortening of the mind's perspective, he thought, that creates the tranquil sense of the eve- n i n g , w h i c h , f r o m o n e d a y t~ t h e n e x t , g i v e s o n e t h i s f i r m s e n s e o f l i f e being in full accord with itself. Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one's ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them. And just as the visual relationships of things always shift to make a coherent . picture for the eye, one in which the immediate and near at hand looks big, while even the big things at a distance look small and the gaps close up and the scene as a whole ends by rounding itself out, so it is with the invisible c(mnec- tions which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in
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such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in charge of o~raffairs. And just this is what I don't seem to be able to achieve the way I should, he said to himself.
A wide puddle blocked his way. Perhaps it was this puddle, or per- haps it was the bare, broonilike trees on either side, that conjured up a country road and a village, and awakened in him that monotonous state of the soul halfway between fulfillment and futility which comes with life in the country, a life that had tempted him more than once to repeat the "escape" he had made as a young man.
Everything becomes so simple, he felt. One's feelings get drowsy, one,'s thoughts drift offlike clouds after bad weather, and suddenly a clear sky breaks out of the soul, and under that sky a cow in the mid- dle of the path may begin· to blaze with meaning; things come in- tensely alive as if there were nothing else in the world. A single cloud drifting past may transform the whole region: the grass darkens, then shines with wetness; nothing else has happened, and yet it's been like a voyage from one seashore to another. Or an old man loses his last tooth, and this trifling event may become a landmark in the lives of his neighbors, from which they date their memories. Every evening the birds sing around the village in the same way, in the stillness of the setting sun, but it feels like something·new happening every time, as though·the world were not yet seven days old! In the coun- try, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life's notorious turning into abstraction.
But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this ab- straction extended a man's powers a thousandfold and how, even if from the point ofview of any given detail it diluted him tenfold, as a whole it expanded him a hundredfold, and there could be no ques- tion of turning the wheel backward. And in one of those apparently random and abstract thoughts ~at so often assumed importance in his life, it struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened. . . . " It is the simple sequence of events in which. the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a unidimensional order,
as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"! Terrible things ,nay have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as con- tented as ifthe sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried- and-true "foreshortening of the mind's perspective," were not al- ready part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional "because" or "in order that" gets knotted into the thread oflife, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has·the look of neces- sity, and the impression that their life has a "course" is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be. narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.
When he resumed his homeward progress, reflecting on this in- sight, he remembered Goethe writing in an essay on art that "Man is not a teaching animal but one that lives, acts, and influences. " He respectfully shrugged his shoulders. "These days," he thought, "a man can only allow himself to forget the uncertainties on which he must base his life and his actions as much as an actor who forgets the scenery and his makeup, and believes that he is really living his part. " The thought of Goethe, however, brought back the thought of Arn- heim, who was always misusing Goethe as an authority, and Ulrich su~denly remembered with distaste his extraordinary confusion when Arnheim had placed an arm on his shoulder. At this point he had emerged from under the trees and was back on the street, look- ing for the best way home. Peering upward for a street sign, he al- most ran full tilt into a shadowy figure emerging from the darkness,
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and had to pull up short to avoid knocking down the prostitute who had stepped in his way. She held her ground and smiled instead of revealing her annoyance at his having charged into her like a bull, and. Ulrich suddenly felt that her professional smile somehow cre- ated a little aura of warmth in the night. She spoke to him, using the threadbare words commonly thrown out as bait, which are like the dirty leavings of other men. She had a child's sloping shoulders, blond hair was showing under her hat, and her face looked pale, even indefmably appealing under the lamplight; beneath her nighttime makeup there was the suggestion of a young girl's freckled skin. She was much shorter than Ulrich and had to look up into his face, yet she said "baby" to him again, too numb to see anything out of place in this sound she uttered hundreds of times in a night.
Ulrich found it touching somehow. He did not brush her off but stopped and let her repeat her offer, as though he had not under- stood. Here he had unexpectedly found a friend who, for a slight charge, would put herselfentirely at his disposal, ready to do her best to please him and avoid anything to put him off. If he showed himself willing, she would slip her arm in his with a gentle trustfulness and faint hesitation, as when old friends meet again for the frrst time after a separation not of their own making. If he promised to double or
·treble her usual price, and put the money on the table beforehand, so that she need not think about it but could abandon herself to that carefree, obliging state of mind that goes with having made a good deal, it would be shown· that pure indifference has the merit of all pure feeling, which is without personal presumption and functions minus the needless confusion caused by interference from private emotions. Such thoughts went through his mind, half seriously, half flippantly, and he could not bring himself altogether to disappoint the little person, who was waiting for him to strike a deal; he even realized that he wanted her to like him, but clumsily enough, instead of simply exchanging a few words with her in the language of her profession, he fumbled in ~s pocket, slipped approximately the amount she would have asked into her hand, and walked on. For the space of a moment he had briefly pressed her hand-which had oddly resisted, in· her surprise-firmly in his, with a single friendly word. But as he left this willing volunteer behind, he knew that she would rejoin her colleagues, who were whispering nearby in the
dark, show them the money, and finally think of some gibe at him to give vent to feelings she could not understand.
The encounter lived on in his mind for a while as though it had been a tender idyll of a minute's duration. He did not romanticize the poverty of his fleeting friend or her debasement, but when he imagined how she would have turned up her eyes and given the fake little moan she had learned to deliver at the right moment, he couldn't help feeling without knowing why that there was something touching about this deeply vulgar, hopelessly inept private perform- ance for an agreed price; perhaps because it was a burlesque version of the human comedy itself. Even while he was still speaking to the girl he had thought fleetingly of Moosbrugger, the pathological co- median, the pursuer and nemesis of prostitutes, who had been out walking on that other, unlucky night just as Ulrich was this evening. When the housefronts on that street had stopped swaying like stage scenery for a moment, Moosbrugger had bumped into the unknown creature who had awaited him by the bridge the night ofthe murder. What a shock of recognition it must have been, going through him from head to toe: for an . instant, Ulrich thought he could feel it him- self. Something was lifting him off the ground like a wave; he lost his balance but didn't need it, the movement itself carried him along. His heart contracted, but his imaginings became confused and over- ran all bounds, until they dissolved in an almost enervating voluptu- ousness. He made an effort to calm down. He had apparently been living so long without some central purpose that he was actually en- vying a psychopath his obsessions and his faith in the part he was playing! But Moosbrugger was fascinating, after all, not just to him- selfbut to everyone else as well. Ulrich heard Amheim's voice asking him: 'Would you set him free? " and his own answer: "No! Probably not. " Never ever, he now said to himself, and yet he had the hal- lucinatory image of an act in which the movement of reaching out in some extreme state of excitement and that of being moved by it fused into an ineffable communion, in which desire was indistin- guishable from compulsion, meaning from necessity, and the most intense activity from blissful receptiveness. He fleetingly recalled the opinion that sm:h luckless creatures as Moosbrugger were the em- bodiments of repressed instincts common to all, of all the murders and rapes committed in fantasies. Let those who believed this make
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their own peace with Moosbrugger, let them justify him to reestab- lish their own morality, after they had satisfied their dark urges through him! UlriCh's conflict was different; he repressed nothing and could not help seeing that the image ofa murderer was no stran- ger to him than any other ofthe world's pictures; what they all had in common with hl~ own old images of himself: part crystallization of meaning, part resurgence ofthe nonsense beneath. A nimpant meta- phor oforder, that was what Moosbrugger meant for him. And sud- denly Ulrich said: "All of that-" and made a gesture as though thrusting something aside with the baclc of his hand. He had not merely thought it, he had said it out loud, and reacted to hearing himself speak by pressing his lips together and finishing his state- ment in silence: "All ofthat has to be settled, once and for alii" Never mind what "all of that" was in detail; it was everything he had been preoccupied with, tormented by, sometimes even delighted with, ever since he had taken his "sabbatical"-everything that had tied him up in knots, like a dreamer for whom all things are possible ex- cept getting up and moving about; all that had led him froq1 one im- possible thing to another, from t:P. e very b~ginning until these last minutes of his homeward walk. Ulrich felt that he would now at long last have to either live like everybody else, for some attainable goal, or come to grips with one of his imp<>. ssible possibilities. He had reached his own neighborhood, and he quickened his pace through the last street with a peculiar sense of hovering on some threshold. The feeling lent him wings, it moved him to take action, but as it was unspecific, again he was left with only an incomparable sense of freedom. ·
This might have passed off like so much else, but when he turned the comer into his own street he thought he saw all the windows of his house lit up, and shortly afterward, when he reached his garden gate, he could have no doubt about it. His old servant had asked for permission to spend the night with relatives somewhere; Ulrich had not been home since the episode with Gerda, when it was still day- light, and the gardener couple, who lived on the ground floor, never entered his rooms; yet there were lights on everywhere-intruders must be in the house, burglars he was about to take by surprise. Ul- rich was so bewildered, and so disinclined to shake off the spell he was under, that he walked straight up to the house without hesita-
tion. He had no idea what to expect. He saw shadows on the windows that seemed to indicate there was only one person moving about in- side, but there could be more, and he wondered whether he might be walking into a bullet as he entered-or should he be prepared to shoot first? In a different state of mind Ulrich would probably have gone looking for a policeman or at least investigated the situation before deciding what to do, but he wanted this adventure to himself, and did not even reach for the pistol he sometimes carried since the night he had been knocked down bythe hoodlums. He wanted . . . he didn't know what he wanted; he was willing to see what happened!
But when he pushed open the front door and entered the house, the burglar he had been looking forward to with such mixed feelings was only Clarisse.
12-3
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THE TURNING POINT
Ulrich's recklessness might from the beginning have been motivated in part by an underlying faith in some harmless· explanation for ev- erything, that shying away from believing the worst that always leads one into danger; nevertheless, when his old servant unexpectedly came up to him in the hall, he almost knocked him down. Fortu- nately, he stopped himself in time, and was told that a telegram had come, which Clarisse had signed for and was now holding for him upstairs. The young lady had arrived about an hour ago, just as he, the old man, had been about to leave, and she would not let herself be turned away, so that he had preferred to stay in and give up his night out this once, for if he might be permitted to say so, the young lady seemed to be rather upset.
Ulrich thanked him and went up to his rooms, where he found Clarisse lying on the couch, on her side with her legs drawn up. Her straight, slim figure, her boyish haircut, and the charming oval of her
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face resting on . one hand as she looked at him when he· opened the door all made a most seductive picture. He told her that he had taken her for a burglar.
Clarisse's eyes flashed like rapid bursts of machine-gun fire. "Maybe I am a burglar! " she said. "That old fox your servant did his best to make me leave. I sent him off to bed, but I know he's been lurking out of sight downstairs somewhere. Your house is lovely! " She held out the telegram to him without getting up. "I was curious to see what you're like when you come home to be by yourself," she went on. 'Walter's gone to a concert. He won't be back till after mid- night. But I didn't tell him fwas coming to see you. "
Ulrich ripped open the telegram and read it while only half listen- ing to Clarisse's words. He turned suddenly pale and read the star- tling message over again, unable to take it in. Although he had failed to answer several letters from his father asking him about the prog- ress of the Parallel Campaign and the problem of "diminishe~ re- sponsibility," a longish interval had passed, without his noticing it, since any further reminders had come-and now this telegram, obvi- ously drafted in advance with meticulous care by his father hims~lf, informed him punctiliously, and in a funereal ~one that did not quite succeed in repressing all reproach, ofhis own death. There had been little enough affection between them; in fact, the thought of his fa- ther had almost always been rather disturbing to Ulrich, and yet, as he now read the quaintly sinister text over again, he was thinking: "Now I am all alone in the world. " He did not mean it literally, nor would that have made any sense, considering how things had been between them; what he meant was that he felt, with some amaze- ment, that he was floating free, as though some mooring rope had snapped, or that· his state of alienation from a world to which his fa- ther had been the last link had now become complete and final.
"My father's dead," he said to Clarisse, holding up the telegram with a touch of unintended solemnity.
"Oh! " Clarisse said. "Congratulations! " And after a slight, thoughtful pause she added: "I suppos,e you're going to be very rich now? " and looked around with interest.
"I don't believe he was more than moderatelywell off," Ulrich re- plied distantly. 'Tve been living here quite beyond his means. "
Clarisse acknowledged the rebuke with a tiny smile, a sort of little
curtsy of a smile; many of her expressi~e movements were as abrupt and disproportionate in a small space as the theatrical bow of a boy who must demonstrate before company how well he has been brought up. She was left alone, for a few moments while Ulrich ex- cused himselfto go and make preparations for the trip he would have to take. When she had left Walter after their violent scene she had not gone far; outside the door to their apartment there was a seldom- use~staircase leading up to the attic, and there she had sat, wrapped in a shawl, until she heard him leave the house. It made her think of the lofts in theaters for the stage machinery, where ropes run on pul- leys, and there she sat while Walter made his exit down the stairs. She imagined that actresses might sit on the rafters above the stage between calls, wrapped in shawls, watching the stage from above; en- joying a full view ofeverything that was going on, just as she was now. It fitted in with a favorite notion ofhers, that life was a dramatic role to be played. There was no need to understal)d one's part rationally, she thought; after all, what did anyone know about it, even those who might know tnore than she did? It was a matter of having the right instinct for life, like a storm bird. One simply spread out one's arms-and for her that included words, tears, ldsses-like wings and took off! This fantasy offered some compensation to her for being no longer able to believe in Walter's future. She looked down the steep staircase Walter had just descended, spread her arms, and kept them raised in that position as long as she could; perhaps she could help him in that way! A steep ascent and a steep descent are strong com- plementary opposites and belong together, she thought. "Joyful world aslant" was what she named her wingspread arms and her gaze down the stairwell. She changed her mind about snealdng out to watch the demonstrators in town; what did she care about the com- mon herd; the fantastic drama of the elect had begun! .
And so Clarisse had gone to see Ulrich. On the way a sly smile would sometimes appear on her face, whenever it occurred to her that Walter thought her crazy each time she let slip any sign of her greater insight into what was going on between them. It tickled her vanity to know that he was afraid of having a child by her even while he impatiently longed for it. "Crazy" to her meant being some- thing like summer lightning, or enjoying so extraordinary a degree of health that it frightened people; it was a quality her marriage had
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brought out in her, step by step, as her feelings of superiority and control grew. She did realize, all the same, that there were times when other people did not know what to make of her, and when Ul- rich reappeared she felt she ought to say something to him that would be in keeping with an event that cut so deeply into his life. She leapt up from the couch, paced through the room and the adjoining rooms, and then said: "Well, my sincere condolences, old fellow! "
Ulrich looked at her in astonishment, although he recognized _the tone she fell into when she was nervous. Sometimes she's so hope- lessly conventional, he thought; it;s like coming upon a page from another book bound in with what one is reading. She had not both- ered to watch her words with the appropriate expression but had flung them at him sideways, over her shoulder, which heightened the effect of hearing, not a false note exactly, but the wrong words to the tune, giving the uncanny impression that she herself consisted of many such misplaced texts. ,
When she received no answer from Ulrich, she stopped in front of him and said: "I have to talk with you! "
"May I offer you some refreshment? " Ulrich said.
Clarisse only fluttered her hand at shoulder height to signal no. She pulled her thoughts together and said: "Walter is dead set on having a child. Can you understand that? " She seemed to be waiting for an answer. But what could Ulrich have said to that?
"But I don't want to! " she cried out violently.
"Well, no need to fly into a rage," Ulrich said. "Ifyou don't want to, it can't happen. "
"But it's destroying him! "
"People who are always expecting to die generally live a long time! You and I will be shriveled ancients while Walter will still have his boyish face under his white mane as Director of his Archives. "
Clarisse turned pensively on her heel and walked away from Ul- rich; at a distance, she wheeled to face him again and "fixed him" with her eye.
"Have you ever seen an umbrella with its shaft removed? Walter falls apart when I tum away from him. I'm his shaft and he's . . . " She was about to say "my umbrella" but thought ofsomething much bet- ter: "my shield," she said. "He sees himself as my protector. And the fust thing that means is giving me a big belly. Next will be the lee-
tures on breast-feeding the infant because that is nature's way, and then he'll want to bring up the child in his own image. You know him well enough to know all that. All he wants is to have the rights to everything and a terrific excuse for making bourgeois conformists out of both of us. But if I go on saying no, as I have been, he'll be done for. I mean simply everything to him! "
Ulrich smiled incredulously at this sweeping claim. "He wants to kill you," Clarisse added quickly. "What? I thought that was your suggestion to him. " "I want the child from you! " Clarisse said.
Ulrich whistled through his teeth in surprise.
She smiled like an adolescent who has misbehaved with deliberate provocation.
"I wouldn't do something so underhanded to such an old friend," Ulrich said slowly. "It goes against my grain. " ·
"Oh? So you're a man of high scruple, are you? " Clarisse seemed to attach some special significance of her own to this that Ulrich didn't understand. She gave it some thought and. then retu~ed to the attack: "But if you are my lover, he's got you where he wants you. "
"How do you mean? "
. "It's obvious; I just don't know quite how to put it. You'll be forced
to treat him with consideration. We'll both be feeling sorry for him. You can't just go ahead and cheat on him, of course, so you'll have to try to make it up to him somehow. And so on and so forth. And most important of all, you'll be driving him to bring out the best that's in him. You know perfectly well that we are stuck inside ourselves like statues in a block ofstone. We have to sculpt ourway out! We have to force each other to do it. "
"Maybe so," Ulrich said, "but aren't you getting ahead ofyourself? What makes you think any of this will happen? "
Clarisse was smiling again. "Perhaps I am ahead of myself," she said. She sidled up to him and slipped her arm confidingly under his, which hung limply at his side and made no room for hers. "Don't you find me attractive? Don't you like me? " she asked. And when he did not answer, she went on: "But you do find me attractive, I know it; I've seen it often enough, the way you look at me, when you come to see us. Do you remember if I've ever told you that you're the Devil?
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That's how I feel. Try to understand, I'm not calling you a poor devil: that's the kind who wants to do evil because he doesn't know any better. You are a great devil: you know what's good and you do the opposite of what you'd like to dol You know the life we lead is abomi- nable, and so you say mockingly that we must go on with it. And you say, full ofyour high scruples, 'I won't cheat on a friend,' but you only say that because you've thought a hundred times, 'I'd like to have Clarisse. ' But just because you're a devil you have something ofa god inside you, Ulo! A great god. The kind who lies to try to 'keep from being recognized. You dowant me. . . . "
She had gripped both his arms now, standing before him with her face lifted up to his, her body curving back like a plant responding to a touch on its petals. In a moment her face will be drenched with that look, like the last time, Ulrich thought apprehensively. But nothing of the kind happened; her face remained beautiful. Instead of her usual tight smile there was an open one, which showed a little of her teeth between the rosy flesh ofher lips, as though about to bite. Her mouth took on the shape of a double Cupid's bow, a line echoed in the curve of her eyebrows and again in the translucent cloud of her hair. ·
"For a long time now you've been wanting to pick me up with those teeth in that lying mouth ofyours and carry me off, ifonlyyou could stand to let me see you as you really are," Clarisse had con- tinued. Ulrich gently freed himself from her grip. She dropped down on the couch as if he had put her there, and pulled him down after her.
"You really shouldn't let your imagination run away with you like this," Ulrich said in reproof. ·
Clarisse had let go of him. She closed her eyes and supported her head with both hands, her elbows resting on her knees; now that her second attack had been repelled, she decided to resort to icy logic.
"Don't be so literal-minded," she said. "When I speak of the Devil, or of God, it's only a figure of speech. But when I'm alone at home, or walking in the neighborhood, I often think: If I turn to the left, God will come; if I turn to the right, the Devil. Or when I'm about to pick something up with my hand, I have the same feeling about using the right or the left hand. When I tell Walter about it he puts his hands in his pockets, in real panic. He's happy to see a flower
in bloom, or even a snail, but don't you think the life we lead is terri- bly· sad? No God comes, or the Devil either. I've been waiting for years now, but what is there to wait for? Nothing. That's all there is, unless art can work a miracle and change everything. "
At this moment there was something so gentle and sad about her that Ulrich gave way to an impulse to touch her soft hair wi\:h his hand. "You may be right in the details, Clarisse," he said. "But I. can never follow your leaps from one point to another, or see how it all hangs together. "
"It's quite simple," she said, still in the same posture as before. "As time went on, an idea came to me. Listen! " She straightened up and was suddenly quite vivacious again. "Didn't you once say yourself that the way we live is full of cracks through which we can see the impossible state of affairs underneath, as it were? You needn't say anything, I've known about it for a long time. W e all want to have our lives in order, but nobody has! I play the piano or paint a picture, but it's like putting up a screen to hide a hole in the wall. You and Walter also have ideas, and I don't understand much ofthat, but that doesn't work either, and you said yourself that we avoid looking at the hole out of habit or laziness, or else we let ourselves be distracted from it by bad things. Well, there's a simple answer: That's the hole we have to escape through! And I know how! There are days when I can slip out of myself. Then it's like finding yourself-how shall I put it? - right in the center ofthings as ifpeeled out ofa shell, and the things have had their dirty ri~d peeled off too. Or else one feels connected by the air with everything there is, like a Siamese twin. It's an incred- ible, marvelous feeling; everything turns into music and color and rhythm, and I'm no longer the citizen Clarisse, as I was baptized, but perhaps a shining splinter pressing into some immense unfathom- able happiness. But you know all about that. That's what you meant when you said that there's something impossible about reality, and that one's experiences should not be turned inward, as something personal and real, but must be turned outward, like a song or a paint- ing, and so on and so forth. Oh, I could recite it all exactly the way you said it. " Her "so on and so forth" recurred like some wild refrain as Clarisse's torrent of words flowed on, regularly interspersed with her assertion "You can do it, but you won't, and I don't know why you won't, but I'm going to shake you up! "
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Ulrich had let her go on talking, only shaking his head from time to time when she attributed to him something too unlikely, but he could not bring himselfto argue with her and left his hand resting on her hair, where his fingertips could almost sense the confused pulsa- tion of the thoughts inside her skull. He had never yet seen Clarisse in such a state of sensual excitement and was amazed to see that even in her slim, hard young body there was room for all the loosening and soft expansion of a woman's glowing passion; this sudden, always sur- prising opening up of a woman one has known only as inaccessibly shut away in herself did not fail to have its effect on him. Although they defied all reason, her words did not repel him, for as they came close to touching him in the quick and then again angled off into ab- surdity, their constant rapid movement, like a buzzing or humming, drowned out the quality of the tone, beautiful or ugly, in the intensity of the vibrations. Listening to her seemed to help him make up his mind, like some wild music, and it was only when she seemed to have· lost her way in the maze ofher own words and could not find her way out that he shook her head a little with his outspread hand, as though to call her back and set her straight.
But the opposite ofwhat he intended happened, for Clarisse sud- denly made a physical assault on him. She flung an arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his so quickly that it_took him completely by surprise and he had no time to resist, as she pulled her legs up under her body and slid over to him so that she ended up kneeling in his lap, ~d he could feel the little hard ball 9f one breast pressing against his shoulder. He caught barely anything ofwhat she was say- ing; she stammered something about her power of redemption, his cowardice, and his being a "barba'rian," which was why she wanted to conceive the redeemer of the world from him and not from Walter. Actually, her words were no more than a raving murmur at his ear, a hasty muttering under her breath more concerned with itself than with communication, a rippling stream of sound in which he could only catch a word here and there, such as ''Moosbrugger" or "Devil's Eye. " In self-defense he had grabbed his little assailant by her upper arms and pushed her back on the couch, so that she was now strug- gling against him with her legs, pushing her hair into his face and trying to get her arms around his neck again.
'Til kill you if you don't give in," she said loud and clear. Like a
boy fighting in affection mixed with anger, who won't be put off, she struggled on in mounting excitement. The effort of restraining her left him with only a faint sense of the current of desire streaming through her body; even so, Ulrich had been strongly affected by it at the moment of putting his arm firmly around her and pressing her down. It was as if her body had penetrated his senses. He had after all known her for such a long time, and had often indulged in a bit of horseplay with her, but he had never been in such close, head-to-toe contact with this little creature, so familiar and yet so strange, its heart wildly ·bouncing, and when Clarisse's movements quieted down in the grip of his hands, and the relaxation of her muscles was reflected tenderly in the glow of her eyes, what he did not want to happen almost happened. But at this instant he thought of Gerda, as though it were only nmv that he was facing the challenge to come to terms with himself.
"I don't want to, Clarisse," he said, and let her go. "I need to be by myself now, and I have things to do before I leave. "
When Clarisse grasped his refusal, it was as though with a jolt her head had shifted gears. She saw Ulrich standing a few steps away, his face contorted with embarrassment, saw him saying things she did not seem to take in, but as she watched the movement of his lips she felt a growing revulsion. Then she noticed that her skirt was above herknees,andjumpedupoffthecouch. Beforesheunderstoodwhat had happened, she was on her feet, shaking her hair and her clothes into place, as ifshe had been lying on the grass, and said:
"Of course you have to pack now; I won't keep you any longer. " She was smiling again, her normal vaguely scoffing smile that was forced through a narrow slit, and wished him a good trip. "By the time you're back we'll probably have Meingast staying with us. He wrote to say he was coming, and that's actually what I came to tell you," she added casually.
Ulrich hesitantly held her hand. She was rubbing his playfully with a finger. She would have given anything to know what in the world she had been saying to him; she must have said all sorts of things, because she had been so worked up that now she had forgotten it all! She did have a general idea of what had happehed, and she didn't mind; for her feelings told her that she had been brave or ready to sacrifice herself, and Ulrich timid. She wanted only to part as good
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friends and not to leave him in any doubt about that. "Better not tell Walter about this visit, and keep what we were talking about be- tWeen ourselves for the time being. " she said lightly. She gave him her hand once more at the garden gate and declined his offer to ac- company her beyond it.
· When Ulrich went back into the house he was preoccupied. He had to write some letters to let Count Leinsdorf and Diotima know he was leaving and had to attend to various other details, because he foresaw that taking over his inheritance might keep him away for some time. He stuffed various personal articles and a few books into the traveling cases already packed by his servant, whom he had sent off to bed, but when he had finished he no longer felt like going to bed himself. He was both exhausted and overstimulated after his eventful day, yet instead ofcanceling each other out, these two states of feeling only heightened each other so that, tired as he was, he felt unable to sleep.
Not really thinking, but followirig the oscillations· of his memories, Ulrich began by acknowledging that he could no longer doubt his impression, at various times, that Clarisse was not merely an unusual person but probably already mentally unbalanced-and yet, during her attack just now, or whatever one might call it, she had said things that were too close for comfort to much ·that he had occasionally said himself. This should have started him really thinking hard, but it only brought the unwelcome reminder, in his half-drowsy state, that he still had much to do. Almost halfofthe year he had taken offto think was gone, without his having settled any of his problems. It flashed through his mind that Gerda had urged him to write a book about it. But he wanted to live without splitting himself into a real and a shadow self. He remembered speaking to Section Chief Tuzzi about writing. He saw himself and Tuzzi standing in Diotirna's drawing room, and there was something theatrical, something stagy, about the scene. He remembered saying casually that he would probably have to either write a book or kill himself. But the thought of death, thinking it over at close range, so to speak, did not in the least corre- spond to his present state of mind either; when he explored it a little and toyed with the notion of killing himself before morning instead of taking the train, it struck him as an improper conjunction at the moment he had received the news of his father's death! · Half asleep
as he was, the figures of his imagination raced through his mind; he saw himself peering down the dark barrel of a gun, where he saw a shadowy nothing, the darkness veiling the depths beyond, and mused on the rare coincidence that the same image of a loaded gun had been his favorite metaphor in his youth, when his will was all charged up, waiting to take aim and let fly at some unknown target. His mind was flooded with images such as the pistol and standing with Tuzzi. The look of a meadow in the early morning. A winding river valley filled with dense evening mists, as seen from a moving train. The place at the far end of Europe where he had parted from the woman he loved-he had forgotten what she looked like, but the image ofthe unpaved village streets and the thatched cottages was as fresh as yesterday. The hair under the arm of another loved woman, all that was left ofher. Snatches offorgotten melodies. A characteris- tic movement. The fragrance of flower beds, unnoticed at the time because ofthe charged words being forced out by the profound emo- tion of two souls, and coming back to him now when the words and the people were long forgotten. He saw a man on various paths, al- most painful to look at, left over like a row of puppets that had had their springs broken long ago. One would think that such images are the most transient things in the world, but there are moments when all one's life splits up into such images, solitary relics along the road oflife, as though the road led only away from them and back to them again, as though a man's fate were obeying not his ideas and his will but these mysterious, half-meaningless pictures.
But while he was moved almost to tears by the pointlessness, the uselessness, ofall the efforts he had ever taken pride in, his sleepless, exhausted state gave rise to a feeling, or perhaps one should say that a marvelous feeling diffused itself around him. The lights Clarisse had turned on in all the rooms while she was alone were still on, and an excess of light flowed back and forth between the walls and the objects, filling the space between with an almost living presence. It was probably the tenderness inherent in any painless state ofexhaus- tion that changed his total sense ofhis body; this ever-present though unheeded physical self-awareness, vaguely enough defined in any case, now passed over into a more yielding and expansive state. It was a loosening up as though a tourniquet were coming undone, and since neither the walls nor the objects underwent any real change
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and no god entered the rooms of this unbeliever, and since Ulrich himself by no means allowed his clear judgment to become clouded (unless his fatigue deceived him into thinking so), it could only be the relationship between himself and his surroundings that was under- going such a change. The transformation was not objective; it was a subjective expanse of feeling, deep as groundwater, on which the senses and the intelligence, those pillars ofobjective perception, nor- mally supported themselves but o~ which they now were gently separating or merging-the distinction lost its meaning almost as soon as he made it.
"It's a change in attitude; as I change, everything else involved changes too," Ulrich thought, sure that he had himself well under observation. But one could also say that his solitude-a condition that was present within him as well as around him, binding both his worlds-it could be said, and he felt it himself, that this solitude was growing greater or denser all the time. It flowed through the walls, flooded the city, ·then, without actually expanding, inundated the world. "What world? " he thought. "There is none! " The notion no longer seemed to have any meaning. But Ulrich's good judgment was still sufficiently in charge to make him recoil at once from such an exaggeration; he stopped hunting for more words and moved instead toward a state of full wakefulness, After a few seconds he gave a start. Day was breaking,. its gray pallor mingling with the swiftly withering brightness of the artificial light.
Ulrich jumped to his feet and stretched. Something remained in his body that he could not shake off. He passed a finger over his eye- lids, but something remained of that gentleness, that fusion of his vision and the things it beheld. And suddenly he recognized in a way hard to describe a sort of dr8. ining away of his strength, as though he had lost any power to go on denying that he was again standing ex- actly where he had stood years before. He shook his head, smiling. "An attack of 'the major's wife,' " he called it mockingly. There was no real danger of that, his rational mind told him, since there was no one with whom he could have repeated that old foolishness. He opened a window. The air outside was neutral, ordinary everyday morning air in which the first sounds of the city's life were·striking up. He let its coolness rinse his temples, as the civilized European's distaste for sentimentality began to fill him with its hard clarity and
he made up his mind to deal with the situation, ifnecessary, with the utmost precision. And yet, standing for a long time at the window, staring out into the morning without thinking ofanything, he still had a sense of all the feelings that were slipping gleamingly away.
His servant's sudden entrance, with the solemn expression of the early riser, to wake him' up, took Ulrich by surprise. He took a bath, rapidly did a few vigorous exercises, and left for the railroad station.
