No More Learning

"When His Majesty ascended the throne in 1848, at Olmiitz, that is to say, practi- cally in exile . . . ," he went on slowly, but suddenly becoming impa- tient or uncertain, he fished a fe~ notes out of his pocket with trembling fingers, struggled in some agitation to set his pince-nez firmly on his nose, and read aloud, his voice sometimes quavering with emotion, as he strained to decipher his own handwriting:
" '. . . he was surrounded by the uproar of the nationalities' wild urge for freedom. He succeeded in quenching the extreme manifes- tations of this upsurge. Finally, even if after granting some conces- sions to the demands of his peoples, he stood triumphant as the victor, and a gracious and magnanimous victor, moreover, who for- gave his subjects the errors of their ways and held out his hand to them with the offer of a peace honorable for them as well. Although the Constitution and the other liberties had been granted by him under the press of circumstances, it was nevertheless an act of His Majesty's free will, the fruit of his wisdom and compassion, and of hope in the progressive civilization ofhis peoples. But in recent years this model relationship between the Emperor and his peoples has been tarnished by the work of agitators, demagogues-' " Here Count Leinsdorf broke off reading his exposition of political history, in which evexy word had been scrupulously weighed and polished,
916 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
and gazed pensively at the portrait of his ancestor the Grand Marshal and Knight of the Order of Maria Theresa, hanging on the wall fac- ing him. When Ulrich's expectant gaze finally drew his attention, he said: "That's as far as I've come.
"But you can see that I have been giving these problems a great deal of thought lately," he went on. "What I have just read to you is the beginning of the response which the Minister should have pre- sented to Parliament in the matter of the demonstration against me, if he had been doing his job! I've gradually worked it out for myself, and I don't mind telling you that I shall have occasion to present it to His Majesty as soon as I have finished it. You see, it was not without purpose that the Constitution of 1861 entrusted the leadership of our country to capital and culture. It was meant to secure our future. But where are capital and culture today? "
He seemed really put out with the Minister of the Interior, and to divert him Ulrich remarked innocently that one could at least say about capital that it was nowadays not only in the hands of the bank- ers but also in the time-tested hands ofthe landed aristocracy.
"I've nothing at all against thE: Jews," Count Leinsdorf assured Ul- rich out of the blue, as though Ulrich had said something that re- quired such a disclaimer. "They are intelligent, hardworking, and reliable. But it was a great mistake to give them those unsuitable names. Rosenberg and Rosenthal, for instance, are aristocratic names; Baer and W olf and all such creatures are originally heraldic beasts; Meyer derives from landed property; Silver and Gold are ar- morial colors. All those Jewish names," His Grace disclosed, to Ul- rich's surprise, "are nothing but the insolence of our bureaucrats aimed at our nobility. It was the noble families, not the Jews, who were the butt of these officials, which is why the Jews were given other names as well, like Abrahams, Jewison, or Schmucker. You can not infrequently observe this animus of our bureaucracy against the old nobility surfacing even today, ifyou know how to look for it," he said oracularly, with a gloomy, obstinate air, as though the struggle of the central administration against feudalism had not long since been overtaken by history and vanished completely from sight. In fact, there was nothing His Grace could resent so pureheartedly as the social privileges enjoyed by important bureaucrats by virtue of their position even when their names might be plain Fuchsenbauer or
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · gz 7
Schlosser. Count Leinsdorf was no diehard country Junker; he wanted to move with the times, and did not mind such a name when it was that of a Member of Parliament or even a cabinet minister or an influential private citizen, nor did he at all object to the political or economic influence of the middle class; what provoked him, with a passion that was the last vestige ofvenerable traditions, was the social status of high-ranking administrative officials with middle-class names. Ulrich wondered whether Leinsdorf's remarks might have been prompted by his own cousin's husband. It was not out of the question, but Count Leinsdorf continued talking and was, as always happened, soon lifted above all personal concerns by an idea that had apparently been working inside him for a long time.
"The whole so-called Jewish Question would disappear without a trace if the Jews would only make up their minds to speak Hebrew, go back to their old names, and wear Eastern dress," he explained. "Frankly, a Galician Jew who has just recently made his fortune in Vienna doesn't look right on the Esplanade at Ischl, wearing Tyro- lean costume with a chamois tuft on his hat. But put him in a long, flowing robe, as rich as you like so long as it covers his legs, and you'll see how admirably his face and his grand sweeping gestures go with his costume! All those things people tend to joke about would then be in their proper place-even the showy rings they like to wear. I am against assimilation the way the English nobility practice it; it's a tedious and uncertain process. But give the Jews back their true character and watch them become a veritable ornament, a genuine aristocracy of a rare and special kind among the nations gratefully thronging around His Majesty's throne-or, ifyou'd prefer to see it in everyday terms, imagine them strolling along on our Ringstrasse, the only place in the world where you can see, in the midst of West- ern European elegance at its fmest, a Mohammedan with his red fez, a Slovak in sheepskins, or a bare-legged Tyrolean! "
At this point Ulrich could not do otherwise than express his admi- ration for His Grace's acumen, which had now also enabled him to uncover the "real Jew. "
'Well, you know, the true Catholic faith teaches us to see things as they really are," Count Leinsdorf explained benevolently. "But you would never guess what it was that put me on the right track. It wasn't Arnheim-I'm not speaking ofthe Prussians right now. But I
gz8 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
have a banker, a man ofthe Mosaic faith, ofcourse, whom I've had to see regularly for years now, and at first his intonation always used to bother me a bit, so that I couldn't keep my mind on the business at hand. He speaks exactly as if he wanted me to think he was my uncle-I mean, as if he'd just got out of the saddle, or back from a day's grouse shooting; exactly the way our own kind of people talk, I must say. Well and good; but then, when he gets carried away, he can't keep it up and, to make no bones about it, slips into a kind of Yiddish singsong. It used to bother me considerably, as I believe I've told you already, because it always happened when some important business matter was at stake, so that I was always unconsciously primed for it, and it got so that I couldn't pay, attention to what he was talking about, or else I imagined I was listening to something important the whole time. But then I found a way around it: Every time he began to talk like that I imagined he was speaking Hebrew, and you ought to have heard how attractive it sounded then! Posi- tively enchanting-it is, after all, a liturgical language; such a melodi- ous chanting: I'm very musical, I should add. In short, from then on he had me lapping up the most complicated calculations of com- pound interest or discount positively as if he were at the piano! " As he said this, Count Leinsdorf had for some reason a melancholy smile.
Ulrich took the liberty of pointing out that the people so favored by His Grace's sympathetic interest would be more than likely to turn down his suggestion.
"Oh, of course they won't want to! " the Count said. "But they would have to be forced to for their own good. It would amount to a world mission for the Empire, and it's not a question ofwhether they want to or not. You see, many people at the beginning have had to be made to do what's best for them. But think, too, what it would mean if we ended up allied with a grateful Jewish State instead of with the Germans and Prussia! Seeing that our Trieste happens to be the Hamburg of the Mediterranean, as it were, apart from the fact that it would make us diplomatically invincible to have not only the Pope on our side but the Jews as well! "
Abruptly, he added: "You must remember that I have to concern myselfwith problems ofthe currency, too, these days. " And again he smiled in that strangely sad, absentminded way.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 919
It was astonishing that His Grace, who had repeatedly sent out ur- gent calls for Ulrich, did not discuss the problems of the day now that he had finally come, but lavished his ideas on him. Apparently ideas had come to him in abundance while he had had to do without his confidant, ideas as restless as bees that stream out for miles but are sure to return in their own good time, laden with honey.
"You might perhaps object," Count Leinsdorf resumed, although Ulrich had not said anything, "that I have on earlier occasions often expressed a decidedly low opinion of the financial world. I don't deny it: too much is too much, and we have too much finance in modern life. But that's precisely why we must deal with it! Look, culture has not been pulling its weight alongside capital-there you have the whole secret of developments since 1861. And that's why we must concern ourselves with capital. "
His Grace made an almost imperceptible pause, just long enough to let his listener know that now he was coming to the secret of capi- tal, but then went on in his gloomily confidential tone:
"You see, what's most important in a culture is what it forbids peo- ple: whatever doesn't belong is out. For instance, a well-bred man will never eat gravy with his knife, only God knows why; they don't teach you these things in school. That's so-called tact, it's based on a privileged class for culture to look up to, a cultural model; in short, if I may say so, an aristocracy. Granted that our aristocracy has notal- ways lived up to that ideal. That's exactly the point, the downright revolutionary experiment, of our 1861 Constitution: Capital and cul- ture were meant to make common cause with the aristocracy. Have they done so? Were they up to taking advantage ofthe great opportu- nity His Majesty had so graciously made available to them? I'm sure you'd never claim that the results of your cousin's great efforts that we see every week are in keeping with such hopes. " His voice grew more animated as he exclaimed: "You know, it's really most interest- ing, what sorts of things claim to be 'mind' these days! I was telling His Eminence the Cardinal about it recently, when we were out hunting in Miirzsteg-no, it was Miirzbruck, at the Hostnitz girl's wedding-and he laughed and clapped his hands together: 'Some- thing new every year,' he said. 'Now you can see how modest we are; we've been telling people the same old thing for almost two thousand years. ' And that's so true. The main thing about faith is that it keeps
920 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
believing the same old thing, even ifit's heresy to say so. 'You know,' he said, 'I always go out hunting because my predecessor in the days of Leopold von Babanberg did too. But I never kill,' he said-he happens to be known for never firing a shot on the hunt-'because it goes against my grain, something tells me it's not in keeping with my cloth. I can talk about this to you, old friend, because we were boys in dancing class together. But I'd never stand up in public and say: ''You shall not shoot while hunting! " Good Lord, who knows whether that would be true, and besides, it's no part of the Church's teaching. But the people who meet at your friend's house make a public issue of things like that the minute it occurs to them! There you have what's called "intelligence" nowadays! ' It's easy for him to laugh," Count Leinsdorf went on, speaking for himself again. "He holds that job in perpetuity, but we laymen have the hard task of finding the right path amid perpetual change. I told him as much. I asked him: 'Why did God let literature and painting and all that come into the world anyway, when they're really such a bore? ' And he came up with a very interesting explanation. 'You've heard about psychoanalysis, haven't you? ' he asked me. I didn't know quite what I was supposed to say. Well,' he said, 'you'll probably say it's just a lot of filth. We won't argue about it, it's what everyone says; and yet they all run to these newfangled doctors more than to our Catholic confessional. Take it from me, they rush to them in droves because the flesh is weak! They let their secret sins be discussed because they enjoy it, and if they disparage it, take it from me, we always pick holes in the things we mean to buy! But I could also prove to you that what their atheistic doctors imagine they invented is nothing but what the Church has been doing from the beginning: exorcising the Devil and healing the possessed. It's identical step for step with the ritual of exorcism, for instance, when they try with their own methods to make the person who's possessed talk about what's inside him; ac- cording to Church teaching, that's precisely the turning point, where the Devil is getting ready to break out! We merely missed adapting ourselves in time to changing conditions by talking of psychosis, the unconscious, and all that current claptrap instead of filth and the Devil. ' Isn't that interesting? " Count Leinsdorf asked. "But what comes next may be even more so. 'Never mind the weakness of the flesh,' the Cardinal said. 'What we need to talk about is that the spirit
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 9 2 1
is weak too. And that's where the Church has kept its wits and not let anything slip by. People aren't nearly so scared of the Devil in the flesh, even if they make a great show of fighting him, as they are of the illumination that comes from the spirit. You never studied theol- ogy,' he said to me, 'but at least you respect it, and that's more than a secular philosopher in his blindness ever does. Let me tell you, theol- ogy is so difficult that a man can devote himself to studying it and nothing else for fifteen years before he realizes that he hasn't really understood a word of it! If people knew how difficult it is, none of them would have any faith at all; they'd only run us down! They'd run us down exactly the way they run people down-you understand? ' he said slyly, '-who are writing their books and painting their pictures and trotting out their theories. And today we're only too glad to let them have plenty of rope to hang themselves with, because, let me tell you, the more earnestly one of those fellows sets about it, the less he's a mere entertainer, or working for his own pocket; the more, in other words, he serves God in his mistaken way, the more he bores people, and the more they run him down. "That's not what life is like! " they say. But we know very well what it's like, and we'll show them too, and because we can also wait, you may yet live to see them come running back to us, full of fury about the time they wasted on all that clever talk. You can see it happening in our own families, even now. And in our fathers' day, God knows, they thought they were going to turn heaven itself into a university. '
"I wouldn't go so far," Count Leinsdorf rounded out this part of his discourse to start on a new topic, "as to say he meant all that liter- ally. The Hostnitzes in Miirzbruck happen to have a celebrated Rhine wine that General Marmont left behind and forgot in 1805 because he had to march on Vienna in such a hurry, and they brought some ofit out for the wedding. But in the main I'm sure the Cardinal was right on target. So ifI ask myselfnow what to make ofit, all I can say is, I'm sure it's true, but it doesn't work. I mean, there can be no doubt that the people we brought in because we were told they rep- resent the spirit of the times have nothing to do with real life, and the Church can well afford to wait them out. But we civilian politicians can't wait; we must squeeze what good we can out oflife as we find it. After all, man doesn't live by bread alone, but by the soul as well. The soul is that which enables him to digest his bread, so to speak. And
922 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
that's why it's necessary . . . "Count Leinsdorfwas ofthe opinion that politics should be a spur to the soul. "In short, something has to hap- pen," he said, "that's what the times demand. Everyone has that feel- ing, as it were, not just the politically minded. The times have a sort of interim character that nobody can stand indefinitely. " He had the idea that the trembling balance ofideas upon which the no less trem- bling balance of power in Europe rested must be given a push.
"It hardly matters what kind of push," he assured Ulrich, who made a show of being stunned by His Grace's having turned, in the period since they had last seen each other, into a veritable revolu- tionary.
'Well, why not? '' Count Leinsdorf retorted, flattered. "His Emi- nence ofcourse also thought that it might be a small step in the right direction if His Majesty could be persuaded to replace the present Minister of the Interior, but such petty reforms don't do the trick in the long run, however necessary they may be. Do you know that as I mull this over I actually find my thoughts turning to the Socialists? '' He gave his interlocutor time to recover from the amazement he as- sumed this was bound to cause, and then continued firmly: "You can take it from me, real socialism wouldn't be nearly as terrible as peo- ple seem to think. You may perhaps object that the Socialists are republicans; that's true, you simply can't listen when they're talking, but ifyou consider them in terms ofpractical politics, you might well reach the conclusion that a social-democratic republic with a strong ruler at the helm would not be an impossible solution at all. For my own part, I'm convinced that ifwe were to go just a little way to meet them, they'd be glad to give up the idea of using brute force and they'd recoil from the rest of their objectionable principles. As it is, they're already inclined to modify their notion of the class struggle and their hostility to private property. And there really are people among them who still place country before party, as compared with the middle-class parties who've gone radical since the last elections in putting their conflicting national-minority interests above every- thing else. Which brings us to the Emperor. " He lowered his voice confidentially. "As I've said already, we must learn to think in eco- nomic terms. The one-sided policy of encouraging national minori- ties has led the Empire into the desert. Now, to the Emperor, all this Czech-Polish-German-Italian ranting about autonomy . . . I don't
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 923
know how to put it: let's just say His Majesty couldn't care less. What His Majesty does care about, deeply, is our getting the defense bud- get through without any cuts so that the Empire may be strong, and apart from that he feels a hearty distaste for all the pretensions ofthe middle-class idea-mongers, a distaste he probably acquired in 1848. But these two priorities simply make His Majesty the First Socialist in the land, as it were. You can now see, I think, the magnificent vista I was speaking of? Which leaves only the problem of religiosity, in which there is still an unbridgeable gap between opposing camps, and that's something I'd have to talk over with His Eminence again. "
His Grace fell silent, absorbed in his conviction that history, in particular that of his own country, bogged down as it was in fruitless nationalist dissensions, would shortly be called upon to take a step into the future-whereby he perceived the spirit of history as being more or less two-legged, but otherwise a philosophical necessity. Hence it was understandable that he surfaced suddenly with sore eyes, like a diver who had gone too far down. "In any case, we must get ready to do our duty! " he said.
"But where does our duty lie, Your Grace? "
''Why, in doing our duty, of course! It's the only thing we canal- ways do! But to change the subject . . . " It was only now that Count Leinsdorf seemed to remember the pile of newspapers and files on which his fist rested. "Look here, what the people want today is a strong hand. But today a strong hand needs fine words, or the people won't put up with it. And you, and I mean you personally, are emi- nently qualified in this respect. What you said, for instance, the last time we all met at your cousin's before you left town, was that what we actually need-if you recall-is a central committee for eternal happiness, to bring it in step with our earthly precision in ratiocina- tion. . . . Well, it wouldn't work out quite so easily, but His Eminence laughed heartily when I told him about it; actually, I rubbed it in a bit, as they say, and even though he's always making fun of every- thing, I can tell pretty well whether his laugh comes from the spleen or from the heart. The fact is, my dear man, we simply can't do with- outyou. . . . " ·
While all of Count Leinsdorf's other pronouncements that day had had the character of complicated dreams, the wish he now ex- pressed-that Ulrich should give up "definitively, at least for now,"
924 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
any idea of resigning his post as Honorary Secretary of the Parallel Campaign-was so definite and so pointedly fledged, and his hand had come down on Ulrich's arm with such an effect of a surprise ma- neuver, that Ulrich almost had the not entirely pleasing impression that all the elaborate harangues he had been listening to had only been calculated, far more slyly than he had anticipated, to put him off'his guard. At this moment he was quite annoyed with Clarisse, who had got him into this fix. But since he had appealed on her be- half to Count Leinsdorf's kindness the very first time there had been an opening in the conversation, and the request had been granted instantly by the obliging high official, who wanted only to go on talk- ing without interruption, he had no choice now but reluctantly to square the account.
"I've heard from Tuzzi," Count Leinsdorf said, pleased with his success, "that you might decide on a man from his office to take the routine business off your hands. 'Splendid,' I told him, 'if he stays on. ' After all, his man has taken his oath of office, which we'll give you too, and my own secretary, whom I'd gladly have put at your disposal, is unfortunately an idiot. All you perhaps shouldn't let him see is the strictly confidential stuff, because he's Tuzzi's man, and that has certain drawbacks; but otherwise, do arrange matters to suit your own convenience," His Grace said, concluding this successful interview with the utmost cordiality.
21
CAST ALL THOU HAST INTO THE FIRE, EVEN UNTO THY SHOES
During this time and from the moment she had stayed behind alone, Agathe had been living in a state of utter release from all ties to the world, in a sweetly wistful suspension ofwill; a condition that was like a great height, where only the wide blue sky is to b~ seen. Once a day
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 925
she treated herself to a short stroll in town; at home, she read, at- tended to her affairs, and experienced this mild, trivial business of living with grateful enjoyment. Nothing troubled her state: no cling- ing to the past, no straining for the future; if her eye lit upon some nearby object, it was like coaxing a baby lamb to her: either it came gently closer or it took no notice ofher at all-but at no time did her mind deliberately take hold of it with that motion of inner grasping which gives to every act of cold understanding a certain violence as well as a certain futility, for it drives away the joy that is in things. In this fashion everything around her seemed far more intelligible to Agathe than ordinarily, but in the main she was still preoccupied with her conversations with her brother. In keeping with the pecu- liarity of her unusually exact memory, which did not distort its mate- rial with any bias or prejudice, there rose up in her mind more or less at random the living words, the subtle surprises of cadence and ges- tures, in these conversations, much as they were before she had quite understood them and realized where they were tending. Neverthe- less, it all held the utmost significance for her; her memory, so often dominated by remorse, was now suffused with a quiet devotion, and the time just past clung like a caress to the warmth of her body, in- stead of drifting off as it usually did into the frost and darkness that awaits life lived in vain.
And so, veiled in an invisible light, Agathe also dealt with the lawyers, notaries, brokers, and agents she now had to see. No one refused her; everyone was glad to oblige the attractive young woman-whose father's name was sufficient recommendation-in every way. She conducted herself with as much self-assurance as de- tachment; she was sure ofwhat she wanted, but it was detached from herself, as it were, and the experience she had acquired in life-also something that can be seen as detached from the personality-went on working in pursuit of that purpose like a shrewd laborer calmly taking advantage for his commission of whatever opportunities pre- sented themselves. That she was engaged in preparing a felony-the significance ofher action that would have been strikingly apparent to an outsider-simply did not enter her state of mind during this time. The unity of her conscience excluded it. The pure light of this con- science outshone this dark point, which nevertheless, like the core of a flame, formed its center. Agathe herself did not know how to ex-
gz6 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
press it; by virtue ofher intention she found herselfin a state that was a world away from this same ugly intention.
On the morning after her brother had left, Agathe was already considering her appearance with great care: it had begun by accident with her face, when her gaze had landed on it and not come back out of the mirror.
She was held fast, much as one who sometimes has absolutely no desire to walk keeps walking a hundred steps, and then another hundred, all the way toward something one catches sight of only at the end, at which point one definitely intends to tum back and yet does not. In this way she was held captive, without vanity, by this landscape ofher self, which confronted her behind the shimmer ofglass. She looked at her hair, still like bright velvet; she opened the collar of her reflection's dress and slipped the dress off its shoulders; then she undressed the image altogether and studied it down to the rosy nails, to where the body tapers off into fingers and toes and hardly belongs to itself anymore. Everything was still like the spar- kling day approaching its zenith: ascendant, pure, exact, and infused with that forenoon growth that manifests itselfin a human being or a young animal as ineffably as in a bouncing ball that has not yet reached its highest point in the air, but is just about to. "Perhaps it is passing through that point this very moment," Agathe thought. The idea frightened her. Still, she was only twenty-seven; it might take a while yet. Her body, as untouched by athletic coaches and masseurs as it was by childbearing and maternal toil, had been formed by noth- ing but its own growth. Ifit could have been set down naked in one of those grand and lonely landscapes that mountain ranges form on the side turned toward the sky, the vast, infertile, billowing swell of such heights would have borne it upward like some pagan goddess. In a nature ofthis kind, noon does not pour down exhalations oflight and heat; it merely seems for a while longer to rise above its zenith and then to pass imperceptiblyinto the sinking, floating beautyofthe afternoon. From the mirror came the eerie sense ofthat undefinable hour.
It occurred to her at this moment that Ulrich, too, was letting his life go by as though it would last forever. "Perhaps it is a mistake that we didn't first meet when we were old," she said to herself, conjuring up the melancholy image of two banks of fog drifting earthward in the evening. "They're not as fine as the blaze of noon, but what do
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 927
those formless gray shapes care what people make of them? Their hour has come, and it is just as tender as the most glowing hour! "
She had now almost turned her back on the mirror, but was pro- voked by a certain extravagance in her mood to turn around again before she knew it, and had to laugh at the memory of two fat people taking the waters at Marienbad years ago; she had watched them as they sat on one of those green benches, doting on each other with the sweetest and tenderest feelings. "Their beating hearts are slim under all that fat, and being lost in their vision of each other, they have no idea how funny they look to the world," Agathe reminded herself, and made an ecstatic face while trying to puff up her body with imag- inary rolls offat. When this fit ofexuberance had passed, it looked as if some tiny tears of rage had risen to her eyes, and pulling herself together, she coolly resumed the point-by-point scrutiny of her ap- pearance. Although she was considered slender, she observed in her body with some concern a possibility that she could become heavy. Perhaps she was too broad-chested. In her face, its very white skin dimmed by her golden hair as if by candles burning in the daytime, the nose was a bit too wide, and its almost classical line a bit dented on one side at the tip. It could be that everywhere inside her flame- like given form a second was lurking, broader and more melancholy, like a linden leaf that has fallen among twigs of laurel. Agathe felt a curiosity about herself, as though she were really seeing herself for the first time. This was how she might well have been perceived by the men she had become involved with, without her having known anything about it. It was a rather uncanny feeling. But by some trick ofthe imagination, before she could call her memories to account for it, she kept hearing behind everything she had experienced the ar- dent, long-drawn-out mating cry of donkeys, which had always curi- ously aroused her: a hopelessly foolish and ugly sound, which for that very reason makes no other heroism of love seem so desperately sweet as theirs. She shrugged her shoulders at her life and resolutely turned back to her image to discover a place where her appearance might already be yielding to age. There were those small areas near the eyes and ears that are the first to change, beginning by looking as though something had slept on them, or the inner curve under the breasts, which so easily loses its definition. At this moment it would have been a satisfaction to her and a promise of peace to come had
928 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
she seen such a change, but there was none yet to be seen, and the loveliness of her body floated almost eerily in the depths of the mirror.
It now seemed odd to her that she was actually Frau Hagauer, and the difference between the clear and close relationship that implied and the vagueness with which the fact reached deep into her being was so great that she seemed to herself to be standing there without a body while the body in the mirror belonged to Frau Hagauer, who was the one who would have to learn to cope with its having commit- ted itself to a situation beneath its dignity. Even in this there was some of that elusive pleasure in living that sometimes startles, and it made Agathe, once she had hastily dressed again, go straight to her bedroom to look for a capsule that must be in her luggage. This small airtight capsule, which had been in her possession almost as long as she had been married to Hagauer, and which she always kept within reach, contained a tiny quantity of a drab powder she had been as- sured was a deadly poison. Agathe recalled certain sacrifices it had cost her to obtain this forbidden stuff, about which she knew only what she had been told of its effect and one of those chemical names the uninitiated must memorize, like a magic formula, without know- ing what they mean. But evidently all those means by which the end may be brought a little closer, such as poison or guns, or seeking out survivable dangers, are part ofthe romantic love oflife; and it may be that most people's lives are so oppressed, so fluctuating, with so much darkness in their brightness, and altogether so perverse, that life's inherent joy can be released only by the distant possibility of putting an end to it. Agathe felt better when her eyes lit on the tiny metal object, which she regarded, amid the uncertainty that lay ahead of her, as a bringer ofluck, a talisman.
So this did not at all mean that Agathe at this time already in- tended to kill herself. On the contrary, she feared death just as every young person does to whom, for instance, before falling asleep in bed at night, after a well-spent day, it suddenly occurs that "It's inevita- ble: sometime, on another fine day just like this, I'll be dead. " Nor does one acquire an appetite for dying by having to watch someone else die; her father's death had tormented her with impressions whose horrors had returned since she had been left alone in the house after her brother's departure. But ''I'm sort of dead, in a way"
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · gzg
was something Agathe felt often; and especially in moments like this, when she had just been conscious of her young body's shapeliness and good health, its taut beauty, equally unfathomable in the mystery of what held it together and what made its elements decompose in death, she tended to fall from her condition ofhappy confidence into one of anxiety, amazement, and silence: it was like stepping from a noisy, crowded room and suddenly standing under the shimmering stars. Regardless of her awakening intentions and her satisfaction at having extricated herself from a bungled life, she now felt rather de- tached from herself and only obscurely linked to her own existence. Coolly she thought of death as a state in which one is released from all efforts and illusions, imagined it as a tender inward rocking to sleep: one lies in God's hand, and this hand is like a cradle or a ham- mock slung between two tall trees swaying faintly in the wind. She thought of death as a great tranquillity and fatigue, the end of all wanting and striving, ofall paying attention and having to think, like the pleasant slackening ofthe fingers one feels when sleep cautiously loosens their hold on whatever last thing ofthis world they have still been clutching. No doubt she was indulging herself in a rather easy and casual notion ofdeath, typical ofsomeone disinclined to take on the exertions of living; and in the end she was amused to think how this was all of a piece with her moving the couch into her father's austere drawing room to lounge on, reading-the only change she had made in the house on her own initiative.
Still, the thought of giving up life was anything but a game for Agathe. It seemed profoundly believable to her that all this frustrat- ing tunnoil must be followed by a state ofblissful repose, which she could not help imagining in physical terms. She felt it this way be- cause she had no need of the suspenseful illusion that the world could be improved, and she was always ready to surrender her share in it completely, as long as it could be done in a pleasant fashion. Besides, she had already had a special encounter with death in that extraordinary illness that had befallen her on the borderline between childhood and girlhood. That was when-in an almost imperceptibly gradual loss of energy that seemed to infiltrate each tiniest particle of time, though as a whole it happened with an irresistible rush-more and more parts ofher body seemed to dissolve away from her day by day and be destroyed; yet, keeping pace with this decline and this
930 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
slipping away from life there was an unforgettable fresh striving to- ward a goal that banished all the unrest and anxiety of her illness, a curiously substantive state that even enabled her to exert a certain domination over the adults around her, who were becoming more and more unsure of themselves. It is not out of the question that this sense ofpower, gained under such impressive circumstances, could later have been at the heart of her spiritual readiness to withdraw in similar fashion from a life whose allurements for some reason fell short of her expectations. But more probably it was the other way around: that that illness, which enabled her to escape the demands of school and home, was the first manifestation of her attitude to the world, an attitude that was transparent and permeated by the light of an emotion unknown to her. For Agathe felt herself to be a person of a spontaneous, simple temperament, warm, lively, even gay and easy to please; she had in fact adapted herself good-naturedly to a great variety of circumstances, nor had she ever suffered that collapse into indifference that befalls women who can no longer bear their disillu- sionment. But in the midst of her laughter or the tumult of some sensual adventure that continued nonetheless, there lived a disen- chantment that made every fiber of her body tired and nostalgic for something else, something best described as nothingness.
This nothingness had a definite, ifindefinable, content. For a long time she had been in the habit of repeating to herself, on all sorts of occasions, words of Novalis: "What then can I do for my soul, that lives within me like an unsolved riddle, even while it grants the visi- ble man the utmost license, because there is no way it can control him? '' But the flickering light ofthis utterance always went out again, like a flash of lightning that only left her in darkness, for she did not believe in a soul, as it was something too presumptuous and in any case much too definite for her own person. On the other hand, she could not believe in the earthly here and now either. To understand this rightly, one need only realize that this turning away from an earthly order when there is no faith in a supernatural order is a pro- foundly natural response, because in every head, alongside the pro- cess of logical thought, with its austere and simple orderliness reflecting the conditions of our external world, there is an affective world, whose logic, insofar as it can be spoken of at all, corresponds to feelings, passions, moods. The laws governing these two bear
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 931
roughly the same relation to each other as those of a lumberyard, where chunks of wood are hewn into rectangular shapes and stacked ready for transport, bear to the dark tangled laws of the forest, with its mysterious workings and rustlings. And since the objects of our thought are in no way quite independent of its conditions, these two modes of thinking not only mingle in each person but can, to a cer- tain extent, even present him with two worlds, at least immediately before and after that "first mysterious and indescribable moment" of which a famous religious thinker has said that it occurs in every sen- sory perception before vision and feeling separate and fall into the places in which one is accustomed to find them: one of them an ob- ject in space and the other a mental process enclosed within the observer.
And so, whatever the relationship may be between objects and feeling in the civilized person's mature view of the world, everyone surely knows those ecstatic moments in which a split has not yet oc- curred, as though water and land had not yet been divided and the waves of feeling still shared the same horizon as the hills and valleys that form the shape of things. There is even no need to assume that Agathe experienced such moments unusually often or with unusual intensity; she merely perceived them more vividly or, if you like, more superstitiously, for she was always willing to trust the world and then again not really trust it, just as she had done ever since her school days, and she had not unlearned it even later, when she had come in closer contact with masculine logic. In this sense, which is not to be confused with whim and willfulness, Agathe could have claimed-given more self-confidence than she had-to be the most illogical of women. But it had never occurred to her to regard the alienated feelings she experienced as more than a personal eccen- tricity. It was only through the encounter with her brother that a transformation occurred within her. In these empty rooms, all hol- lowed out in the shadows of solitude, rooms so recently filled with talk and a fellowship that reached to the innermost soul, the distinc- tion between physical separation and mental presence unwittingly lost itself; and as the days glided by without a trace, Agathe felt with a hitherto unknown intensity the curious charm of that sense of omni- presence and omnipotence which occurs when the felt world makes the transition to perceptions. Her attention now seemed to be not
932 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
with the senses but already opened wide deep inside her emotions, where no light could enter that did not already glow like the light in her heart, and it seemed to her, remembering her brother's words, that regardless of the ignorance she normally complained of she could understand everything that mattered without having to reflect on it. And as in this way her spirit was so filled with itself that even the liveliest idea had something of the soundless floating quality of a memory about it, everything that came her way spread out into a lim- itless present. Even when she did something, only a dividing line melted between herself, the doer, and the thing done, and her move- ments seemed to be the path by which things came to her when she stretched out her arms to them. This gentle power, this knowledge, and the world's speaking presence were, however, whenever she wondered with a smile what she was doing after all, hardly distin- guishable from absence, helplessness, and a profound muteness of the spirit. With only a slight exaggeration of what she was feeling, Agathe could have said that she no longer knew where she was. On all sides she was in a state of suspension in which she felt both lifted up and lost to sight. She might have said: I am in love, but I don't know with whom. She was filled with a clear will, something she had always felt the lack of, but she did not know what she should under- take in its clarity, since all that her life had ever held of good and evil was now meaningless.
So it was not only when she looked at the poison capsule but every day that Agathe thought she would like to die, or that the happiness of death must be like the happiness in which she was spending her days while she was waiting to go and join her brother, meanwhile doing exactly what he had pleaded with her to stop doing. She could not imagine what would happen after she was with her brother in the capital. She remembered almost reproachfully that he had some- times nonchalantly given signs of assuming that she would be suc- cessful there and would soon find a new husband or at least a lover; it would be nothing like that, that much she knew. Love, children, fine days, gay social gatherings, travel, a little art-the good life was so easy; she understood its appeal and was not immune to it. But ready as she was to regard herselfas useless, Agathe felt the total contempt of the born rebel for this easy way out. She recognized it as a fake. The life supposedly lived to the full is in truth a life "without rhyme
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 933
or reason"; in the end-and truly at the real end, death-something is always missing. It is-how should she put it? -like things piled up without being ordered by some guiding principle; unfulfilled in its fullness, the opposite of easy or simple, a jumble one accepts with the cheerfulness of habit! And suddenly going off at a tangent, she thought: "It's like a bunch of strange children you look at with con- ventional friendliness, with growing anxiety because you can't find your own child among them! "
She took some comfort in her resolve to put an end to her life if the new tum it was about to take should prove to have changed noth- ing. Like fermenting wine, she felt hope streaming in her that death and terror would not be the finai word of truth. She felt no need to think about it. Actually, she feared this need, which Ulrich was al- ways so glad to indulge, and she feared it aggressively. For she did feel that everything that moved. her so strongly was not entirely free of a persistent hint that it was merely illusion. But it was just as true that every illusion contained a reality, however fluid and dissolved: perhaps a reality not yet solidified into earth, she thought; and in one ofthose wonderful moments when the place where she was standing seemed to melt away, she was able to believe that behind her, in that space into which one could never see, God might be standing. This was too much, and she recoiled from it. An awesome immensity and emptiness suddenly flooded through her, a shoreless radiance dark- ened her mind and overwhelmed her heart with fear. Her youth, eas- ily prone to such anxieties as come with a lack of experience, whispered to her that she might be in danger of allowing an incipient madness to grow in her; she struggled to back away. Fiercely, she reminded herselfthat she did not believe in God at all. And she really did not believe, ever since she had been taught belief; it was part of her mistrust of everything she was taught. She was anything but reli- gious ifit meant faith in the supernatural, or at least some moral con- viction. But after a while, exhausted and trembling, she still had to admit to herself that she had felt "God" as distinctly as if he were a man standing behind her and putting a coat on her shoulders.
When she had thought this over and recovered her nerve, she dis- covered that the meaning of her experience did not lie in that "solar eclipse" of her physical sensations, but was mainly a moral matter. A sudden change of her inmost condition, and hence of all her relations
934 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
with the world, had for a moment given her that "unity of the con- science with the senses" which she had so far experienced so fleet- ingly that it was barely sufficient to impart to her ordinary life a tinge of something disconsolate and murkily passionate, whether Agathe tried to behave well or badly. This change seemed to her an incom- parable outpouring that emanated as much from her surroundings toward her as from herself toward them, a oneness of the highest significance through the smallest mental motion, a motion that was barely distinguishable from the objects themselves. The objects were perfused by her sensations and the sensations by the objects in a way so convincing that Agathe felt she had never before been remotely touched by anything for which she had formerly used the word "con- vincing. " And this had happened in circumstances that would nor- mally be expected to rule out the possibility of her being convinced.
So the meaning ofwhat she experienced in her solitude did not lie in its possible psychological import, as an indication of a high-strung or overly fragile personality, for it did not lie in the person at all but in something general, or perhaps in the link between his generality and the person, something Agathe not unjustly regarded as a moral conclusion in the sense that it seemed to the young woman--disap- pointed as she was in herself-that ifshe could always live as she did in such exceptional moments, and if she was not too weak to keep it up, she could love the world and willingly accommodate herself to it-something she would never be able to do otherwise! Now she was filled with a fierce longing to recover that mood, but such mo- ments of highest intensity cannot be willed by force. It was only when her furious efforts proved useless that she realized, with the clarity which a pale day takes on after sunset, that the only thing she could hope for, and what in fact she was waiting for, with an impa- tience merely masked by her solitude, was the strange prospect that her brother had once half-humorously called the Millennium. He could just as well have chosen another word for it, for what it meant to Agathe was the convincing and confident ring of something that was coming. She would never have dared make this assertion. Even now she did not know whether it was truly possible. She had no idea what it could be. She had at the moment again forgotten all the words with which her brother had proved to her that beyond what filled her spirit with nebulous light, possibility stretched onward into
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 935
the uncharted. As long as she had been in his company she had sim- ply felt that a country was crystallizing out of his words, crystallizing not in her head but actually under her feet. The very fact that he often spoke of it only ironically, and his usual way of alternating be- tween coolness and emotion, which had so often confused her in the beginning, now gladdened her in her loneliness, and she took it as a kind of guarantee that he meant it-antagonistic states of soul being more convincing than rapturous ones. "I was apparently thinking of death only because I was afraid he was not being serious enough," she confessed to herself.
The last day she had to spend in absentia took her by surprise. All at once everything in the house was cleared out and tidied up; noth- ing was left to do but hand the keys over to the old couple who were being pensioned off under the provisions of the will and were to go on living in the servants' lodge until the property found a new owner. Agathe refused to go to a hotel, intending to stay at her post until her train left in the small hours. The house was packed up and shrouded. One naked bulb was lit. Some crates, pushed together, served as table and chair. She had them set her table for supper on the edge of a ravine on a terrace of crates. Her father's old factotum juggled a loaded tray through light and shadow; he and his wife had insisted on cooking a dinner in their own kitchen, so that, as they expressed it, "the young lady" should be properly taken care offor her last meal at home. Suddenly Agathe thought, completely outside the state of mind in which she had spent the last few days: "Can they possibly have noticed anything? " She could easily -have neglected to destroy every last scrap of paper on which she had practiced changing the will. She felt cold terror, a nightmarish weight that hung on all her limbs: the miserly dread of reality that holds no nourishment for the spirit but only consumes it. Now she perceived with fierce intensity her newly awakened desire to live; it furiously resisted the possibility of anything getting in her way. When the old servant returned, she scrutinized his face intently. But the old man, with his discreet smile, went about his business unsuspecting, seeming to feel something or other that was mute and ceremonious. She could not see into him any more than she could see into a wall, and did not know what else there might be in him behind his blank polish. Now she, too, felt something muted, ceremonious, and sad. He had always been her
936 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
father's confidant, unfailingly ready to betray to him his children's every secret as soon as he had discovered it. But Agathe had been born in this house, and everything that had happened since was com- ing to an end this day: Agathe was moved to find herself and him here now, solemnly alone. She made up her mind to give him a spe- cial little gift of money, and in a fit of sudden weakness she planned to tell him that it came from Professor Hagauer; not from some cal- culating motive but as an act of atonement, with the intention of leaving nothing undone, even though she realized this was as un- necessary as it was superstitious. Before the old man returned again, she also took out her locket and capsule. The locket with the portrait of her never-forgotten beloved she slipped, after one last frowning look at his face, under the loosely nailed lid of a crate destined to go into storage indefinitely; it appeared to contain kitchen utensils or lamps, for she heard the clink of metal on metal, like branches falling from a tree. Then she placed the capsule with the poison where she had formerly worn the portrait.
"How old-fashioned of me! " she thought with a smile as she did this. 'Tm sure there are things more important than one's love life! " But she did not believe it.
At this moment it would have been as untrue to say that she was disinclined to enter into illicit relations with her brother as that she desired to. That might depend on how things turned out; but in her present state of mind nothing corresponded to the clarity of such a problem.
The light painted the bare boards of the crates between which she was sitting a glaring white and deep black. And a similar tragic mask gave an eerie touch to the otherwise simple thought that she was now spending her last evening in the house where she had been born of a woman she had never been able to remember, who had also given birth to Ulrich. An old impression came to her of clowns with dead- serious faces and strange instruments standing around her. They began to play. Agathe recognized it as a childhood daydream of hers. She could not hear the music, but all the clowns were looking at her. She told herself that at this moment her death would be no loss to anyone or anything, and for herselfit would mean no more than the outward end of an inner dying. So she thought while the clowns were
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 937
sending their music up to the ceiling and she seemed to be sitting on a circus floor strewn with sawdust, tears dropping on her finger. It was a feeling of utter futility she had known often as a girl, and she thought: "I suppose rve remained childish to this day," which did not prevent her from thinking at the same time of something that loomed vastly magnified by her tears: how, in the first hour of their reunion, she and her brother had come face-to-face in just such clown costumes. "What does it mean that it is my brother, of all peo- ple, who seems to hold the key to what's inside me? " she wondered. And suddenly she was really weeping. It seemed to be happening for no other reason she knew of but sheer pleasure, and she shook her head hard, as though there were something here she could neither undo nor put together.
At the same time she was thinking with a native ingenuousness that Ulrich would flnd the answers to all problems . . . until the old man came back again and was moved at seeing her so moved. "Oh my, the dear young lady! " he said, also shaking his head.
Agathe looked at him in confusion, but when she realized the mis- understanding behind this compassion, that it had been aroused by her appearance ofchildlike grief, heryouthful high spirits rose again.
"Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes. When thou has nothing left, think not even on thy shroud, but cast thyself naked into the fire! " she said to him.
It was an ancient saying that Ulrich had read to her delightedly, and the old man showed the stumps of his teeth in a smile at the grave and mellow lilt of the words she recited to him, her eyes aglow with tears; with his eyes he followed her hand pointing at the high- piled crates-she was trying to help his understanding by misleading it-suggesting something like a pyre. He had nodded at the word "shroud," eager to follow even though the path of the words was none too smooth, but he'd stiffened from the word "naked" on, and when she repeated her maxim, his face had reverted to the mask of the well-trained servant whose expression gives assurance that he can be trusted not to hear, see, or judge his betters.
In all his years with his old master that word had never once been uttered in his hearing; "undressed" would have been the closest per- missible. But young people were different nowadays, and he would
938 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
probably not be able to give them satisfaction in any case. Serenely, as one who has earned his retirement, he felt that his career was over. But Agathe's last thought before she left was: 'Would Ulrich really
cast everything into the fire? ''
22
FROM KONIA TOWSK(S CRITIQUE OF DANIELLJ'S THEOREM TO THE FALL OF MAN. FROM THE FALL OF MAN TO THE EMOTIONAL RIDDLE POSED BY A MAN'S SISTER
The state in which Ulrich emerged into the street on leaving the Palais Leinsdorf was rather like the down-to-earth sensation of hun- ger. He stopped in front of a billboard and stilled his hunger for bourgeois normality by taking in the announcements and advertise- ments. The billboard was several yards wide and covered with words.
"Actually," it occurred to him, "one might assume that these par- ticular words, which are met with in every comer of the city, have a great deal to tell us. " The language seemed to him akin to the cliches uttered by the characters in popular novels at important points in their lives. He read: "Have you ever worn anything so flattering yet so durable as Topinam silk stockings? '' "His Excellency Goes Out on the Town! " "Saint Bartholomew's Night-A Brand-New Produc- tion! " "For Fun and Food Come to the Black Pony! " "Hot Sex Show & Dancing at the Red Pony! " Next to this he noticed a political poster: "Criminal Intrigues! " but it referred to the price of bread, not to the Parallel Campaign. He turned away and, a few steps farther along, looked into the window of a bookshop. "The Great Author's Latest Work," said a cardboard sign beside a row of fifteen copies of the same book. In the opposite comer of the display window, a sign accompanying another book read: "Love's Tower ofBabel b y - - - makes gripping reading for men and women. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 939
"The Great Author? " Ulrich thought. He remembered having read one book by him and resolved never to read another; but since then the man had nevertheless become famous. Considering the window display of German intellect, Ulrich was reminded of an old army joke: "Mortadella! " During Ulrich's military service this had been the nickname ofan unpopular general, after the popular Italian sausage, and ifanyone wondered why, the answer was: "Part pig, part donkey. " He was prevented from pursuing this stimulating analogy by the voice of a woman asking him:
"Are you waiting for the streetcar too? '' Only then did he realize that he was no longer standing in front of the bookshop. He also had not realized that he was now standing immobile at a streetcar stop. The woman who had called this to his attention wore a knapsack and glasses, and turned out to be an acquaintance from the staff of the Astronomical Institute, one of the few women of accomplishment in this man's profession. He looked at her nose and the bags under her eyes, which the strain of unremitting intellectual effort had turned into something resembling underarm dress shields made of gutta- percha. Then he glanced down and noticed her short tweed skirt, then up and saw a black rooster feather in a green mountaineer's hat that floated over her learned features, and he smiled.
"Are you off to the mountains? '' he asked.
Dr. Strastil was going to the mountains for three days to "relax.