No More Learning

"But I must speak of it. Until now I wasn't sure what was going on between you and Arnheim. But now I understand, and you look to me like a person who is seriously thinking of flying to the moon. I would never have thought you capable of such madness. "
''I've told you that I'm capable of going to extremes. " Her upward gaze was meant to be audacious, but the sun made her screw up her eyes, so that she seemed to be twinkling at him.
"These are the ravings of starved love," Ulrich said, "which pass off when hunger is appeased:" He wondered what Arnheiin's plans might be with regard to her. Did he regret his proposal, and was he covering his retreat by putting on some sort of act? But then he could simply leave and not come back; a man who had been in business all his life would surely have the necessary callousness for that? Here- membered noticing certain signs in Arnheim that indicated passion in an older man; his face was sometimes a grayish yellow, slack and tired, like a room with the bed still unmade at noon. The most likely explanation was the havoc caused by two almost equally strong pas- sions fighting each other to a standstill. But since he was incapable of imagining the passion for power in the degree to which it ruled Am- heim, he could not conceive ofthe measures love had to take in order to fight it.
"You're an odd sort of man," Diotima said. "Always different from what one would expect. Wasn't it you who spoke to me of seraphic love? "
"You regard that as a possibility? " Ulrich asked absentmindedly. "Not as you described it, of course. "
"So Arnheim loves you seraphically? " Ulrich began to laugh softly. "I wish you wouldn't laugh. " Diotima almost hissed at him.
"You don't understand," he apologize& "It's only the excitement. You and Arnheim are sensitive people. You love poetry. I'm sure that you are sometimes touched by a breath . . . a breath of something: the question is just what that is. And now you want to get to the bot- tom of it, with all the thoroughness of your idealism. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 6 z9
620 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"Aren't you always saying that one must be precise and thorough? " Diotima countered. .
It was too much. ''You're mad! " he said. "Forgive my saying so, but you are mad. And you of all people mustn't be. "
Meanwhile Arnheim had been telling the General that for the last two generations the world had been undergoing the most profound revolution of all: the end of the soul was in sight.
It gave the Genera! a stab. What the devil, here was yet another problem to think about. To be honest, he ·had thought until this mo- ment, despite Diotima, that there was no such thing as the soul. At military school and in the regiment, nobody gave a hang about this kind of preacher's talk. But here was this manufacturer of guns and tanks, tallCing about. the soul as though he could see it standing there. The General's eyes began to itch and to roll around gloomily, gog- gling at the translucent air around them.
But Arnheim was not waiting to be asked for particulars; words flowed from his lips, from that pale pink slit between his clipped mustache and his little pointed beard. As he phrased it, the soul had started to shrivel and age ever since the Church began to crumble, around the beginning ofthe bourgeois era. Since then it had lost God and all solid values and ideals until the present, when men had actu- ally reached the point of living without morals, without principles, without real experiences, in fact.
The General could not quite see why one could not have experi- ences ifone had no morals. Whereupon Arnheim opened the big vol- ume bound in pigskin that he was holding, revealing an expensive facsimile of a manuscript so valuable that even a mortal of Amheim's extraordinary standing could not be permitted to take the original out of the building. The General saw the depiction of an angel with wings spread horizontally across two pages, against ·a background of dark earth, golden sky, and marvelous colors layered like clouds; he was looking at a reproduction of one of the most moving and splen- did of early medieval paintings, but since he did not know this, while he did know all about bird-hunting and depictions of it, he could only conclude that a creature with wings and a long neck that was neither human nor a snipe must be an aberration to which his companion wished to draw his attention.
Amheim was. pointing his finger at it and saying pensively: "Here
you see what that great lady who is creating the Austrian Campaign is trying to bring back into the world. . . . "
"I see, I see," Stumm said, realizing that he had failed to appreci- ate this thing for what it was and that he had better watch his step.
"The great expressiveness, and with such utter simplicity," Am- heim went on, "bears witness to what our age has lost forever. What is our science compared with this? Patchwork. Our art? Extremes, without~ mediating substance to hold them together. We lack the magic key to unity, and this, you see, is why I am so deeply moved by this Austrian plan to set the world an example of unification, of a shared idea, even though I do not quite believe it can be done. I am a German. Everything in the world today is loud and crude, and Ger- many is the loudest. In every country the people are straining them- selves morning, noon, and night, whether at work or at play, but in Germany they start earlier and stop later than anywhere else. In all the world the spirit of cold calculation and brute force has lost touch with the soul, but we in Germany have the most businessmen and the strongest army in the world. " He looked around the square with delight. "Here in Austria, things have not yet gone so far. The past is still with you, and the people have kept something of their original intuitiveness. Ifthe German spirit can still be saved from rationalism, this is the only place left. from which a start can be made. But I am afraid," he added with a sigh, "we can hardly succeed. A great idea nowadays encounters too much resistance; great ideas just barely help to prevent each other from being misused. We are living in a state of moral truce, as it were, armed to the teeth with ideas. "
He smiled at his own joke. Then something more occurred to him: "You know, the difference between Germany and Austria we have just touched on always reminds me of billiards. Even at billiards ev- erything goes wrong if you try to do it all by calculation instead of with feeling. "
The General had guessed that he was supposed to feel flattered by the reference to a moral armed truce, and he wanted to show that he had been paying attention. He did know something about billiards, so he said, "I play snooker myself, and skittles too, but I never heard that there's a difference between the Austrian and the German styles ofplay. " u
Amheim shut his eyes and gave it some thought: "I myself never
Pseudoreality Prevails · 6 2 1
622 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
play billiards," he said after a moment, "but I know that you can play the ball high or low, from the right or from the left; that you can strike the second ball head-on or merely graze it; that you can hit it hard or lightly, bluffa little-or a lot-and there must be many more such options. Now, if you imagine each of these elements with all their inherent gradations, you have an almost infinite number ofpos- sible combinations. To state them theoretically, I should have to take into account, besides the laws of mathematics and statics, the me- chanics ofsolids, plus the laws ofelasticity; I would have to know the coefficients of the materials, the influence of the temperature, the most precise means of measuring the coordination and gradation of my motor impulses, of estimating distances exactly, like a nonius, how to combine the various factors with better than the speed and accuracy of a slide rule, to say nothing of allowing for margins of error, fields of dispersal, and the fact that the aim, which is the cor- rect coincidence of the two balls, is in itself not clearly definable but only a collection of barely adequate data round an average value. "
Arnheim spoke slowly, and in·~way that compelled attention, as though pouring a liquid drop by drop from a vial to a glass; he did not spare his interlocutor a single detail.
"And so you see," he continued, "that I should need to have all the qualities, and do all the things, I cannot possibly ·have and do. You must be enough of a mathematician to see that. it would take a life- time to plan a single carom shOt in that fashion; it boggles the mind! And yet I step up to the table with a cigarette between my lips, a tune in my ear, and my hat on, as it were, and hardly bothering to look over the board, I take my cue to the ball and the problem is solved! General, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life. You are not only an Austrian, you are a military man, so you're bound to understand me: politics, honor, war, art, all the crucial processes of life, take place beyond the scope of the conscious rational mind. Man's greatness is rooted in the irrational. Even we businessmen don't really operate by calculation-not the leading men, that is. The little fellows may have to count their pennies; we learn to regard our really successful moves as a mystery that defies analysis. A man who doesn't care deeply about feeling, morality, religion, music, 'poetry, form, discipline, chivalry, generosity, cru\dor, tolerance-believe me, such a man will never make a businessman of real stature. This is why
I have always admired the military, especially the Austrian military, based as it is on age-old traditions, and I am truly delighted that Frau Tuzzi can count on your support. It is a relief to me to know it. Your influence, with that of our younger friend, is extremely important. All great things rest on the same principles; great obligations are a blessing, General. "
To his own surprise he suddenly found himself spontaneously shaking Stumm's hand, then he ended by saying: "Hardly anyone realizes that true greatness has no rational basis; I mean to say, every- thing strong is simple. "
Stumm von Bordwehr held his breath; he was not sure he under- stood a word of it all, and wished he could rush back into the library and spend hours reading up on all these points that the great man had paid him the compliment of making to him. At last, out of this March gale whirling in his mind, there came a piercing ray of lucid- ity. What the hell, he thought, this fellow wants something from me! He looked up. Arnheim was still holding the book in both hands but was now turning his attention seriously to hailing a cab. His face was slightly flushed with animation, like that of a man who has just been trading ideas with another. The General was silent, like a man awed by a portentous thought. If Arnheim wanted something from him, then General Stumm was free to want something from Amheim too, to the advantage of His Majesty's service. This perception opened such vistas of possibility that Stumm put off thinking about just what it all really meant. But if the angel in the book had suddenly lifted up a wing to give clever General S~mm a glimpse of what was hidden underneath, the General could not have felt more bewildered and overjoyed.
Over in Diotima's and Ulrich's comer, the following question had meanwhile been posed: Should a woman in Diotima's difficult posi- tion make a gesture ofrenunciation, or let herselfbe swept into adul- tery, or take a third, mixed course, such as belonging physically to one man and spiritually to another, or perhaps physically to neither? For this third solution there was as yet no libretto, as it were, only some great harmonic chords. Diotima still wanted it understood that she was absolutely not speaking of herself but speaking only of "a woman"-every time Ulrich tried to fuse the two together he got a warning glance from her.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 623
624 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
And so he also chose a devious course. ''Have you ever seen a dog? " he asked. "You only think you have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in regarding as a dog. It isn't a dog in every respec;t, and always has some personal quality no other. dog has. So how can we ever hope, in this life, to do 'the right thing'? A1). we can do is something that's never the right thing and is always both more· and less than that. Has a tile ever fallen off the roof in precise accord with the law of falling bodies? Never. Even in the lab, things never behave just as they should. 11ley diverge from the ideal course in all possible directions, while we keep up a fiction that this is to be blamed on our faulty execution of the experiment, and that somewhere midway a perfe. Ct result is obtainable.
"Or else you find certain stones, and because of the properties they have in common they are all regarded as diamonds. But suppose one ofthem comes from Africa. and another from Asia, one is dug out of the ground by a black man and the other by an Oriental. What if these differences in circumstances were to matter so much that they cancel out what the objects have in common? In th~ equation 'dia- mond plus circumstances is still diamond,' the use value of the dia- mond is so great that it makes the value of the circumstances negligible. But it's. possible to imagine spiritual circumstances in which the situation is reversed. .
"Everything partakes of the universal and also has something spe- cial all its own. Everything is both true to type and refuses to con- form to type and is in a category all its own, simultan~ously. The personal quality of any given creature is precisely that which doesn't coincide with anything else. . I once said to you that the more truth we discover, the less of the personal is left in the world, because of the longtime war again. st individuality that individuality is losing. By the time everything has been rationalized, there's no telling how much of us will be left. Nothing at all, possibly, but then, when the false sig- nificance we attach to personality has gone, we may enter upon a new kind of sigriificance as if embarking upon a splendid adventure.
"So how do you decide? Should 'a woman' go by the law? Then she may as well go by the laws of society. Conventional morality is a per- fectly valid average and collective value, to b~ Uterally adhered to, without deviations, wherever it is acknowledged. But no individual case can be decided on moral grounds alone; morality is irrelevant to
it in the precise degree that it shares in the inexhaustible nature of the universe. "
"That was quite a speech," Diotima said. She took a certain satis- faction in the loftiness of discourse being'imposed upon her, but in- tended to gain the upper hand by not talking in equally wild
. generalities. "But what is a woman to do, given the circumstances, in real life? "
"Let things happen," Ulrich answered.
"What things? "
"Whatever happens. Her husband, her lover, her renunciation,
her mixed feelings. "
"Do you have any idea what you are saying? " Diotima asked, feel-
ing painfully reminded of how her high resolve possibly to give up Amheim had its wings clipped every night by the mere fact that she slept in Tuzzi. 's bed. Ulrich must have sensed-some of this, because he asked her bluntly: 'Would you try your luck with me? "
'With you? " Diotima drawled, then decided to save face by taking a humorous tack. "Ifthis is an offer,justwhat is it you have iil mind? " "I'll tell you," Ulrich replied seriously. "You read a great deal,
don't you? "
"Of course. "
'What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever
doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reach- ing their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and un- happier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as ifwe were characters in a novel who have met in the pages ofa book. Let's in any case leave offall the fatty tissue that plumps up reality. "
Diotima felt called upon to argue the case; she wanted to direct the conversation away from this too~personal vein, and she also wanted to show that she understood something of the problems that had been touched upon.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 625
626 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"All well and good," she said, "but art is supposed to afford us a vacation from reality, so that we can return to it with our energies restored. "
"And I am opinionated enough to say that there should be no time off,'' her cousin retorted. "What sort of a life is it that we have to drill holes in it called holidays; would we punch holes in a painting be- cause it makes too strenuous demands on our sense of beauty? Should we look forward to taking time off from eternal bliss in the next world? Even the thought of time taken off my life by having to sleep sometimes seems unacceptable to me. "
"Ah, there it is. " Diotima seized her opportunity. "You see how unnatural it all is, what you're saying. What human being doesn't need to rest and take a break? It's a perfect illustration of the differ- ence between you and Amheim. Yours is a mind that will not ac- knowledge the shadow on things, the dark side, while his has developed out of the fullness of human experience, with sunshine and shadow intenningled. "
"Of course I exaggerate,'' Ulrich admitted coolly. "You will see it even more clearly as we go into more detail. Think of the great writ- ers, for instance. We can model our lives on them, but we can't squeeze life out of them, like wine out of grapes. They have given so solid a fonn to what once moved them that it confronts us like pressed metal even between the lines. But what have they actually said? . Nobody knows. They themselves never knew all of it at a time. They're like a field over which bees fly back and forth; they them- selves are flying back and forth, as it were.
Their thoughts and feel- ings show all the gradations between truth and even error, as can be demonstrated if necessary, and changeable natures that come close to us at will and then elude us when we try to observe them closely.
"There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It's like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation,
with nothing to hold on to, no finn impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn't suit us and our conceptions, we're merely going back to the original condition of life itself. "
"My dear friend," Diotima said, "you don't seem to be talking about anything in particular. " Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
"Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven't been talking too loudly. "
"You've been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length," she said, with a touch of sarcasm. 'Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you've just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It's true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I
·think, it made a lasting impression-I don't know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven't yet revealed, I'm sorry to say. " "Clearly, I'd have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? IfI'm not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of tran- scendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to
recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense. "
"Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there," Diotima said. "Of course not. That's just the difference between him and me.
He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arn- heim, and doesn't know whether to marry you or not, mean some- thing, and to this end he has been colle9ting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life. " Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a:while he asked, in a different tone: "Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I'm reminded of my childhood. You won't believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . . " But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated "precision of feel- ing," while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored "letting things happen. " And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich
Pseudoreality Prevails · 62 7
628 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
was advocating an intense emotional life without any "time off," compared with Amheim's ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love/ These thoughts left her uneasy.
"Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feel- ing? " Ulrich asked her.
"Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion," Diotima said, the ground finn under her feet again.
"You see, I don't quite believe that," Ulrich said absently. "Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were ~raid of drowning in it. "
He noticed that Diotima was not listening. She was upeasily watching Amheim, who was looking around for a cab.
'Tm afraid we ought to rescue him from the General," she said.
"I'll go and, get a cab and take the Generai off your hands," Ulrich offered, and at the moment he turned to go, Diotima laid her hand on his arm and said kindly, as if to reward him for his trouble: "Any feeling that isn't boundless is worthless. "
115
THE TIP OF YOUR BREAST IS LIKE A POPPY LEAF
In accordance with the law that periods of great stability tend to be followed by violent upheavals, Bonadea, too, suffered a relapse. Her attempts to get on closer terms with Diotima had failed, and her fine scheme to get even with Ulrich by making friends with her rival, leaving Ulrich out in the cold-a fantasy she had spent much time in spinning out-had come to nothing. She had to swallow her pride and come knocking on his door again, but when she was there her beloved seemed to have arranged for constant interruptions, and her stories to account for her coming to see him again even though he
did not deserve it were wasted on his impervious friendliness. She was longing to make a terrible scene but committed to behaving with absolute propriety, so that in time she came to hate herself for being so good. At night her head, heavy with unappeased cravings, sat on her shoulders like a coconut with its mat of monkeylike hair growing freakishly inside the shell, and she came close to bursting with help- less rage, like a drinker deprived of his bottle. She privately called Diotima every name she could think of, such as fraud and insuffer- able pompous bitch, and came up with cynical glosses on that noble femininity which was the secret of Diotima's charm. Her aping of Diotima's style, which had delighted her for a while, had now become a prison from which she broke out into an almost licentious freedom; her curling iron and mirror lost the power to tum her into an idealized image of herself, and th~ artificial state of mind it had supported collapsed as well. Even sleep, which Bonadea had always reveled in despite her chronic inner conflicts, sometimes kept her waiting when she had· gane to bed, an experience so new to her that she thought she must be sick with insomnia, and felt what people usually feel when they are seriously ill, that her spirit was deserting her body,leaving it helpless like a wounded soldier on the battlefield. As she lay there in her vexations as if on red-hot sand, all that high- minded talk of Diotima's, which Bonadea had so admired, seemed to her infinitely beside the point, and she honestly despised it.
When she found it impossible to go to Ulrich yet again, she thought of another scheme to bring him back to his senses. It was of course the culmination of the plan that came to her first: a vision of herself effecting an entrance at Diotima's when that. siren had Ulrich with her. Bonadea regarded. all his visits with ·Diotima as transparent pretexts for carrying on their flirtation rather than actually doing something for the public good. So it was up to Bonadea to do some- thing for the public good-and this gave her the opening gambit of her plan as well: no one was paying any attention to Moosbrugger anymore, and he was going to his doom, while all the others were pontificating about it. Bonadea never stopped to wonder that it was Moosbrugger once more who came to her rescue in her hour of need. Had she bothered to think about him at all, she would have been horrified, but all she was thinking was that if Ulrich cared so much about Moosbrugger, she would see to it that he would at least
Pseudoreality Prevails · 629
630 • TH"E MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
not forget the man. & she mulled over her plan, she rem~mbered two things Ulrich had said when they were talking·about the mur- derer: namely, that everyone had a second soul, which was always innocent; and that a responsible persqn could always choose to do otherwise, but an irresponsible person had no such choice. From this she somehow concluded that she wanted to be irresponsible, which would mean that she would also be innocent, which Ulrich was not, and which he needed to be, for his own salvation.
So motivated, and dressed as for a social occasion, she spent sev- eral evenings wandering up and doWI1 past Diotima's windows, and never had long to wait before they lit up along the whole front, betokening something going on inside. She had told her husband that she was invited out but would not stay too long, and in the course of a few days, while sh~ was still trying to screw up her cour- age, her lies and her strolls in front of a house where she had no business to be unleashed a growing impulse that would soon drive her up those steps to the front door. What if she was seen by some acquaintance, or even by her husband if he should pass that way by chance, or what if she was noticed by the doorman, or by a police- man, who might decide to question her-the more often she went out on this expedition, the greater the risks, and the more probable that if she hesitated too long an incident would occur. Now, it was true that Bonadea ha~ more than once slipped into doorways or places where she did not want to be seen, but on those occasions she had been fortified by the thought that it had to be; this time she was about to intrude where she was not expected and could not be sure of her reception. She felt like an assassin who has started out with none too clear an idea of what it would be like, and is then swept by circumstances into a state in which the actual pistol shot or the glitter of vitriol drops flying through the air no longer adds much to the excitement.
Without any such dramatic intentions, Bonadea nevertheless felt similarly benumbed by. the time she actually found herself pressing the doorbell and walking inside. Little Rachel had slipped over to Ulrich and told him that someone was waiting out in the hall to see him, not mentioning that this someone was a heavily veiled unknown lady-who, when Rachel shut the door to the salon behind him,
flung the veil back from her face. At the moment she was absolutely convinced that Moosbrugger's fate depended on her taking instant action, and she received Ulrich not like a lover plagued by jealousy, but gasping for breath like a marathon runner. With no effort, she lied that her husband had tolq her yesterday that Moosbrugger would soon be past saving.
"There's nothing I hate so much," she ended, "as this obscene kind of murderer. But even though it goes against my grain, I've taken the risk of being regarded as an intruder here, because you must go straight back to the lady of the house and her very influential guests and get their help if you still want to get anything done:" She had no idea what she expected to come of this. Perhaps that Ulrich would be deeply moved and would thank her, then call Diotima, who would then take Bonadea into some private place to talk, away from the other gues~s. Or else Diotima might be drawn to the hall by the sound of voices, and Bonadea was ready to let her see that she, Bona- dea, was far from being the person least qualified to take an interest in Ulrich's noble causes. Her eyes were moist and flash~g. her hands trembled, her voice rose out of control. Ulrich, deeply embarrassed, smiled desperately to quiet her down and gain time while he found a way to talk her into leaving as quickly as possible. It was a ticklish situation and could have ended with Bonadea's having a screaming or crying fit, if Rachel had not come to his aid. Little Rachel had been standing close by all this time, with wide-open, shining eyes. When the beautiful stranger, trembling all over, had asked to speak to Ulrich, the maid had instantly divined the romantic nature of the affair. She managed to hear most of what was said, and the syllables of Moosbrugger's name fell on her ear like pistol shots. The sadness, passion, and jealousy throbbing in this lady's voice moved her power- fully, although she knew nothing of what was behind it. She guessed that the woman was Ulrich's mistress, and it doubled her infatuation with him. It was as though the two of them had burst into full- throated song together and made her want to lift up her own voice
and join in, or do something to help. And so, with a glance enjoining secrecy, she opened a door and inVited the pair into the only room not being used for the gathering this evening. It was Rachel's flrst conscious act of disloyalty to her mistress, and she knew what would
Pseudoreality Prevails · 6 3 z
632 · THE MAN WITH0UT·QUALITIES
happen if she was found out, but life was so exciting, and romantic passion such an untidy state of mind, that she had no chance to think twice about it.
When the gaslight flamed upward a11-d Bonadea's eyes gradually took in her surroundings, her legs almost gave way under her, and her cheeks flushed red with jealousy: they were inside Diotima's bedroom. There were stockings, hairbrushes, and much else lying around, whatever is left in view when a woman must change hastily from head to foot for a big party and the maid has not had time to put things away or has left it till the next morning, as in this case, because the room was due for a thorough cleaning then anyway; on big-party evenings the bedroom was used to store furnishings from the other rooms where the space was needed. So the·air was heavy with the smell of all this furniture jammed together, and of powder, soap, and scent.
"What a silly thing for the girl to do," Ulrich said with a laugh. "We can't stay here. Anyway, you shouldn't have come. There's nothing to be done for Moosbrugger. "
"So I shouldn't have bothered, is that it? " Bonadea echoed him almost inaudibly. Her eyes strayed all over the place. How could the girl have even thought of taking Ulrich into the most private room in the house, she wondered in anguish, if she had not done it often before? Yet she could not bring herself tQ confront him with this proof of his infidelity, but chose instead to say dully: "How can you sleep in peace when such injustice is being done? I haven't been able to sleep at night, which is why I decided to come looking for you. " She had turned her back on the room and stood staring out the win- dow into the opaque, glassy darkness outside, at what might be tree- tops or some deep courtyard down below. Upset as she was, she had enough sense of orientation to know that she was not looking out on the street, and when she considered that here she was in her rival's bedroom, standing in a flood of light in the uncurtained window be- side her faithless lover, as on a stagein front ofan unseen audience, it threw her mind into turmoil. She had taken off her hat and thrown her coat back; her forehead and the warm tips of her breasts touched the cold windowpane; tenderness ·and tears moistened her eyes. Slowly she freed herself from the spell and turned back to her friend,
but her eyes still held some of that soft, yielding darkness she had gazed into, and were deeper than she knew.
"Ulrich," she said with feeling, "you're not a bad man! You only pretend to be. You go to a lot of trouble to be as good as you can be. " These incongruously perceptive words of Bonadea's made the sit- uation precarious again; for once, they were not the ridiculous desire of a woman to mask her body's demands for consolation with an overlay of lofty sentiment, but the beauty of that body itself claiming its right to the gentle dignity of love. Ulrich went up to her and put his arm around her shoulder; together they turned and looked into the darkness outside. A faint glimmer of light from the house was dissolving in the infinite darkness beyond so that it looked like a dense mist softening the air, and Ulrich felt as if he were staring out into a mildly chilly October night, though it was late winter; the whole city seemed wrapped in a vast woolen blanket. Then it occurred to him that one could just as well say that a woolen blanket resembled a night in October. He felt a gentle uncertainty on his skin
and drew Bonadea closer.
"Will you go back to them now? " Bonadea asked.
"And save Moosbrugger from injustice? No; I don't even know
whether injustice is being done to him. What do I really know about him? I saw him once, just a glimpse in a courtroom, and I've read a few things that were written about him. It's as though I had dreamed that the tip ofyour breast is like a poppy leaf. Does that give me the right to think it is any such thing? "
He stopped to think. So did Bonadea. He was thinking, "One human being, when you think of it, means nothing more to another one than a string of similes. " Bonadea's thinking concluded with: "Come, let's get away from here. "
"That's impossible," Ulrich told her. "They would wonder about my disappearance, and then if something should leak out about your coming here, it could cause quite a scandal. "
Again they both fell silent, staring out the window together, into something that could have been a night in October, a night in Janu- ary, a woolen blanket, sorrow, or joy, though they didn't attempt to define it. ·
"Why do you never do the natural next thing? " Bonadea asked.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 633
634 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
He suddenly remembered a recent dream. He was one of those people who seldom have dreams, or at least never remember their dreams, so that it gave him a queer feeling to have this unexpected memory opening up and letting him in. In the dream, he had kept trying to cross a steep mountainside and was driven back, again and again, by violent dizzy spells. Without trying to interpret it, he now knew that the dream was about Moosbrugger, who never actually appeared in it. Since a dream image often has several meanings, it was also a physical representation of his mind's useless struggles to make some he. adway, as recently manifested again and again in his conversation and in his affairs, struggles that exactly resembled walking without a path to follow . and being unable to get beyond a certain point. He could not help smiling at the ingenuous concrete- ness of the dream imagery for this: smooth rock and slippery earth undertoot, the occasional lone tree to hold on to or to aim for, the abrupt increase in the steepness of the grade as he went. He had tried and failed to make it on a higher and a lower route and was growing sick with vertigo, when he said to someone with him, Let's give it up; there's the easy road down there in the valley that every- one takes! The meaning was obvious. Incidentally, it occurred to Ulrich that the person·with him might very well have been Bona- dea. It was quite possible that he had also dreamed of her nipple as a poppy leaf-some unconnected thing that might, to the groping touch, easily seem broad and jagged, the dark purplish hue of a mallow, floating like a mist from some as yet unlit cranny in the dream world.
Now he experienced a moment of that special lucidity that lights up everything going on behind the scenes of oneself, though one may be far from being able to express it. He understood the'rela- tionship between a dream and what it expresses, which is no more than analogy, a metaphor, something he often thought about. A metaphor holds a truth and an untruth, felt as inextricably bound up with each other. If one takes it as it is and gives it some sensual form, in the shape of reality, one gets dreams and art; but between these two and real, full-scale life there is a glass partition. If one, analyzes it for its rational content and separates the unverifiable from the verifiable, one gets truth and knowledge but kills the feel-
ing. Like certain kinds of bacteria that split an organic substance into two parts, mankind splits the originalli~ng body of the meta- phor into the firm substance of reality and truth, and the glassy un- reality of intuition, faith, and artifact. There seems to be nothing in between; and yet how often a vaguely conceived undertaking does succeed, if only one goes ahead without worrying it too much! Ul- rich felt that he had at last emerged from the tangle of streets through which his thoughts and moods had so often t~en him, into the central square where all streets had their beginning. And he touched on all this in answering _Bonadea's question as to why he never did the natural next thing. She probably did not understand his answer, but this was decidedly one of her good days; after thinking it over, she slipped her arm more firmly into his and summed it all up by saying: 'Well, in your dreams you don't think either; you only live through some story or other. " This was almost true. He squeezed her hand. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears again. They coursed slowly down her cheeks, and from her skin, bathed in those salty tears, there arose the indefinable scent of de- sire. Ulrich breathed it in and felt a great longing for this slippery nebulous state, for surrender and forgetfulness. But he pulled him- self together and led her tenderly to the door. At this moment he felt sure that there, was still something ahead of him and that he must not fritter it away in halfhearted attachments.
"You must go now," he said gently, "and don't be angry with me because I don't know when we can see each other again. I have a great deal to work out for myself just now. "
And wonder of wonders! Bonadea put up no resistance and said nothing in anger or wounded pride. Her jealousy was gone. She felt that she was herself part of a story. She felt like taking him in her arms, gues~ing that he needed to be brought down to earth again, and was tempted to make the sign of the cross over his forehead for his protection, as she did with her children. It was all so romantic that it never occurred to her that it could be the end. She put on her hat and kissed him, and then she kissed him again through her veil, so that the threads seemed to glow like red-hot wires.
With the help of Rachel, who had been guarding the door and lis- tening, Bonadea managed to slip away unseen, even though the party
Pseudoreality Prevails · 6 3 5
636 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
was breaking up and people were coming out. Ulrich pressed a big tip into Rachel's hand and complimented her on her presence of mind, making Rachel so ecstatic that her fingers unconsciously kept clutching his hand with the money. He had to laugh; when she blushed scarlet at this, he patted her on the shoulder.
THE TWO TREES OF LIFE AND A PROPOSAL TO ESTABLISH A GENERAL SECRETARIAT FOR PRECISION AND SOUL
That evening at the Tuzzis', there had been fewer guests than for- merly; attendance at meetings of the Parallel Campaign was falling off, and people tended to leave earlier. Even the last-minute appear- ance of His Grace-who incidentally looked worried and preoc- cupied, and was in a bad mood, in fact, because he had received disturbing news about the nationalist intrigues against his work- could not prevent the party from breaking up. People lingered on for a bit in the expectation that he had brought some special news, but then, when he gave no sign of having anything of the kind to report and paid scant attention to the remaining guests, even the last of them left. By the time Ulrich reappeared, he was shocked to see the rooms almost empty. Shortly aftelWlll'd only the "innermost circle" was left, joined by Section Chief Tuzzi, who had meanwhile come home.
His Grace had reverted to a favorite topic: "Of course we· can re- gard an eighty-eight-year-old monarch of peace as a symbol; it gives us so much to think about. But it must be giv. en a political content as well. Without that, it is only too natural fm: people to lose interest. In other words, as far as I am concerned, I've done all I could. The Ger- man Nationalists are furious with me for appointing Wisnieczky, whom they regard as a Slavophile, and the Slavs are furious because,
as far as they're concerned, when he was in the government he was a wolf in sheep's clothing. All that only goes to show that he is a true patriot who stands above parties, and I wouldn't think of dropping him! However, we must supplement this with all possible speed on the cultural front, so that people have something positive to go on. Our public-opinion survey of what the various population sectors want is moving far too slowly. An Austrian Year or a World Year of Austria is a splendid idea, of course, but I must say that every symbol must in due course tum into something real; that is to say, I can let myself be deeply moved by a symbol without necessarily understand- ing it, but after a while I am bound to tum away from the mirror of my heart and get something else done, something I have mean~hile found needs doing. I wonder if I have managed to make my point? Our admirable friend the lady of the house is doing her utmost, and the discussions that have been held in this house for months have been most fruitful, I'm sure, but attendance is falling off neverthe- less, and I have a feeling that we shall soon have to decide on some- thing definite. I don't know what it will be: perhaps a second steeple on St. Stephen's, or an Imperial and Royal Colony in Africa; it doesn't matter what-it's sure to tum into something else at the last moment anyway. The main thing is to harness the inventi~eness of the participants in time, before it all dribbles away. "
Count Leinsdorf felt that he had spoken to the point. Amheim now took the floor on everybody else's behalf. "What you say about the need, at times, to fructify thought by taking action, even if only pro tern, is most realistic and is true to life in general. You will be interested to know that there is a new mood, corresponding to what you say, among those of us meeting here regularly.