No More Learning

There are no general rules for this. Each of them has to observe how the other reacts to life. To be a good ob- server, a person has to have some insight into sexual life. One has to be able to compare one's practical experience with the results ofthe- oretical research, Diotima says. Woman today happens to have a new and different attitude to the sex problem; she expects a man not only to act but to act with a real understanding of the feminine! " And for Ulrich's entertainment or even just to amuse herself, she gaily added: "Just imagine what it must be like for her husband, who hasn't the faintest inkling ofall this new stuffand gets to hear about it mostly at bedtime while they're undressing-let's say when Diotima is taking her hair down and fishing for hairpins, with her petticoats tucked be-
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tween her knees, and then suddenly she starts talking about all that. I tried it out on my husband, and it drove him almost to apoplexy. One thing you must admit: If marriage is to be for a lifetime, at least there's the advantage that you have the opportunity of getting all the erotic possibilities in it out ofyour spouse. Which is what Diotima is trying to do with Tuzzi, who happens to be a bit crude! "
"Sounds like hard times for your husbands! " Ulrich teased.
Bonadea laughed, and he could tell how glad she would be to oc- casionally play truant from the oppressive earnestness of her school of love.
But Ulrich's probing instincts would not let go; he sensed that his greatly changed friend was keeping quiet about something she would much rather have talked about. He professed to be mystified be- cause, from what he had heard, the two husbands involved had so far rather erred in overdoing the "erotic possibilities. "
"Of course, that's all you ever think! " Bonadea said reproachfully, giving him a long, pointed glance with a little hook at its end that could easily be interpreted as regret for the innocence she had ac- quired. "You take advantage of a woman's physiological feeblemind- edness yourself! "
"What do I take advantage of? You've found a splendid expression for the history of our love! "
Bonadea slapped his face lightly and, nervously, patted her hair in front of the mirror. Glancing at him out of the mirror, she said: "That's from a book. "
"Of course. A very well known book. "
"But Diotima disputes it. She found something in another book that speaks of 'the physiological inferiority of the male. ' The author is a woman. Do you think it really makes much difference? "
"How can I tell, since I've no idea what we're talking about? "
'Well then, listen! Diotima's starting point is the discovery that she calls 'a woman's constant readiness for sex. ' Can you see that? "
"Not in Diotima! "
"Don't be so crude! " she rebuked him. "It's a delicate theory, and it's hard for me to explain it to you so that you don't draw false con- clusions from the fact that I happen to be here alone with you in your house while I'm talking about it. So this theory has it that a woman
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can be made love to even when she doesn't feel like it. Now do you see? "
"I do. "
"Unfortunately, it can't be denied either. On the other hand, they say that quite often a man can't make love even when he wants to. Diotima says this has been scientifically established. Do you believe that? "
"It's been known to happen. "
"Oh, I don't know," Bonadea said doubtfully. "But Diotima says that ifyou regard it in the light ofscience, it's obvious. For in contrast with a woman's constant readiness for sex, a man-well, in a word, a man's manliest part is easily discouraged. " Her face was the color of bronze as she now turned it away from the mirror.
"I never would have guessed it about Tuzzi," Ulrich said tactfully.
"I don't think it used to be the case, either," Bonadea said. "It's only happening now, as a belated confinnation of the theory, be- cause she lectures him on it day in, day out. She calls it the theory of the 'fiasco. ' Because the male procreator is so prone to this fiasco, he only feels sexually secure if he doesn't have to be afraid of a woman's being in some way or other spiritually superior, and that's why men hardly ever have the courage to try a relationship with a woman who's their equal as a human being. At least, they try right away to put them down. Diotima says that the guiding principle of all male love transactions, and especially of male arrogance, is fear. Great men show it-she means Arnheim, ofcourse. Lesser men hide it be- hind brutal physical aggression and abusing a woman's soul-I mean you! And she means Tuzzi. That sort of 'Now or never! ' you men so often use to make us give in is only a kind of overcomp--" She was about to say "compress"; "overcompensation," Ulrich said, coming to the rescue.
"Right. That's how you men manage to overcome the impression of your physiological inferiority! "
"What have you two decided to do, then? " Ulrich said meekly.
"We have to make an effort to be nice to men! That's why I've come to see you. We'll see how you take it. ''
"And Diotima? "
"Heavens, what do you care about Diotima? Arnheim's eyes pop
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out like a snail's when she tells him that the most intellectually supe- rior men unfortunately seem to find full satisfaction only with in- ferior women and fail with women who are their equals, as attested scientifically by the case of Frau von Stein and the Vulpius woman. You see, now I've got her name right, but of course I've always known she was the noted sex partner of the aging Olympian! "
Ulrich tried to steer the conversation away from himself and back to Tuzzi. Bonadea began to laugh; she was not without sympathy for the sony predicament ofthe diplomat, whom she found quite attrac- tive as a man, and felt a certain malicious and conspiratorial glee about his having to suffer under the castigations of the soul. She re- ported that Diotima was basing her treatment of Tuzzi on the as- sumption that she must cure him of his fear of her, which had also enabled her to come to terms somewhat with his "sexual brutality. " The great blunder of her life, she admitted, was in achieving an emi- nence too great for her male marriage partner's na! ve need to feel superior, so she had set about toning it down by hiding her spiritual superiority behind a more suitable erotic coquetry.
Ulrich broke in to ask, with lively interest, what she understood by that.
Bonadea's glance bored deeply into his face. "She might say to him, for instance, 'Up to now our life has been spoiled by our com- peting for status. ' And then she admits to him that the poisonous ef- fect of the male struggle for power dominates all of public life as well. . . :·
"But that's neither coquettish nor sexy! " Ulrich objected.
"Oh, but it is! You have to remember that a man in the grip of passion will behave toward a woman like an executioner toward his victim. That's part of his struggle for self-assertion, as it's now called. On the other hand, you won't deny that the sex drive is important to a woman too? "
"Certainly not! "
"Good. But a happy sexual relationship demands an equal give- and-take. To get a really rapturous response from the love partner, the partner must be respected as an equal and not just as a will-less extension of oneself," she went on, caught up in her mentor's mode of expression like someone sliding helplessly and anxiously across a polished surface, carried along by his own momentum. "If no other
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g63
human relationship is able to endure unremitting pressure and coun- terpressure, how much less can a sexual-"
"Oho! " Ulrich disagreed.
Bonadea pressed his arm, and her eye glittered like a falling star. "Hold your tongue! " she cried. "None of you have any firsthand ex- perience ofthe feminine psyche! And ifyou want me to go on telling you about your cousin . . . " But her energy was spent, and her eyes now had the glitter ofa tigress's as she watches fresh meat being car- ried past her cage. "No, I can't listen to any more ofthis myself! " she cried.
"Does she really talk like that? " Ulrich asked. "Did she actually say these things? "
"But it's all I hear every day, nothing but sexual practice, success- ful embraces, key principles of eroticism, glands, secretions, re- pressed urges, erotic training, and regulation of the sex drive! Apparently everyone has the sexuality he deserves, at least that's what your cousin claims, but do I deserve to be so overloaded with it? "
Her gaze firmly held his.
"I don't think so," Ulrich said slowly.
"After all, couldn't one just as easily say that my strong capacity for
experiencing represents a physiological superiority? " Bonadea asked with a gaily suggestive burst oflaughter.
There was no more discussion. When, some considerable time later, Ulrich became aware of a certain resistance in himself, living daylight was spraying through the chinks in the curtains, and if one glanced in that direction the darkened room resembled the sepul- cher of an emotion that had shriveled past the point of recognition. Bonadea lay there with her eyes closed, giving no sign of life. The feeling she now had of her body was not unlike that of a child whose defiance had been broken by a whipping. Every inch of that body, which was both completely satiated and battered, cried out for the tenderness of moral forgiveness. From whom? Certainly not from the man in whose bed she lay and whom she had implored to kill her, because her lust could not be appeased by any repetition or intensifi- cation. She kept her eyes shut to avoid having to see him. She tried thinking: ''I'm in his bed. " This-and 'T il never let myself be driven out of it again! "-was what she had been shouting inwardly just a
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short time before; now it merely expressed a situation she could not get out of without having to go through an embarrassing perform- ance, which was still ahead of her. Bonadea slowly and indolently picked up her thoughts where she had dropped them.
She thought of Diotima. Gradually, words came to mind, then whole sentences and fragments of sentences, but mainly only a sense of satisfaction at being where she was while words as incomprehensi- ble and hard to remember as hormones, lymphatic glands, chromo- somes, zygotes, and inner secretions thundered past her ear in a cascade of talk. For her mentor's chastity recognized no boundaries as soon as they were effaced by the glare of scientific illumination.
Diotima was capable of saying to her listeners: "One's sex life is not a craft that is to be learned; it should always be the highest art we may acquire in life! " while feeling as little unscientific emotion as when in her zeal she spoke of a "point of reference" or "a central point. " Her disciple now recalled these expressions exactly. Critical analysis of the embrace, clarification ofthe physical elements, erogenous zones, the way to highest fulfillment for the woman, men who have them- selves well under control and are considerate oftheir partner . . . Just an hour ago Bonadea, who normally admired these scientific, intel- lectual, and highly refined terms, had felt grossly deceived by them. To her surprise she had just now realized with returning conscious- ness that this jargon was meaningful not only for science but for the emotions too, when the flames were already licking out from the un- supervised emotional side. At that point she hated Diotima. "Talking that way about such things, it's enough to kill your appetite! " she had thought, feeling horribly vindictive toward Diotima, who evidently, with four men of her own, begrudged Bonadea anything at all and was deliberately hoodwinking her in this fashion. Indeed, Bonadea had actually considered the enlightenment with whose help sexual science cleans up the occult ways of the sexual process as a plot of Diotima's. Now she could not understand that any more than she could understand her passionate longing for Ulrich. She tried to re- member the moments in which all her thoughts and feelings had gone wild; it was as incomprehensible as if a man bleeding to death were to try to think back on the impatience that had led him to tear off his protective bandages. Bonadea thought of Count Leinsdorf, who had called marriage a high office and had compared Diotima's
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books on the subject with a manual for organizing official proce- dures. She thought of Arnheim, who was a multimillionaire and who had called the revival of marital fidelity, based on the idea of the body, a true necessity of the times. And she thought of all the other famous men she had recently met, without even remembering whether they had short legs or long ones, were fat or lean, for all she saw in them was the radiance of their celebrity rounded out by a vague physical mass, much as the delicate frame of a young roast pi- geon is given substance by a solid mass of herb stuffing. Sunk in these memories, Bonadea vowed that she would never again let her- selfbe prey to one ofthose sudden hurricanes that mix up above and below, and she swore this to herself so fervently that she could al- ready see herself-if only she could hold firmly enough to her re- solve-in fantasy and without physical particulars, as the mistress of the finest ofall her great friend's admirers, hers for the choosing. But since for the present there was no getting around the fact that she was still lying in Ulrich's bed with very little on, reluctant to open her eyes, this rich sense of eager contrition, instead of developing further into a comfort to her, turned into a wretched state of exasperation.
The passion whose workings split Bonadea's life irito such oppos- ing elements had its deepest roots not in sensuality but in ambition. Ulrich, who knew her well, thought about this but said nothing, to avoid bringing on her complaints, as he studied her face, while her eyes hid from him. The root of all her desires seemed to him a desire for distinction that had got on the wrong track, quite literally the wrong nerve track. And why shouldn't, really, an ambition to break social records that can be celebrated with triumph, such as drinking the most beer or hanging the most diamonds on one's neck, some- times manifest itself, as in Bonadea's case, as nymphomania? Now that it was over, she regretted this form of expression and wished she could undo it, he could see that; and he could also appreciate the fact that Diotima's elaborate artificiality must impress Bonadea, whom the devil had always ridden bareback, as divine. He looked at her lidded eyeballs resting exhausted and heavy in their sockets; he saw before him her tawny nose, turned decidedly upward at the tip, with its pink, pointed nostrils; he noticed in some bewilderment the vari- ous lines of her body, its large round breasts spreading on the straight corset of her ribs, the bulbous curve of hips, the hollow
g66 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
sweep of the back rising from them, the hard pointed nails shielding the soft tips of the fingers. And finally, as he gazed for some time in revulsion at a few tiny hairs sprouting before his eyes from his mis- tress's nostrils, he, too, wondered at recalling how his desires had been aroused only a short while ago by this person's seductive channs. The bright, mischievous smile with which Bonadea had ar- rived for their "talk," the natural ease with which she had fended off any rebukes or told the latest story about Arnheim, indeed her new, almost witty keenness of observation: she really had changed for the better; she seemed to have grown more independent, to have achieved a finer balance between the forces in her nature that pulled her up and those that pulled her down, and Ulrich found this lack of moral ponderousness particularly refreshing after his own recent bouts of seriousness. He still could feel the pleasure with which he had listened to her and watched the play of expression on her face, like sun and waves. Suddenly, while his gaze was still on Bonadea's now sulky face, it struck him that only serious people could really be evil. "One might safely say," he thought, "that lighthearted people are proof against wickedness. On the same principle that the villain in opera is always a bass! " Somehow this also implied an uncomfort- able link in his own case between "deep" and "dark. " Guilt is cer- tainly mitigated when incurred "lightly" by a cheerful person, but on the other hand this may apply only to love, where impassioned se- ducers seem to act far more destructively and unforgivably than friv- olous ones, even when they are doing the same thing. So his thoughts went this way and that, and if this hour of love, so lightly begun, left him a little downhearted, it had also unexpectedly stimulated him.
So thinking, he forgot, without quite knowing how, the Bonadea who was there; resting his head on his ann, he had pensively turned his back to Bonadea and was gazing through the walls at distant things, when his total silence moved her to open her eyes. All un- aware, he was at this moment remembering how he had once on a journey got off a train before reaching his destination; a translucent day that had mysteriously, seductively, swept the veils from the land- scape had lured him away from the station for a walk, only to desert him at nightfall, when he found himselfwithout his luggage in a ham- let hours away. Indeed, he seemed to recall that he had always had the quality ofstaying out for unpredictable lengths oftime and never
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g67
returning by the same road; and this suddenly brought back a far dis- tant memory, from a period in his childhood that he normally could not recall, which cast a light on his life. Through a tiny chink in time he seemed to feel again the mysterious yearning by which a child is drawn toward some object it sees, to touch it or even put it in its mouth, at which point the magic comes to a stop as in a blind alley. Just as briefly, he regarded it as possible that the longing of adults, which drives them toward any distance merely to transform it into nearness, is no better or worse-the same sort of longing that domi- nated him, a compulsion, to judge by a certain aimlessness that was merely masked by curiosity; and finally, this basic image changed to a third, emerging as this hasty and disappointing episode with Bona- dea, which neither of them had wanted to turn out as it had. Lying side by side in bed seemed utterly childish to him. "But what does its opposite mean, that motionless, hushed love at a great distance, as incorporeal as an early autumn day? " he wondered. "Probably only another version of child's play," he thought skeptically, and remem- bered the colorful animal prints he had loved more rapturously as a child than he had loved his mistress today.
Bonadea at this point had seen just about enough of his back to gauge her unhappiness, and she spoke up: "It was your fault! "
Ulrich turned to her with a smile and said spontaneously: "My sis- ter is coming here in a few days to staywith me-did I tell you? We'll hardly be able to see each other then. "
"For how long? " Bonadea asked.
"To stay," Ulrich answered, smiling again.
"Well? '' Bonadea said. "What difference will it make? Unless
you're trying to tell me that your sister won't let you have a lover? '' "That's just what I am trying to tell you," Ulrich said.
Bonadea laughed. "Here I came to see you today in all innocence,
and you never even let me finish my story! " she complained.
"I seem to have been designed as a machine for the relentless devaluation of life! I want to be different for once," Ulrich retorted. This was quite beyond her, but it made her remember defiantly that
she loved Ulrich. All at once she stopped being the helpless victim of her nerves and found a convincing naturalness; she said, simply: "You've started an affair with her! "
Ulrich warned her not to say such things; a little more grimly than
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he had meant to. "I intend for a long time to love no woman other- wise than ifshe were my sister," he said, and stopped. The length of his silence impressed Bonadea with a greater sense ofhis determina- tion than was perhaps justified by his words.
"You're really perverse! " she cried in a tone ofprophetic warning, and leapt out of bed in order to huny back to Diotima's academy of love, whose unsuspecting portals stood wide open to receive its re- pentant and refreshed disciple.
AGATHE ACTUALLY ARRIVES
That evening there was a telegram, and the next afternoon Agathe arrived.
Ulrich's sister brought only a few suitcases, in accordance with her plan to leave everything behind-not that the quantity ofher luggage was wholly in keeping with the precept "Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes. " When he heard about the precept, Ulrich laughed; there were even two hatboxes that had escaped the fire.
Agathe's forehead showed the charming furrow denoting hurt feelings and futile brooding over them.
Whether it was fair of Ulrich to find fault with the imperfect ex- pression of a grand and sweeping emotion was left undetermined, for Agathe did not raise the question. The cheerful fuss and upheaval that of necessity attended her arrival made an uproar in her ears and eyes like a dance swaying around a brass band. She was in fine spirits but faintly disappointed, although she had not been expecting any- thing in particular and had even made a point during her journey of not forming any expectations.
It was only that when she remembered that she had stayed up all the previous night she was suddenly over- come with fatigue. She didn't mind when Ulrich had to tell her, after a while, that her telegram had come too late for him to postpone an
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g6g
appointment he had for the afternoon. He promised to be back in an hour, and settled his sister on the sofa in his study with such elabo- rate care that they both had to laugh.
When Agathe woke up, the hour was long gone, and Ulrich was not there. The room was sunk in deep twilight and was so alien that she felt suddenly dismayed at finding herself in the midst of the new life to which she had been looking forward. As far as she could make out, the walls were lined with books just as her father's had been, and the tables covered with papers. Curiosity led her to open a door and enter the adjacent room: here she found clothes closets, shoe boxes, the punching bag, barbells, and parallel bars. Beyond these were more books, the bathroom with its eau de cologne, bath salts, brushes, and combs, her brother's bedroom, and the hall, with its hunting trophies. Her passage was marked by lights flashing on and off, but as chance would have it, Ulrich noticed none of this, even though he was home by now. He had put off waking her to let her rest a while longer, and now he ran into her on the landing as he was coming up from the little-used basement kitchen. He had gone there to look around for a snack to bring her; since he had not planned ahead, there was no one to wait on them that day. It was only when they stood side by side that Agathe's random impressions began to coalesce into a perception that left her so disconcerted and disheart- ened that she felt it would be best to bolt as soon as she could. There was something so impersonal, so indifferent about the spirit in which things had been thrown together here that it frightened her.
Ulrich noticed this and apologized, explaining the situation light- heartedly. He told her how he had come to acquire his house and gave its history in detail, beginning with the antlers he had come to own without ever going hunting and ending with the punching bag, which he set bobbing for her benefit. Agathe looked at everything again with disquieting seriousness, and even turned her head for an- other look whenever they left a room. Ulrich tried to make this exam- ination entertaining, but as it went on he began to feel embarrassed about his house. It turned out-something habit had made him over- look-that he had used only the few rooms he needed, leaving the rest dangling from them like a neglected decoration. When they sat down together after this survey Agathe asked: "But why did you do it, if you don't like it? ''
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Her brother provided her with tea and every refreshment he could find in the house, and insisted on giving a hospitable welcome, belated though it was, so that their second reunion should not be inferior to the first in material comforts. Dashing back and forth on these errands, he confessed: "''ve done everything so carelessly and wrong that the place doesn't have anything at all to do with me. "
"But it's all really very attractive," Agathe now consoled him.
Ulrich responded that it would probably have been even worse if he had done it differently. "I can't stand houses with interiors tai- lored to express one's personality," he declared. "It would make me feel that I had ordered myself from an interior decorator too. "
And Agathe said: "I shy away from that kind of house also. "
"Even so, it can't be left the way it is," Ulrich rectified. He was sitting at the table with her, and the very fact that they would now be having their meals together raised a number of problems. The real- ization that all sorts of things would have to be changed took him by surprise; it would take a quite unprecedented effort on his part, and he reacted to this at first with the zeal of a beginner.
"A person li\. ing alone," he said, when his sister seemed consider- ately willing to leave everything as it was, "can afford to have a weak- ness; it will merge with his other qualities and hardly be noticeable. But when two people share a weakness it becomes twice as conspicu- ous in comparison with the qualities they don't share, and ap- proaches a public confession. "
Agathe could not see it.
"In other words, as brother and sister there are things that each of us could indulge in on our own but we cannot do together; that's exactly why we have come together. "
This appealed to Agathe. Still, his negative formulation, that they had come together in order not to do something, left something to be desired, and after a while she asked, returning to the way his furnish- ings had been assembled by the best firms: ''I'm afraid I still don't understand. Why did you let the place be done like this ifyou didn't think it was right? "
Ulrich met her cheerful gaze and let his eyes rest on her face, which, above the slightly crumpled traveling dress she was still wear- ing, now looked smooth as silver and so amazingly present that it felt equally near and far from him; or perhaps the closeness and the re-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 971
moteness in his presence canceled each other out, just as, out of the infinity of sky, the moon suddenly appears behind the neighboring roof.
"Why did I do it? " he answered, smiling. "I forget now. Probably because I could just as well have done it some other way. I felt no responsibility. I'd be less sure ofmyselfifI were to tell you that the irresponsible way in which we're conducting ourselves now may well be the first step toward a new responsibility. "
"How so? "
"Oh, in all sorts of ways. You know: the life of an individual person may be only a slight variant of the most probable average value in the series, and so on. "
All Agathe took in of this was what made sense to her. She said: "Which comes to: 'Quite nice' and 'Very nice indeed. ' Soon one stops realizing what a revolting life one is leading. But sometimes it gives one the creeps, like waking up to find oneself on a slab in the mortuary! "
"What was your place like? " Ulrich asked.
"Middle-class respectable, aIa Hagauer. 'Quite nice. ' Just as coun- terfeit as yours! "
Ulrich had meanwhile found a pencil and was sketching the plan of his house on the tablecloth, reallotting the rooms. That was easy, and so quickly done that Agathe's housewifely gesture of protecting the tablecloth came too late and ended uselessly with her hand rest- ing on his. Problems arose again only over the principles of how the place should be furnished.
'W e happen to have a house," Ulrich argued, "and we do have to make some changes to accommodate the two of us. But by and large it's an outdated and idle question these days. 'Setting up house' is putting up a fa~ade with nothing behind it: social and personal rela- tions are no longer solid enough for homes; no one takes any real pleasure now in keeping up a show of durability and permanence. In the old days people did that, to show who they were by the number of rooms and servants and guests they had. Today almost everyone feels that only a formless life corresponds to the variety of purposes and possibilities life is filled with, and young people either prefer stark simplicity, which is like a bare stage, or else they dream of wardrobe trunks and bobsled championships, tennis cups and luxury
972 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
hotels along great highways, with golf course scenery and music on tap in every room. "
He spoke in a light conversational tone, as if playing host to a stranger, but was actually talking himself up to the surface because he was self-conscious about their being together in a situation that combined finality with a new beginning.
After she had let him have his say, his sister asked:
"Are you suggesting that we ought to live in a hotel? "
"Not at all! " Ulrich hastened to assure her. "Except now and then
when traveling. "
"And for the rest of the time, should we build ourselves a bower on
an island or a log cabin in the mountains? ''
'We'll be settling in here, ofcourse," Ulrich answered, more seri-
ously than the nature of their conversation warranted. There was a brief lull in the exchange. He had stood up and was pacing up and down the room. Agathe pretended to be picking at a thread on the hem of her dress, bending her head below the line on which their eyes had been meeting. Suddenly Ulrich stopped and said, with some effort in his voice but going straight to the point:
"My dear Agathe, there's a whole circle of questions here, which has a large circumference and no center, and all these questions are: 'How should I live? '"
Agathe had risen, too, but still did not look at him. She shrugged her shoulders.
'We'll have to try! " she said. Her face was flushed from bending over, but when she lifted her head, her eyes were alight with high spirits, the flush only lingering on her cheek like a passing cloud. "If we're going to stay together," she declared, "you'll have to start by helping me unpack and put my things away and change, because I haven't seen a maid anywhere! "
His bad conscience traveled into his arms and legs and made them galvanically mobile, under Agathe's direction and with her help, to make up for his negligence. He cleared out closets like a hunter disemboweling an animal, abandoning his bedroom to Agathe, swearing to her that it was hers and that he would find a sofa some- where. Eagerly he moved to and fro all objects of daily use that had hitherto lived in their places like flowers in a flower bed, waiting to be picked one at a time by a selecting hand. Suits were piled up on
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 973
chairs; on the glass shelves in the bathroom, cosmetics were carefully separated into men's and women's departments. By the time order had more or less been transformed into disorder, only Ulrich's gleaming leather slippers remained, abandoned on the floor like an offended lapdog evicted from its basket: a pitiful symbol ofdisrupted comfort in all its pleasant triviality. But there was no time to take this to heart, for Agathe's suitcases were next, and however few there seemed to be, they were inexhaustibly crammed with exquisitely folded things that spread open as they were lifted out, blossoming in the air just like the hundreds of roses a magician pulls from his hat. These things had to be hung up or laid down, shaken out and put in piles, and because Ulrich was helping, it proceeded with slip-ups and laughter.
But in the midst ofall this activity, he could only think, incessantly, that for his whole life, and up to a few hours ago, he had lived alone. And now Agathe was here. This little sentence, "Agathe is here now," repeated itself in waves, like the astonishment of a boy who has received a new plaything; there was something mind-numbing about it and, on the other hand, a quite overwhelming sense of pres- ence too, all of which expressed itself again and again in the words: Agathe is here now.
"So she's tall and slender? " Ulrich thought as he watched her cov- ertly. But she wasn't at all; she was shorter than he, and had broad, athletic shoulders. "Is she attractive? " he mused. That was hard to say too. Her proud nose, for instance, was slightly tilted up from one side; there was far more potent charm in this than attractiveness. "Could she be a beauty? " Ulrich wondered in a rather strange way, for he was not quite at ease with this question even though, leaving aside all convention, Agathe was a stranger to him. There is, after all, no such thing as a natural inhibition against looking at a blood relation with sexual interest; it is only a matter of custom, or to be explained by the detours of morality or eugenics. Also, the circum- stance that they had not grown up together had prevented the steril- ized brother-sister relationship that is prevalent in European families. Even so, their origin and their feeling toward each other were enough to take the edge off even the harmless question of how beautiful she might be, a missing excitement Ulrich now noticed with distinct surprise. To find something beautiful surely means, first
974 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ofall, tofind it: whether it is a landscape or a lover, there it is, looking at the pleased finder, and it seems to have been waiting for him alone. And so, delighted that she was now his and ready to be discov- ered by him, he was hugely pleased with his sister. But he still thought: "One can't regard one's own sister as truly beautiful; at most one can be pleased by the admiration she evokes in others. " But then he was hearing her voice for minutes at a time, where no voice had been before, and what was her voice like? Waves of scent accompa- nied the movement ofher clothing, and what was this scent like? Her movements were now knee, now delicate finger, now rebelliousness of a curl. All one could say about it was: it was there. It was there where before there had been nothing. The difference in intensity be- tween the most vivid moment ofthinking about the sister he had left behind and the emptiest present moment was still so great and dis- tinct a pleasure that it was like a shady spot fllling up with the warmth ofthe sun and the scent ofwild herbs unfurling.
Agathe was aware ofher brother's watching her, but she did not let him know it. During the pauses, when she felt his eyes following her movements while the intetval between a response and the next re- mark was not so much a complete stop as like a car coasting over some deep and risky patch of road with its motor switched off, she, too, enjoyed the supercharged air and the calm intensity that sur- rounded their reunion. When they had finished unpacking and put- ting things away and Agathe was alone in her bath, an adventure threatened to break into these peaceful pastures like a wolf, for she had undressed down to her underclothes in the room where Ulrich, smoking a cigarette, was now keeping watch over her abandoned things. Soaking in the water, she wondered what she should do. There was no maid, so ringing was as pointless as calling out; there was evidently nothing to be done but to wrap herselfin Ulrich's bath- robe, which was hanging on the wall, knock on the door, and send him out ofthe room. But considering the serious intimacy that, ifnot already flourishing, had just been born between them, Agathe cheer- fully doubted whether it was appropriate to play the young lady and beg Ulrich to withdraw, so she decided to ignore the ambivalence of femininity and simply appear before him as the natural, familiar companion he should see in her, dressed or not.
Yet when she resolutely entered the room again, both felt an unex-
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pected quickening of the heart. They each tried not to feel embar- rassed. For an instant they could not shake off the conventional in- consistency that permits virtual nakedness on the beach while indoors the hem of a chemise or a panty becomes the smuggler's path to romantic intimacy. Ulrich smiled awkwardly as Agathe, with the light of the anteroom behind her, stood in the open door like a silver statue lightly veiled in a haze of batiste and, in a voice much too emphatically casual, asked for her dress and stockings, which turned out to be in the next room. Ulrich showed her the way, and saw to his secret delight that she strode off in a manner that was a little too boyish, taking a sort of defiant pleasure in it, as women tend to do when they don't feel themselves protected by their skirts. Then something new came up, when a little later Agathe found herself stuck midway getting into her dress and had to call Ulrich for help. While he was busy at her back she sensed, without sisterly jealousy but rather, if anything, with pleasure, that he clearly knew his way around women's clothing, and she moved with agility to make it easier for him when the nature of the procedure made it necessary.
Bending over close to the moving, delicate, yet full and fresh skin of her shoulders, intent upon the unaccustomed task, which raised a flush on his brow, Ulrich felt himself lapped by a pleasing sensation not easily put into words, unless one might say that his body was equally affected by having a woman and yet not having a woman so close to him; or one could just as easily have said that though he was unquestionably standing there in his own shoes, he nevertheless felt drawn out of himself and over to her as though he had been given a second, far more beautiful, body for his own.
This was why the first thing he said to his sister when he had straightened up again was: "Now I know what you are: you are my self-love! " It may have sounded odd, but it really expressed what it was that moved him so. "In a sense," he explained, "I've always lacked the right sort of love for myself that others seem to have in abundance. And now," he added, "by some mistake or by fate, it has been embodied in you instead of myself! "
It was his first attempt that evening to pass a verdict on the mean- ing of his sister's arrival.
976
THE SIAMESE TWINS
Later that evening he came back to this.
"You should know," he started to tell his sister, "that there's a kind
of self-love that's foreign to me, a certain tenderness toward oneself that seems to come naturally to most other people. I don't know how best to describe it. I could say, for instance, that I've always had lov- ers with whom I've had a skewed relationship. They've been illustra- tions of some sudden idea, caricatures of my mood-in effect, just instances of my inability to be on easy terms with other people. That in itself reveals something about one's relationship to oneself. Basi- cally, lovers I have chosen were always women I didn't like. . . . "
"There's nothing wrong with that! " Agathe interrupted. "If I were a man, I wouldn't have any qualms about trifling with women in the most irresponsible way. And I'd desire them only out of absentmind- edness and wonder. "
"Oh? Would you really? How nice ofyou! "
"They're such absurd parasites. Women share a man's life on the same level as his dog! " There was no hint of moral indignation in Agathe's statement. She was pleasantly tired and kept her eyes closed, for she had gone to bed early and Ulrich, who had come to say good night, saw her lying in his place in his bed. But it was also the bed in which Bonadea had lain thirty-six hours earlier, which was probably why Ulrich reverted to the subject of his mistresses.
"All I was trying to describe was my own incapacity for a reason- ably forgiving relationship to myself," he repeated, smiling. "For me to take a real interest in something it must be part of some context, it must be controlled by an idea. The experience itself I'd really prefer to have behind me, as a memory; the emotional effort it exacts strikes me as unpleasant and absurdly beside the point. That's how it is with me, to describe myself to you bluntly. Now, the simplest, most in- stinctive idea one can have, at least when one is young, is that one's a hell of a fellow, the new man the world's been waiting for. But that
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doesn't last beyond thirty! " He reflected for a moment and then said: "That's not it. It's so hard to talk about oneself. What I would have to say is that I have never subjected myself to an idea with staying power. One never turned up. One should love an idea like a woman; be oveijoyed to get back to it. And one always has it inside oneself! And always looks for it in everything outside! I never formed such ideas. My relationship to the so-called great ideas, and perhaps even to those that really are great, has always been man-to-man: I never felt I was born to submit to them; they always provoked me to over- throw them and put others in their place. Perhaps it was precisely this jealousy that drove me to science, whose laws are established by teamwork and never regarded as immutable! " Again he paused and laughed, at either himself or his argument. "But however that may be," he went on seriously, "by connecting no idea or every idea with myself, I got out ofthe habit oftaking life seriously. I get much more out of it when I read about it in a novel, where it's wrapped up in some point of view, but when I'm supposed to experience it in all its fullness it always seems already obsolete, overdone in an old-fash- ioned way, and intellectually outdated. And I don't think that's pecu- liar to me. Most people today feel much the same. Lots of people feign an urgent love of life, the way schoolchildren are taught to hop about merrily among the daisies, but there's always a certain pre- meditation about it, and they feel it. Actually, they're as capable of killing each other in cold blood as they are of being the best of friends. Our time certainly does not take all the adventures and go- ings-on it's full of at all seriously. When they happen, there's a fuss. They immediately set off more happenings, a kind of vendetta of happenings, a whole compulsive alphabet of sequels, from B to Z, and all because someone said A. But these happenings in our lives have less life than a book, because they have no coherent meaning. "
So Ulrich talked, loosely, his moods changing. Agathe offered no response; she still had her eyes closed but was smiling.
Ulrich said: "Now I've forgotten what I'm telling you. I don't think I know my way back to the beginning. "
They were silent for a while. He was able to scrutinize his sister's face at leisure, since it was not defended by the gaze of her eyes. It lay there, a piece of naked body, the way women are when they're together in a women's public bath. The feminine, unguarded, natural
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cynicism of this sight, not intended for men's eyes, still had an unusual effect on Ulrich, though no longer quite as powerful as in their first days together, when Agathe had from the start claimed her right as a sister to talk to him without any mental beating around the bush, since for her he was not a man like others. He remembered the mixture of surprise and horror he had experienced as a boy when he saw a pregnant woman on the street, or a woman nursing her child; secrets from which the boy had been carefully shielded suddenly bulged out full-blown and unembarrassed in the light of day. Per- haps he had long been carrying vestiges of such reactions about with him, for all at once he seemed to feel entirely free of them. That Agathe was a woman with many experiences behind her was a pleas- ant and comfortable thought; there was no need to be on his guard in talking with her, as he would be with a young girl; indeed, it was touchingly natural that everything was morally relaxed with a mature woman. It also made him feel protective toward her, to make up to her for something by being good to her in some way. He decided to do all he could for her. He even decided to look for another husband for her. This need to be kind restored to him, although he barely noticed, the lost thread of his discourse.
"Our self-love probably undergoes a change during adolescence," he said without transition. "That's when a whole meadow of tender- ness in which one had been playing gets mowed down to provide the fodder for one particular instinct. "
"So that the cow can give milk! " Agathe added, after the slightest pause, pertly and with dignity but without opening her eyes.
"Yes, it's all connected, I suppose," Ulrich agreed, and went on: "So there's a moment when the tenderness goes out of our lives and concentrates on that one particular operation, which then remains overcharged with it. It's as though there were a terrible drought ev- erywhere on earth except for one place where it never stops raining, don't you think?