No More Learning

The temptation, the unease she felt at making herself feel at ease, the illusive possibility that it might happen, always evoked in her the story ofan abducted girl who, educated among strangers, changed places as it were within herself and became a differ- ent woman: this was one of the stories that, reaching back to her child- hood and without being especially important to her, had sometimes played a role in the temptations of her life and their excuses. But Ulrich had given her a particular interpretation of these stories, from which otherwise it would be easy to deduce merely a deficient spiritual consti- tution, and she believed more passionately in his interpretation than he did himself. For in the length and breadth of time, God has created more than this one life that we happen to be leading; it is in no way the true one, it is one of His many hopefully systematic experiments, into which He has placed no compulsion of necessity for those of us who are not blinded by the light of the passing moment, and Ulrich, talking this way about God and the imperfection of the world and the aimless, meaningless facticity ofits course, stripping away its false order to reveal the true vision of God that represented the most promising approach to Him, also taught her the meaning of the tentative claim of this way of understanding how one could, in a shadowy figuration alongside oneself, also be another.
So as she attentively observed Lindner's walls, which were equipped (hung) with pictures ofdivine subjects, Agathe felt that Ulrich was hov- ering in the vicinity. It occurred to her that she found Raphael, Murillo, and Bernini in individual engravings on the walls, but not Titian, and nothing at all from the Gothic period; on the other hand, there predomi- nated in many of the pictures present-day imitations of that style ala Jesuit Baroque that had sucked up vast quantities of sugar like a puffy omelet. If one followed only these pictures around the walls, the piling up of billowing robes and vacant, uplifted oval faces and sweetish naked bodies was disquieting. Agathe said: There is so much soul in them that the total effect is of a monstrous despiritualization. And look: the heav- enward gaze has become such a convention that all the irrepressible human vitality has taken refuge in the less prominent details and hidden itself there. Don't you find these garment. hems, shoes, leg positions, arms, robe folds, and clouds loaded down by all the sexuality that isn't openly recognized? This isn't too far removed from fetishism!
Well, Agathe ought to know about this phenomenon of being loaded down. This yearningly leaning out from a balcony into the void. Or it's really the other way around: an infinite pressing inward. With horror,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 0 1
one could see it right here on the borderline between pathological crotchet and exaltation.
Lindner had no inkling of this. But the reproach dismayed him, and he first tried speaking of this beauty in a belittling way. The artist must make use of the material and the fleshly, and clings to it; this leads to a lower order ofart. Agathe overestimated it. Art might well propagate the great experiences of mankind but could not turn them into experience.
Agathe then angrily accused him of having too many such pictures. The freedoms that, according to what he said, had to be conceded to the lower humanity in the artist still seemed by that measure to have some meaning even for him. -What? Agathe asked.
Cornered, Lindner gave his views on art. True art is spiritualization of matter. It can represent nakedness only when the superiority of soul over matter speaks from the representation.
Agathe objected that he was mistaken, for it was the superiority not of soul that was speaking, but of convention.
Suddenly he burst out: Or did she think that could justify to a serious person painters' and sculptors' cult of nakedness? - I s the naked human really such a beautiful thing? Something so scandalous! Aren't the trans- ports ofaesthetes simply ridiculous, even ifone doesn't even try to apply serious moral concepts (to them)?
Agathe: - T h e naked body is beautiful! . . . This was a lie, for heaven's sake, whose only purpose was to enrage her partner. Agathe had never paid any attention to the beauty of male bodies; women today regard a man's body for the most part only as an armature to support the head. Men are accustomed to pay somewhat more attention to beauty. But let one gather all the naked bodies with which our museums and exhibitions are filled and put them in a single place, and then seek out from among this confusion of white maggots those that are truly beautiful. The first thing one would notice is that the naked body is usually merely naked: naked like a face that for decades has worn a beard and is suddenly shaven. But beautiful? That the world stops in its tracks whenever a truly beautiful person appears reveals beauty to be a mystery; because beauty-love and love are a mystery, it is true for the whole. Likewise that the concept of beauty has been lost (assembly-line art). So she sits there, and Ulrich speaks through her mouth.
But Lindner immediately jumps at the challenge. -Well! he ex- claimed. -Oh, of course, the modem cult of the body! It excites the imagination in just one direction and inflames it with claims that life can't fulfill! Even the exaggerated concern with physical culture that the Americans have wished on us is a great danger!
-Y ou're seeing ghosts, Agathe said indifferently.
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Lindner to this: -Many pure women, who welcome and participate in such things without a deeper lmowledge of life, don't consider that in doing so they are conjuring up spirits that might perhaps destroy their own lives and the lives of those closest to them!
Agathe retorted sharply: -Should one bathe only once every two weeks? Bite off one's nails? Wear flannel and smell of chilblain oint- ment? . . . It was an attack on these surroundings, but at the same time she felt imprisoned and ridiculously punished for having to argue over such platitudes.
Their conversations often took the form of Agathe's mocking and irri- tating him so that he would lose his temper and ''bark. " This was how she was acting now, and Lindner took on the adversary.
- A truly manly soul will regard not only the plastic arts but also the whole institution of the theater with the greatest reservation, and calmly suffer the scorn and mockery of those who are too effeminate to rigor- ously forbid themselves every tickling of the senses! he asserted, imme- diately adding novels with the remark that most novels, too, unmistakably breathe the sensual enslavement and overstimulation of their authors and stimulate the reader's lower aspects precisely through the poetic illusion with which they gloss over and cover up everything!
He seemed to assume that Agathe despised him for being inartistic, and was anxious to show his superiority. "It is after all dogma," he ex- claimed, "that one must have heard and seen everything in order to be able to talk about it! But how much better it would be if one would be proud of one's lack of culture and let others prattle! One shouldn't con- vince oneself that it's part of culture to look at filth under electric light. "
Agathe looked at him, smiling, without answering. His observations were so dismally obtuse that her eyes misted over. This moist, mocking glance left him uncertain.
-All these observations are not, ofcourse, directed at great and true art! Lindner qualifled I assured her I he retreated.
Since Agathe continued her silence, he yielded another step.
"It's not prudery," he defended himself. "Pruderywould itselfbe only a sign of corrupted imagination. But naked beauty evokes the tragic in the inner person and, at the same time, spiritual powers, which the tragic strives to absolve and unbind: do you understand what I'm feel- ing? " He stopped before her. He was again captivated by her. He looked at her. "That's why one must either conceal nakedness or so associate it with man's higher longings that it isn't enslaving and arousing but calm- ing and liberating. " This was what had always been attempted at the high points of art, in the figures of the frieze on the Parthenon, in Ra- phael's transcendent figures-Michelangelo associates transfigured
From the Posthumous Papers · 1503
bodies with the suprasensual world, Titian binds covetousness through a facial expression that does not stem from the world of natural drives.
Agathe stood up. "Just a minute! " she said. "You have a thread in your beard," and she reached up rapidly and seemed to remove something; Lindner could not make out whether it was real or pretended, since he spontaneously and with signs of chaste horror fell back, while she imme- diately sat down again. He was extremely upset at his clumsy lack of self- control, and attempted to mask it through a blustering tone. He rode around like a Sunday rider on the word "tragic," which suited him so badly. He had said that naked beauty evokes the tragic in the inner man, and now supplemented this by saying that this tragic sense repeats itself in art, whose powers in spite of everything did not suffice for complete spiritualization. This was not very illuminating, but it quite clearly amounted to saying that the soul of man is not a protection against the senses but their powerful echo! Indeed, sensuality acquired its power only in that its false pretenses conquered and usurped man's soul!
"Is that a confession? " Agathe asked dryly, unabashed.
"How so, a confession? " Lindner exclaimed. And he added: "What an arrogant way of looking at things you have! What megalomania! And be- sides: What do you think of me? " But he fled, quit the field, he actually physically retreated before Agathe.
One discovers nothing so quickly as another's inner insecurity, and pounces on it like a cat on a grubbing beetle: it was really the capricious technique of the girls' boarding school, with its passions between the admired "big ones" and adoring smaller ones, the eternal basic form of spiritual dependency, which Agathe was using against Lindner by ap- pearing to respond understandingly and ardently to his words as often as she fell upon him coldly and frightened him just when he thought he was secure in a shared feeling.
From the corner of the room his voice now boomed like an organ, with an artificially fearless bass; he acted as ifhe were the aggressor by proposing: "Let's talk about this, for once, freely and frankly. Realize how inadequate and unsatisfying the entire process of procreation is as a mere natural process. Even motherhood! Is its physiological mechanism really so indescribably manrelous and perfect? How much horrible suf- fering it involves, how much senseless and unbearable contingency! So let's just leave the deification of nature to those who don't know what life is, and open our eyes to reality: the process of procreation is ennobled and raised above apathetic servitude only by being endowed with loyalty and responsibility, and subordinated to spiritual ideals! "
Agathe seemed to be reflecting silently. Then she asked relentlessly: "Why are you talking to me about the process of procreation? "
1504 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
Lindner had to take a deep breath: "Because I am your friend! Scho- penhauer has shown us that what we would like to think of as our most intimate experience is the most impersonal of arousals. But the higher emotions are exempted from this deception of the drive to procreate: loyalty, for instance, pure, selfless love, admiration and serving. "
"Why? " Agathe asked. "Certain feelings that suit you are supposed to have some supernatural origin, and others to be mere nature? "
Lindner hesitated; he struggled. "I can't marry again," he said softly and hoarsely. "I owe that to my son Peter. "
"But who's asking that of you? Now I don't understand you," Agathe replied.
Lindner shrank back. "I meant to say that even if I could do it, I wouldn't," he said defensively. "Moreover, in my opinion friendship be- tween man and wife demands an even more elevated frame of mind than love! " He made another try: "You know my principles, so you must also understand that in accord with them I would like nothing better than to offer to serve you as a brother, even to awaken, so to speak, in the woman the counterweight to the woman: I'd like to reinforce the Mary in the Eve! " He was close to breaking out in a sweat, so strenuous was it to pursue the strict line of his reasoning.
"So you're offering me a kind of eternal friendship," Agathe said qui- etly. "That's lovely of you. And you surely know that your present was accepted in advance. "
She seized his hand, as is appropriate at such a moment, and was a little taken aback at this epidermal piece ofstrange person that lay in the lap of her hand. Lindner was not able to withdraw his fingers either: it seemed to him that he should, and yet also that he didn't have to. Even Ulrich's lack of resolution sometimes exercised this natural impulse to flirt with her, but Agathe also despaired if she saw that she was doing it successfully herself, for the power of flirtation is united with the notion of bribery, cunning, and compulsion, and no longer with love; and while she was reminded of Ulrich, she looked at this unsteady creature, who was now bobbing up and down inwardly like a cork, in a mood, shot through with evil thoughts, that was close to tears.
"I would like you to open your refractory and taciturn heart to me," Lindner said timorously, warmly, and comically. "Don't think of me as a man. You've missed having a mother! " ·
"Fine," Agathe responded. "But can you stand it? Would you be pre- pared to entrust me with your friendship"-she withdrew her hand- "even if I were to tell you that I had stolen and that I had incest on my conscience? " therefore (or) something on account of which one is ruth- lessly expelled from the community of others?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1505
Lindner forced himself to smile. "What you're saying is strong, of course; it's even extremely unfeminine to venture such a jest," he scolded. "Honestly! Do you know what you remind me of at such mo- ments? Of a child who's made up its mind to annoy a grownup! But this isn't the moment for that," he added, offended because he was just now reminding himself of it.
But suddenly Agathe had something in her voice that cut through the conversation to the bottom when she asked: "You believe in God; reveal to me: In what way does He answer when you ask Him for advice and a decision about a heavy sin? "
Lindner rejected this question with the appalled severity that a decor- ous palace employee shows I puts on when asked about the married life of the Royal Couple.
Agathe: God in association with crime, specifically the Augustinian God, the abyss. Maybe really as Augustinian as possible: I see no possi- bility of being good on my own. I don't understand when I am doing good or evil. Only His grace can tear me away, or something similar. Seems to assume that she had recently been worrying about this. For the moment remains open.
Lindner did feel something of the passion of her words, therefore his answer gentle and father-confessorial: I don't know your life, you've only given me a few hints. But I consider it possible that you could act in a way similar to the way a bad person would act. You haven't learned in the small things to take life seriously, and therefore you perhaps won't hit it right when it comes to big decisions. You're probably capable of doing evil and disregarding all standards for no other reason than that it's a matter of indifference to you what the other person feels, but that only because, while you feel the impulse to the good, you don't know how much wisdom and obedience it involves. He seized her hand and asked: "Tell me the truth. "
"The truth is more or less what I've already told you," Agathe re- peated soberly and emphatically.
"No! "
"Yes. " There was something in this simple "yes" that made Lindner suddenly push away her hand.
Agathe said: "You wanted to make me better, didn't you? If I'm like a gold piece twisted out of shape that you'd like to bend back, I'm still a gold piece, aren't I? But you're losing your courage. The challenge (from God? ) presented to you in my person collides with your conventional division of actions into light and darkness. And I say to you: to identify God with a human morality is blasphemy! "
The voice in which she exclaimed this had, at least for Lindner, the
1506 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
sound of trumpets, something oddly arousing; he also felt Agathe's wild youthful beauty, and suffered enough as it was, whenever he reproached her, from an unuttemble anxiety and insinuation. For his principles, where were his principles? They were round about him, but far off. And in the empty space whose innermost vacuum was now his breast, some- thing stirred that was despicable but as alive as a basket full of puppies. Certainly, the only reason he wanted to strike to the heart of this obdu- mte young woman was in order to do her a seiVice, but the heart he was aiming at looked like a piece offlower flesh. Since Lindner had become a widower he had lived ascetically and avoided prostitutes and frivolous women on principle, but, to say it straight out, the more ardent he was about saving Agathe, the more grounded his fear became that in the pro- cess he would one day experience himself in a state of impermissible arousal. For this reason he often rapidly counted to fifty inwardly, in moments of anger as well as love. But his success was a remarkable one: the more this enabled him to drive his arousal from the point of threat- ened breach, the more it gathered in his whole body, until his body seemed to shine inside. He chose words of blame, but inwardly they were, ultimately, as soft as dying candles. He himself simply no longer believed what he was saying, for while externally he separated good from evil, inwardly everything was as mixed up together as it had been in Par- adise before the Fall. And with a horrifying clarity for which there are no words, he was reminded of that grimly edifying experience which, in his adolescence, had warned him once and for all against the power of the emotions. Lindner felt punished by a bitter self-contempt when he had to think that what at that time had clothed itselfwith devilish cunning in the appearance of God was now emerging in his mature years as com- mon lust ofthe flesh, precisely in the way that the Enlightener's shallow view had said it would.
-Get away from me with this lie! he begged.
-The will? Agathe said. -It's not a lie. I've falsified a will.
Lindner seized her by the arm in sudden anger as ifshe were a pupil
and shouted: "Out! "
"No," Agathe replied. "In our struggle against each other we have a
secret pact to drive out each other's devils! "
- Y o u are arrogant and vain! Lindner exclaimed. - B u t behind it lies
suffering and disappointment and humiliation! And again he nearly had it right.
But he only nearly had it right, and Agathe suddenly became tired ofit (him) and left him standing.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1507 Museum pre-chapter
At the lawyer's
Were their souls two doves in a world of hawks and owls? Ulrich would never have been able to contemplate letting such a view prevail, and he was therefore fond of remarking, and even found a kind of secu- rity in doing so, that external events took no account of the ravishments and anxieties of the soul but followed their own logic. Since Hagauer's letters had compelled him to consult a lawyer, Hagauer too had turned to a counselor, and since both attorneys were now exchanging letters, a "case" had begun, independent of personal origins and furnished, as it were, with suprapersonal powers of attorney. This case compelled Ul- rich's lawyer to ask for a personal consultation with Agathe and to be surprised when she did not appear and, later, when she still did not ap- pear, to raise serious questions that finally put Ulrich in the extreme po- sition of having to overcome his sister's resistance by painting the unpleasant consequences. When they appeared at their adviser's, this already put the course of events on a certain path. They found before them a secure and adroit man not much older than they, who was accus- tomed to smiling and preserving a polite composure even in the halls of the court and who, in consulting with his clients, proceeded from the principle that the first thing to do was gain his own picture of all things and people and take care to let himself be influenced as little as possible by the client, who was always undependable and wasted time.
And indeed Agathe did declare afterward that the whole time, she had felt like a "law patient," and this was true to the extent that all her answers to the introductory and basic questions of her lawyer were of a nature to reinforce the latter's doubts. His task was difficult.
A departure from "bed and board," the easily arranged "separation," did not suffice for his client's wishes, and a divorce "of the conjugal bond," the true annulment of the Catholic marriage concluded with Hagauer, was, ac- cording to the laws of the land, impossible; it could be managed only by a roundabout route through various other countries and their legal inter- connections, as well as through complicated acquisitions and renuncia- tions of citizenship, which did open a path that ought to lead safely to the goal but was by no means without difficulty or easily surveyed in ad- vance. So Agathe's lawyer had undertaken to substitute a more valid rea- son for her all too ordinary grounds for divorce, which she indicated simply as aversion.
"Insurmountable aversion wouldn't be enough; don't you have some- thing else against your husband? " he probed.
1508 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Agathe said, curtly, no. There was much she could have reproached Hagauer with, but she became red and pale, for it all belonged in this place as little as she did herself. She was angry with Ulrich.
The lawyer looked at her attentively. "Impolite treatment, frivolous management of property, flagrant neglect of conjugal obligations . . . how about those? " He tried to get her to have an idea. "The surest grounds for divorce, ofcourse, is always marital infidelity! "
Agathe looked at her interlocutor and answered in a clear, composed, low voice: "I have none of those grounds! "
Perhaps she ought to have smiled. Then the man who sat opposite her, in impeccably correct clothes that in no way contradicted his capac- ity for high spirits, would have been convinced that he had before him a lovely and undefinably captivating woman. But the seriousness of her expression left him no room at all, and his lawyer's brain became dull. He recalled from the files, which contained not only the correspondence of the opposing attorney but also the letters from Hagauer to Ulrich, Hagauer's carefully documented complaints that the desire for a divorce was unjustified and capriciously frivolous, and the thought went through his mind that he would much rather be representing this apparently rea- sonable and dependable man. Then it occurred to him that somewhere the term "psychopathic woman" occurred, but he rejected it not so much on account of Agathe as because it might have prevented him from taking on this rewarding commission. "Nervous, of course: The kind ofnervousness that's capable ofanything, not at all uncommon! " he thought, and cautiously began to direct his questioning at the point that had impressed him as most in need of explanation when he had gone over the situation. In the correspondence in the files there were-both in Hagauer's letters to Ulrich and, more significantly, in the correspon- dence of the opposing lawyer-more or less clear allusions that gave the sense that the two men might know of irregularities which had taken place in the management of the estate, or might even be of a mind to suspect the relations that had since ensued between brother and sister: these results, noted from the point-by-point checklist of Ulrich's brother-in-law's reflections, were intended to be understood as indicat- ing that the pair might well consider whether it would not be better to change their resolve before they went too far in an affair that held all sorts of danger for them. Agathe's new adviser now brought up these unambiguous allusions by turning to Ulrich, as the person more familiar to him, with the politeness of a man who cannot spare another the repe- tition of a superfluous unpleasantness; but every so often he turned to Agathe and gave her to understand that although it was only a question of pure formality, still she, too, as his client, had to give him some assur-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 0 9
ance about these objections, which in certain circumstances, when brought unscrupulously out into the open, could weigh so heavily, an assurance on which he could base his further actions.
But Agathe had neither read Hagauer's letters nor informed Ulrich of what she had been doing during the time she had been alone following the "so-called falsifying of the will"-involuntarily, at this moment, he was speaking thus cautiously to himself! This led to a short, embarrassed pause that had a quite peculiar effect. Ulrich sought to bring it to an end by a gesture whose calm superciliousness sought to characterize the law- yer's request as superfluous and already accommodated, but his sister disturbed this plan somewhat by asking the lawyer out of curiosity what her husband really thought he knew. The lawyer looked from one to the other. "My sister will, ofcourse, give you the assurance you desire in any form," Ulrich declared quickly and with the greatest indifference. "I have informed her of the precise content of the letters, but for quite personal reasons she herself has read them only in part. " Agathe now smiled in time, having caught her error, and confirmed that this was so. "I was too out of sorts," she asserted calmly.
The attorney reflected for a moment. It went through his mind that this incident could quite well be an unwished-for confirmation of the adversary's assertion that Agathe was under her brother's baleful influ- ence. Of course he did not believe this to be the case, but felt, even so, a slight aversion toward Ulrich. This moved him to answer Agathe with the greatest politeness: "I must sincerely beg your pardon, madame, but my profession compels me to insist on the request that you examine the matter for yourself. " And with these words, gently insisting, he handed the file over to her.
Agathe hesitated.
Ulrich said: "You must formally examine it yourself. "
The lawyer smiled politely and added: "I beg your pardon, not only
formally. "
Agathe let her glance dip twice into the pages, pulled a wry face, and
slapped the file shut again.
The lawyer was satisfied. "These allusions are meaningless," he as-
sured her. "That's what I assumed from the start. My colleague simply should not have given in to his client's unpleasant irritability. But it would ofcourse be embarrassingifduring the civil procedure a criminal indictment should suddenly be entered. If that happens, one would im- mediately have to respond with a countercomplaint on grounds of slan- der, or something similar. " Seemingly without his wishing it, what he was saying again passed from the unreal to the possible, and it seemed to ULrich that in these assurances a question was still lurking.
1510 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Ofcourse it would be extremely embarrassing," he confirmed dryly, and thought he would consult, aside from this celebrated divorce lawyer, a proper criminal lawyer, one with whom one could speak more openly in order to address all the possibilities contained in such an unfortunate story. But he did not know how to find such a man. "A battle of this dirty kind is always embarrassing for people who are clean," he added. "But is there something else one can do besides wait? "
The lawyer acted as if he needed to think this over for a moment, smiled, and said that he was sorry, but he must very strongly advise that they go back to his original proposal and show that their adversary had transgressed marital fidelity. The length of time the separation had al- ready lasted gave grounds for assuming the factual basis of such a com- plaint; there was no lack of investigators who took care of these things dependably and discreetly, and with this, as it were, classical ground for divorce, one would inevitably and most rapidly arrive at their goal, which would be of the greatest advantage in a struggle where one must not leave the adversary any time to develop his intrigues.
Ulrich also seemed to see the necessity of this.
But Agathe, who had completely lost the confidence she had once had in her dealings with lawyers and other persons of the law, said no. Whether she had imagined that one orders a divorce from a lawyer the way one orders a cake from the baker, which is selected and delivered to one's house, or whether it happened that she held it against Ulrich for having put her in a situation where her sense of responsibility for the embarrassments being visited upon the innocent Hagauer was awak- ened, or whether she simply could not bear the collapse of her world in the continuance of such conferences; enough, she refused vehemently.
She also considered this proposal to be a convenience on the part of the lawyer, and might perhaps have let herself be talked out of it; but Ulrich did not do so, merely excusing her smilingly with the jest that even through a detective she had no desire to find out any more about her husband, and the divorce lawyer suddenly gave a sigh of chivalric defeat, for he wanted to bring the conference to an end. He now assured them that they would try to attain their goal this way, and pushed over to Agathe the power of attorney for her to sign.
Addendum. Possibly: Ulrich asks whether there were any proposals from Hagauer for an amicable settlement, and declares the continuation of the conference in this sense otherwise undesirable.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 1 1
Even as they were descending the steps, Ulrich took Agathe's arm in his, and in that moment they involuntarily stopped.
"We were in reality for an hour! " he said.
Agathe looked at him. Pain closed off the background of her light eyes like a stone wall.
"Are you very depressed? '' he asked sympathetically.
"It involves such humiliation that we must withdraw from it," she re- plied slowly.
'That's very much the question," Ulrich said.
"A real humiliation, like falling with one's mouth in the dust! Some- thing we have forgotten how to imagine lately! " Agathe added in a soft, urgent voice.
"I mean, the question is whether we will be allowed to withdraw from this humiliation," Ulrich responded. "Perhaps there are even greater ones threatening us. I must confess to you that my sense of our situation today is that it's bad. For, granted we give in: perhaps we could claim it had been an error, hastily repair it, cover things up. But it would be up to him to accept it or not, and he isn't going to give you up; indeed, now that he's become suspicious, he won't put down his weapons until you've submitted to him unconditionally. That's simply his sense of order! " Ul- rich said, since Agathe did not seem to want to wait for him to finish. "On the other hand, we could of course follow our lawyer's proposal or some similar plan and try to wear him down. But what does that get us? Increased danger, for the enemy will feel himself absolved from all re- straint by our attack, and in the best case our success would be that be- sides the divorce we would have maliciously harmed a person to whom we are profoundly indifferent. "
"And the guilt of existence? " Agathe objected passionately, although she violently forced herself to make a jest of it. "What you yourself have often said, that the only woman who remains pure is the one who has her lover's head chopped off? ''
"Did I say that? One would have to blow up the planet," Ulrich said calmly, "if one wanted to get rid of all the witnesses to one's mistakes! " And he added seriously: "You're still misjudging the degree of ordinari- ness, the tangible difficulty, of the situation we're in: one way or the other, we're threatened with disaster and have only the choice of re- maining so o r - "
"Killing ourselves! " Agathe said curtly and decisively.
"Oh come on! How that echoes in the stones ofsuch a staircase! I hope no one heard it! " he rebuked her angrily, and looked cautiously around. "You're so stupid! It's not even sure that death is better than prison. But we could remove ourselves from the choice by running away. "
1512 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Agathe looked at him, and in this split second her eyes involuntarily resembled those of a child who has been romping wildly and been picked up.
"To an island in the South Seas," Ulrich said, and smiled. "But per- haps an island in the Adriatic would do as well. Where once a week a boat will bring us what we need. "
When they stood below at the gateway, they were benumbed and struck by the shock of the summery street. A whitish fire in which bright shadows lived seemed to be waiting for them. People, animals, curbs, even they themselves lost something of their bodily constraints in the hot rays of light. Agathe had said: ''You've never wanted to! For that I mean too little to you? " Ulrich responded: "Oh, let's not talk about it this way! It's harder than the resolve to deny the world. For once we've run away, everything here in the real world, which was imposed on us as ours, will tum really bad, and there's hardly any turning back, although we have no idea whether where we want to go there's solid ground on which people can stand differently from the way they do in dreams. If I still keep thinking about it, it's because I have doubts not about you or myself but about what's possible! "
? But on the other hand it's also quite practical! The lawyer has his in- structions, the client is away: either both attorneys will come to an agree- ment in order to wind it up, or they'll procrastinate.
When they finally do come back, everything is in quite good shape: the automatism of life that protects itself against catastrophes. They were merely on a trip, the lawyers were still procrastinating, etc.
c. 193. 2 5. 2
THE THREE SISTERS
Ulrich asked: "What is it you want from me: my clothes, my books, my house, my views about the future? What should I give you? I'd like to give you everything I have. "
Agathe replied: "Cut offyour arm for me, or at least a finger! "
They were in the reception room on the ground floor, whose high, narrow windows, arched at the top, let in the soft new morning light, which mingled with the shade of trees as it fell into its own reflection on the floor. If one looked down at oneself it was like seeing beneath one's feet the discolored sky with its brightness and clouds through a brownish glass. Brother and sister had so retired from the world that there was hardly danger any longer of their being disturbed by a visit.
''You're too modest! " Ulrich went on. "Go ahead, ask for my life! I believe I could discard it for you. But a finger? I must confess: a finger is of no importance to me at all! "
He laughed, his sister along with him; but her face retained the ex- pression of someone who sees another joking about something that is serious to him.
Now Ulrich turned the tables: "When one loves one bestows, one 'keeps nothing for oneself,' one doesn't want to possess anything by one- self: why do you want to possess Lindner for yourself? '' he asked.
"But I don't possess him at all! " Agathe retorted.
''You possess your secret emotions for him and your secret thoughts about him. Your error about him! "
"And why don't you cut off an arm? '' Agathe challenged.
"We will cut it off," was Ulrich's response. "But for the moment I'm still asking myself what kind of life would result if I really gave up my sense of self, and others did likewise? Everyone would have a self in common with everyone else; not only the feeding bowl and the bed would be shared, but truly the self, so that every one would love his neighbor as himself and no one would be his own neighbor. "
Agathe said: "That must somehow be possible. "
"Can you imagine sharing a lover with another woman? '' Ulrich asked.
1514 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"I could," Agathe asserted. "I can even imagine it being quite beauti- ful! I just can't imagine the other woman. "
Ulrich laughed.
Agathe made a parrying gesture. "I have a particular personal dislike of women," she said.
"Of course, of course! And I don't like men! "
Agathe felt his mockery was somewhat insulting because she felt that it was not unjustified, and she did not go on to say what she had in- tended.
In the resulting pause Ulrich, to encourage her, began to relate some- thing he had recently dreamed up in the distracted condition of shaving. "You know that there were times when aristocratic women," he said, "if a slave pleased them, could have him castrated so that they might have their pleasure of him without endangering the aristocracy of their prog- eny. "
Agathe did not know it, but she gave no sign. On the other hand, she now recalled having once read that among some uncivilized tribes every woman married all her husband's brothers along with him and had to serve them all, and every time she imagined such servile humiliation, an involuntary and yet not quite unwelcome shudder made her shrink. But she did not reveal any of this to her brother either.
". . . whether something like that happened often, or only exception- ally, I don't know, nor does it matter," Ulrich had meanwhile been say- ing. "For, as I must confess, I was thinking only of the slave. More precisely, I was thinking of the moment when he left his sickbed for the first time and encountered the world again. At first, ofcourse, the will to resist and defend himself, which had been paralyzed at the start of what happened, rouses and thaws out again. But then the awareness must set in that it's too late. Anger wants to rebel, but there follow one after the other the memory of the pain suffered, the cowardly awakening of a fear from which only consciousness was removed, and finally that humility signifying a now irrevocable humiliation, and these emotions now hold down the anger, the way the slave himselfwas held down while the oper- ation was being performed. " Ulrich interrupted this odd recital and searched for words; his eyelids were lowered in meditation. "Physically, he could doubtless still pull himself together," he continued, "but a strange feeling of shame will keep him from doing so, for he must recog- nize its futility in a way that embraces everything; he is no longer a man, he has been debased to a girl-like existence, to the existence ofa towel, a handkerchief, a cup, of some kind of being that, not without affection, is allowed to serve. I would like to know the moment when he is then
From the Posthumous Papers · 1515
called for the first time before the lady who tortured him and reads in her eyes what she proposes to do with him. . . . "
Agathe laughed mockingly. "You've been thinking some really strange thoughts, Ulo! And when I think that before he was castrated your slave was perhaps a butcher or a stylish domestic . . . "
Ulrich laughed innocently along with her. "Then I myself would prob- ably find my depiction of the awakening of his soul disturbingly comi- cal," he admitted. He himself was happy that this disreputable emotional report was brought to an end. For without his noticing, vari- ous things must have come into his mind that didn't belong there: as if something of the mythological goddesses who consume their devotees, or the Siamese twins, up to masochism or the castration complex, had been drawn with fingernails across the dubious keyboard of contempo- rary psychology! When he had stopped laughing he immediately made an embittered face.
Agathe laid her hand on his ann. The tiny shadows of a concealed excitement twitched in her gray eyes. "But why did you tell me that? '' she asked.
"I don't know," Ulrich said.
"I believe you were thinking of me," she asserted.
"Nonsense! " Ulrich retorted, but after a while he asked: "Do you
know that another letter from Hagauer came today? " and so apparently began talking about something else.
The letters from Hagauer that were then arriving became more threatening from one to the next. "I don't understand why, under these circumstances, he doesn't get on the train and come here to confront us," Ulrich went on.
"He won't find the time," Agathe said.
And that was indeed how it was. At the beginning Hagauer had re- solved several times to do just that, but every time something inter- vened, and then he had become rather accustomed to being alone. It seemed to him not a bad thing to live for a while without his wife: man ought not to be too happy or too comfortable-that is a heroic concep- tion of life. So Hagauer confronted his misfortune energetically, and was able to note the compensation that not only time can heal wounds, but lack of time as well.