No More Learning

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
g68 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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
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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? ''
970 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 975
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
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 977
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
978 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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? "
Agathe said: "I think that as a child I loved my dolls more fiercely than I have ever loved a man. After you'd gone I found a whole trunkful of my old dolls in the attic. "
"What did you do with them? " Ulrich asked. "Did you give them away? "
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"Who was there to give them to? I gave them a funeral in the kitchen stove," she said.
Ulrich responded with animation: "When I remember as far back as I can, I'd say that there was hardly any separation between inside and outside. When I crawled toward something, it came on wings to meet me; when something important happened, the excitement was not just in us, but the things themselves came to a boil. I won't claim that we were happier then than we were later on. After all, we hadn't yet taken charge of ourselves. In fact, we didn't really yet exist; our personal condition was not yet separated from the world's. It sounds strange, but it's true: our feelings, our desires, our very selves, were not yet quite inside ourselves. What's even stranger is that I might as easily say: they were not yet quite taken away from us. I f you should sometime happen to ask yourself today, when you think you're en- tirely in possession of yourself, who you really are, you will discover that you always see yourself from the outside, as an object. You'll no- tice that one time you get angry, another time you get sad, just as your coat will sometimes be wet and sometimes too warm. No matter how intensely you try to look at yourself, you may at most find out something about the outside, but you'll never get inside yourself. Whatever you do, you remain outside yourself, with the possible ex- ception of those rare moments when a friend might say that you're beside yourself. It's true that as adults we've made up for this by being able to think at any time that 'I am'-if you think that's fun. You see a car, and somehow in a shadowy way you also see: 'I am seeing a car. ' You're in love, or sad, and see that it's you. But neither the car, nor your sadness, nor your love, nor even yourself, is quite fully there. Nothing is as completely there as it once was in child- hood; everything you touch, including your inmost self, is more or less congealed from the moment you have achieved your 'personal- ity,' and what's left is a ghostly hanging thread of self-awareness and murky self-regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence. What's gone wrong? There's a feeling that something might still be salvaged. Surely you can't claim that a child's experience is all that different from a man's? I don't know any real answer, even if there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time I've responded by having lost my love for this kind of 'being myself' and for this kind of world. "
g8o · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich was glad that Agathe listened to him without interrupting, for he was not expecting an answer from her any more than he was from himself, and was convinced that for the present, nobody could give him the kind of answer he had in mind. Yet he did not fear for an instant that anything he was talking about might be above her head. He did not see it as philosophizing, nor even as an unusual subject for a conversation, any more than a young man-and he was behav- ing like one, in this situation-will let the difficulty of groping for the right words keep him from finding everything simple when he is ex- changing views on the eternal problems of "Who are you? This is who I am" with someone else. He derived the assurance that his sis- ter was able to follow him word for word not from having reflected on it but from her inner being. His eyes rested on her face, and there was something in it that made him happy. This face, its eyes closed, did not thrust back at him. The attraction it held for him was bottom- less, even in the sense that it seemed to draw him into never-ending depths. Submerging himself in contemplation of this face, he no- where found that muddy bottom of dissolved resistances from which the diver into love kicks off, to rebound to the surface and reach dry ground again. But since he was accustomed to experience every incli- nation toward a woman as a forcibly reversed disinclination against human beings, which-even though he found it regrettable-did offer some guarantee against losing himself in her, the pure inclina- tion as he bent even deeper toward her in curiosity alarmed him al- most as ifhe were losing his balance, so that he soon drew back from this state, and from pure happiness took refuge in a boy's trick for recalling Agathe to everyday reality: with the most delicate touch he could manage, he tried to open her eyes. Agathe opened them wide with a laugh and cried: "Isn't this pretty rough treatment for some- one who's supposed to be your self-love? "
This response was as boyish as his attack, and their looks collided hard, like two little boys who want to tussle but are laughing too much to begin. Suddenly Agathe dropped this and asked seriously: "You know that myth Plato tells, following some ancient source, that the gods divided the original human being into two halves, male and female? " She had propped herself up on one elbow and unexpect- edly blushed, feeling awkward at having asked Ulrich if he knew so familiar a story; then she resolutely charged ahead: "Now those two
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pathetic halves do all kinds of silly things to come together again. It's in all the schoolbooks for older children; unfortunately, they never tell you why it doesn't work! "
"I can tell you that," Ulrich broke in, glad to see how well she had understood him. "Nobody knows which of so many halves running around in the world is his missing half. He grabs one that seems to be his, vainly trying to become one with her, until the futility of it be- comes hopelessly clear. If a child results, both halves believe for a few youthful years that they've at least become one in the child. But the child is merely a third half, which soon shows signs of trying to get as far away from the other two as it possibly can and look for a fourth half. In this way human beings keep 'halving' themselves physiologically, while the ideal ofoneness remains as far away as the moon outside the bedroom window. "
"You'd think that siblings might have succeeded halfway already! " Agathe interjected in a voice that had become husky.
"Twins, possibly. "
"Aren't we twins? "
"Certainly! " Ulrich suddenly became evasive. "Twins are rare;
twins of different gender especially so. But when, into the bargain, they differ in age and have hardly known each other for the longest time, it's quite a phenomenon-one really worthy of us! " he de- clared, struggling to get back into a shallower cheeriness.
"But we met as twins! " Agathe challenged him, ignoring his tone. "Because we unwittingly dressed alike? "
"Maybe. And in all sorts of ways! You may say it was chance; but
what is chance? I think it's fate or destiny or providence, or whatever you want to call it. Haven't you ever thought it was by chance that you were hom as yourself? Our being brother and sister doubles that chance! " That was how Agathe put it, and Ulrich submitted to this wisdom.
"So we declare ourselves to be twins," he agreed. "Symmetrical creatures of a whim of nature, henceforth we shall be the same age, the same height, with the same hair, walking the highways and by- ways of the world in identical striped clothes with the same bow tied under our chins. But I warn you that people will tum around and look after us, half touched and half scornful, as always happens when something reminds them of the mysteries of their own beginnings. "
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"Why can't we dress for contrast? " Agathe said lightly. "One in yellow when the other is in blue, or red alongside green, and we can dye our hair violet or purple, and I can affect a hump and you a paunch: yet we'd still be twins! "
But the joke had gone stale, the pretext worn out, and they fell silent for a while.
"Do you realize," Ulrich then said suddenly, "that this is some- thing very serious we're talking about? ''
No sooner had he said this than his sister again dropped the fan of her lashes over her eyes and, veiling her consent, let him talk alone. Or perhaps it only looked as if she had shut her eyes. The room was dark; what light there was did not so much clarify out- lines as pour over them in bright patches. Ulrich had said: "It's not only the myth of the human being divided in two; we could also mention Pygmalion, the Hermaphrodite, or Isis and Osiris-all dif- ferent forms of the same theme. It's the ancient longing for a dop- pelganger of the opposite sex, for a lover who will be the same as yourself and yet someone else, a magical figure that is oneself and yet remains magical, with the advantage over something we merely imagine of having the breath of autonomy and independence. This dream of a quintessential love, unhampered by the body's limita- tions, coming face-to-face in two identical yet different forms, has been concocted countless times in solitary alchemy in the alembic ofthe human skull. . . . "
Here he broke off; evidently something disturbing had occurred to him, and he ended with the almost unfriendly words: "There are traces of this in even the most commonplace situations of love: the charm of every change of clothing, every disguise, the meaning two people find in what they have in common, the way they see them- selves repeated in the other. This little magic is always the same, whether one's seeing an elegant lady naked for the first time or a naked girl formally dressed for the first time in a dress buttoned up to the neck, and great reckless passions all have something to do with the fact that everyone thinks it's his own secret self peering out at him from behind the curtains of a stranger's eyes. ··
It sounded as though he were asking her not to attach too much importance to what they were saying. But Agathe was again thinking
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of the lightning flash of surprise she had felt when they first met, disguised, as it were, in their lounging suits. And she answered:
"So this has been going on for thousands ofyears. Is it any easier to understand as a case of shared self-delusion? "
Ulrich was silent.
And after a while, Agathe said delightedly: "But it does happen in one's sleep! There you do sometimes see yourself transformed into something else. Or meet yourself as a man. And then you're much kinder to him than you are to yourself. You'll probably say that these are sexual dreams, but I think they are much older. "
"Do you often have that sort of dream? " Ulrich asked. "Sometimes. Not often. "
"I almost never do," he confessed. "It must be ages since I had
such a dream. "
"And yet you once explained to me," Agathe now said, " - i t must
have been at the very beginning, back in our old house-that people really did experience life differently thousands of years ago. "
"Oh, you mean the 'giving' and the 'receiving' vision? " Ulrich re- plied, smiling at her although she could not see him. "The 'embrac- ing' and 'being embraced' of the spirit? Yes, of course I should have talked about this mysterious dual sexuality of the soul too. And how much else besides! There's a hint of it wherever you look. Every anal- ogy contains a remnant of that magic of being identical and not iden- tical. But haven't you noticed? In all these cases we've been talking about, in dream, in myth, poem, childhood, even in love, feeling more comes at the cost of understanding less, and that means: through a loss of reality. "
"Then you don't really believe in it? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich did not answer. But after a while he said: "Translated into the ghastlyjargon ofour times, we could call this faculty we all lack to such a frightening degree nowadays 'the percentual share' of an indi- vidual's experiences and actions. In dreams it's apparently a hundred percent, in our waking life not even half as much. You noticed it today at once in my house; but it's exactly the same with my relations to the people you'll meet. I also once called it-if I'm not mistaken, in conversation with a woman where it was truly relevant, I must admit-the acoustics of the void. If a pin drops in an empty room,
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the sound it makes is somehow disproportionate, even incommen- surable; but it's the same when there's a void between people. There's no way to tell: is one screaming, or is there a deathly silence? For everything out of place and askew acquires the magnetic attrac- tion of a tremendous temptation when there's nothing with which to counteract it. Don't you agree? . . . But I'm sorry," he interrupted himself, "you must be tired, and I'm not letting you have your rest. It seems there are many things in my surroundings and my social life that won't be much to your liking, I'm afraid. "
Agathe had opened her eyes. After coming out of hiding at last, her glance contained something uncommonly hard to define, which Ulrich felt coursing sympathetically through his whole body. He sud- denly started to talk again: "When I was younger I tried to see just that as a source of strength. And if one doesn't have anything to pit against life? Fine, then life flees from man into his works! That's more or less what I thought. And I suppose there's something daunt- ing about the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today's world. At the very least there's something in it of adolescence, which centuries can go through as well as teenagers, years of rapid, uneven growth. And like every young man I began by plunging into work, adven- tures, amusements; what difference did it make what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly? Do you remember that we once spoke of 'the morality of achievement'? We're born with that image, and orient ourselves by it. But the older one gets, the more clearly one finds out that this apparent exuberance, this independence and mo- bility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the par- tial drives-both your own against yourself and yours against the world-in short, everything that we 'people of the present' have regarded as a strength and a special distinction of our species, is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole as against its parts. Passion and willpower can do nothing about it. The moment you're ready to go all out into the middle of something, you find your- self washed back to the periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences! "
Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to hap- pen in his voice; when nothing changed and her brother's words sim- ply came to an end like a path turning off a road into a dead end, she said: "So your experience tells you that one can never really act with
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conviction and will never be able to. By conviction," she explained, "I don't mean whatever knowledge or moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling replete now where there's emptiness, something one starts out from and returns to-" She broke off. "Oh, I don't really know what I mean! I was hoping you'd explain it to me. "
"You mean just what we were talking about," Ulrich answered gently. "And you're also the only person I can talk to about these things. But there'd be no point in starting over just to add a few more seductive words. I'd have to say, rather, that being 'at the inner core' ofthings, in a state ofunmarred 'inwardness'-using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the meaning we just gave it-is ap- parently not a demand that can be satisfied by rational thinking. " He had leaned forward and was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes. "Human nature is probably averse to it," he said in a low voice. "All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it! Perhaps it's connected with the need for sibling love, an addition to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction toward a love un- mixed with otherness and not-loving. " And after a pause he added: "You know how popular those babes-in-the-wood games are in bed: people who could murder their real siblings fool around as brother- and-sister babies under the same blanket. "
In the dim light his face twitched in self-mockery. But Agathe put her trust in his face and not in his confused words. She had seen faces quivering like this a moment before they plunged; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an immense distance. Tersely she answered: "Being brother and sister isn't really enough, that's all. "
'Well, we've already spoken of being twins," Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.
'We'd have to be Siamese twins," Agathe managed to say.
"Right, Siamese twins! " her brother echoed, gently disengaging her hand from his and carefully placing it on the coverlet. His words had a weightless sound, light and volatile, expanding in widening cir- cles even after he had left the room.
Agathe smiled and gradually sank into a lonely sadness, whose darkness imperceptibly turned into that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile
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tiptoed into his study and stayed there, unable to work, for another two hours, until he, too, grew tired, learning for the first time what it was like to be cramped out of considerateness. He was amazed at how much he would have wanted to do during this time that would involve making noise and so had to be suppressed. This was new for him.