No More Learning

She was still standing, with her arm raised against the doorpost, and one instant too many could spoil the whole effect. He detested women who behaved as though they had been brought into the world by a painter or a director, or who do an artful fade-out after such a moment of high excitement as Agathe's. "She could come down," he thought, "from this peak of enthusiasm with the dim-wit- ted look of a sleepwalker, like a medium coming out of a trance. She doesn't have much choice, and it's bound to be awkward. " But Agathe seemed to be aware of this herself, or possibly something in her brother's eye had put her on guard. She leapt gaily from her high limb, landed on both feet, and stuck out her tongue at him.
But then she was grave and quiet again, and without saying a word went to fetch the medals. And so brother and sister set about acting in defiance of their father's last will.
It was Agathe who did it. Ulrich felt shy about touching the de- fenseless old man lying there, but Agathe had a way of doing wrong that undercut any awareness of wrongdoing. Her movements of hand and eye were those of a woman tending a patient, and they had at times the spontaneous and appealing air of young animals who suddenly pause in their romping to make sure that their master is watching. The master took from her the decorations that had been removed and handed her the replicas. He was reminded of a thief
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 767
whose heart is in his mouth. And if he had the impression that the stars and crosses shone more brightly in his sister's hand than in his own, indeed as iftheywould turn into magical objects, it might really have been true in the greenish darkness in the room, filled with glim- merings of light reflected off the leaves of the big potted plants; or it might have been that he felt his sister's will, hesitantly taking the lead and youthfully seizing his. But since no conscious motive was to be recognized in this, there again arose in these moments of unalloyed contact an almost dimensionless and therefore intangibly powerful sense of their joint existence.
Now Agathe stopped; it was done. Yet something or other still re- mained, and after thinking about it for a while she said with a smile: "How about each of us writing something nice on a piece of paper and putting it in his pocket? "
This time, Ulrich instantly knew what she meant, for they did not have many such shared memories, and he recalled how, at a certain age, they had loved sad verses and stories in which someone died and was forgotten by everyone. It might perhaps have been the loneli- ness of their childhood that had brought this about, and they often made up such stories between them, but even then Agathe had been inclined to act them out, while Ulrich took the lead only in the more manly undertakings, which called for being bold and hard. And so it had been Agathe's idea, one day, that they each should cut off a fin- gernail to bury in the garden, and she even slipped a small lock of her blond hair in with the parings. Ulrich proudly declared that in a hun- dred years someone might stumble across these relics and wonder who it might have been, since he was concerned with making an ap- pearance in posterity; but for little Agathe the burial had been an end in itself. She had the feeling that she was hiding a part of herself, permanently removing it from the supervision of a world whose pedagogical demands always intimidated her even though she never thought very highly of them. And because that was when the cottage for the servants was being built at the bottom of the garden, they decided to do something special for it. They would write wonderful poems on two slips of paper, adding their names, to be bricked up in the walls. But whim they began writing these poems that were sup- posed to be so splendid, they couldn't think of anything to say, day after day, and the walls were already rising out of the foundations.
768 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Finally, when it was almost too late, Agathe copied a sentence out of her arithmetic book, and Ulrich wrote: "I am . . . " and added his name. Nevertheless, their hearts were pounding furiously when they sneaked up on the two bricklayers at work in the garden, and Agathe simply threw her piece of paper in the ditch where they were stand- ing and ran off. But Ulrich, as the bigger and as a man even more frightened of being stopped and questioned by the astonished brick- layers, could move neither hand nor foot from excitement; so that Agathe, emboldened because nothing had happened to her, finally came back and took his slip from him. She then sauntered along with it innocently, inspected a brick at the end of a freshly laid row, lifted it, and slipped Ulrich's name into the wall before anyone could tum her away. Ulrich himself had hesitantly followed her and felt at the moment she did it the vise in which in his fright he had been gripped turning into a wheel of sharp knives whirling so rapidly in his chest that it threw off sparks like a flaming catherine wheel.
It was this incident to which Agathe was alluding now, and Ulrich gave no answer for the longest while, but smiled in a way that was meant to deter her, for repeating such a game with the dead man seemed taboo to him. But Agathe had already bent down, slid from her leg a wide silk garter that she wore to relieve the pull on her girdle, lifted the pall, and slipped it into her father's pocket.
And Ulrich? He could hardly believe his eyes to see this childhood memory restored to life. He almost leapt forward to stop her, just because it was so completely out of order. But he caught in his sis- ter's eyes a flash of the dewy fresh innocence of early morning that is still untainted by any of the drab routines of the day, and it held him back.
"What do you think you're doing? " he admonished her softly. He did not know whether she was trying to propitiate the deceased be- cause he had been wronged, or doing him one last kindness because of all the wrong he had done himself. He could have asked, but the barbaric notion of sending the frosty dead man on his way with a garter still warm from his daughter's thigh tightened his throat and muddled his brain.
6
THE OLD GENTLEMAN IS FINALLY LEFT IN PEACE
The short time left before the funeral was filled with any number of unaccustomed small chores and passed quickly; in the last half hour before the departure of the deceased, the number of callers in black whose coming had run through all the hours like a black thread fi- nally became a black festival. The undertaker's men had intensified their hammering and scraping-with the gravity of a surgeon to whom one has entrusted one's life and from that moment on surren- dered any right to interfere-and had laid, through the untouched normality in the rest of the house, a gangway of ceremonial feeling, which ran from the entrance past the stairs into the room that held the coffin. The flowers and potted plants, the black cloth and crepe hangings, and the silver candelabra with trembling little golden tongues offlame, which received the visitors, knew their responsibil- ity better than Ulrich and Agathe, who had to represent the family and were obliged to welcome all who had come to pay their last re- spects, though they hardly knew who any of them were and would have been lost without their father's old servant, who unobtrusively prompted them whenever especially eminent guests appeared. All those who appeared glided up to them, glided past, and dropped an- chor somewhere in the room, alone or in little groups, motionlessly observing the brother and sister, whose expressions grew stiff with solemn restraint, until at last the funeral director-the same man who had given Ulrich the printed forms to sign and in this last half hour had dashed up and down the steps at least twenty times- bounded up to Ulrich from the side and, with the studiously modu- lated self-importance of an adjutant reporting to his general on parade, told him that all was ready.
To conduct the funeral cortege ceremoniously through the town-the mourners would only later be seated in their carriages- Ulrich had to take the lead on foot, flanked on one side by His Impe-
770 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
rial and Royal Majesty's representative, the Governor of the prov- ince, who had come in person to honor the final sleep of a member of the Upper House, and on the other by an equally high-ranking gen- tleman, the senior member ofthree from the Upper House, followed by the two other noblemen of that delegation, then by the Rector and Senate of the University. Only after these, though ahead of the interminable stream of silk hats topping off public figures of slowly diminishing importance and dignity, came Agathe, hemmed in by women in black and personifying the point where, among the peaks of officialdom, the sanctioned private grief had its place. For the un- regulated participation of those who had come "merely to show their sympathy" had its place only after those officially in attendance, and it is even possible that it may have consisted solely of the old serving couple trudging along by themselves behind the procession. Thus it was a procession composed mainly of men, and it was not Ulrich who walked at Agathe's side but her husband, Professor Hagauer, whose apple-cheeked face with the bristly caterpillar mustache above the upper lip had been rendered unfamiliar to her by its curious. dark- blue cast, produced by the thick black veil that allowed her to ob- serve him unseen. As for Ulrich, who had been spending the many preceding hours with his sister, he could not help feeling that the ancient protocol of funeral precedence, dating back to the medieval beginnings of the University, had tom her from his side, and he missed her without daring to turn around to look for her. He tried to think of something funny to make her laugh when they met again, but his thoughts were distracted by the Governor, pacing along si- lently beside him with his lordly bearing and occasionally addressing a quiet word to Ulrich, who had to catch it, along with the many other attentions being shown him by all the Excellencies, Lordships, and Worships, for he was looked upon as Count Leinsdorf's shadow, so that even the mistrust with which His Grace's patriotic campaign was gradually coming to be regarded added to Ulrich's prestige.
The curbs and the windows were filled with clusters of the curi- ous, and even though he knew it would all be over in an hour, like a theater performance, he nevertheless experienced everything hap- pening that day with a special vividness, and the universal concern with his personal fate weighed on his shoulders like a heavily braided cape. For the first time he felt the upright attitude of tradition. The
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 771
involvement that ran like a wave ahead of the procession, among the chatting crowds that lined the pavements, who fell silent and then breathed freely again; the spell cast by the clergy; the thudding of clods of earth on wood that one knew was coming; the dammed-up silence of the procession-all this plucked at the spinal cord as if it were some primordial musical instrument, and Ulrich was amazed to sense within himself an indescribable resonance whose vibrations buoyed up his whole body as though he were actually being borne along by the waves of ceremony around him. And as he was feeling closer to the others on this day, he imagined how it would be ifat this moment he were really striding forward in the original sense-half forgotten in the pomp it assumed in its present-dayform-as the real heir of a great power. The thought banished the sadness, and death was transmuted from a horrible private affair to a transition that was completed as a public ceremony. Gone was the gaping hole, stared at in dread, that every man whose presence one is accustomed to leaves behind in the first days after his disappearance, for his successor was already striding along in his place, the crowd breathing in homage to him, the funeral being at the same time a coming of age for him who now took up the sword and, for the first time without someone ahead of him, and alone, now walked toward his own end.
"I should have been the one," Ulrich surprised himself by think- ing, "to close my father's eyes! Not for his sake, or my own, but . . . " He did not know how to complete the thought. That he had neither liked his father, nor his father him, seemed a petty overestimation of personal importance in the face of this order of things; in the face of death, anyway, personal concerns had the stale taste of meaningless- ness, while everything that was of significance now seemed to ema- nate from the gigantic bodyofthe cortege moving slowlythrough the streets lined with people, no matter how much idleness, curiosity, and mindless conformity were intermingled with it.
Still, the music played on, it was a light, clear, dazzling day, and Ulrich's feelings wavered this way and that, like the canopy carried in procession above the Holy of Holies. Now and then he would see his own reflection in the glass panes of the hearse in front of him, his head with its hat, his shoulders, and from time to time he glimpsed on the floor of the hearse, beside the armorially resplendent coffin, little droppings of candle wax, never quite cleaned away from previ-
772 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
ous funerals, and he simply and without thinking felt sony for his father, as one feels sony for a dog run over in the street. Then his eyes grew moist, and when he gazed over all the blackness at the onlookers on the curb they looked like colorful sprinkled flowers, and the thought that it was he, Ulrich, who was seeing this, and not the man who had always lived here and who, moreover, loved cere- mony so much more than he did, was so peculiar that it seemed downright impossible that his father should miss seeing himself leav- ing the world, which he had, on the whole, regarded as a good world. Deeply moved as he was, however, Ulrich could not help noticing that the director or undertaker who was leading this Catholic funeral procession to the cemetery and keeping it in good order was a tall, muscular Jew in his thirties: graced with a long blond mustache, car- rying papers in his pocket like a courier, he dashed up and down, now straightening a horse's harness, now whispering some instruc- tion to the band. This reminded Ulrich further that his father's body had not been in the house on the last day but had been brought back to it only just before the funeral, in accordance with the old gentle- man's testamentary last wish, inspired by the free spirit of humanistic inquiry, to put his body at the disposal of science; after which ana- tomical intervention it was only natural to assume that the old gentle- man had been hurriedly sewn up again. Behind those shiny glass panes that reflected Ulrich's image, then, at the center of this great, beautiful, solemn pageantry, was an untidily recobbled object. 'With or without his decorations? " Ulrich wondered in dismay. He had for- gotten about it and had no idea whether his father had been dressed again in the lab before the closed coffin was returned to the house. And what about Agathe's garter? It could have been found-and he could imagine the jokes ofthe medical students. It was all extremely embarrassing, and so the protestations of the present again frag- mented his feeling into myriad details, after it had for a moment al- most rounded itselfout into the smooth shell ofa living dream. All he could feel now was the absurdity, the confused wavering nature of human order, and of himself.
"Now I'm all alone in the world," he thought. "A mooring rope has snapped-up I go! " This echo of his first sensation on receiving the news ofhis father's death now once more expressed his feelings as he walked on between the walls of people.
7
A LETTER FROM CLARISSE ARRIVES
Ulrich had not left his address with anyone, but Clarisse had it from Walter, who knew it as well as he knew his own childhood.
She wrote:
My darling-my duckling-my ling!
Do you know what a ling is? I can't work it out. Could Walter
be a weakling? [All the "lings" were heavily underlined. ]
Do you think I was drunk when I came to you? I can't get
drunk. (Men get drunk before I do. An amazing fact. )
But I don't know what I said to you; I can't remember. I'm
afraid you imagine I said things I never said. I never said them. But this is supposed to be a letter-in a minute! But first: You
know how dreams open up. You know how, when you're dreaming, sometimes: you've been there before, you've talked with that person already, or-it's like finding your memory again.
Being awake means knowing I've been awake.
(I have sleepmates. )
Do you still remember who Moosbrugger is? There's something I have to tell you:
Suddenly, there was his name again.
Those three musical syllables.
But music is fakery. I mean, when it's by itself. Music by itself is for aesthetes or something like that; no vitality. But music combined with vision, that makes the walls shake and the life of those to come rise up out of the grave of the present. Those three musical syllables, I didn't just hear them, I saw them. They loomed up in my memory! Then suddenly you know: Where these appear, there's something more. Why, I once wrote your Count a letter about Moosbrugger-how could I possibly have forgotten that! Now I hear-see a world in which the things stand still and the people move around, just as you've always known it,
773
774 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
but in sound that's visible! I don't know how to describe it exactly, because only three syllables have shown up so far. Can you understand that? It may be too soon to talk about it.
I told Walter: "I must meet Moosbrugger! "
Walter asked: "Who's Moosbrugger? "
I told him: "Ulo's friend the murderer. "
We were reading the paper; it was morning, time for Walter to
go to the office. Remember how we used to read the paper together, the three of us? (You have a poor memory, you won't remember! ) So I had just unfolded the part of the paper Walter had handed me, one arm left, one right: suddenly I feel hard wood, I'm nailed to the Cross. I ask Walter: 'Wasn't it only yesterday that there was something in the paper about a train wreck near Budweis? "
"Yes," he says. 'Why do you ask? A minor accident, one person killed, or two. "
After a while I say: "Because there's been an accident in America too. Where's Pennsylvania? "
He doesn't know. "In America," he says.
I say: "Those engineers never have a head-on collision on purpose! "
He looks at me. I could tell he didn't understand. "Of course not," he says.
I ask him when Siegmund's coming. He's not sure.
So there you are: of course the engineers don't deliberately drive their locomotives into each other head-on; but why else do they do it? I'll tell you why. That monstrous network oftracks, switches, and signals that covers the whole globe drains our conscience ofall its power. Because ifwe had the strength to check ourselves just once more, to go over everything we had to do once more, we would do what was necessary every time and avoid the disaster. The disaster is that we holt before the next-to-last stepI
Of course we can't expect Walter to realize this at once. I think that I'm capable of achieving this immense power of conscience, and I had to shut my eyes so Walter wouldn't see the lightning flash in them.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 775
For all these reasons I regard it as my duty to get to know Moosbrugger.
You know my brother Siegmund is a doctor. He'll help me. I was waiting for him.
Last Sunday he came.
When he's introduced to someone he says: "But I'm neither
. . . nor musical. " That's his sort ofjoke. Just because his name is Siegmund he doesn't want to be thought to be either a Jew or musical. He was conceived in a Wagnerian ecstasy. You can't get him to give a sensible answer to anything. All the time I was talking to him he only muttered some nonsense or other. He threw a rock at a bird, he bored holes in the snow with his stick. He wanted to shovel out a path too; he often comes to work in our garden, because, as he says, he doesn't like staying home with his wife and children. Funny that you've never met him. "You two have the Fleurs du mal and a vegetable garden! " he says. I pulled his ears and punched him in the ribs, but it did no good whatsoever.
Then we went indoors to Walter, who of course was sitting at the piano, and Siegmund had his jacket under his arm and his hands were all dirty.
"Siegmund," I said to him in front ofWalter, "when do you understand a piece of music? "
He grinned and answered: "Absolutely never. "
"When you play it inside yourself," I said. "When do you understand another human being? When you feel with him. Feel with him" That's a great mystery, Ulrich! You have to be like him: not by putting yourself into him but by taking him out into yourself! W e redeem outward: that's the strong way! W e fall in with people's actions, but we fill them out and rise above them.
Sorry to be writing so much about this. But the trains collide because our conscience doesn't take that final step. Worlds don't materialize unless we pull them. More of this another time. The man ofgenius is duty bound to attack! He has the mysterious power required. But Siegmund, the coward, looked at his watch and mentioned supper, because he had to go home. You know, Siegmund always tries to find the balance between the blase
776 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
attitude of the seasoned physician who has no very high opinion of the ability of his profession, and the blase attitude of the contemporary person who has transcended the intellectual and already rediscovered the hygiene ofthe simple life and gardening. But Walter shouted: "Oh, for God's sake, why are you two talking such nonsense? What do you want with this Moosbrugger anyway? " And that was a help.
Because then Siegmund said: "He's neither insane nor a criminal, that's true. But what if Clarisse has a notion that she can do something for him? I'm a doctor, and I have to let the hospital chaplain imagine the same sort ofthing! Redeem him, she says! Well, why not let her at least see him? ''
He brushed off his trousers, adopted an air of serenity, and washed his hands; we worked it all out over supper.
Now we've already been to see Dr. Friedenthal; he's the deputy medical officer Siegmund knows. Siegmund said straight out that he'd take the responsibility for bringing me in under some sort of false pretenses, as a writer who would like to see the man.
But that was a mistake, because when it was put to him so openly, Dr. Friedenthal could only refuse. "Even ifyou were Selma Lagerlof I'd be delighted to see you, of course, as I am in any case, but here we recognize only a scientific interest. "
It was rather fun to be called a writer. I looked him straight in the eye and said: "In this situation I count for mqre than Selma Lagerlof, because I'm not doing it for 'research. '"
He looked at me, and then he said: "The only thing I can suggest is for you to bring a letter of introduction from your embassy to the superintendent of the clinic. " He took me for a foreign writer, not realizing that I was Siegmund's sister.
We finally agreed that I would not be coming to see Moosbrugger the psychiatric patient but Moosbrugger the prisoner.
Siegmund got me a letter of introduction from a charitable organization and a permit from the District Court. Afterward Siegmund told me that Dr. Friedentha1 regards psychiatry as a science that's half art, and called him the ringmaster of a demons' circus. I rather liked that.
What I liked best was that the clinic is housed in an old
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 777
monastery. We had to wait in the corridor, and the lecture hall is in a chapel. It has huge Gothic windows, and I could see inside from across the courtyard. The patients are dressed in white, and they sit up on the dais with the professor. And the professor bends over their chairs in a friendly way. I thought: "Maybe they'll bring Moosbrugger in now. " I felt like flying into the lecture hall through that tall window. You'll say I can't fly: jump through the window, then? But I'd never have jumped; that was not how I felt at all.
I hope you'll be coming back soon. One can never express things. Least of all in a letter.
This was signed, heavily underlined, "Clarisse. "
8
A FAMILY OF TWO
Ulrich says: "When two men or women have to share a room for any length of time when traveling-in a sleeping car or a crowded hotel-they're often apt to strike up an odd sort offriendship. Every- one has his own way of using mouthwash or bending over to take off his shoes or bending his leg when he gets into bed. Clothes and un- derwear are basically the same, yet they reveal to the eye innumera- ble little individual differences. At first-probably because of the hypertensive individualism of our current way of life--there's are- sistance like a faint revulsion that keeps the other person at arm's length, guarding against any invasion into one's own personality. Once that is overcome a communal life develops, which reveals its unusual origin like a scar. At this point many people behave more cheerfully than usual; most become more innocuous; many more talkative; almost all more friendly. The personality is changed; one might almost say that under the skin it has been exchanged for a less
778 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
idiosyncratic one: the Me is displaced by the beginnings-clearly un- easy and perceived as a diminution, and yet irresistibl~fa We. "
Agathe replies: "This revulsion from closeness affects women es- pecially. I've never learned to feel at ease with women myself. "
"You'll find it between a man and a woman too," Ulrich says. "But there it's covered up by the obligatory rituals of love, which immedi- ately claim all attention. But more often than you might think, those involved wake suddenly from their trance and find-with amaze- ment, irony, or panic, depending on their individual temperament- some totally alien being ensconced at their side; indeed, some people experience this even after many years. Then they can't tell which is more natural: their bond with others or the self's bruised recoil from that bond into the illusion of its uniqueness-both impulses are in our nature, after all. And they're both entangled with the idea of the family. Life within the family is not a full life: Young people feel robbed, diminished, not fully at home with themselves within the cir- cle of the family. Look at elderly, unmarried daughters: they've been sucked dry by the family, drained of their blood; they've become quite peculiar hybrids of the Me and the We. "
Clarisse's letter came as a disturbance to Ulrich. The manic out- bursts in it bother him much less than the steady and quasi-rational working out of some obviously demented scheme deep within her. He has told himself that after his return he will have to talk to Walter about it, and since then he has deliberately been speaking of other things.
Agathe, stretched out on the couch with one knee drawn up, ea- gerly picks up what he has just said: "You yourself are explaining, with what you're saying, why I had to marry again! "
"And yet there is also something in the so-called sanctity of the family, in the entering into one another, serving one another, the selfless movement within a closed circle . . . ," Ulrich continues, tak- ing no notice, and Agathe wonders at the way his words so often move away from her again just when they have been so close. "Usu- ally this collective self is only a collective egotist, and then a strong family feeling is the most insufferable thing imaginable. Still, I can also imagine this unconditional leaping into the breach for one an- other, this fighting shoulder-to-shoulder and licking each other's wounds, as an instinctual feeling of satisfaction rooted deep in the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 779
beginnings ofthe human race, and even marked in herd animals . . . ," she hears him say, without being able to make much of it. Nor can she do more with his next statement: "This condition is subject to rapid degeneration, as it happens, like all ancient conditions whose origin has been lost," and it is only when he ends by saying, "and would presumably have to require that the individuals involved be something quite special ifthe group they form is not to become some pointless caricature! " that she again feels comfortable with him and tries, as she looks at him, to keep her eyes from blinking so that he won't meanwhile disappear, because it's so amazing that he is sitting there saying things that vanish high into the air and then suddenly drop down again like a rubber ball caught in the branches of a tree.
Brother and sister had met in the late afternoon in the drawing room; many days had already passed since the funeral.
This long room was not only decorated in the Biedermeier taste, it was furnished with genuine pieces of the period. Between the win- dows hung tall rectangular mirrors in plain gilt frames, and the stiff, sober chairs were ranged along the walls, so that the empty floor seemed to have flooded the room with the darkened gleam ofits par- quet and filled a shallow basin, into which one hesitantly set foot. At the edge of this salon's elegant barrenness-for the study where Ul- rich had settled down on the first morning was set aside for him- about where in a quarried-out niche the tiled stove stood like a severe pillar, wearing a vase on its head (and also a lone candlestick, precisely in the middle of its front, on a shelf running around the stove at waist height), Agathe had created a very personal peninsula for herself. She had had a couch moved here, with a rug beside it, whose ancient reddish blue, in common with the couch's Turkish pattern that repeated itself in infinite meaninglessness, constituted a voluptuous challenge to the subtle grays and sober, unassertive linea- ments that were at home in this room by ancestral decree. She had further outraged that chaste and well-bred decree by rescuing a large-leaved man-sized plant complete with tub from the funeral decorations and installing it at the head ofthe couch, as a "grove," on the other side from the tall, bright floor lamp that would enable her to read in comfort while lying down, and which, in that classicizing setting, had the effect of a searchlight or an antenna pole. This salon, with its coffered ceiling, pilasters, and slender glass cabinets, had not
780 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
changed much in a hundred years, for it was seldom used and had never really been drawn into the lives of its more recent owners. In their forefathers' day the walls now painted a pale gray might have been covered in fine fabrics, and the upholstery on the chairs had probably looked different too; but Agathe had known this salon as it now was since childhood, without even knowing whether it was her great-grandparents who had furnished it like this or strangers. She had grown up in this house, and the only association she had was the memory that she had always entered this room with the awe that is instilled into children about something they might easily damage or dirty.
But now she had laid aside the last symbol of the past, the mourn- ing she had worn, and put on her lounging pajamas again, and was lying on the rebelliously intruding couch, where since early morning she had been reading all kinds ofbooks, good and bad, whatever she could get her hands on, interrupting herself from time to time to eat or fall asleep; now that the day spent in this fashion was fading into evening, she gazed through the darkening room at the pale curtains that, already quite immersed in twilight, ballooned at the windows like sails, which made her feel that she was voyaging through that stiffiy dainty room within the harsh corona of her lamp and had only just come to a halt. So her brother had found her, taking in her well- lit encampment at a glance, for he, too, remembered this salon and could even tell her that the original owner was supposed to have been a rich merchant whose fortunes declined, so that their great- grandfather, an imperial notary, had been in a position to acquire the attractive property at a price well within his means. Ulrich knew all sorts of other things as well about this room, which he had looked over thoroughly; his sister was especially impressed to hear that in their grandparents' day such formal decor had been seen as particu- larly natural. This was not easy for her to comprehend, since it looked to her like something spawned in a geometry class, and it took a while before she could begin to grasp the outlook of a time so over- saturated with the swirling aggressiveness of the Baroque that its own leaning toward symmetry and somewhat unbending forms was veiled by the tender illusion of being truer to nature in being pure, unadorned, and rational. But when she finally succeeded in grasping this shift of ideas, with the help of all the details Ulrich could supply,
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 781
she was delighted to know so much about things that every experi- ence in her life up until then had taught her to despise; and when her brother wanted to know what she was reading, she quickly rolled over on top of her supply of books, even though she defiantly said that she enjoyed trashy reading just as much as good.
Ulrich had worked all morning and then gone out. His hope of concentrating, of gaining the new impetus he had expected from the interruption ofhis customary life, had up to now not been ful6lled; it was outweighed by the distractions resulting from his new circum- stances. Only after the funeral had there been a change, when his relations with the outside world, which had begun so actively, had been cut off at a stroke. The brother and sister had been the center of sympathetic attention for a few days, if only as a kind of represen- tation of their father, and had felt the connections attendant upon their position; but apart from Walter's old father they knew no one in town they would have felt like visiting, and in consideration of their mourning no one invited them. Only Professor Schwung had ap- peared not only at the funeral but again the following day to inquire whether his late friend had not left a manuscript on the problem of diminished responsibility, which one might hope to see published posthumously.
The brusque transition from a constantly seething commotion to the leaden stillness that had followed produced something like a physical shock. Besides, they were still sleeping on camp beds up in the attic, in the rooms they had occupied as children-there were no guest rooms in the house--surrounded by the sparse odds and ends left over from the nursery, their bareness suggesting that of a padded cell, a bareness that, with the insipid sheen of the oilcloth on the tables or the linoleum on the floor~n whose desert the box of building blocks had once spewed forth its rigid ideas of architec- ture--invaded their dreams. These memories, as senseless and as endless as the life for which they were supposed to have been a preparation, made it a relief that their bedrooms were at least adja- cent, separated only by a clothes and storage room; and because the bathroom was on the floor below, they were much in each other's company soon after they got up, meeting on the empty stairs and throughout the empty house, having to show consideration for one another and deal together with all the problems of that unfamiliar
782 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
household with which they had suddenly been entrusted. In this way they also felt the inevitable comedy ofthis coexistence, as intimate as it was unexpected: it resembled the adventurous comedy of a ship- wreck that had stranded them back on the lonely island of their childhood, and so, after those first few days, over the course ofwhich they had had no control, they strove for independence, although both did so out of altruism more than selfishness.
This was why Ulrich had been up before Agathe had built her pe- ninsula in the drawing room, and had slipped quietly into the study to take up his interrupted mathematical investigation, really more as a way of passing time than with the intention of getting it done. But to his considerable astonishment he all but finished in one morn- ing-except for insignificant details-the work he had left lying un- touched for months. He had been helped in this unexpected solution by one of those random ideas of which one might say, not that they tum up only when one has stopped expecting them, but rather that the startling way they flash into the mind is like another sudden rec- ognition-that of the beloved who had always been just another girl among one's friends until the moment when the lover is suddenly amazed that he could ever have put her on the same level as the rest. Such insights are never purely intellectual, but involve an element of passion as well, and Ulrich felt as though he should at this moment have been finished with it and free; indeed, since he could see nei- ther reason nor purpose in it, he had the impression of having fin- ished prematurely, and the leftover energy swept him off into a reverie. He glimpsed the possibility of applying the idea that had solved his problem to other, far more complex problems, and play- fully let his imagination stretch the outlines of such a theory. In these moments of happy relaxation he was even tempted to consider Pro- fessor Schwung's insinuation that he should return to his career and find the path that leads to success and influence. But when, after a few minutes of intellectual pleasure, he soberly considered what the consequences would be if he were to yield to his ambition and now, as a straggler, take up an academic career, he felt for the first time that he was too old to start anything like that. Since his boyhood he had never felt that the half-impersonal concept of "age" had any in- dependent meaning, any more than he had known the thought: This is something you are no longer able to do!
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 783
When Ulrich was telling this to his sister afterward, late that after- noon, he happened to use the word "destiny," and it caught her at- tention. She wanted to know what "destiny" was.
"Something halfway between 'my toothache' and 'King Lear's daughters,' " Ulrich answered. 'Tm not the sort of person who goes in for that word too much. "
"But for young people it is part of the song of life; they want to have a destiny but don't know what it is. "
"In times to come, when more is known, the word 'destiny' will probably have acquired a statistical meaning," Ulrich responded.
Agathe was twenty-seven. Young enough to have retained some of those hollow, sentimental concepts young people develop first; old enough to already have intimations of the other content that reality pours into them.
·:crowing old is probably a destiny in itself! " she answered, but was far from pleased with her answer, which expressed her yout4ful sadness in a way that seemed to her inane.
But her brother did not notice this, and offered an example: "When I became a mathematician," he said, "I wanted to achieve something in my field and gave it all I had, even though I regarded it only as preliminary to something else. And my first papers-imper- fect beginner's work though they were-really did contain ideas that were new at the time, but either remained unnoticed or even met with resistance, though everything else I did was well received. Well, I suppose you could call it destiny that I soon lost patience with hav- ing to keep hammering at that wedge. "
'Wedge? " Agathe interrupted, as though the mere sound ofsuch a masculine, workmanlike term could mean nothing but trouble. 'Why do you call it a wedge? "
"Because it was only my first move; I wanted to drive the wedge further, but then I lost patience. And today, as I completed what may well be the last piece of work that reaches back to that time, I real- ized that I might actually have had some justification in seeing myself as the leader of a new school of thought, if I'd had better luck then, or shown more persistence. "
"You could still make up for it! " Agathe said. "After all, a man doesn't get too old to do things, the way a woman does. "
"No," Ulrich replied. "I don't want to go back to that! It's surpris-
784 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
ing, but true, that objectively-historically, or in the development of science itself-it would have made no difference. I may have been ten years ahead of my time, but others got there without me, even if more slowly or by other means. The most I could have done was to lead them there more quickly, but it remains a question whether such a change in my life would have been enough to give me a fresh impetus that would take me beyond that goal. So there you have a bit of what one calls personal destiny, but what it finally amounts to is something remarkably impersonal.
"Anyway," he went on, "it happens that the older I get, the more often I see something I used to hate that subsequently and in round- about ways takes the same direction as my own road, so that I sud- denly can no longer dismiss its right to exist; or it happens that I begin to see what's wrong with ideas or events I used to get excited about. So in the long run it hardly seems to matter whether one gets excited or to what cause one commits one's existence. It all arrives at the same goal; everything serves an evolution that is both unfathom- able and inescapable. "
"That used to be ascribed to God's working in mysterious ways," Agathe remarked, frowning, with the tone of one speaking from her own experience and not exactly impressed. Ulrich remembered that she had been educated in a convent. She lay on her sofa, as he sat at its foot; she wore her pajama trousers tied at the ankle, and the floor lamp shone on them both in such a way that a large leaf of light formed on the floor, on which they floated in darkness.
"Nowadays," he said, "destiny gives rather the impression of being some overarching movement of a mass; one is engulfed by it and rolled along. " He remembered having been struck once before by the idea that these days every truth enters the world divided into its half-truths, and yet this nebulous and slippery process might yield a greater total achievement than ifeveryone had gone about earnestly trying to accomplish the whole task by himself. He had once even come out with this idea, which lay like a barb in his self-esteem and yet was not without the possibility of greatness, and concluded, tongue-in-cheek, that it meant one could do anything one pleased! Actually, nothing could have been further from his intention than this conclusion, especially now, when his destiny seemed to have set him down and left him with nothing more to do; and at this moment
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 785
so dangerous to his ambition, when he had been so curiously driven to end, with this belated piece of work, the last thing that had still tied him to his past-precisely at this moment when he felt person- ally quite bare, what he felt instead of a falling off was this new ten- sion that had begun when he had left his home. He had no name for it, but for the present one could say that a younger person, akin to him, was looking to him for guidance; one could also just as well call it something else. He saw with amazing clarity the radiant mat of bright gold against the black-green ofthe room, with the delicate loz- enges of Agathe's clown costume on it, and himself, and the superlu- cidly outlined happenstance, cut from the darkness, of their being together.
"Can you say that again? " Agathe asked.
"What we still refer to as a personal destiny," Ulrich said, "is being displaced by collective processes that can finally be expressed in sta- tistical terms. "
Agathe thought this over and had to laugh. "I don't understand it, of course, but wouldn't it be lovely to be dissolved by statistics? " she said. "It's been such a long time since love could do it! "
This suddenly led Ulrich to tell his sister what had happened to him when, after finishing his work, he had left the house and walked to the center of town, in order to somehow fill the void left in him by the completion of his paper. He had not intended to speak of it; it seemed too personal a matter. For whenever his travels took him to cities to which he was not connected by business of any kind, he par- ticularly enjoyed the feeling of solitude this gave him, and he had rarely felt this so keenly as he did now. He noticed the colors of the streetcars, the automobiles, shop windows, and archways, the shapes of church towers, the faces and the fa~ades, and even though they all had the usual European resemblances, his gaze flew over them like an insect that has strayed into a field bright with unfamiliar colors and cannot, try as it will, find a place to settle on. Such aimless, pur- poseless strolling through a town vitally absorbed in itself, the keen- ness of perception increasing in proportion as the strangeness of the surroundings intensifies, heightened still further by the connection that it is not oneself that matters but only this mass of faces, these movements wrenched loose from the body to become armies of arms, legs, or teeth, to all of which the future belongs-all this can
786 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
evoke the feeling that being a whole and inviolate strolling human being is positively antisocial and criminal. But if one lets oneself go even further in this fashion, this feeling may also unexpectedly pro- duce a physical well-being and irresponsibility amounting to folly, as if the body were no longer part of a world where the sensual self is enclosed in strands of nerves and blood vessels but belongs to a world bathed in somnolent sweetness. These were the words that Ul- rich used to describe to his sister what might perhaps have been the result of a state of mind without goal or ambition, or the result of a diminished ability to maintain an illusory individuality, or perhaps nothing more than that "primal myth of the gods," that "double face of nature," that "giving" and "taking vision," which he was after all pursuing like a hunter.
Now he was waiting curiously to see ifAgathe would show by some sign that she understood, that she, too, was familiar with such im- pressions, but when this did not happen he explained it again: "It's like a slight split in one's consciousness. One feels enfolded, em- braced, pierced to the heart by a sense of involuntary dependence; but at the same time one is still alert and capable of making critical judgments, and even ready to start a fight with these people and their stuffy presumptuousness. It's as though there were two relatively in- dependent strata of life within us that normally keep each other pro- foundly in balance. And we were speaking of destiny: it's as ifwe had two destinies--one that's all superficial bustle, which takes life over, and one that's motionless and meaningful, which we never find out about. "
Now Agathe, who had been listening for a long time without stir- ring, said out of the blue: "That's like kissing Hagauer! "
Laughing, she had propped herself up on one elbow, her legs still stretched out full length on the couch. And she added: "Ofcourse, it wasn't as beautiful as the way you describe it! "
Ulrich was laughing too. It was not really clear why they were laughing. Somehow this laughter had come upon them from the air, or from the house, or from the traces of bewilderment and uneasi- ness left behind by the solemnities of the last few days, which had touched so uselessly on the Beyond; or from the uncommon pleasure they found in their conversation. For every human custom that has reached an extreme of cultivation already bears within itself the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 787
seeds of change, and every excitement that surpasses the ordinary soon mists over with a breath of sorrow, absurdity, and satiety.
In this fashion and in such a roundabout way they finally end up, as if for relaxation, talking about less demanding matters, about Me and Us and Family, and arriving at the discovery, fluctuating between mockery and astonishment, that the two of them constitute a family. And while Ulrich speaks of the desire for community--once more with the zeal of a man out to mortify his own nature, without know- ing whether it is directed against his true nature or his assumed na- ture--Agathe is listening as his words come close to her and retreat again, and what he notices, looking at her lying quite defenseless in that bright island of light and in her whimsical costume, is that for some time now he has been searching for something about her that would repel him, as he regrettably tends to do, but he has not found anything, and for this he is thankful with a pure and simple affection that he otherwise never feels. And he is thoroughly delighted by the conversation. But when it is over, Agathe asks him casually: "Now, are you actuallyfor what you call the family or are you against it? "
Ulrich answers that this is beside the point, because he was talk- ing about an indecision on the part of the world, not his personal indecision.
Agathe thinks it over.
Finally, she says abruptly: "I have no way of judging that. But I wish I could be entirely at one and at peace with myself, and also . . . well, somehow be able to live accordingly. Wouldn't you like to try that too? "
9
AGATHE WHEN SHE CAN'T TALK TO ULRICH
The moment Agathe got on the train and began the unexpected jour- ney to her father something had happened that bore every resem- blance to a sudden rupture, and the two fragments into which the moment of departure exploded flew as far apart as if they had never belonged together. Her husband had seen her off, had raised his hat and held it, that stiff, round, black hat that grew visibly smaller and smaller, in the gesture appropriate to leave-taking, aslant in the air, as her train began to move, so that it seemed to Agathe that the sta- tion was rolling backward as fast as the train was rolling forward. At this moment, though an instant earlier she had still been expecting to be away from home no longer than circumstances absolutely re- quired, she made the decision never to return, and her mind became agitated like a heart that realizes suddenly that it has escaped a dan- ger of which it had been wholly unaware.
When Agathe thought it over afterward, she was by no means completely satisfied. What troubled her about her attitude was that its form reminded her of a curious illness she had had as a child, soon after she had begun going to school. For more than a year she had suffered from a not inconsiderable fever that neither rose nor sub- sided, and she had grown so thin and frail that it worried the doctors, who could not determine the cause. Nor was this illness ever ex- plained later. Actually, Agathe had rather enjoyed seeing the great physicians from the University, who at first entered her room so full of dignity and wisdom, visibly lose some of their confidence from week to week; and although she obediently swallowed all the medi- cines prescribed for her and really would have liked to get well, be- cause it was expected of her, she was still pleased to see that the doctors could not bring this about with their remedies and felt her- self in an unearthly or at least an extraordinary condition, as her physical self diminished. That the grownups' world had no power over her as long as she was sick made her feel proud, though she had
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 789
no idea how her little body had brought this about. But in the end it recovered of its own accord, and just as mysteriously, too.
Almost all she knew about it today was what the servants had told her later: they maintained that she had been bewitched by a beggar woman who came often to the house but had once been rudely turned away from the door. Agathe had never been able to find out how much truth there was in this story, for although the servants freely dropped hints, they could never be pinned down to explana- tions and were obviously frightened of violating a strict ban her fa- ther was supposed to·have issued. Her own memory of that time held only a single, though indeed remarkably lively, image, in which she saw her father in front ofher, lashing out in a raging fury at a suspi- cious-looking woman, the flat of his hand repeatedly making contact with her cheek. It was the only time in her life she had seen that small, usually painfully proper man of reason so utterly changed and beside himself; but to the best ofher recollection this had happened not pefore but during her illness, for she thought she remembered lying in bed, and this bed was not in her nursery but on the floor below, "with the grownups," in one of the rooms where the servants would not have been allowed to let the beggar woman in, even if she had been no stranger to the kitchen and below stairs. Actually, Agathe believed this incident must have occurred rather toward the end of her illness and that she had suddenly recovered a few days later, roused from her bed by a remarkable impatience that ended this illness as unexpectedly as it had begun.
Of course, she could not tell how far these memories stemmed from facts or whether they were fantasies born of the fever. "Proba- bly the only curious thing about it is the way these images have stayed floating in my mind somewhere between reality and illu- sion," she thought moodily, "without my finding anything unusual about it. "
The jolting of the taxi that was driving them over badly paved streets prevented a conversation. Ulrich had suggested taking advan- tage of the dry winter weather for an outing, and even had an idea where to go, though it was not a specific destination so much as an advance into a half-remembered country of the mind. Now they found themselves in a car that was to take them to the edge of town. ''I'm sure that's the only odd thing about it! " Agathe kept saying to
790 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
herself. This was how she had learned her lessons in school, so that she never knew whether she was stupid or bright, willing or unwill- ing: she had a facility for coming up with the answers that were de- manded of her without ever seeing the point of the questions, from which she felt protected by a deep-seated indifference. After she recovered from her illness she liked going to school as much as before, and because one of the doctors had hit upon the idea that it might help to remove her from the solitary life in her father's house and give her more company ofher own age, she had been placed in a convent school. There, and in the secondary school she was sent on to, she was regarded as cheerful and docile. Whenever she was told that something was necessary or true she accommodated herself to it, and she willingly accepted everything required of her, because it seemed the least trouble and it would have seemed foolish to her to do anything against an established system that had no relevance to herself but obviously belonged to a world ordained by fathers and teachers. However, she did not believe a word ofwhat she was learn- ing, and since despite her apparent docility she was no model pupil and, wherever her desires ran counter to her convictions, calmly did as she pleased, she enjoyed the respect of her schoolmates and even that admiring affection won in school by ! :hose who know how to make things easy for themselves. It could even be that her mysteri- ous illness had been such an arrangement, for with this one excep- tion she had really always been in good health and hardly ever high-strung. "In short, an idle, good-for-nothing character! " she con- cluded uncertainly. She remembered how much more vigorously than herself her friends had often mutinied against the strict disci- pline of the convent, and with what moral indignation they had justi- fied their offenses against the regulations; yet as far as she had been in a position to observe, the very girls who had been most passionate in rebelling against details had eventually succeeded admirably in coming to terms with the whole; they developed into well-situated women who brought up their children not very differently from the way they had been brought up themselves. And so, although dissatis- fied with herself as she was, she was not convinced that it was better to have an active and a good character.
Agathe despised the emancipation ofwomen just as she disdained the female's need for a brood in a nest supplied by the male. She
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 791
remembered with pleasure the time when she had first felt her breasts tightening her dress and had borne her burning lips through the cooling air of the streets. But the fussy erotic busyness of the female sex, which emerges from the guise of girlhood like a round knee from pink tulle, had aroused scorn in her for as long as she could remember. When she asked herself what her real convictions were, a feeling told her that she was destined to experience some- thing extraordinary and of a rare order-even then, when she knew as good as nothing of the world and did not believe the little she had been taught. And it had always seemed to her like a mysterious but active response, corresponding to this impression, to let things go as they had to, without overestimating their importance.
Out of the corner of her eye Agathe glanced at Ulrich, sitting gravely upright, rocking to and fro in the jolting cab, and recalled how hard it had been on their first evening together to make him see why. she had not simply run away from her husband on their wedding night, although she didn't like him. She had been so tremendously in awe of her big brother while she was awaiting his arrival, but now she smiled as she secretly recalled her impression of Hagauer's thick lips in those first months, every time they rounded amorously under the bristles of his mustache; his entire face would be drawn in thick- skinned folds toward the corners ofhis mouth, and she would feel, as if satiated: Oh, what an ugly man he is! She had even suffered his mild pedagogic vanity and kindliness as a merely physical disgust, more outward than inward. After the first surprise was over, she had now and then been unfaithful to him. "Ifyou can call it that," she thought, "when an inexperienced young thing whose sensuality is dormant instantly responds to the advances of a man who is not her husband as iftheywere thunderclaps rattling her door! " But she had shown little talent for unfaithfulness; lovers, once she had got to know them a little, were no more masterful to her than husbands, and it soon seemed to her that she could take the ritual masks of African tribal dancers as seriously as the love masks put on by Euro- pean men. Not that she never lost her head; but even in the first attempts to repeat the experience the magic was gone.