But when I try to ask you
something
crucial you dissolve into thin air!
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
At the moment she couldn't quite recall, but then realized with delight that it hadn't been Ulrich but she her- selfwho had said it.
As a matter offact, much ofwhat he said she had been thinking herself, only without words; all on her own, the way she used to be, she would never have made such bold assertions.
Up to now Agathe had been feeling perfectly comfortable be- tween the joggings and joltings as the cab drove over bumpy subur- ban streets, leaving them incapable of speech, wrapped as they were in a network of mechanical vibrations, and whenever she had used her husband's name in her thoughts, it was as a mere term of refer- ence to a period and its events. But now, for no particular reason, an infinite horror slowly came over her: Hagauer had actually been
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there with her, in the flesh! The way in which she had tried up to now to be fair to him disappeared, and her throat tightened with bitterness.
He had arrived on the morning of the funeral and had affection- ately insisted, late as he was, on seeing his father-in-law, had gone to the autopsy lab and delayed the closing of the coffin. In a tactful, honorable, undemonstrative fashion, he had been truly moved. After the funeral Agathe had excused herself on grounds of fatigue, and Ulrich had to take his brother-in-law out to lunch. As he told her afteiWard, Hagauer's constant company had made Ulrich as frantic as a tight collar, and for that reason he had done everything to get him to leave as soon as possible. Hagauer had intended to go to the capital for an educators' conference and there devote another day to calling on people at the Ministry and some sightseeing, but he had reserved the two days prior to this to spend with his wife as an atten- tive husband and to go into the matter ofher inheritance. But Ulrich, in collusion with his sister, had made up a story that made it seem impossible for Hagauer to stay at the house, and told him he had booked a room for him at the best hotel in town. As expected, this made Hagauer hesitant: the hotel would be inconvenient and expen- sive, and he would in all decency have to pay for it himself; instead, he could allot two days to his calls and sightseeing in the capital, and if he traveled at night save the cost of the hotel. So Hagauer ex- pressed fulsome regrets at being unable to take advantage of Ulrich's thoughtfulness, and finally revealed his plan, unalterable by now, to leave that very evening. All that was left to discuss was the question of the inheritance, and this made Agathe smile again, because at her instigation Ulrich had told her husband that the will could not be read for a few days yet. Agathe would be here, after all, he was told, to look after his interests, and he would also receive a proper legal statement. As for whatever concerned furniture, mementos, and the like, Ulrich, as a bachelor, would make no claims to anything his sis- ter might happen to want. Finally, he had asked Hagauer whether he would agree in case they decided to sell the house, which was of no use to them, without committing himself, of course, since none of them had yet seen the will; and Hagauer had agreed, without com- mitting himself, of course, that he could see no objection for the mo- ment, though he must of course reserve the right to determine his
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position in the light ofthe actual conditions. Agathe had suggested all this to her brother, and he had passed it on because it meant nothing to him one way or the other, and he wanted to be rid of Hagauer.
Suddenly Agathe felt miserable again, for after they had managed this so well, her husband had after all come to her room, together with her brother, to say goodbye to her. Agathe had behaved as coldly as she could and said that there was no way oftelling when she would be returning home. Knowing him as she did, she could tell at once that he had not been prepared for this and resented the fact that his decision to leave right away was now casting him in the role of the unfeeling husband; in retrospect he was suddenly offended at having been expected to stay at a hotel and by the cool reception accorded him. But since he was a man who did everything according to plan he said nothing, decided to have it out with his wife when the time came, and kissed her, after he had picked up his hat, dutifully on the lips.
And this kiss, which Ulrich had seen, now seemed to demolish Agathe. "How could it happen," she asked herself in consternation, "that I stood this man for so long? But then, haven't I put up with things all my life without resisting? " She furiously reproached her- self: " I f I were any good at all, things could never have gone this far! "
Agathe turned her face away from Ulrich, whom she had been watching, and stared out the window. Low suburban buildings, icy streets, muffied-up people-images of an ugly wilderness rolling past, holding up to her the wasteland of the life into which she felt she had fecklessly allowed herself to drift. She was no longer sitting upright but had let herself slide down into the cab's musty-smelling upholstery; it was easier to look out the window in this position, and she remained in this ungraceful posture, in which she was rudely jolted and shaken to the very bowels. This body of hers, being tossed about like a bundle of rags, gave her an uncanny feeling, for it was the only thing she owned. Sometimes, when as a schoolgirl she awak- ened in the gray light of dawn, she had felt as though she were drift- ing into the future inside her body as if inside the hull of a wooden skiff. Now she was just about twice as old as she had been then, and the light in the cab was equally dim. But she still could not picture her life, had no idea what it ought to be. Men were a complement to one's body, but they were no spiritual fulfillment; one took them as
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they took oneself. Her body told her that in only a few years it would begin to lose its beauty, which meant losing the feelings that, be- cause they arise directly out of its self-assurance, can only barely be expressed in words or thoughts. Then it would be all over, without anything having ever been there. It occurred to her that Ulrich had spoken in a similar vein about the futility of his athletics, and while she doggedly kept her face turned away to the window, she planned to make him talk about it.
10
FURTHER COURSE OF THE EXCURSION TO THE SWEDISH RAMPARTS. THE MORALITY OF THE NEXT STEP
Brother and sister had left the cab at the last, low, and already quite rural-looking houses on the edge of the town and set off along a wide, furrowed country road that rose steadily uphill. The frozen earth of the wheel tracks crumbled beneath their tread. Their shoes were soon covered with the miserable gray of this parquet for carters and peasants, in sharp contrast with their smart city clothes, and although it was not cold, a cutting wind blowing toward them from the top of the hill made their cheeks glow, and the glazed brittleness of their lips made it hard to talk.
The memory of Hagauer drove Agathe to explain herself to her brother. She was convinced that he could not possibly understand her bad marriage from any point ofview, not even in the simplest of social terms. The words were already there within her, but she could not make up her mind to overcome the resistance of the climb, the cold, and the wind lashing her face. Ulrich was striding ahead, in a broad track left by a dragging brake, which they were using as their path; looking at his lean, broad-shouldered form, she hesitated. She
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had always imagined him hard, unyielding, a bit wild, perhaps only because of the critical remarks she had heard from her father and occasionally also from Hagauer; thinking of her brother, estranged and escaped from the family, had made her ashamed of her own sub- servience. "He was right not to bother about me! " she thought, and her dismay at having continually submitted to demeaning situations returned. But in fact she was full of those same tempestuous, con- flicting feelings that had made her break out with those wild lines of poetry between the doorposts of her father's death chamber. She caught up with Ulrich, which left her out of breath, and suddenly questions such as this workaday road had probably never heard before rang out, and the wind was tom to ribbons by words whose sounds no other wind had ever carried in these rural hills.
"You surely remember . . . ,"she exclaimed, and named several well-known instances from literature: ''You didn't tell me whether you could forgive a thief, but do you mean you'd regard these mur- derers as good people? "
"Of course! " Ulrich shouted back. "No-wait. Perhaps they're just potentially good people, valuable people. They still are, even after- ward, as criminals. But they don't stay good! "
"Then why do you still like them after their crime? Surely not be- cause of their earlier potentiality but because you still find them at- tractive? "
"But that's always the way it is," Ulrich said. "It's the person who gives character to the deed; it doesn't happen the other way round. We separate good and evil, but in our hearts we know they're a whole! "
Agathe's wind-whipped cheeks flushed an even brighter red be- cause the passion of her questions, which words both revealed and hid, had forced her to resort to books for examples. The misuse of "cultural problems" is so extreme that one could feel them out of place wherever the wind blows and trees stand, as though human culture did not include all of nature's manifestations! But she had struggled bravely, linked her arm through her brother's, and now re- plied, close to his ear so as not to have to raise her voice anymore and with a flicker of bravado in her face: "I suppose that's why we exe- cute bad men but cordially serve them a hearty breakfast first. "
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Ulrich, sensing some of the agitation at his side, leaned down to speak in his sister's ear, though in a normal voice: "Everyone likes to think that he couldn't do anything evil, because he himself is good. "
With these words they had reached the top, where the road no longer climbed but cut across a rolling, treeless plateau. The wind had suddenly dropped and it was no longer cold, but in this pleasant stillness the conversation stopped as if severed, and would not start up again.
"What on earth got you onto Dostoyevsky and Stendhal in the middle ofthat gale? " Ulrich asked a while later. "Ifanybody had seen us they'd have thought we were crazy. "
Agathe laughed. "They wouldn't have understood us anymore than the cries of the birds. . . . Anyway, you were talking to me the other day about Moosbrugger. "
They walked on.
After a while, Agathe said: "I don't like him at all! "
"And I'd nearly forgotten him," Ulrich replied.
After they had again walked on in silence, Agathe stopped. "Tell
me," she asked. "You've surely done some irresponsible things your- self. I remember, for instance, that you were in the hospital once with a bullet wound. You certainly don't always look before you leap . . . ? ''
"What a lot of questions you're asking today! " Ulrich said. "What do you expect me to say to that? "
"Are you never sorry for anything you do? " Agathe asked quickly. "I have the impression that you never regret anything. You even said something like that once. "
"Good God," Ulrich answered, beginning to walk on again. "There's a plus in every minus. Maybe I did say something like that, but you don't have to take it so literally. "
"A plus in every minus? ''
"Some good in everything bad. Or at least in much of the bad. A human minus-variant is likely to contain an unrecognized plus- variant-that's probably what I meant to say. Having something to regret may be just the thing to give you the strength to do something far better than you might ever have done otherwise. It's never what one does that counts, but only what one does next! "
"Suppose you've killed someone: what can you do next? ''
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Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He was tempted to answer, for the sake of the argument: "It might enable me to write a poem that would enrich the inner life of thousands of people, or to come up with a great invention! " But he checked himself. "That would never happen," he thought. "Only a lunatic could imagine it. Or an eigh- teen-year-old aesthete. God knows why, but those are ideas that con- tradict the laws of nature. On the other hand," he conceded, "it did work that way for primitive man. He killed because human sacrifice was a great religious poem! "
He said neither the one thing nor the other aloud, but Agathe went on: "You may regard my objections as silly, but the first time I heard you say that what matters isn't the step one takes but always the next step after that, I thought: So if a person could fly inwardly, fly morally, as it were, and could keep flying at high speed from one improvement to the next, then he would know no remorse! I was madly envious ofyou! "
"That's nonsense! " Ulrich said emphatically. "What I said was that one false step doesn't matter, only the next step after that. But then what matters after the next step? Evidently the one that follows after that. And after the nth step, the n-plus-one step! Such a person would have to live without ever coming to an end or to a decision, indeed without achieving reality. And yet it is still true that what counts is always only the next step. The truth is, we have no proper method of dealing with this unending series. Dear Agathe," he said abruptly, "I sometimes regret my entire life. "
"But that's just what you can't do! " his sister said.
"And why not? Why not that in particular? "
"I have never really done anything," Agathe replied, "and so I've
always had time to regret the little I have done. I'm sure you don't know what that's like: such a dim state of mind! The shadows come, and what was has power over me. It's present in the smallest detail, and I can forget nothing and understand nothing. It's an unpleasant state of mind. . . . "Her tone was unemotional, quite unassuming. Ulrich had in fact never known this backwash of life, since his own had always been oriented toward expansion, and it merely reminded him that his sister had several times already expressed dissatisfaction with herself in strong terms. But he failed to question her because they had meanwhile reached a hilltop that he had chosen as their
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destination and stepped toward its edge. It was a huge mound as- sociated by legend with a Swedish siege in the Thirty Years' War be- cause it looked like a fortification, even though it was far too big for that: a green rampart of nature, without bush or tree, that broke off to a high, bright rock face on the side overlooking the town. A low, empty world of hills surrounded this mound; no village, no house was to be seen, only the shadows ofclouds and gray pastures. Once again Ulrich felt the spell of this place, which he remembered from his youth: the town was still lying there, far below in the distance, anx- iously huddled around a few churches that looked like hens herding their chicks, so that one suddenly felt like leaping into their midst with one bound and laying about one, or scooping them up in the grip of a giant hand.
"What a glorious feeling it must have been for those Swedish ad- venturers to reach such a place after trotting relentlessly for weeks, and then from their saddles catch sight oftheir quarry," he said to his sister after telling her the story of the place. "It is only at such mo- ments that the weight of life, the burden of our secret grievance- that we must all die, that it's all been so brief and probably for nothing-is ever really lifted from us. "
"What moments do you mean? "
Ulrich did not know what to answer. He did not want to answer at all. He remembered that as a young man he had always felt the need in this place to clench his teeth and keep silent. Finally, he replied: "Those romantic moments when events run away with us-the senseless moments! " He felt as if his head were a hollow nut on his neck, full of old saws like "Death be not proud" or "I care for no- body, no, not I," and with them the faded fortissimo of those years when there was not yet a boundary between life's expectations and life itself. He thought: "What single-minded and happy experiences have I had since then? None. "
Agathe responded: ''I've always acted senselessly, and it only makes one unhappy. "
She had walked ahead, to the very edge. Her ears were deaf to her brother's words; she did not understand them, and saw a somber, barren landscape before her whose sadness harmonized with her own. When she turned around she said: "It's a place to kill oneself," and smiled. "The emptiness in my head could melt with sweet peace
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 8oz
into the emptiness of this view! " She took a few steps back to Ulrich. "All my life," she went on, "''ve been reproached with having no willpower, with loving nothing, respecting nothing; in short, for being a person with no real will to live. Papa used to scold me for it, and Hagauer blamed me for it. So now I wish you would tell me, for God's sake, tell me at long last, in which moments does something in life strike us as necessary? ''
"When one turns over in bed! " Ulrich said gruffly.
"What does that mean? ''
"Excuse the mundane example," he said. "But it's a fact: You're in
an uncomfortable position; you incessantly think of changing it and decide on one move and then another, without doing anything; fi- nally, you give up; and then all at once you've turned over! One really should say you've been turned over. That's the one pattern we act on, whether in a fit of passion or after long reflection. " He did not look at her as he spoke; he was answering himself. He still had the feeling: Here I stood and longed for something that has never been satisfied.
Agathe smiled again, but the smile twisted her mouth as ifin pain. She returned to where she had been standing and stared silently into the romantic distance. Her fur coat made a dark outline against the sky, and her slender form presented a sharp contrast to the broad silence ofthe landscape and the shadows ofthe clouds flying over it. Looking at her, Ulrich had an indescribably strong sense that some- thing was happening. He was almost ashamed to be standing there in the company of a woman instead of beside a saddled horse. And al- though he was perfectly aware that the cause of this was the tranquil image emanating at this moment from his sister, he had the impres- sion that something was happening, not to him, but somewhere in the world, and he was missing it. He felt he was being ridiculous. And yet there had been something true in his blurting out that he regretted the way he had lived his life. He sometimes longed to be wholly involved in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were meaningless or criminal, as long as they were valid, absolute, without the everlasting tentativeness they have when a person is superior to his experiences. "Something an end in itself, authentic," Ulrich thought, seriously looking for the right expression, and, unawares, his thoughts stopped pursuing imaginary events and focused on the sight that Agathe herselfnow presented, as nothing but the mirror of
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her self. So brother and sister stood for quite a while, apart and soli- tary, immobilized by a hesitancy filled with conflicting feelings. Most curious of all, perhaps, was that it never occurred to Ulrich that something had indeed already happened when, at Agathe's behest and in his own desire to get rid of him, he had palmed off on his unsuspecting brother-in-law the lie that there was a sealed testament that could not be opened for several days, and had assured him, also against his better knowledge, that Agathe would look after his inter- ests: something Hagauer would subsequently refer to as "aiding and abetting. "
Eventually they did move away from this spot, where each had been sunk in thought, and walked on together without having talked things out. The wind had freshened again, and because Agathe seemed fatigued, Ulrich suggested stopping to rest at a shepherd's cottage he knew of nearby. They soon found the stone cabin, and they had to duck their heads as they went in, while the shepherd's wife, . staring, fended them off in embarrassment. In the mixture of German and Slavic that prevailed in this part of the country and that he still vaguely remembered, Ulrich asked ifthey might come in for a while to warm themselves and eat their provisions indoors, and sup- ported this request with a tip so generous that the involuntary host- ess broke out into horrified lamentations that her wretched poverty did not enable her to offer better hospitality to such "fine gentry. " She wiped off the greasy table by the window, fanned a fire of twigs on the hearth, and put on some goat's milk to heat. Agathe had im- mediately squeezed past the table to the window without paying any attention to these efforts, as if it were a matter of course that one would find shelter somewhere, no matter where. She looked out through the dim little square offour panes at the landscape here, on the far side ofthe rampart, which without the wide extent ofthe view they had had from the top was more reminiscent of what a swimmer sees, surrounded by green crests. Though it was not yet evening, the day had passed its zenith and the light was fading.
Suddenly Agathe asked: "Why don't you ever talk to me seri- ously? "
How could Ulrich have found a better answer to this other than to glance up at her with an air ofinnocence and surprise? He was busy
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laying out ham, sausage, and boiled eggs on a piece of paper between himself and his sister.
But Agathe continued: "If one accidentally bumps into you it hurts, and one feels a shock at the terrific difference.
But when I try to ask you something crucial you dissolve into thin air! "
She did not touch the food he pushed toward her-indeed, in her aversion to winding up the day with a rural picnic, her back was so straight that she was not even touching the table. And now some- thing recurred that was like their climb up the country road. Ulrich shoved aside the mugs of goat's milk that had just been brought to the table from the stove and were emitting a very disagreeable smell to noses unaccustomed to it; the faint nausea it produced in him had a sobering, stimulating effect such as comes from a sudden rush of bitterness.
"I've always spoken seriously to you," he retorted. "If you don't like what I say, it's not my fault; what you don't like in my responses is the morality of our time. " He suddenly realized that he wanted to explain to his sister as completely as possible all she would have to know in order to understand herself, and to some extent her brother as well. And with the firmness of a man who will brook no idle inter- ruptions, he launched on a lengthy speech.
"The morality ofour time, whatever else may be claimed, is that of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are accept- able provided the fifth leads to a time of prosperity and patronage. Success can cause everything else to be forgotten. When you reach the point where your money helps win elections and buys paintings, the State is prepared to look the other way too. There are unwritten rules: ifyou donate to church, charities, and political parties, it needs to be no more than one tenth of the outlay required for someone to demonstrate his goodwill by patronizing the arts. And even success still has its limits; one cannot yet acquire everything in every way; some principles of the Crown, the aristocracy, and society can still to some extent restrain the social climber. On the other hand, the State, for its own suprapersonal person, quite openly countenances the principle that one may rob, steal, and murder ifit will provide power, civilization, and glory. Of course, I'm not saying that all this is ac- knowledged even in theory; on the contrary, the theory of it is quite
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obscure. I just wanted to sum up the most mundane facts for you. The moral argumentation is just one more means to an end, a weapon used in much the same way as lies. This is the world that men have made, and it would make me want to be a woman-if only women did not love men!
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere, but this is precisely what you just called the flying man without remorse, and what I've called a problem we have no method for solving. As a scientifically trained person I feel in every situation that my knowledge is incomplete, no more than a pointer, and that perhaps tomorrow I will have new knowledge that will cause me to think differently. On the other hand, even a person wholly gov- erned by his feelings, 'a person on the way up,' as you have depicted him, will see everything he does as a step upward, from which he is raised to the next step. So there is something in our minds and in our souls, a morality ofthe 'next-step'-but is that simply the morality of the five bankruptcies, is the entrepreneurial morality of our time so deeply rooted in our inner life? Or is there only the illusion of a con- nection? Or is the morality of the careerists a monstrosity prema- turely born from deeper currents? At this point I really don't know the answer! "
Ulrich's short pause for breath was only rhetorical, for he intended to develop his views further. Agathe, however, who had so far been listening with the curiously passive alertness that was sometimes characteristic of her, switched the conversation onto a totally differ- ent track with the simple remark that she wasn't interested in this answer because all she wanted to know was where Ulrich himself stood; she was not in a position to grasp what everyone might think.
"But ifyou expect me to accomplish anything in any form whatso- ever, I'd rather have no principles at all," she added.
"Thank God for that! " Ulrich said. "It's always a pleasure for me, every time I look at your youth, beauty, and strength, to hear from you that you have no energy at all! Our era is dripping with the en- ergy of action. It's not interested in ideas, only in deeds. This fearful activity stems from the single fact that people have nothing to do. Inwardly, I mean. But even outwardly, in the last analysis, everyone spends his whole life repeating the same thing over and over: he gets into some occupation and then goes on with it. I think this brings us
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back to the question you raised before, out there in the open air. It's so simple to have the energy to act, and so hard to make any sense of it! Almost nobody understands that these days. That's why our men of action look like men bowling; they manage to knock down their nine pins with all the gestures of a Napoleon. It wouldn't even sur- prise me to see them ending up by assaulting each other in a frenzy, because of their inability to comprehend why all action is inade- quate. . . . " He had spoken energetically at first but lapsed again, first into pensiveness, then into silence for a while. At last he just glanced up with a smile and contented himself with saying: "You say that if I expect any moral effort from you, you are bound to disappoint me. I say that if you expect any moral counsel from me, I am bound to disappoint you. I think that we have nothing definite to demand of one another-all of us, I mean; we really shouldn't demand action from one another; we should create the conditions that make action possible; that's how I feel about it. "
"But how is that to be done? " Agathe said. She realized that Ulrich had abandoned the big pronouncements he had begun with and had drifted into something closer to himself, but even this was too gen- eral for her taste. She had, as we know, no use for general analysis and regarded every effort that extended beyond her own skin, as it were, as more or less hopeless; she was sure of this for her own part, and believed it was probably true of the general assertions of others too. Still, she understood Ulrich quite well. She noticed that as he sat there with his head down, speaking softly against the energy of ac- tion, her brother kept absentmindedly carving notches and lines into the table with his pocketknife, and all the sinews of his hand were tense. The unthinking but almost impassioned motion of his hand, and the frank way he had spoken of Agathe's youth and beauty, made for an absurd duet above the orchestra of the other words; nor did she try to give it a meaning other than that she was sitting here watching.
"What's to be done? " Ulrich replied in the same tone as before. "At our cousin's I once proposed to Count Leinsdorf that he should found a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul, so that even the people who don't go to church would know what they had to do. Nat- urally, I only said it in fun, for while we created science a long time ago for truth, asking for something similar to cope with everything
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else would still appear so foolish today as to be embarrassing. And yet everything the two of us have been talking about so far would logi- cally call for such a secretariat! " He had dropped the speech and leaned back against his bench. "I suppose I'm dissolving into thin air again if I add: But how would that turn out today? ''
Since Agathe did not reply, there was a silence. After a while Ul- rich said: "Anyway, I sometimes think that I can't really stand believ- ing that myself! When I saw you before, standing on the rampart," he added in an undertone, "I suddenly had a wild urge to do some- thing! I don't know why. I really have done some rash things some- times. The magic lay in the fact that when it was over, there was something more besides me. Sometimes I'm inclined to think that a person could be happy even as a result of a crime, because it gives him a certain ballast and perhaps keeps him on a steadier course. "
This time, too, his sister did not answer right away. He looked at her quietly, perhaps even expectantly, but without reexperiencing the surge he had just described, indeed without thinking of anything at all. After a little while, she asked him: 'Would you be angry with me if I committed a crime? ''
'What do you expect me to say to that? '' Ulrich said; he had bent over his knife again.
"Is there no answer? "
"No; nowadays there is no real answer. "
At this point Agathe said: 'Td like to kill Hagauer. "
Ulrich forced himself not to look up. The words had entered his
ear lightly and softly, but when they had passed they left behind something like broad wheel marks in his mind. He had instantly for- gotten her tone; he would have had to see her face to know how to take her words, but he did not want to accord them even that much importance.
"Fine," he said. 'Why shouldn't you? Is there anyone left today who hasn't wanted to do something of the kind? Do it, if you really can! It's just as if you had said: 'I would like to love him for his faults! ' " Now he straightened up again and looked his sister in the face. It was stubborn and swprisingly excited. Keeping his eyes on her, he said slowly:
"There's something wrong here, you see; on this frontier between what goes on inside us and what goes on outside, some kind of com-
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munication is missing these days, and they adapt to each other only with tremendous losses. One might almost say that our evil desires are the dark side of the life we lead in reality, and the life we lead in reality is the dark side ofour good desires. Imagine ifyou actually did it: it wouldn't at all be what you meant, and you'd be horribly disap- pointed, to say the least. . . . "
"Perhaps I could suddenly be a different person-you admitted that yourself! " Agathe interrupted him.
As Ulrich at this moment looked around, he was reminded that they were not alone; two people were listening to their conversation. The old woman-hardly over forty, perhaps, but her rags and the traces of her humble life made her look older-had sat down socia- bly near the stove, and sitting beside her was the shepherd, who had come home to his hut during their conversation without their notic- ing him, absorbed in themselves as they were. The two old people sat with their hands on their knees and listened, or so it appeared, in wonder and with pride to the conversation that filled their hut, greatly pleased even though they did not understand a single word. They saw that the milk went undrunk, the sausage uneaten; it was all a spectacle and, for all anyone knew, an edifying one. They were not even whispering to each other. Ulrich's glance dipped into their wide-open eyes, and he smiled at them in embarrassment, but of the two only the woman smiled back, while the man maintained his seri- ous, reverential propriety.
"We must eat," Ulrich said to his sister in English. "They're won- dering about us. "
She obediently toyed with some bread and meat, and he for his part ate resolutely and even drank a little of the milk. Meanwhile Agathe went on, aloud and unembarrassed: "The idea of actually hurting him is repugnant to me when I come to think of it. So maybe I don't want to kill him. But I do want to wipe him out! Tear him into little pieces, pound them in a mortar, flush it down the drain; that's what I'd like to do! Root out everything that's happened! "
"This is a funny way for us "to be talking," Ulrich remarked.
Agathe was silent for a while. But then she said: "But you prom- ised me the first day you'd stand by me against Hagauer! "
"Ofcourse I will. But not like that. "
Again she was silent. Then she said suddenly: "If you bought or
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rented a car we could drive to my house by way of Iglau and come back the longer way around, through Tabor, I think. It would never occur to anyone that we'd been there in the night. "
"And the servants? Fortunately, I can't drive! " Ulrich laughed, but then he shook his head in annoyance. "Such up-to-date ideas! "
"So you say," Agathe answered. Pensively, she pushed a bit of bacon back and forth on her plate with a fingernail, and it looked as though the fingernail, which had a greasy spot from the bacon, was doing it on its own. "But you've also said that the virtues of society are vices to the saint! "
"But I didn't say that the vices of society are virtues to the saint! " Ulrich pointed out. He laughed, caught hold of Agathe's hand, and cleaned it with his handkerchief.
"You always take everything back! " Agathe scolded him with a dis- satisfied smile, the blood rushing to her face as she tried to free her finger.
The two old people by the stove, still watching exactly as before, now smiled broadly in echo.
'When you talk with me first one way, then another," Agathe said in a low but impassioned voice, "it's as if I were seeing myself in a splintered mirror. With you, one never sees oneself from head to toe! "
"No," Ulrich answered without letting go of her hand. "One never sees oneselfas awhole nowadays, and one never moves as awhole- that's just it! "
Agathe gave in and suddenly stopped withdrawing her hand. ''I'm certainly the opposite of holy," she said softly. "I may have been worse than a kept woman with my indifference. And I'm certainly not spoiling for action, and maybe I'll never be able to kill anyone. But when you first said that about the saint-and it was quite a while ago-it made me see something 'as a whole. ' " She bowed her head, in thought or possibly to hide her face. "I saw a saint-maybe a fig- ure on a fountain. To tell the truth, maybe I didn't see anything at all, but I felt something that has to be expressed this way. The water flowed, and what the saint did also came flowing over the rim, as ifhe were a fountain gently brimming over in all directions. That's how one ought to be, I think; then one would always be doing what was right and yet it wouldn't matter at all what one did. "
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. . Agathe sees herself standing in the world overflowing with holi- ness and trembling for her sins, and sees with incredulity how the snakes and rhinoceroses, mountains and ravines, silent and even smaller than she is, lie down at her feet," he said, gently teasing her. . . But what of Hagauer? "
. . That's just it. He doesn't fit in. He has to go. "
. . Now I have something to tell you," her brother said. . . Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something ofgen- uine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the thea- ter before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat, and play. "
Agathe gave him a searching look. It was and wasn't an adequate answer.
Ulrich met her gaze. . . You, too, are often plagued by a sense that there's always a 'dislike' before there's a 'like,'" he said, and thought: . . Is she really like me? " Again he thought: . . Perhaps the way a pastel resembles a woodcut. " He regarded himself as the more stable. And she was more beautiful than he. Such a pleasing beauty! He shifted his grip from her finger to her whole hand, a wann, long hand full of life, which up to now he had held in his own only long enough for a greeting. His young sister was upset, and while there were no actual tears in her eyes, he saw a moist shimmer there.
. . In a few days you'll be leaving me too," she said, . . and how can I cope with everything then? "
'W e can stay together; you can follow me. "
. . How do you suppose that would work? " Agathe asked, with the little thoughtful furrow on her forehead.
. . 1 don't suppose at all; it's the first I've thought of it. "
He stood up and gave the sheepherders some more money, . . for the carved-up table. "
Through a haze Agathe saw the country folk grinning, bobbing, and saying something about how glad they were, in short, incompre- hensible words. As she went past them, she felt their four hospitable eyes, staring with naked emotion at her face, and realized that she and Ulrich had been taken for lovers who had quarreled and made up.
. . They took us for lovers! " she said. Impetuously she slid her ann
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in his, and a wave ofjoy welled up in her.
Up to now Agathe had been feeling perfectly comfortable be- tween the joggings and joltings as the cab drove over bumpy subur- ban streets, leaving them incapable of speech, wrapped as they were in a network of mechanical vibrations, and whenever she had used her husband's name in her thoughts, it was as a mere term of refer- ence to a period and its events. But now, for no particular reason, an infinite horror slowly came over her: Hagauer had actually been
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there with her, in the flesh! The way in which she had tried up to now to be fair to him disappeared, and her throat tightened with bitterness.
He had arrived on the morning of the funeral and had affection- ately insisted, late as he was, on seeing his father-in-law, had gone to the autopsy lab and delayed the closing of the coffin. In a tactful, honorable, undemonstrative fashion, he had been truly moved. After the funeral Agathe had excused herself on grounds of fatigue, and Ulrich had to take his brother-in-law out to lunch. As he told her afteiWard, Hagauer's constant company had made Ulrich as frantic as a tight collar, and for that reason he had done everything to get him to leave as soon as possible. Hagauer had intended to go to the capital for an educators' conference and there devote another day to calling on people at the Ministry and some sightseeing, but he had reserved the two days prior to this to spend with his wife as an atten- tive husband and to go into the matter ofher inheritance. But Ulrich, in collusion with his sister, had made up a story that made it seem impossible for Hagauer to stay at the house, and told him he had booked a room for him at the best hotel in town. As expected, this made Hagauer hesitant: the hotel would be inconvenient and expen- sive, and he would in all decency have to pay for it himself; instead, he could allot two days to his calls and sightseeing in the capital, and if he traveled at night save the cost of the hotel. So Hagauer ex- pressed fulsome regrets at being unable to take advantage of Ulrich's thoughtfulness, and finally revealed his plan, unalterable by now, to leave that very evening. All that was left to discuss was the question of the inheritance, and this made Agathe smile again, because at her instigation Ulrich had told her husband that the will could not be read for a few days yet. Agathe would be here, after all, he was told, to look after his interests, and he would also receive a proper legal statement. As for whatever concerned furniture, mementos, and the like, Ulrich, as a bachelor, would make no claims to anything his sis- ter might happen to want. Finally, he had asked Hagauer whether he would agree in case they decided to sell the house, which was of no use to them, without committing himself, of course, since none of them had yet seen the will; and Hagauer had agreed, without com- mitting himself, of course, that he could see no objection for the mo- ment, though he must of course reserve the right to determine his
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position in the light ofthe actual conditions. Agathe had suggested all this to her brother, and he had passed it on because it meant nothing to him one way or the other, and he wanted to be rid of Hagauer.
Suddenly Agathe felt miserable again, for after they had managed this so well, her husband had after all come to her room, together with her brother, to say goodbye to her. Agathe had behaved as coldly as she could and said that there was no way oftelling when she would be returning home. Knowing him as she did, she could tell at once that he had not been prepared for this and resented the fact that his decision to leave right away was now casting him in the role of the unfeeling husband; in retrospect he was suddenly offended at having been expected to stay at a hotel and by the cool reception accorded him. But since he was a man who did everything according to plan he said nothing, decided to have it out with his wife when the time came, and kissed her, after he had picked up his hat, dutifully on the lips.
And this kiss, which Ulrich had seen, now seemed to demolish Agathe. "How could it happen," she asked herself in consternation, "that I stood this man for so long? But then, haven't I put up with things all my life without resisting? " She furiously reproached her- self: " I f I were any good at all, things could never have gone this far! "
Agathe turned her face away from Ulrich, whom she had been watching, and stared out the window. Low suburban buildings, icy streets, muffied-up people-images of an ugly wilderness rolling past, holding up to her the wasteland of the life into which she felt she had fecklessly allowed herself to drift. She was no longer sitting upright but had let herself slide down into the cab's musty-smelling upholstery; it was easier to look out the window in this position, and she remained in this ungraceful posture, in which she was rudely jolted and shaken to the very bowels. This body of hers, being tossed about like a bundle of rags, gave her an uncanny feeling, for it was the only thing she owned. Sometimes, when as a schoolgirl she awak- ened in the gray light of dawn, she had felt as though she were drift- ing into the future inside her body as if inside the hull of a wooden skiff. Now she was just about twice as old as she had been then, and the light in the cab was equally dim. But she still could not picture her life, had no idea what it ought to be. Men were a complement to one's body, but they were no spiritual fulfillment; one took them as
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they took oneself. Her body told her that in only a few years it would begin to lose its beauty, which meant losing the feelings that, be- cause they arise directly out of its self-assurance, can only barely be expressed in words or thoughts. Then it would be all over, without anything having ever been there. It occurred to her that Ulrich had spoken in a similar vein about the futility of his athletics, and while she doggedly kept her face turned away to the window, she planned to make him talk about it.
10
FURTHER COURSE OF THE EXCURSION TO THE SWEDISH RAMPARTS. THE MORALITY OF THE NEXT STEP
Brother and sister had left the cab at the last, low, and already quite rural-looking houses on the edge of the town and set off along a wide, furrowed country road that rose steadily uphill. The frozen earth of the wheel tracks crumbled beneath their tread. Their shoes were soon covered with the miserable gray of this parquet for carters and peasants, in sharp contrast with their smart city clothes, and although it was not cold, a cutting wind blowing toward them from the top of the hill made their cheeks glow, and the glazed brittleness of their lips made it hard to talk.
The memory of Hagauer drove Agathe to explain herself to her brother. She was convinced that he could not possibly understand her bad marriage from any point ofview, not even in the simplest of social terms. The words were already there within her, but she could not make up her mind to overcome the resistance of the climb, the cold, and the wind lashing her face. Ulrich was striding ahead, in a broad track left by a dragging brake, which they were using as their path; looking at his lean, broad-shouldered form, she hesitated. She
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had always imagined him hard, unyielding, a bit wild, perhaps only because of the critical remarks she had heard from her father and occasionally also from Hagauer; thinking of her brother, estranged and escaped from the family, had made her ashamed of her own sub- servience. "He was right not to bother about me! " she thought, and her dismay at having continually submitted to demeaning situations returned. But in fact she was full of those same tempestuous, con- flicting feelings that had made her break out with those wild lines of poetry between the doorposts of her father's death chamber. She caught up with Ulrich, which left her out of breath, and suddenly questions such as this workaday road had probably never heard before rang out, and the wind was tom to ribbons by words whose sounds no other wind had ever carried in these rural hills.
"You surely remember . . . ,"she exclaimed, and named several well-known instances from literature: ''You didn't tell me whether you could forgive a thief, but do you mean you'd regard these mur- derers as good people? "
"Of course! " Ulrich shouted back. "No-wait. Perhaps they're just potentially good people, valuable people. They still are, even after- ward, as criminals. But they don't stay good! "
"Then why do you still like them after their crime? Surely not be- cause of their earlier potentiality but because you still find them at- tractive? "
"But that's always the way it is," Ulrich said. "It's the person who gives character to the deed; it doesn't happen the other way round. We separate good and evil, but in our hearts we know they're a whole! "
Agathe's wind-whipped cheeks flushed an even brighter red be- cause the passion of her questions, which words both revealed and hid, had forced her to resort to books for examples. The misuse of "cultural problems" is so extreme that one could feel them out of place wherever the wind blows and trees stand, as though human culture did not include all of nature's manifestations! But she had struggled bravely, linked her arm through her brother's, and now re- plied, close to his ear so as not to have to raise her voice anymore and with a flicker of bravado in her face: "I suppose that's why we exe- cute bad men but cordially serve them a hearty breakfast first. "
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Ulrich, sensing some of the agitation at his side, leaned down to speak in his sister's ear, though in a normal voice: "Everyone likes to think that he couldn't do anything evil, because he himself is good. "
With these words they had reached the top, where the road no longer climbed but cut across a rolling, treeless plateau. The wind had suddenly dropped and it was no longer cold, but in this pleasant stillness the conversation stopped as if severed, and would not start up again.
"What on earth got you onto Dostoyevsky and Stendhal in the middle ofthat gale? " Ulrich asked a while later. "Ifanybody had seen us they'd have thought we were crazy. "
Agathe laughed. "They wouldn't have understood us anymore than the cries of the birds. . . . Anyway, you were talking to me the other day about Moosbrugger. "
They walked on.
After a while, Agathe said: "I don't like him at all! "
"And I'd nearly forgotten him," Ulrich replied.
After they had again walked on in silence, Agathe stopped. "Tell
me," she asked. "You've surely done some irresponsible things your- self. I remember, for instance, that you were in the hospital once with a bullet wound. You certainly don't always look before you leap . . . ? ''
"What a lot of questions you're asking today! " Ulrich said. "What do you expect me to say to that? "
"Are you never sorry for anything you do? " Agathe asked quickly. "I have the impression that you never regret anything. You even said something like that once. "
"Good God," Ulrich answered, beginning to walk on again. "There's a plus in every minus. Maybe I did say something like that, but you don't have to take it so literally. "
"A plus in every minus? ''
"Some good in everything bad. Or at least in much of the bad. A human minus-variant is likely to contain an unrecognized plus- variant-that's probably what I meant to say. Having something to regret may be just the thing to give you the strength to do something far better than you might ever have done otherwise. It's never what one does that counts, but only what one does next! "
"Suppose you've killed someone: what can you do next? ''
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Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He was tempted to answer, for the sake of the argument: "It might enable me to write a poem that would enrich the inner life of thousands of people, or to come up with a great invention! " But he checked himself. "That would never happen," he thought. "Only a lunatic could imagine it. Or an eigh- teen-year-old aesthete. God knows why, but those are ideas that con- tradict the laws of nature. On the other hand," he conceded, "it did work that way for primitive man. He killed because human sacrifice was a great religious poem! "
He said neither the one thing nor the other aloud, but Agathe went on: "You may regard my objections as silly, but the first time I heard you say that what matters isn't the step one takes but always the next step after that, I thought: So if a person could fly inwardly, fly morally, as it were, and could keep flying at high speed from one improvement to the next, then he would know no remorse! I was madly envious ofyou! "
"That's nonsense! " Ulrich said emphatically. "What I said was that one false step doesn't matter, only the next step after that. But then what matters after the next step? Evidently the one that follows after that. And after the nth step, the n-plus-one step! Such a person would have to live without ever coming to an end or to a decision, indeed without achieving reality. And yet it is still true that what counts is always only the next step. The truth is, we have no proper method of dealing with this unending series. Dear Agathe," he said abruptly, "I sometimes regret my entire life. "
"But that's just what you can't do! " his sister said.
"And why not? Why not that in particular? "
"I have never really done anything," Agathe replied, "and so I've
always had time to regret the little I have done. I'm sure you don't know what that's like: such a dim state of mind! The shadows come, and what was has power over me. It's present in the smallest detail, and I can forget nothing and understand nothing. It's an unpleasant state of mind. . . . "Her tone was unemotional, quite unassuming. Ulrich had in fact never known this backwash of life, since his own had always been oriented toward expansion, and it merely reminded him that his sister had several times already expressed dissatisfaction with herself in strong terms. But he failed to question her because they had meanwhile reached a hilltop that he had chosen as their
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destination and stepped toward its edge. It was a huge mound as- sociated by legend with a Swedish siege in the Thirty Years' War be- cause it looked like a fortification, even though it was far too big for that: a green rampart of nature, without bush or tree, that broke off to a high, bright rock face on the side overlooking the town. A low, empty world of hills surrounded this mound; no village, no house was to be seen, only the shadows ofclouds and gray pastures. Once again Ulrich felt the spell of this place, which he remembered from his youth: the town was still lying there, far below in the distance, anx- iously huddled around a few churches that looked like hens herding their chicks, so that one suddenly felt like leaping into their midst with one bound and laying about one, or scooping them up in the grip of a giant hand.
"What a glorious feeling it must have been for those Swedish ad- venturers to reach such a place after trotting relentlessly for weeks, and then from their saddles catch sight oftheir quarry," he said to his sister after telling her the story of the place. "It is only at such mo- ments that the weight of life, the burden of our secret grievance- that we must all die, that it's all been so brief and probably for nothing-is ever really lifted from us. "
"What moments do you mean? "
Ulrich did not know what to answer. He did not want to answer at all. He remembered that as a young man he had always felt the need in this place to clench his teeth and keep silent. Finally, he replied: "Those romantic moments when events run away with us-the senseless moments! " He felt as if his head were a hollow nut on his neck, full of old saws like "Death be not proud" or "I care for no- body, no, not I," and with them the faded fortissimo of those years when there was not yet a boundary between life's expectations and life itself. He thought: "What single-minded and happy experiences have I had since then? None. "
Agathe responded: ''I've always acted senselessly, and it only makes one unhappy. "
She had walked ahead, to the very edge. Her ears were deaf to her brother's words; she did not understand them, and saw a somber, barren landscape before her whose sadness harmonized with her own. When she turned around she said: "It's a place to kill oneself," and smiled. "The emptiness in my head could melt with sweet peace
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into the emptiness of this view! " She took a few steps back to Ulrich. "All my life," she went on, "''ve been reproached with having no willpower, with loving nothing, respecting nothing; in short, for being a person with no real will to live. Papa used to scold me for it, and Hagauer blamed me for it. So now I wish you would tell me, for God's sake, tell me at long last, in which moments does something in life strike us as necessary? ''
"When one turns over in bed! " Ulrich said gruffly.
"What does that mean? ''
"Excuse the mundane example," he said. "But it's a fact: You're in
an uncomfortable position; you incessantly think of changing it and decide on one move and then another, without doing anything; fi- nally, you give up; and then all at once you've turned over! One really should say you've been turned over. That's the one pattern we act on, whether in a fit of passion or after long reflection. " He did not look at her as he spoke; he was answering himself. He still had the feeling: Here I stood and longed for something that has never been satisfied.
Agathe smiled again, but the smile twisted her mouth as ifin pain. She returned to where she had been standing and stared silently into the romantic distance. Her fur coat made a dark outline against the sky, and her slender form presented a sharp contrast to the broad silence ofthe landscape and the shadows ofthe clouds flying over it. Looking at her, Ulrich had an indescribably strong sense that some- thing was happening. He was almost ashamed to be standing there in the company of a woman instead of beside a saddled horse. And al- though he was perfectly aware that the cause of this was the tranquil image emanating at this moment from his sister, he had the impres- sion that something was happening, not to him, but somewhere in the world, and he was missing it. He felt he was being ridiculous. And yet there had been something true in his blurting out that he regretted the way he had lived his life. He sometimes longed to be wholly involved in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were meaningless or criminal, as long as they were valid, absolute, without the everlasting tentativeness they have when a person is superior to his experiences. "Something an end in itself, authentic," Ulrich thought, seriously looking for the right expression, and, unawares, his thoughts stopped pursuing imaginary events and focused on the sight that Agathe herselfnow presented, as nothing but the mirror of
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her self. So brother and sister stood for quite a while, apart and soli- tary, immobilized by a hesitancy filled with conflicting feelings. Most curious of all, perhaps, was that it never occurred to Ulrich that something had indeed already happened when, at Agathe's behest and in his own desire to get rid of him, he had palmed off on his unsuspecting brother-in-law the lie that there was a sealed testament that could not be opened for several days, and had assured him, also against his better knowledge, that Agathe would look after his inter- ests: something Hagauer would subsequently refer to as "aiding and abetting. "
Eventually they did move away from this spot, where each had been sunk in thought, and walked on together without having talked things out. The wind had freshened again, and because Agathe seemed fatigued, Ulrich suggested stopping to rest at a shepherd's cottage he knew of nearby. They soon found the stone cabin, and they had to duck their heads as they went in, while the shepherd's wife, . staring, fended them off in embarrassment. In the mixture of German and Slavic that prevailed in this part of the country and that he still vaguely remembered, Ulrich asked ifthey might come in for a while to warm themselves and eat their provisions indoors, and sup- ported this request with a tip so generous that the involuntary host- ess broke out into horrified lamentations that her wretched poverty did not enable her to offer better hospitality to such "fine gentry. " She wiped off the greasy table by the window, fanned a fire of twigs on the hearth, and put on some goat's milk to heat. Agathe had im- mediately squeezed past the table to the window without paying any attention to these efforts, as if it were a matter of course that one would find shelter somewhere, no matter where. She looked out through the dim little square offour panes at the landscape here, on the far side ofthe rampart, which without the wide extent ofthe view they had had from the top was more reminiscent of what a swimmer sees, surrounded by green crests. Though it was not yet evening, the day had passed its zenith and the light was fading.
Suddenly Agathe asked: "Why don't you ever talk to me seri- ously? "
How could Ulrich have found a better answer to this other than to glance up at her with an air ofinnocence and surprise? He was busy
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laying out ham, sausage, and boiled eggs on a piece of paper between himself and his sister.
But Agathe continued: "If one accidentally bumps into you it hurts, and one feels a shock at the terrific difference.
But when I try to ask you something crucial you dissolve into thin air! "
She did not touch the food he pushed toward her-indeed, in her aversion to winding up the day with a rural picnic, her back was so straight that she was not even touching the table. And now some- thing recurred that was like their climb up the country road. Ulrich shoved aside the mugs of goat's milk that had just been brought to the table from the stove and were emitting a very disagreeable smell to noses unaccustomed to it; the faint nausea it produced in him had a sobering, stimulating effect such as comes from a sudden rush of bitterness.
"I've always spoken seriously to you," he retorted. "If you don't like what I say, it's not my fault; what you don't like in my responses is the morality of our time. " He suddenly realized that he wanted to explain to his sister as completely as possible all she would have to know in order to understand herself, and to some extent her brother as well. And with the firmness of a man who will brook no idle inter- ruptions, he launched on a lengthy speech.
"The morality ofour time, whatever else may be claimed, is that of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are accept- able provided the fifth leads to a time of prosperity and patronage. Success can cause everything else to be forgotten. When you reach the point where your money helps win elections and buys paintings, the State is prepared to look the other way too. There are unwritten rules: ifyou donate to church, charities, and political parties, it needs to be no more than one tenth of the outlay required for someone to demonstrate his goodwill by patronizing the arts. And even success still has its limits; one cannot yet acquire everything in every way; some principles of the Crown, the aristocracy, and society can still to some extent restrain the social climber. On the other hand, the State, for its own suprapersonal person, quite openly countenances the principle that one may rob, steal, and murder ifit will provide power, civilization, and glory. Of course, I'm not saying that all this is ac- knowledged even in theory; on the contrary, the theory of it is quite
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obscure. I just wanted to sum up the most mundane facts for you. The moral argumentation is just one more means to an end, a weapon used in much the same way as lies. This is the world that men have made, and it would make me want to be a woman-if only women did not love men!
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere, but this is precisely what you just called the flying man without remorse, and what I've called a problem we have no method for solving. As a scientifically trained person I feel in every situation that my knowledge is incomplete, no more than a pointer, and that perhaps tomorrow I will have new knowledge that will cause me to think differently. On the other hand, even a person wholly gov- erned by his feelings, 'a person on the way up,' as you have depicted him, will see everything he does as a step upward, from which he is raised to the next step. So there is something in our minds and in our souls, a morality ofthe 'next-step'-but is that simply the morality of the five bankruptcies, is the entrepreneurial morality of our time so deeply rooted in our inner life? Or is there only the illusion of a con- nection? Or is the morality of the careerists a monstrosity prema- turely born from deeper currents? At this point I really don't know the answer! "
Ulrich's short pause for breath was only rhetorical, for he intended to develop his views further. Agathe, however, who had so far been listening with the curiously passive alertness that was sometimes characteristic of her, switched the conversation onto a totally differ- ent track with the simple remark that she wasn't interested in this answer because all she wanted to know was where Ulrich himself stood; she was not in a position to grasp what everyone might think.
"But ifyou expect me to accomplish anything in any form whatso- ever, I'd rather have no principles at all," she added.
"Thank God for that! " Ulrich said. "It's always a pleasure for me, every time I look at your youth, beauty, and strength, to hear from you that you have no energy at all! Our era is dripping with the en- ergy of action. It's not interested in ideas, only in deeds. This fearful activity stems from the single fact that people have nothing to do. Inwardly, I mean. But even outwardly, in the last analysis, everyone spends his whole life repeating the same thing over and over: he gets into some occupation and then goes on with it. I think this brings us
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back to the question you raised before, out there in the open air. It's so simple to have the energy to act, and so hard to make any sense of it! Almost nobody understands that these days. That's why our men of action look like men bowling; they manage to knock down their nine pins with all the gestures of a Napoleon. It wouldn't even sur- prise me to see them ending up by assaulting each other in a frenzy, because of their inability to comprehend why all action is inade- quate. . . . " He had spoken energetically at first but lapsed again, first into pensiveness, then into silence for a while. At last he just glanced up with a smile and contented himself with saying: "You say that if I expect any moral effort from you, you are bound to disappoint me. I say that if you expect any moral counsel from me, I am bound to disappoint you. I think that we have nothing definite to demand of one another-all of us, I mean; we really shouldn't demand action from one another; we should create the conditions that make action possible; that's how I feel about it. "
"But how is that to be done? " Agathe said. She realized that Ulrich had abandoned the big pronouncements he had begun with and had drifted into something closer to himself, but even this was too gen- eral for her taste. She had, as we know, no use for general analysis and regarded every effort that extended beyond her own skin, as it were, as more or less hopeless; she was sure of this for her own part, and believed it was probably true of the general assertions of others too. Still, she understood Ulrich quite well. She noticed that as he sat there with his head down, speaking softly against the energy of ac- tion, her brother kept absentmindedly carving notches and lines into the table with his pocketknife, and all the sinews of his hand were tense. The unthinking but almost impassioned motion of his hand, and the frank way he had spoken of Agathe's youth and beauty, made for an absurd duet above the orchestra of the other words; nor did she try to give it a meaning other than that she was sitting here watching.
"What's to be done? " Ulrich replied in the same tone as before. "At our cousin's I once proposed to Count Leinsdorf that he should found a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul, so that even the people who don't go to church would know what they had to do. Nat- urally, I only said it in fun, for while we created science a long time ago for truth, asking for something similar to cope with everything
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else would still appear so foolish today as to be embarrassing. And yet everything the two of us have been talking about so far would logi- cally call for such a secretariat! " He had dropped the speech and leaned back against his bench. "I suppose I'm dissolving into thin air again if I add: But how would that turn out today? ''
Since Agathe did not reply, there was a silence. After a while Ul- rich said: "Anyway, I sometimes think that I can't really stand believ- ing that myself! When I saw you before, standing on the rampart," he added in an undertone, "I suddenly had a wild urge to do some- thing! I don't know why. I really have done some rash things some- times. The magic lay in the fact that when it was over, there was something more besides me. Sometimes I'm inclined to think that a person could be happy even as a result of a crime, because it gives him a certain ballast and perhaps keeps him on a steadier course. "
This time, too, his sister did not answer right away. He looked at her quietly, perhaps even expectantly, but without reexperiencing the surge he had just described, indeed without thinking of anything at all. After a little while, she asked him: 'Would you be angry with me if I committed a crime? ''
'What do you expect me to say to that? '' Ulrich said; he had bent over his knife again.
"Is there no answer? "
"No; nowadays there is no real answer. "
At this point Agathe said: 'Td like to kill Hagauer. "
Ulrich forced himself not to look up. The words had entered his
ear lightly and softly, but when they had passed they left behind something like broad wheel marks in his mind. He had instantly for- gotten her tone; he would have had to see her face to know how to take her words, but he did not want to accord them even that much importance.
"Fine," he said. 'Why shouldn't you? Is there anyone left today who hasn't wanted to do something of the kind? Do it, if you really can! It's just as if you had said: 'I would like to love him for his faults! ' " Now he straightened up again and looked his sister in the face. It was stubborn and swprisingly excited. Keeping his eyes on her, he said slowly:
"There's something wrong here, you see; on this frontier between what goes on inside us and what goes on outside, some kind of com-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 8o7
munication is missing these days, and they adapt to each other only with tremendous losses. One might almost say that our evil desires are the dark side of the life we lead in reality, and the life we lead in reality is the dark side ofour good desires. Imagine ifyou actually did it: it wouldn't at all be what you meant, and you'd be horribly disap- pointed, to say the least. . . . "
"Perhaps I could suddenly be a different person-you admitted that yourself! " Agathe interrupted him.
As Ulrich at this moment looked around, he was reminded that they were not alone; two people were listening to their conversation. The old woman-hardly over forty, perhaps, but her rags and the traces of her humble life made her look older-had sat down socia- bly near the stove, and sitting beside her was the shepherd, who had come home to his hut during their conversation without their notic- ing him, absorbed in themselves as they were. The two old people sat with their hands on their knees and listened, or so it appeared, in wonder and with pride to the conversation that filled their hut, greatly pleased even though they did not understand a single word. They saw that the milk went undrunk, the sausage uneaten; it was all a spectacle and, for all anyone knew, an edifying one. They were not even whispering to each other. Ulrich's glance dipped into their wide-open eyes, and he smiled at them in embarrassment, but of the two only the woman smiled back, while the man maintained his seri- ous, reverential propriety.
"We must eat," Ulrich said to his sister in English. "They're won- dering about us. "
She obediently toyed with some bread and meat, and he for his part ate resolutely and even drank a little of the milk. Meanwhile Agathe went on, aloud and unembarrassed: "The idea of actually hurting him is repugnant to me when I come to think of it. So maybe I don't want to kill him. But I do want to wipe him out! Tear him into little pieces, pound them in a mortar, flush it down the drain; that's what I'd like to do! Root out everything that's happened! "
"This is a funny way for us "to be talking," Ulrich remarked.
Agathe was silent for a while. But then she said: "But you prom- ised me the first day you'd stand by me against Hagauer! "
"Ofcourse I will. But not like that. "
Again she was silent. Then she said suddenly: "If you bought or
8o8 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
rented a car we could drive to my house by way of Iglau and come back the longer way around, through Tabor, I think. It would never occur to anyone that we'd been there in the night. "
"And the servants? Fortunately, I can't drive! " Ulrich laughed, but then he shook his head in annoyance. "Such up-to-date ideas! "
"So you say," Agathe answered. Pensively, she pushed a bit of bacon back and forth on her plate with a fingernail, and it looked as though the fingernail, which had a greasy spot from the bacon, was doing it on its own. "But you've also said that the virtues of society are vices to the saint! "
"But I didn't say that the vices of society are virtues to the saint! " Ulrich pointed out. He laughed, caught hold of Agathe's hand, and cleaned it with his handkerchief.
"You always take everything back! " Agathe scolded him with a dis- satisfied smile, the blood rushing to her face as she tried to free her finger.
The two old people by the stove, still watching exactly as before, now smiled broadly in echo.
'When you talk with me first one way, then another," Agathe said in a low but impassioned voice, "it's as if I were seeing myself in a splintered mirror. With you, one never sees oneself from head to toe! "
"No," Ulrich answered without letting go of her hand. "One never sees oneselfas awhole nowadays, and one never moves as awhole- that's just it! "
Agathe gave in and suddenly stopped withdrawing her hand. ''I'm certainly the opposite of holy," she said softly. "I may have been worse than a kept woman with my indifference. And I'm certainly not spoiling for action, and maybe I'll never be able to kill anyone. But when you first said that about the saint-and it was quite a while ago-it made me see something 'as a whole. ' " She bowed her head, in thought or possibly to hide her face. "I saw a saint-maybe a fig- ure on a fountain. To tell the truth, maybe I didn't see anything at all, but I felt something that has to be expressed this way. The water flowed, and what the saint did also came flowing over the rim, as ifhe were a fountain gently brimming over in all directions. That's how one ought to be, I think; then one would always be doing what was right and yet it wouldn't matter at all what one did. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · Bog
. . Agathe sees herself standing in the world overflowing with holi- ness and trembling for her sins, and sees with incredulity how the snakes and rhinoceroses, mountains and ravines, silent and even smaller than she is, lie down at her feet," he said, gently teasing her. . . But what of Hagauer? "
. . That's just it. He doesn't fit in. He has to go. "
. . Now I have something to tell you," her brother said. . . Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something ofgen- uine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the thea- ter before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat, and play. "
Agathe gave him a searching look. It was and wasn't an adequate answer.
Ulrich met her gaze. . . You, too, are often plagued by a sense that there's always a 'dislike' before there's a 'like,'" he said, and thought: . . Is she really like me? " Again he thought: . . Perhaps the way a pastel resembles a woodcut. " He regarded himself as the more stable. And she was more beautiful than he. Such a pleasing beauty! He shifted his grip from her finger to her whole hand, a wann, long hand full of life, which up to now he had held in his own only long enough for a greeting. His young sister was upset, and while there were no actual tears in her eyes, he saw a moist shimmer there.
. . In a few days you'll be leaving me too," she said, . . and how can I cope with everything then? "
'W e can stay together; you can follow me. "
. . How do you suppose that would work? " Agathe asked, with the little thoughtful furrow on her forehead.
. . 1 don't suppose at all; it's the first I've thought of it. "
He stood up and gave the sheepherders some more money, . . for the carved-up table. "
Through a haze Agathe saw the country folk grinning, bobbing, and saying something about how glad they were, in short, incompre- hensible words. As she went past them, she felt their four hospitable eyes, staring with naked emotion at her face, and realized that she and Ulrich had been taken for lovers who had quarreled and made up.
. . They took us for lovers! " she said. Impetuously she slid her ann
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in his, and a wave ofjoy welled up in her.
