She dared not ask about
anything
more exciting.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
"
"She claims I murdered him! But they had broken up definitively well
before! "
RACHEL
And while Ulrich was letting the notion of remorse surface in his re- flections, in order to dissolve it immediately again in the deep play of thought, his little friend Rachel was suffering this word in all its tor- tures, dissolved by nothing but the palliative effect of tears and the cautious return of temptation after the remorse had gone on for a while. One will recall that Diotima's intense little maid, ejected from her parents' house because of a misstep, who had landed in the golden aura of virtue surrounding her mistress, had, in the weakest of a series of increasingly weak moments, submitted to the attacks of the black Moorish boy. It happened and made her very unhappy. But this un- happiness aspired to repeat itself as often as the scanty opportunities that Diotima's house offered would allow. On the second or third day after every unhappiness a remarkable change occurred, which can be compared to a flower that, bent over by the rain, raises its little head again. Can be compared to fine weather that, way up above, peeks from a remote corner of the sky through a rainy day; finds friendly lit- tle spots of blue; forms a blue lake; becomes a blue sky; is veiled by a light haze of the overwhelming brightness of a day of happiness; is tinged with brown; lets down one hot veil of haze after another and fi- nally towers, torrid and trembling, from earth to sky, filled with the zigzags and cries of birds, filled with the listless droop of tree and leaf, filled with the craziness of not-yet-discharged tensions that cause man and beast to roam madly about.
On the last day before the remorse, the head of the Moor always twitched through the house like a rolling head of cabbage, and little Ra- chel would have loved to creep on it like a caterpillar with a sweet tooth. But then remorse set in. As if a pistol had been fired and a shimmering glass ball been turned into a powder of glassy sand. Rachel felt sand be- tween her teeth, in her nose, her heart; nothing but sand. The world was dark; not dark like a Moor, but nauseatingly dark, like a pigsty. Rachel, having disappointed the confidence placed in her, seemed to herself be- smirched through and through. Grief placed a deep drill in the vicinity of her navel. A raging fear of being pregnant blinded her thoughts. One
From the Posthumous Papers · 1685
could go on in this fashion-every limb in Rachel ached individually with remorse-but the main thing was not in these details but seized hold ofthe whole person, driving her before the wind like a cloud ofdust raised by a broom. The knowledge that a misstep that has happened can- not be rectified by anything in the world made the world something of a hurricane in which one can find no support to stand up. The peaceful- ness of death seemed to Rachel like a dark feather bed, which it must be delightful to roll on. She had been torn out ofher world, abandoned to a feeling whose intensity was unlike anything in Diotima's house. She could not get at this feeling with an idea, any more than comfortings can get at a toothache, while it actually seemed to her, on the other hand, that there was only one remedy, to pull little Rachel entirely out of the world like a bad tooth.
Had she been cleverer, she would have been able to assert that re- morse is a basic disturbance of equilibrium, which one can restore in the most various ways. But God helped her out with his old, proven home remedy by again giving her, after a few days, the desire to sin.
We, however, cannot of course be as indulgent as the great Lord, to whom earthly matters offer little that is new or important. We must ask whether in a condition in which there is no sin there can be any remorse. And since this question has already been answered in the negative, ex- cept for a few borderline cases, a second question immediately arises: from which ocean did the little drop of hell's fire fall into Rachel's heart, ifit may not be said to have originated in the ocean whose clouds Ulrich had discovered? Every such question was suited to plunge Ulrich out of the sky on which he wanted to set foot purely theoretically. There are so many lovelythings on earth that have nothing to do with divine, seraphic love, and most decidedly there are among them things that forbid any- thing and everything to be expected from their rediscovery. This ques- tion was later to be of the greatest significance for Ulrich and Agathe.
LATE 1920S
The weeks since Rachel had left Diotima's house had passed with an improbability that a different person would hardly have accepted calmly. But Rachel had been shown the door of her parents' house as a sinner, and at the conclusion ofthat fall had landed, straight as an arrow, in paradise, at Diotima's; now Diotima had thrown her out, but such an enchantingly refined man as Ulrich had been standing there and had
1686 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
caught her: how could she not believe that life is the way it is described in the novels she loved to read? Whoever is destined to be a hero fate throws into the air in daredevil ways over and over, but it always catches him again in its strong arms. Rachel placed blind confidence in fate, and during this entire time had really done nothing but wait for its next inter- vention, when it might perhaps unveil its intentions. She had not become pregnant; so the experience with Soliman seemed to have been only a passing incident. She ate in a small pub, together with coachmen, out-of-work servant girls, workers who had business in the neighbor- hood, and those undefinable transients who flood a large city. The place she had chosen for herself, at a specific table, was reserved for her every day; she wore better clothes than the other women who frequented the pub; the way she used her knife and fork was different from what one was accustomed to seeing here; in this place Rachel enjoyed a secret respect, which she was acutely aware of even though not many people wanted to show it, and she assumed that she was taken for a countess or the mistress of a prince, who for some reason was compelled for a time to conceal her class. It happened that men with dubious diamonds on their fingers and with slicked-down hair, who sometimes turned up among the respectable guests, arranged to sit at Rachel's table and di- rected seductively sinuous compliments to her; but Rachel knew how to refuse these with dignity and without unfriendliness, for although the compliments pleased her as much as the buzzing and creeping ofinsects and caterpillars and snakes on a luxuriant summer day, she still sensed that she could not let herselfgo in this direction without running the risk of losing her freedom. She most liked to converse with older people, who knew something of life and told stories of its dangers, disappoint- ments, and events. In this way she picked up knowledge that, broken into crumbs, came to her the way food sinks down to a fish lying quietly at the bottom ofits tank. Adventurous things were going on in the world. People were now said to be flying faster than birds. Building houses en- tirelywithout bricks. The anarchists wanted to assassinate the Emperor. A great revolution was imminent, and then the coachmen would sit in- side the coaches and the rich people would be in harness, instead of the horses. In a tenement block in the vicinity, a woman had, in the night, poured petroleum on her husband and lit him; it was unimaginable! In America, blind people were given glass eyes with which they could really see again, but it still cost lots of money and was only for billionaires. These were the gripping things Rachel heard, of course not all at once, as she sat and ate. When afterward she stepped out into the street, noth- ing of such monstrosities was to be seen: everything flowed on in its well-ordered way or stood there exactly as it had the day before; but was
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1687
not the air boiling in these summer days, was not the asphalt secretly yielding underfoot, without Rachel having to picture clearly that the sun had softened it? On the church roofs the saints stretched out their arms and lifted their eyes in a way that made one think that everywhere there must be something special to be seen. The policemen wiped away the sweat of their exertions in the midst of the commotion that roared around them. Vehicles going at high speed braked violently as an old lady crossing the street was almost run over because she was not paying attention to anything. When Rachel got back to her little room, she felt her curiosity sated by this light nourishment; she took out her undergar- ments to mend them, or altered a dress or read a novel-for with aston- ishment at the way the world was run, she had discovered the institution of the lending library-her landlady came in and chatted with her defer- entially, because Rachel had money without having to work and without one's being able to discern any misconduct; and so the day passed, with no time to miss anything in the least, and poured its contents, filled to the brim with exciting things, into the dreams of the night.
To be sure, Ulrich had forgotten to send money promptly, or to ask Rachel to come to him, and she had already begun to use up the small savings from her work. But she was not concerned, for Ulrich had prom- ised to protect her for the present, and to go to him to remind him seemed to her quite improper. In all the fairy tales she knew, there was something one was forbidden to say or do; and it would have been ex- actly that had she gone to Ulrich and told him she was out of money. This is not in any way to imply that she expressly thought that her man- ner oflife seemed like a fairy tale, or that she believed in fairy tales at all. On the contrary, that was the way the reality that she had never known differently was constituted, even if it had never been as beautiful as it was now. There are people to whom this is permitted, and people to whom it is forbidden; the ones sink from step to step and end in utter misery, while the others become rich and happy-and leave behind lots of children. Rachel had never been told to which of the two groups she belonged; she had never revealed to the two people who might have ex- plained the difference to her that she was dreaming, but had worked industriously, except for the two unintentional missteps that had had such serious consequences. And one day her landlady actually reported that while she was out to eat, a fine lady had asked for her and an- nounced that she would return in an hour. Anxiously, Rachel gave a de- scription of Diotima; but the lady who was looking for her was most decidedly not tall, the landlady asserted, and not stout either, not even if by stout one did not mean fat. The lady who was looking for Rachel was most decidedly, rather, to be called small and skinny.
1688 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
And indeed the lady was slender and small, and returned within a half hour. She said "Dear Fraulein" to Rachel, mentioned Ulrich's name, and pulled from her purse a tightly folded, rather considerable sum of money, which she gave to Rachel on behalf of their friend. Then she began to tell an involved and exciting story, and Rachel had never in her life been so enthralled by a conversation. There was a man, the lady said, who was being pursued by his enemies because he had nobly sacrificed himself for them. Really not nobly; for he had to do it, it was his inner law, every person has an animal which he inwardly resembles. -You, for example, Fraulein-the lady said-have either a gazelle or a queen snake in you-it can't always be determined at first glance.
If it had been the cook in Diotima's kitchen who had said that, it would have made either no impression on Rachel or an unfavorable one; but it was said by someone who with every word radiated the certainty of a well-bred lady, the gift: ofcommand that would make any doubt appear to be an offense against respect. It was therefore firmly established in Rachel's mind that there was some link between herself and a gazelle or a queen snake, a link that at the moment was over her head, but that could doubtless be explained in some fashion, for one sometimes does hear such things. Rachel felt herself ch_arged with this piece of news like a candy box one can't get open.
The man who had sacrificed himself, the lady continued, had within himself a bear, that is to say, the soul of a murderer, and that meant that he had taken murder upon himself, all murder: the murder of unborn and handicapped children, the cowardly murder that people commit against their talents, and murder on the street by vehicles, bicyclists, and trams. Clarisse asked Rachel-for of course it was Clarisse who was speaking-whether she had ever heard the name Moosbrugger. Now, Rachel had, although she later forgot him again, loved and feared Moos- brugger like a robber captain, at the time when he had horrified all the newspapers, and he had often been the topic of conversation at Di- otima's; so she asked right away whether it concerned him.
Clarisse nodded. - H e is innocent!
For the first time Rachel heard from an authority what she had earlier often thought herself.
- W e have freed him, Clarisse went on. - W e , the responsible peo- ple, who know more than the others do. But now we must hide him. Clarisse smiled, and so peculiarly and yet with such rapturous friendli- ness that Rachel's heart, intending to fall into her panties, got stuck on the way, somewhere in the neighborhood of her stomach. -Hide where? she stammered, pale.
- T h e police will be looking for him---Clarisse declared-so it has to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1689
be where no one would think of looking for him. The best thing would be ifyou would pretend he was your husband. He would have to wear a wooden leg, that's easy to pretend, or something, and you would get a little shop with living quarters attached, so it would look as ifyou were supporting your invalid husband who can't leave the house. The whole thing would be for only a few weeks, and I could offer you more money than you need.
- B u t why don't you take him in yourself? Rachel dared to counter.
-My husband isn't in on it and would never allow it, Clarisse an- swered, adding the lie that the proposal she had made came from Ul- rich.
-But I'm afraid ofhim! Rachel exclaimed.
-That's as it should be, Clarisse said. -But, my dear Fraulein, ev- erything great is terrible. Many great men have been in the insane asy- lum. It is uncanny to put oneself on a level with someone who is a murderer; but to put oneself on a level with the uncanny is to resolve to be great! '
-But does he want to? Rachel asked. -Does he know me? He won't do anything to me?
- H e knows that we want to save him. Look, his whole life he's known only substitute women; you understand what I mean. He'll be happy at having a real woman to protect him and take him in; and he won't lay a finger on you ifyou don't let him. I'll back you up on that all the way! He knows that I have the power to compel him, ifI want!
- N o , no! was all Rachel could get out; from everything Clarisse was saying she could hear only the shape of the voice and language, a friend- liness and a sisterly equality that she could not resist. A lady had never spoken to her this way, and yet there was nothing artificial or false in it; Clarisse's face was on a level with hers and not up in the air like Di- otima's; she saw her features working, especially two long furrows that constantly formed by the nose and ran down by the mouth; Clarisse was visibly struggling together with her for the solution.
-Consider, Fraulein- Clarisse went on to say-that he who recog- nizes must sacrifice himself. You recognized right away that Moosbrug- ger only appears to be a murderer. Therefore you must sacrifice yourself. You must draw what is murderous out of him, and then what's behind it, which corresponds to your own nature, will come out. For like is attracted only by like; that's the merciless law of greatness!
- B u t when will it be?
-Tomorrow. I'll come in the late afternoon and get you. By that time everything will be arranged.
- I f a third person could live with us, I'd do it, Rachel said.
16go • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
-I'll drop in every day-Clarisse said-and watch over things; the living arrangement is only for show. Then too, it wouldn't do to be un- grateful to Ulrich ifhe needs you to do him a favor.
That clinched the matter. Clarisse had confidently used his Christian name. It appeared to Rachel as though her cowardice were unworthy of her benefactor. The portrayal our inner being gives us of what we ought to do is extraordinarily deceitful and capricious. Suddenly the whole thing seemed to Rachel a joke, a game, a trifle. She would have a shop and a room; ifshe wanted, she could bar the door between them. Then too, there would be two exits, the way there are in rooms on the stage. The whole proposal was only a formality, and it was really exaggerated of her to make difficulties, even though she was horribly afraid of Moos- brugger. She had to get over this cowardice. And what had the lady said? What corresponds to your own nature will come out in him. If he really was not so fearsome, then she would have what she had earlier passion- ately wished for.
The shop and the adjoining room and the two exits came to nothing. Clarisse had appeared and declared that at the last minute the rent had posed an obstacle; since time was pressing, they had to take what was available, and fate perhaps depended on a matter of minutes. She had found another room. Had Rachel already packed up her things, and was she ready? The taxi was waiting downstairs. Unfortunately, it was not a nice room. And above all it was not yet furnished. But Clarisse had hast- ily had the most necessary items brought over. Now it was only a matter of getting Moosbrugger settled quickly. Everything else could be taken care of tomorrow. Today everything was only provisional. Clarisse re- ported the greater part of this when they were in the taxi. The words were dizzying. Rachel had no time to think. The taxi meter, half lit by a tiny light, advanced incessantly; with every revolution of the wheels Ra- chel heard the ticking of the meter, like a jug that has sprung a leak and drips unceasingly; in the darkness of the old cab Clarisse pressed a sum of money into her hand, and Rachel had to concentrate on stuffing it into her purse; in the process, the paper expanded, individual notes sailed away and had to be pursued and caught; laughing, Clarisse helped her find them, and this took up the rest of the long ride.
The taxi stopped in a remote alley in front of an old tumbledown "court," one of those deep plots of land where, from a narrow frontage on the alley, low wings run to the back, with workshops, stables, chick-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1691
ens, children, and the small dwellings of large families opening directly onto the courtyard or, one story higher, onto an open gallery connecting everything from the outside. Clarisse helped Rachel drag her things and seemed anxious to avoid the superintendent; they bumped into wagons standing in the dark, into tools that lay around everywhere, and into the well, but they arrived undamaged at Rachel's new dwelling. Clarisse had a candle in her pocket and with its aid found a large oil lamp she had remembered to sneak from her parents' attic. It was a tall piece worked in metal, incorporating all the latest advances the petroleum age had made just before it was irrevocably shunted aside by electrical illumina- tion, and it filled the entire room, because it lacked a shade, with moder- ate light. Clarisse was very proud of it, but she had to huny, since she had had the taxi wait at the next corner in order to fetch Moosbrugger.
As soon as she was alone and looked around in her new surroundings, tears filled Rachel's eyes. Except for the dirty walls, the thick white light of the lamp was almost the only thing in the room. But her fright had made Rachel misjudge; on closer inspection she found against one wall a narrow iron bed, on which there was something like bedclothes; in a corner, a pile of blankets was heaped up in disorder, no doubt meant to be the second sleeping place; blankets were also hanging in front of the windows and the door that led outside, and formed before a small and extremely plain table a kind of carpet, on which a roughly finished chair stood. Sighing, Rachel sat down on it and drew out her money in order to count and sort it. But now she again got a fright, this time over the size, indeed the excess, of the amount Clarisse, throwing caution to the winds, had thrust at her in the taxi. She smoothed the banknotes and concealed them in a small purse, which she wore on her breast. If she had known that she was sitting at the table at which Meingast had cre- ated his great work, and that the narrow iron bed had also been his, she might perhaps have understood a little more. But as it was, she simply sighed once more, already made easier about the future, and even dis- covered an old fireplace, a spirit stove, and odds and ends of dishes before Clarisse returned with Moosbrugger.
This moment was like the terrifying moment when one is called in by the dentist, which Rachel had experienced only once, and she stood up obediently as the two entered.
Moosbrugger allowed himself to be led into the room the way a great artist is introduced to a circle of people who have been waiting for him. He pretended not to notice Rachel, and first inspected the new room; only then, after he had found fault with nothing, did he direct his glance at the girl and nod byway of greeting. Clarisse seemed to have no more to say to him; she pushed him, her tiny hand against his gigantic arm,
1692 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
toward the table and merely smiled, the way a person does who during a risky enterprise has to tense every muscle and is meanwhile trying to smile, so that the delicate facial muscles have to pull themselves to- gether sharply in order to force their way between the pressure of all the other muscles. She maintained this expression while she placed a bag of groceries on the table and explained to the other two that she could not stay a minute longer but had to rush home. She promised to come back the next morning around ten and would then take care of anything else they might need.
So now Rachel was alone with the revered man. She covered the table with a pillowcase, since she could not find a tablecloth, and spread out on a large platter the cold cuts Clarisse had brought. These duties greatly eased her embarrassment. Then, placing the meal on the table, she said in carefully chosen German: "You will most certainly be hun- gry"; she had thought out this sentence ahead of time. Moosbrugger had stood up, and with a gallant gesture of his big paw offered her his place, for it turned out that there was only the one chair. - O h , no thank y o u - Rachel said-I don't want much; I'll sit over there. She took two slices from the platter Moosbrugger offered her and sat down on the bed.
Moosbrugger had taken a horrifying long folding knife from his pocket and used it while eating. In the days of his flight he had eaten irregularly and badly, and had developed a great hunger. Rachel took advantage of the opportunity to study him; more properly, she had to, for as soon as she turned in the direction of the table, this man com- pletely filled her field of vision; more, his appearance overflowed her eyes, spilling over their rims in every direction, and Rachel could not properly let her glance roam around; it was, for instance, quite a long distance across the whole extent of his chest, or from the edge of the table to his thick mustache, and also from his chin to the top of his pow- erful skull, and one could linger in the reddish-blond hairs of his mighty fists as in underbrush. In the meantime, all the ideas and some of the fantasies ofwhich Moosbrugger had once been the object came back to Rachel. Above all, she sought to bring to mind how many women would envy the situation in which she found herself. For her, Moosbrugger was a great and famous man, which corresponded to the truth if one leaves aside the different degrees of public notoriety that are made but are by no means clear or precise. She did not at all overlook the fearfulness of the notoriety, which had been acquired by cruel, indeed even treacher- ous deeds, for she was trembling with fear, although she was also burn- ing with excitement. But like all people, she admired the energy in this cruelty, and like all impulsive people she assumed that in contact with
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1693
her, this herculean strength would not be dangerous but could be turned toward the good, so that her fear seemed to her only a petty ex- ternal habit, while her soul became braver and braver the longer she was together with Moosbrugger. And indeed, whoever lives in the proper relation to criminals lives as securely among them as among other people.
Moosbrugger had not found it proper to be bothered by the girl's glances during such an important an occasion as eating. But when he had finished he leaned back, snapped his knife shut, stroked the crumbs from his mustache, and said: -Well, little Fraulein, now a glass of schnapps wouldn't b e -
Rachel hastened to assure him that there were no alcoholic drinks in the house, adding the lie that Clarisse had charged her not to provide any.
Moosbrugger hadn't meant it that seriously. He was not a drinker, in- deed he himself took care not to drink, out of fear of its unpredictable effects. But he hadn't seen a drop for months, and after the substantial meal had thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to try one on this dull eve- ning. He was angry at her refusal. These women had him really locked up. But he did not show it, and undertook to canyon the conversation in the most civilized manner.
-So here we are, man and wife, in a way, for the time being, little Fraulein, he began. -What should I call you? He used the natural Du of simple people; Rachel did not find this unpleasant, but just as natu- rally she stayed with the formal Sie. -My name is Rachel or R~le, whichever you like.
-Oo-la-la, R~le, my compliments! He pronounced the French name twice over, with pleasure. -And Rachel was the loveliest daughter of Laban. He laughed gallantly.
-T ell me how you beat the masons! Rachel asked.
She dared not ask about anything more exciting.
Moosbrugger turned away and rolled a cigarette. He was insulted. In his circles such a question was regarded as an unwarranted intimacy after so short an acquaintance. He smoked several cigarettes in succes- sion. He was bored. Insignificant, importunate women meant nothing to him. He became sleepy. In prison and the asylum he had become accus- tomed to going to bed early.
Rachel was upset that he was smoking so inconsiderately. She also had the feeling of having done something wrong, without knowing what.
Moosbrugger stood up, stretched his legs, and yawned. - D o you want to go to sleep? Rachel asked.
1694 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
-W hat else is there to do? Moosbrugger said. He inspected the bed; then, remembering the commandments of chivahy, turned to the comer where the bedding lay.
-Sleep in the bed; you need rest, Rachel said.
-No, you can sleep in the bed. Indolently, he removed his coat. Ra- chel was embarrassed when Moosbrugger took offhis pants. But then he lay down on the blankets as he was, and pulled one of them over himself. Rachel waited awhile, then blew out the lamp and undressed in the dark.
During the night she again grew afraid; she imagined that if she were to fall asleep it might happen that she would never wake up again. But soon she did sleep, and when she awoke, morning was shining into the room. Moosbrugger lay covered up in the comer like a huge mountain. Everything was still quiet in the house. Rachel took advantage of it to fetch water from the well. She also cleaned her shoes and Moosbrug- ger's out in the courtyard. When she softly slipped in the door again, Moosbrugger said good morning to her.
-W ould you like coffee, tea, or hot chocolate? she asked him. Moos- brugger was astonished. He said coffee, but did not find the decision an easy one. Then too, he liked Rachel better in the daylight than he had last evening; there was something delicate and refined in her appear- ance. He took care getting dressed, and turned away from the wall only when he was finished.
- W e r e you angry at me last evening? Rachel asked, noticing his good humor.
-Oh, women always want to know everything, but ifyou like I'll tell you the story about the masons. That will show you what people are like; they're all the same. And what have you been doing up to now?
- I was in a very elegant house, where I was treated like a daughter. -W ell, and what got you turned out? ·
- O h ! said Rachel, not at all resolved to tell the truth. - Y o u know,
the master in this house is a very high diplomat, and there was this busi- ness with a Moorish prince-
- A r e you pregnant? Moosbrugger asked suspiciously.
-For shame! Rachel exclaimed indignantly. -You're taking too many liberties in speaking to me that way! Would the lady have en- trusted you to me?
Moosbrugger definitely liked her. She was something finer, you could see and hear that. When he thought over the females he knew, he had never had anything so fine. -W ell, all right, he said. - I didn't mean to insult you. The story with the masons went like this:
He told it minutely and with dignity, together with all the scheming
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1695
and corruption that a man like himselfencounters before the court, and because she had mentioned an acquaintance with a Moorish prince, he felt he had to match it, so he also told her about his march to Constanti- nople.
- D o the Turks have more than one wife? Rachel asked.
-Only the rich ones. But that's why the Turks aren't worth anything, he answered with a gallant smile. -Even one wife will ruin a man!
-Have you had bad experiences with women? Rachel asked, her blood twitching in circles like the tail of a cat lying in ambush.
Moosbrugger looked at her inquiringly, and became serious. -A ll my life I've had only bad experiences. If I were to write down my life, a lot of people would be surprised!
- Y o u ought to! Rachel proposed enthusiastically.
-Writing is much too uncomfortable for me! Moosbrugger said proudly, and stretched his shoulders. -But you're an educated girl. Perhaps I'll tell you something. Then you can write it.
-I've neverwritten a book, Rachel replied modestly; but she felt as if she had been offered Section ChiefTuzzi's job. And this man before her was no idle gossip; he had shown that he could put meaning into his words.
Thus the time passed in animated conversation, and it got to be ten o'clock, but Clarisse did not appear.
Moosbrugger pulled his large, fat, chrome-plated watch from his vest and determined that it was ten thirty-five.
When they next looked, it was seven minutes before eleven.
-She's not coming; I thought as much, Moosbrugger said.
- B u t she has to come! Rachel said.
The conversation ran down. They had got up early and had not left the
room. Being cooped up made them tired. Moosbrugger stood and stretched. Rachel finally declared herself ready to go and get something to eat without waiting any longer. But first Moosbrugger had to put on the green eyeshade and strap on the wooden leg, in case during Rachel's absence a stranger should come in; wooden leg and eyeshade were a legacy of Clarisse's. It was no simple matter to get his leg, which was bent back to the thigh and on whose knee the wooden leg was strapped, through a pant leg; Moosbrugger had to place his arm around Rachel's neck, and he took the opportunity to draw her gently toward himself.
He hobbled around the room alone for more than a quarter of an hour; it was nauseatingly tedious; then Rachel cooked, but she did not know much about cooking, and the meal was not exactly cheerful. Grad- ually, Moosbrugger became fed up with this seclusion, but realized that it would be a long time before he could give it up. He wanted to sleep a
1696 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
bit to make the time pass, yawned like a lion, and sat on the bed to un- buckle the damn leg, which was driving the blood to his head. Rachel had to help him. And as he again laid his arm around her shoulder, he thought that after all she really was his wife for the time being. Surely she had never expected anything else of him and had made fun of him yesterday when he went straight off to sleep. As the wooden leg fell to the ground, with the arm that was around her shoulder he pulled Rachel back on the bed and drew her up on it a little, until her head rested on a pillow. Rachel did not resist. His large mustache descended on her mouth. But her small mouth came to meet it. Went into this mustache as into a forest, as it were, and sought the mouth in it. When the man pushed himself up on her, Rachel lay with her face almost under his chest and had to move her head to one side in order to be able to breathe; it seemed to her as if she were being buried by soil that was trembling volcanically. The really great bodily arousals are brought about by the imagination; Rachel saw in Moosbrugger not a hero with- out his peer on earth-for comparison and reflection would then have killed the power of imagination-but simply a hero, a notion that is less definite but blends with the time and place in which it appears and with the person who arouses admiration. Where there are heroes the world is still soft and glowing, and the web of creation unbroken. The adventur- ous room with the covered windows suddenly took on the appearance of the cave of a big robber who has withdrawn from the world. Rachel felt her breast lying under an enormous pressure; the scurrying quality that was part of her nature was pinned down for the moment by an overpow- ering force and compelled to be patient; her upper body could move as little as ifit had fallen under the iron wheels of a truck, and this position would have been torture had not all the spontaneity and independence of which her body was capable gathered in her hips, where a giant was struggling with clouds and which despite their helplessness were em- bracing him again and again, and were just as strong in their way as he was in his. A desire such as Rachel had never felt in her life, indeed had never suspected, pressed upon her mind and from there opened up her entire person: she wanted to conceive and bear a hero. Her lips re- mained open in astonishment, her limbs lay where they were when Moosbrugger got up, and her eyes remained for a long time misted over with a bluish-yellow mist, the way chanterelles do when one breaks them. She did not get up until it was time to light the lamp and think of the evening meal; till then she had waited, with a kind of emptiness of mind, for a continuation that she was not able to picture to herself but did not think of at all as simply a repetition.
For Moosbrugger, the matter was finished until further notice. Peo-
From the Posthumnus Papers · 1697
ple who on occasion commit sexual crimes are, as one knows, ordinarily anything but flamboyant lovers, since their crimes, to the extent that they do not spring from external influences, express nothing but the ir- regularity of their desire. Moosbrugger felt nothing more than boredom while Rachel lay demolished on the bed. So what had given their being together a certain tension was now, in his opinion, over and done with before one had thought of it.
Clarisse did not come; she did not come the next day either; she did not come at all.
Moosbrugger smoked cigarettes and yawned. Several times Rachel put her hand around his neck and her hand in his hair; he shook her off. He pulled her onto his lap, and then immediately set her on her feet again because he had changed his mind. What he felt beside boredom was that he had been insulted. These women had fetched him out of school like a boy and taken him home; he had sometimes observed this picture and thought that such sonny boys could never develop into real men. But he realized that for the time being he had to go along with it; he did not dare venture out on the street as long as the zeal of the police was still fresh, and to visit Biziste or other friends would not be a good idea at all. He had Rachel bring him the newspapers and looked for what was being said about him; but this time he was not at all pleased with his press: the papers dismissed his escape in three to five lines. He knew that Rachel was just as downcast as he was at Clarisse's not showing up; but he still laid on her the resentment that was building in him, even if he did not regard Rachel as its cause, since she was Clarisse's represent- ative. Rachel committed the error of continuing to refuse to provide al- cohol, though ifshe had done so, that would have been a mistake as well.
Moosbrugger was silent after such refusals, but the insults to which he was exposed formed, together with the stale boredom and his longing for a tavern, a tangle of revulsion whose spindle was the skinny girl who moved around him the entire day. He spoke only when he had to and disregarded all Rachel's attempts to bring the conversation back to the level of the first morning. Tortured in addition by her own cares, Rachel was very unhappy.
A few days later they had their first scene. After supper and a period ofyawning, Moosbrugger pulled over the little purse from which Rachel paid for their daily needs, and tried to fish out a coin with his thick fin- gers. Rachel, who immediately saw what he was up to, could not get her purse away from him in time; she ran around the table and fell on his arm. -No! she exclaimed. -You mustn't go to the tavern! You'll be- But she did not get to finish her sentence, for Moosbrugger's arm shoved her away so violently that she lost her balance and had to make
1698 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
strenuous efforts not to fall. Moosbrugger put on his hat and left the room, as unapproachable as a huge stone figure.
In desperation, Rachel thought over what she should do. She decided to do battle against Moosbrugger's indiscretion. She reproached herself with letting herselfbe frightened by the change in his behavior, which in the loneliness of reflection seemed to her understandable. As the weaker person, it was easy for her to be the cleverer, but she had to bend every effort to make clear to him that in this case she really was more clever; and if he saw that, then he might possibly accommodate himself to his situation; for Rachel understood quite well that it was no situation for a hero to be in. But when Moosbrugger came home he was drunk. The room filled with a bad smell, his shadow danced on the walls, Ra- chel was dispirited, and her words chased after this shadow with sharp reproaches she did not intend. Moosbrugger had landed on the bed and wasbeckoningherwithhisfinger. -No,neveragain! Rachelscreamed. Moosbrugger pulled from his pocket a bottle he had brought along. He had left the tavern at eleven, only one third filled with schnapps; the second third was filled with a bad conscience, and the third third with anger at having left. Rachel committed the strategic error of rushing at him in order to tear the bottle away. The next moment, she thought her head was bursting; the lamp revolved, and her body lost all connection to the world; Moosbrugger had warded off her attack with a powerful slap of his paw to her face, and when Rachel came to, she was lying far away from him on the floor; something was dripping out between her teeth, and her upper lip and nose seemed to have grown painfully to- gether. She saw how Moosbrugger was still staring at the bottle, which he then rudely smashed on the floor; after which he stood up and blew out the lamp.
Whether deliberately or merely in his stupor, Moosbrugger had taken the bed, and Rachel crept weeping onto the pile of blankets, near which she had fallen. The pain in her face and body did not let her sleep, but she did not dare light the lamp to make poultices for herself. She was cold, humiliation filled her mind with a hazy restlessness that closely re- sembled feverish fantasies, and the spilled schnapps covered the floor with a nauseating, paralyzing haze. All night she thought over as well as she could what had to be done. She had to find Clarisse, but she had no idea where Clarisse lived. She wanted to run away, but then she told herself that she would be betraying Clarisse's confidence if she left Moosbrugger in the lurch before Clarisse returned; she had taken money for this. It also occurred to her that she could go find Ulrich, but she was ashamed and put that off for later. She had never been beaten before, but aside from the pain it wasn't so bad; it simply expressed the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1699
fact that she was weaker than this giant whom she loved, that her entrea- ties did not penetrate to his ear, and that she had to be circumspect; he did not mean to harm her, she realized that quite well, and the most unpleasant thing remained the fear that her chastisement would be re- peated, an idea that robbed her breast of courage and made her totally miserable.
So day came before she reached any conclusions. Moosbrugger got up, and stumbling with inner emptiness, she had to follow his example. A glance in the mirror showed that her nose and mouth were badly swol- len in a discolored, greenish-yellow, half-extinguished face; the magic of this night had made Rachel ugly and unprepossessing. Neither she nor Moosbrugger said anything. Moosbrugger had a fuzzy head; in his sleep he had smelled the schnapps and woken up with the feeling of not hav- ing drunk enough. When he saw Rachel's swollen face, he had an inkling of what had happened the day before; a dim recollection that she had provoked him kept him from asking her about it. But he really would have liked to ask her; he just did not know how to go about it. And Ra- chel waited for a kind word from him the way any girl in love waits; when he let himself be served in silence, she became more and more sulky. Moosbrugger would have liked most of all to go straight back to the bar, but he was afraid of this girl, who would again make a scene, and he could not go on beating her every time. Her eyes, swollen with weeping, repelled him even more than her swollen mouth, which was visible every time she moistened the cloth she was holding to it. It was indeed his fault, he said to himself, what's right is right, but to have this around first thing in the morning was too much. Rachel's tender back and her slen- der arms, which she exposed as she washed, the devil take them, he didn't like them, they looked like chicken bones.
He summed it all up by finding himself in a really stupid situation that he had to stick out as honorably as he could. In the evenings he went to the tavern; he had made up his mind to risk it in this part of town where no one knew him, and Rachel no longer dared to refuse him the money or reproach him for it. Not even when he began to play cards and needed more. There was pretty good company in the bar; in this way, Moosbrugger thought, you can stick it out if you sleep a lot during the day. But Rachel did not sleep during the day, and bothered him like a bat. A few times he caught her in his arms. A few times, too, he made an attempt to begin a better life and to talk with her as the little Fraulein whom she indeed was. But then it came out that Rachel could do no more. She answered evasively and monosyllabically. Whenever Moos- brugger opened his mouth she froze, without meaning to, for she would have liked to talk with him; but he had poured something alien into her,
1700 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
violence, an<l the well that is the source of everything worth saying had frozen over. So there remained nothing for Moosbrugger to do but turn to the wall.
But there was one occasion when she always spoke up, and that was when Moosbrugger returned from the tavern. Ifhe was not drunk he did not respond, or merely growled incomprehensible answers, and Rachel pursued him into sleep with reproaches about his heedlessness. He had beaten her in the tension, the very unpleasant tension, that ruled in him as long as he had been tempted to leave the house but could not make up his mind to do so; now that this was no longer a problem, he was tender and well-mannered, and Rachel, sensing that she was not in any danger, became bolder and bolder. He stayed out longer from one day to the next, in the hope of returning only after she had gone to sleep. But Rachel had developed a strange habit of sleeping. When he left the house after dark she instantly fell asleep, and when he returned she woke up, and with an assurance as ifit were only the continuation ofher dream, she began to quarrel with him. Her poor soul, condemned to be unable to resolve her situation through reflection and thought, allowed itself to be borne upward by the drunken powers of sleep.
-Such a scrawny little chicken! Moosbrugger thought about her, and the insult that such a meager chicken was allowed to scratch around him, day in, day out, gnawed at him. But Rachel, as if she knew what he thought about her without his having said it aloud, and in almost tele- pathic (somnambulent) concord with the silent man who groped his way through the room in the night, felt an obsessive desire to cackle and argue. And when Moosbrugger came home drunk, which was not ex- actly seldom, his stumbling and tottering was like a large ship dancing on the same waves as the girl's small, excited sentences. And if one of these sentences struck too close to home, the powerfully drunken Christian Moosbrugger grabbed at her. As mentioned, it was never again the im- pulsive rage it had been the first time, when he had nearly crushed Ra- chel with a sweep of his hand, but he wanted to make this screeching, rebellious child shut up, and with cautiously measured force, the way a drunk carefully calculates his step over the curb, he let his hand fall on her. When Rachel was beaten she became still for a moment. A bound- less astonishment came over her, as at a totally unexpected, conclusive answer. Since leaving her parents' house she had not been religious; the way she had grown up, she thought religion was something for coarse people: but if Elohim, or better yet an evil spirit, had suddenly sat on a bench in the park among the dressed-up people, that was exactly how it seemed to her when she was beaten. She was drawn to observe this evil spirit closely once more and sought to set it in motion. Then she would
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 0 1
open her mouth again and say something about which she knew just as surely that it would irritate Moosbrugger as that if he would follow it it would be what he needed for his salvation. Then Moosbrugger would hit her with the back of his hand, or shove her to the wall. And Rachel, although again astonished, would find another expression, as sharp and penetrating as a knitting needle. And then of course Moosbrugger would have to increase the size of his gift. This giant, not wanting to kill her, beats her wildly on her back, her buttocks, tears her shift, throws her by the hair to the ground, or with a kick sends her flying into the comer; but he does all this with as much care in his wildness as his drunken condition permits, so that no bones will be broken. Rachel is amazed at the evil spirit of force and brutality that demolishes all words.
"She claims I murdered him! But they had broken up definitively well
before! "
RACHEL
And while Ulrich was letting the notion of remorse surface in his re- flections, in order to dissolve it immediately again in the deep play of thought, his little friend Rachel was suffering this word in all its tor- tures, dissolved by nothing but the palliative effect of tears and the cautious return of temptation after the remorse had gone on for a while. One will recall that Diotima's intense little maid, ejected from her parents' house because of a misstep, who had landed in the golden aura of virtue surrounding her mistress, had, in the weakest of a series of increasingly weak moments, submitted to the attacks of the black Moorish boy. It happened and made her very unhappy. But this un- happiness aspired to repeat itself as often as the scanty opportunities that Diotima's house offered would allow. On the second or third day after every unhappiness a remarkable change occurred, which can be compared to a flower that, bent over by the rain, raises its little head again. Can be compared to fine weather that, way up above, peeks from a remote corner of the sky through a rainy day; finds friendly lit- tle spots of blue; forms a blue lake; becomes a blue sky; is veiled by a light haze of the overwhelming brightness of a day of happiness; is tinged with brown; lets down one hot veil of haze after another and fi- nally towers, torrid and trembling, from earth to sky, filled with the zigzags and cries of birds, filled with the listless droop of tree and leaf, filled with the craziness of not-yet-discharged tensions that cause man and beast to roam madly about.
On the last day before the remorse, the head of the Moor always twitched through the house like a rolling head of cabbage, and little Ra- chel would have loved to creep on it like a caterpillar with a sweet tooth. But then remorse set in. As if a pistol had been fired and a shimmering glass ball been turned into a powder of glassy sand. Rachel felt sand be- tween her teeth, in her nose, her heart; nothing but sand. The world was dark; not dark like a Moor, but nauseatingly dark, like a pigsty. Rachel, having disappointed the confidence placed in her, seemed to herself be- smirched through and through. Grief placed a deep drill in the vicinity of her navel. A raging fear of being pregnant blinded her thoughts. One
From the Posthumous Papers · 1685
could go on in this fashion-every limb in Rachel ached individually with remorse-but the main thing was not in these details but seized hold ofthe whole person, driving her before the wind like a cloud ofdust raised by a broom. The knowledge that a misstep that has happened can- not be rectified by anything in the world made the world something of a hurricane in which one can find no support to stand up. The peaceful- ness of death seemed to Rachel like a dark feather bed, which it must be delightful to roll on. She had been torn out ofher world, abandoned to a feeling whose intensity was unlike anything in Diotima's house. She could not get at this feeling with an idea, any more than comfortings can get at a toothache, while it actually seemed to her, on the other hand, that there was only one remedy, to pull little Rachel entirely out of the world like a bad tooth.
Had she been cleverer, she would have been able to assert that re- morse is a basic disturbance of equilibrium, which one can restore in the most various ways. But God helped her out with his old, proven home remedy by again giving her, after a few days, the desire to sin.
We, however, cannot of course be as indulgent as the great Lord, to whom earthly matters offer little that is new or important. We must ask whether in a condition in which there is no sin there can be any remorse. And since this question has already been answered in the negative, ex- cept for a few borderline cases, a second question immediately arises: from which ocean did the little drop of hell's fire fall into Rachel's heart, ifit may not be said to have originated in the ocean whose clouds Ulrich had discovered? Every such question was suited to plunge Ulrich out of the sky on which he wanted to set foot purely theoretically. There are so many lovelythings on earth that have nothing to do with divine, seraphic love, and most decidedly there are among them things that forbid any- thing and everything to be expected from their rediscovery. This ques- tion was later to be of the greatest significance for Ulrich and Agathe.
LATE 1920S
The weeks since Rachel had left Diotima's house had passed with an improbability that a different person would hardly have accepted calmly. But Rachel had been shown the door of her parents' house as a sinner, and at the conclusion ofthat fall had landed, straight as an arrow, in paradise, at Diotima's; now Diotima had thrown her out, but such an enchantingly refined man as Ulrich had been standing there and had
1686 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
caught her: how could she not believe that life is the way it is described in the novels she loved to read? Whoever is destined to be a hero fate throws into the air in daredevil ways over and over, but it always catches him again in its strong arms. Rachel placed blind confidence in fate, and during this entire time had really done nothing but wait for its next inter- vention, when it might perhaps unveil its intentions. She had not become pregnant; so the experience with Soliman seemed to have been only a passing incident. She ate in a small pub, together with coachmen, out-of-work servant girls, workers who had business in the neighbor- hood, and those undefinable transients who flood a large city. The place she had chosen for herself, at a specific table, was reserved for her every day; she wore better clothes than the other women who frequented the pub; the way she used her knife and fork was different from what one was accustomed to seeing here; in this place Rachel enjoyed a secret respect, which she was acutely aware of even though not many people wanted to show it, and she assumed that she was taken for a countess or the mistress of a prince, who for some reason was compelled for a time to conceal her class. It happened that men with dubious diamonds on their fingers and with slicked-down hair, who sometimes turned up among the respectable guests, arranged to sit at Rachel's table and di- rected seductively sinuous compliments to her; but Rachel knew how to refuse these with dignity and without unfriendliness, for although the compliments pleased her as much as the buzzing and creeping ofinsects and caterpillars and snakes on a luxuriant summer day, she still sensed that she could not let herselfgo in this direction without running the risk of losing her freedom. She most liked to converse with older people, who knew something of life and told stories of its dangers, disappoint- ments, and events. In this way she picked up knowledge that, broken into crumbs, came to her the way food sinks down to a fish lying quietly at the bottom ofits tank. Adventurous things were going on in the world. People were now said to be flying faster than birds. Building houses en- tirelywithout bricks. The anarchists wanted to assassinate the Emperor. A great revolution was imminent, and then the coachmen would sit in- side the coaches and the rich people would be in harness, instead of the horses. In a tenement block in the vicinity, a woman had, in the night, poured petroleum on her husband and lit him; it was unimaginable! In America, blind people were given glass eyes with which they could really see again, but it still cost lots of money and was only for billionaires. These were the gripping things Rachel heard, of course not all at once, as she sat and ate. When afterward she stepped out into the street, noth- ing of such monstrosities was to be seen: everything flowed on in its well-ordered way or stood there exactly as it had the day before; but was
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1687
not the air boiling in these summer days, was not the asphalt secretly yielding underfoot, without Rachel having to picture clearly that the sun had softened it? On the church roofs the saints stretched out their arms and lifted their eyes in a way that made one think that everywhere there must be something special to be seen. The policemen wiped away the sweat of their exertions in the midst of the commotion that roared around them. Vehicles going at high speed braked violently as an old lady crossing the street was almost run over because she was not paying attention to anything. When Rachel got back to her little room, she felt her curiosity sated by this light nourishment; she took out her undergar- ments to mend them, or altered a dress or read a novel-for with aston- ishment at the way the world was run, she had discovered the institution of the lending library-her landlady came in and chatted with her defer- entially, because Rachel had money without having to work and without one's being able to discern any misconduct; and so the day passed, with no time to miss anything in the least, and poured its contents, filled to the brim with exciting things, into the dreams of the night.
To be sure, Ulrich had forgotten to send money promptly, or to ask Rachel to come to him, and she had already begun to use up the small savings from her work. But she was not concerned, for Ulrich had prom- ised to protect her for the present, and to go to him to remind him seemed to her quite improper. In all the fairy tales she knew, there was something one was forbidden to say or do; and it would have been ex- actly that had she gone to Ulrich and told him she was out of money. This is not in any way to imply that she expressly thought that her man- ner oflife seemed like a fairy tale, or that she believed in fairy tales at all. On the contrary, that was the way the reality that she had never known differently was constituted, even if it had never been as beautiful as it was now. There are people to whom this is permitted, and people to whom it is forbidden; the ones sink from step to step and end in utter misery, while the others become rich and happy-and leave behind lots of children. Rachel had never been told to which of the two groups she belonged; she had never revealed to the two people who might have ex- plained the difference to her that she was dreaming, but had worked industriously, except for the two unintentional missteps that had had such serious consequences. And one day her landlady actually reported that while she was out to eat, a fine lady had asked for her and an- nounced that she would return in an hour. Anxiously, Rachel gave a de- scription of Diotima; but the lady who was looking for her was most decidedly not tall, the landlady asserted, and not stout either, not even if by stout one did not mean fat. The lady who was looking for Rachel was most decidedly, rather, to be called small and skinny.
1688 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
And indeed the lady was slender and small, and returned within a half hour. She said "Dear Fraulein" to Rachel, mentioned Ulrich's name, and pulled from her purse a tightly folded, rather considerable sum of money, which she gave to Rachel on behalf of their friend. Then she began to tell an involved and exciting story, and Rachel had never in her life been so enthralled by a conversation. There was a man, the lady said, who was being pursued by his enemies because he had nobly sacrificed himself for them. Really not nobly; for he had to do it, it was his inner law, every person has an animal which he inwardly resembles. -You, for example, Fraulein-the lady said-have either a gazelle or a queen snake in you-it can't always be determined at first glance.
If it had been the cook in Diotima's kitchen who had said that, it would have made either no impression on Rachel or an unfavorable one; but it was said by someone who with every word radiated the certainty of a well-bred lady, the gift: ofcommand that would make any doubt appear to be an offense against respect. It was therefore firmly established in Rachel's mind that there was some link between herself and a gazelle or a queen snake, a link that at the moment was over her head, but that could doubtless be explained in some fashion, for one sometimes does hear such things. Rachel felt herself ch_arged with this piece of news like a candy box one can't get open.
The man who had sacrificed himself, the lady continued, had within himself a bear, that is to say, the soul of a murderer, and that meant that he had taken murder upon himself, all murder: the murder of unborn and handicapped children, the cowardly murder that people commit against their talents, and murder on the street by vehicles, bicyclists, and trams. Clarisse asked Rachel-for of course it was Clarisse who was speaking-whether she had ever heard the name Moosbrugger. Now, Rachel had, although she later forgot him again, loved and feared Moos- brugger like a robber captain, at the time when he had horrified all the newspapers, and he had often been the topic of conversation at Di- otima's; so she asked right away whether it concerned him.
Clarisse nodded. - H e is innocent!
For the first time Rachel heard from an authority what she had earlier often thought herself.
- W e have freed him, Clarisse went on. - W e , the responsible peo- ple, who know more than the others do. But now we must hide him. Clarisse smiled, and so peculiarly and yet with such rapturous friendli- ness that Rachel's heart, intending to fall into her panties, got stuck on the way, somewhere in the neighborhood of her stomach. -Hide where? she stammered, pale.
- T h e police will be looking for him---Clarisse declared-so it has to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1689
be where no one would think of looking for him. The best thing would be ifyou would pretend he was your husband. He would have to wear a wooden leg, that's easy to pretend, or something, and you would get a little shop with living quarters attached, so it would look as ifyou were supporting your invalid husband who can't leave the house. The whole thing would be for only a few weeks, and I could offer you more money than you need.
- B u t why don't you take him in yourself? Rachel dared to counter.
-My husband isn't in on it and would never allow it, Clarisse an- swered, adding the lie that the proposal she had made came from Ul- rich.
-But I'm afraid ofhim! Rachel exclaimed.
-That's as it should be, Clarisse said. -But, my dear Fraulein, ev- erything great is terrible. Many great men have been in the insane asy- lum. It is uncanny to put oneself on a level with someone who is a murderer; but to put oneself on a level with the uncanny is to resolve to be great! '
-But does he want to? Rachel asked. -Does he know me? He won't do anything to me?
- H e knows that we want to save him. Look, his whole life he's known only substitute women; you understand what I mean. He'll be happy at having a real woman to protect him and take him in; and he won't lay a finger on you ifyou don't let him. I'll back you up on that all the way! He knows that I have the power to compel him, ifI want!
- N o , no! was all Rachel could get out; from everything Clarisse was saying she could hear only the shape of the voice and language, a friend- liness and a sisterly equality that she could not resist. A lady had never spoken to her this way, and yet there was nothing artificial or false in it; Clarisse's face was on a level with hers and not up in the air like Di- otima's; she saw her features working, especially two long furrows that constantly formed by the nose and ran down by the mouth; Clarisse was visibly struggling together with her for the solution.
-Consider, Fraulein- Clarisse went on to say-that he who recog- nizes must sacrifice himself. You recognized right away that Moosbrug- ger only appears to be a murderer. Therefore you must sacrifice yourself. You must draw what is murderous out of him, and then what's behind it, which corresponds to your own nature, will come out. For like is attracted only by like; that's the merciless law of greatness!
- B u t when will it be?
-Tomorrow. I'll come in the late afternoon and get you. By that time everything will be arranged.
- I f a third person could live with us, I'd do it, Rachel said.
16go • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
-I'll drop in every day-Clarisse said-and watch over things; the living arrangement is only for show. Then too, it wouldn't do to be un- grateful to Ulrich ifhe needs you to do him a favor.
That clinched the matter. Clarisse had confidently used his Christian name. It appeared to Rachel as though her cowardice were unworthy of her benefactor. The portrayal our inner being gives us of what we ought to do is extraordinarily deceitful and capricious. Suddenly the whole thing seemed to Rachel a joke, a game, a trifle. She would have a shop and a room; ifshe wanted, she could bar the door between them. Then too, there would be two exits, the way there are in rooms on the stage. The whole proposal was only a formality, and it was really exaggerated of her to make difficulties, even though she was horribly afraid of Moos- brugger. She had to get over this cowardice. And what had the lady said? What corresponds to your own nature will come out in him. If he really was not so fearsome, then she would have what she had earlier passion- ately wished for.
The shop and the adjoining room and the two exits came to nothing. Clarisse had appeared and declared that at the last minute the rent had posed an obstacle; since time was pressing, they had to take what was available, and fate perhaps depended on a matter of minutes. She had found another room. Had Rachel already packed up her things, and was she ready? The taxi was waiting downstairs. Unfortunately, it was not a nice room. And above all it was not yet furnished. But Clarisse had hast- ily had the most necessary items brought over. Now it was only a matter of getting Moosbrugger settled quickly. Everything else could be taken care of tomorrow. Today everything was only provisional. Clarisse re- ported the greater part of this when they were in the taxi. The words were dizzying. Rachel had no time to think. The taxi meter, half lit by a tiny light, advanced incessantly; with every revolution of the wheels Ra- chel heard the ticking of the meter, like a jug that has sprung a leak and drips unceasingly; in the darkness of the old cab Clarisse pressed a sum of money into her hand, and Rachel had to concentrate on stuffing it into her purse; in the process, the paper expanded, individual notes sailed away and had to be pursued and caught; laughing, Clarisse helped her find them, and this took up the rest of the long ride.
The taxi stopped in a remote alley in front of an old tumbledown "court," one of those deep plots of land where, from a narrow frontage on the alley, low wings run to the back, with workshops, stables, chick-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1691
ens, children, and the small dwellings of large families opening directly onto the courtyard or, one story higher, onto an open gallery connecting everything from the outside. Clarisse helped Rachel drag her things and seemed anxious to avoid the superintendent; they bumped into wagons standing in the dark, into tools that lay around everywhere, and into the well, but they arrived undamaged at Rachel's new dwelling. Clarisse had a candle in her pocket and with its aid found a large oil lamp she had remembered to sneak from her parents' attic. It was a tall piece worked in metal, incorporating all the latest advances the petroleum age had made just before it was irrevocably shunted aside by electrical illumina- tion, and it filled the entire room, because it lacked a shade, with moder- ate light. Clarisse was very proud of it, but she had to huny, since she had had the taxi wait at the next corner in order to fetch Moosbrugger.
As soon as she was alone and looked around in her new surroundings, tears filled Rachel's eyes. Except for the dirty walls, the thick white light of the lamp was almost the only thing in the room. But her fright had made Rachel misjudge; on closer inspection she found against one wall a narrow iron bed, on which there was something like bedclothes; in a corner, a pile of blankets was heaped up in disorder, no doubt meant to be the second sleeping place; blankets were also hanging in front of the windows and the door that led outside, and formed before a small and extremely plain table a kind of carpet, on which a roughly finished chair stood. Sighing, Rachel sat down on it and drew out her money in order to count and sort it. But now she again got a fright, this time over the size, indeed the excess, of the amount Clarisse, throwing caution to the winds, had thrust at her in the taxi. She smoothed the banknotes and concealed them in a small purse, which she wore on her breast. If she had known that she was sitting at the table at which Meingast had cre- ated his great work, and that the narrow iron bed had also been his, she might perhaps have understood a little more. But as it was, she simply sighed once more, already made easier about the future, and even dis- covered an old fireplace, a spirit stove, and odds and ends of dishes before Clarisse returned with Moosbrugger.
This moment was like the terrifying moment when one is called in by the dentist, which Rachel had experienced only once, and she stood up obediently as the two entered.
Moosbrugger allowed himself to be led into the room the way a great artist is introduced to a circle of people who have been waiting for him. He pretended not to notice Rachel, and first inspected the new room; only then, after he had found fault with nothing, did he direct his glance at the girl and nod byway of greeting. Clarisse seemed to have no more to say to him; she pushed him, her tiny hand against his gigantic arm,
1692 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
toward the table and merely smiled, the way a person does who during a risky enterprise has to tense every muscle and is meanwhile trying to smile, so that the delicate facial muscles have to pull themselves to- gether sharply in order to force their way between the pressure of all the other muscles. She maintained this expression while she placed a bag of groceries on the table and explained to the other two that she could not stay a minute longer but had to rush home. She promised to come back the next morning around ten and would then take care of anything else they might need.
So now Rachel was alone with the revered man. She covered the table with a pillowcase, since she could not find a tablecloth, and spread out on a large platter the cold cuts Clarisse had brought. These duties greatly eased her embarrassment. Then, placing the meal on the table, she said in carefully chosen German: "You will most certainly be hun- gry"; she had thought out this sentence ahead of time. Moosbrugger had stood up, and with a gallant gesture of his big paw offered her his place, for it turned out that there was only the one chair. - O h , no thank y o u - Rachel said-I don't want much; I'll sit over there. She took two slices from the platter Moosbrugger offered her and sat down on the bed.
Moosbrugger had taken a horrifying long folding knife from his pocket and used it while eating. In the days of his flight he had eaten irregularly and badly, and had developed a great hunger. Rachel took advantage of the opportunity to study him; more properly, she had to, for as soon as she turned in the direction of the table, this man com- pletely filled her field of vision; more, his appearance overflowed her eyes, spilling over their rims in every direction, and Rachel could not properly let her glance roam around; it was, for instance, quite a long distance across the whole extent of his chest, or from the edge of the table to his thick mustache, and also from his chin to the top of his pow- erful skull, and one could linger in the reddish-blond hairs of his mighty fists as in underbrush. In the meantime, all the ideas and some of the fantasies ofwhich Moosbrugger had once been the object came back to Rachel. Above all, she sought to bring to mind how many women would envy the situation in which she found herself. For her, Moosbrugger was a great and famous man, which corresponded to the truth if one leaves aside the different degrees of public notoriety that are made but are by no means clear or precise. She did not at all overlook the fearfulness of the notoriety, which had been acquired by cruel, indeed even treacher- ous deeds, for she was trembling with fear, although she was also burn- ing with excitement. But like all people, she admired the energy in this cruelty, and like all impulsive people she assumed that in contact with
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1693
her, this herculean strength would not be dangerous but could be turned toward the good, so that her fear seemed to her only a petty ex- ternal habit, while her soul became braver and braver the longer she was together with Moosbrugger. And indeed, whoever lives in the proper relation to criminals lives as securely among them as among other people.
Moosbrugger had not found it proper to be bothered by the girl's glances during such an important an occasion as eating. But when he had finished he leaned back, snapped his knife shut, stroked the crumbs from his mustache, and said: -Well, little Fraulein, now a glass of schnapps wouldn't b e -
Rachel hastened to assure him that there were no alcoholic drinks in the house, adding the lie that Clarisse had charged her not to provide any.
Moosbrugger hadn't meant it that seriously. He was not a drinker, in- deed he himself took care not to drink, out of fear of its unpredictable effects. But he hadn't seen a drop for months, and after the substantial meal had thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to try one on this dull eve- ning. He was angry at her refusal. These women had him really locked up. But he did not show it, and undertook to canyon the conversation in the most civilized manner.
-So here we are, man and wife, in a way, for the time being, little Fraulein, he began. -What should I call you? He used the natural Du of simple people; Rachel did not find this unpleasant, but just as natu- rally she stayed with the formal Sie. -My name is Rachel or R~le, whichever you like.
-Oo-la-la, R~le, my compliments! He pronounced the French name twice over, with pleasure. -And Rachel was the loveliest daughter of Laban. He laughed gallantly.
-T ell me how you beat the masons! Rachel asked.
She dared not ask about anything more exciting.
Moosbrugger turned away and rolled a cigarette. He was insulted. In his circles such a question was regarded as an unwarranted intimacy after so short an acquaintance. He smoked several cigarettes in succes- sion. He was bored. Insignificant, importunate women meant nothing to him. He became sleepy. In prison and the asylum he had become accus- tomed to going to bed early.
Rachel was upset that he was smoking so inconsiderately. She also had the feeling of having done something wrong, without knowing what.
Moosbrugger stood up, stretched his legs, and yawned. - D o you want to go to sleep? Rachel asked.
1694 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
-W hat else is there to do? Moosbrugger said. He inspected the bed; then, remembering the commandments of chivahy, turned to the comer where the bedding lay.
-Sleep in the bed; you need rest, Rachel said.
-No, you can sleep in the bed. Indolently, he removed his coat. Ra- chel was embarrassed when Moosbrugger took offhis pants. But then he lay down on the blankets as he was, and pulled one of them over himself. Rachel waited awhile, then blew out the lamp and undressed in the dark.
During the night she again grew afraid; she imagined that if she were to fall asleep it might happen that she would never wake up again. But soon she did sleep, and when she awoke, morning was shining into the room. Moosbrugger lay covered up in the comer like a huge mountain. Everything was still quiet in the house. Rachel took advantage of it to fetch water from the well. She also cleaned her shoes and Moosbrug- ger's out in the courtyard. When she softly slipped in the door again, Moosbrugger said good morning to her.
-W ould you like coffee, tea, or hot chocolate? she asked him. Moos- brugger was astonished. He said coffee, but did not find the decision an easy one. Then too, he liked Rachel better in the daylight than he had last evening; there was something delicate and refined in her appear- ance. He took care getting dressed, and turned away from the wall only when he was finished.
- W e r e you angry at me last evening? Rachel asked, noticing his good humor.
-Oh, women always want to know everything, but ifyou like I'll tell you the story about the masons. That will show you what people are like; they're all the same. And what have you been doing up to now?
- I was in a very elegant house, where I was treated like a daughter. -W ell, and what got you turned out? ·
- O h ! said Rachel, not at all resolved to tell the truth. - Y o u know,
the master in this house is a very high diplomat, and there was this busi- ness with a Moorish prince-
- A r e you pregnant? Moosbrugger asked suspiciously.
-For shame! Rachel exclaimed indignantly. -You're taking too many liberties in speaking to me that way! Would the lady have en- trusted you to me?
Moosbrugger definitely liked her. She was something finer, you could see and hear that. When he thought over the females he knew, he had never had anything so fine. -W ell, all right, he said. - I didn't mean to insult you. The story with the masons went like this:
He told it minutely and with dignity, together with all the scheming
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1695
and corruption that a man like himselfencounters before the court, and because she had mentioned an acquaintance with a Moorish prince, he felt he had to match it, so he also told her about his march to Constanti- nople.
- D o the Turks have more than one wife? Rachel asked.
-Only the rich ones. But that's why the Turks aren't worth anything, he answered with a gallant smile. -Even one wife will ruin a man!
-Have you had bad experiences with women? Rachel asked, her blood twitching in circles like the tail of a cat lying in ambush.
Moosbrugger looked at her inquiringly, and became serious. -A ll my life I've had only bad experiences. If I were to write down my life, a lot of people would be surprised!
- Y o u ought to! Rachel proposed enthusiastically.
-Writing is much too uncomfortable for me! Moosbrugger said proudly, and stretched his shoulders. -But you're an educated girl. Perhaps I'll tell you something. Then you can write it.
-I've neverwritten a book, Rachel replied modestly; but she felt as if she had been offered Section ChiefTuzzi's job. And this man before her was no idle gossip; he had shown that he could put meaning into his words.
Thus the time passed in animated conversation, and it got to be ten o'clock, but Clarisse did not appear.
Moosbrugger pulled his large, fat, chrome-plated watch from his vest and determined that it was ten thirty-five.
When they next looked, it was seven minutes before eleven.
-She's not coming; I thought as much, Moosbrugger said.
- B u t she has to come! Rachel said.
The conversation ran down. They had got up early and had not left the
room. Being cooped up made them tired. Moosbrugger stood and stretched. Rachel finally declared herself ready to go and get something to eat without waiting any longer. But first Moosbrugger had to put on the green eyeshade and strap on the wooden leg, in case during Rachel's absence a stranger should come in; wooden leg and eyeshade were a legacy of Clarisse's. It was no simple matter to get his leg, which was bent back to the thigh and on whose knee the wooden leg was strapped, through a pant leg; Moosbrugger had to place his arm around Rachel's neck, and he took the opportunity to draw her gently toward himself.
He hobbled around the room alone for more than a quarter of an hour; it was nauseatingly tedious; then Rachel cooked, but she did not know much about cooking, and the meal was not exactly cheerful. Grad- ually, Moosbrugger became fed up with this seclusion, but realized that it would be a long time before he could give it up. He wanted to sleep a
1696 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
bit to make the time pass, yawned like a lion, and sat on the bed to un- buckle the damn leg, which was driving the blood to his head. Rachel had to help him. And as he again laid his arm around her shoulder, he thought that after all she really was his wife for the time being. Surely she had never expected anything else of him and had made fun of him yesterday when he went straight off to sleep. As the wooden leg fell to the ground, with the arm that was around her shoulder he pulled Rachel back on the bed and drew her up on it a little, until her head rested on a pillow. Rachel did not resist. His large mustache descended on her mouth. But her small mouth came to meet it. Went into this mustache as into a forest, as it were, and sought the mouth in it. When the man pushed himself up on her, Rachel lay with her face almost under his chest and had to move her head to one side in order to be able to breathe; it seemed to her as if she were being buried by soil that was trembling volcanically. The really great bodily arousals are brought about by the imagination; Rachel saw in Moosbrugger not a hero with- out his peer on earth-for comparison and reflection would then have killed the power of imagination-but simply a hero, a notion that is less definite but blends with the time and place in which it appears and with the person who arouses admiration. Where there are heroes the world is still soft and glowing, and the web of creation unbroken. The adventur- ous room with the covered windows suddenly took on the appearance of the cave of a big robber who has withdrawn from the world. Rachel felt her breast lying under an enormous pressure; the scurrying quality that was part of her nature was pinned down for the moment by an overpow- ering force and compelled to be patient; her upper body could move as little as ifit had fallen under the iron wheels of a truck, and this position would have been torture had not all the spontaneity and independence of which her body was capable gathered in her hips, where a giant was struggling with clouds and which despite their helplessness were em- bracing him again and again, and were just as strong in their way as he was in his. A desire such as Rachel had never felt in her life, indeed had never suspected, pressed upon her mind and from there opened up her entire person: she wanted to conceive and bear a hero. Her lips re- mained open in astonishment, her limbs lay where they were when Moosbrugger got up, and her eyes remained for a long time misted over with a bluish-yellow mist, the way chanterelles do when one breaks them. She did not get up until it was time to light the lamp and think of the evening meal; till then she had waited, with a kind of emptiness of mind, for a continuation that she was not able to picture to herself but did not think of at all as simply a repetition.
For Moosbrugger, the matter was finished until further notice. Peo-
From the Posthumnus Papers · 1697
ple who on occasion commit sexual crimes are, as one knows, ordinarily anything but flamboyant lovers, since their crimes, to the extent that they do not spring from external influences, express nothing but the ir- regularity of their desire. Moosbrugger felt nothing more than boredom while Rachel lay demolished on the bed. So what had given their being together a certain tension was now, in his opinion, over and done with before one had thought of it.
Clarisse did not come; she did not come the next day either; she did not come at all.
Moosbrugger smoked cigarettes and yawned. Several times Rachel put her hand around his neck and her hand in his hair; he shook her off. He pulled her onto his lap, and then immediately set her on her feet again because he had changed his mind. What he felt beside boredom was that he had been insulted. These women had fetched him out of school like a boy and taken him home; he had sometimes observed this picture and thought that such sonny boys could never develop into real men. But he realized that for the time being he had to go along with it; he did not dare venture out on the street as long as the zeal of the police was still fresh, and to visit Biziste or other friends would not be a good idea at all. He had Rachel bring him the newspapers and looked for what was being said about him; but this time he was not at all pleased with his press: the papers dismissed his escape in three to five lines. He knew that Rachel was just as downcast as he was at Clarisse's not showing up; but he still laid on her the resentment that was building in him, even if he did not regard Rachel as its cause, since she was Clarisse's represent- ative. Rachel committed the error of continuing to refuse to provide al- cohol, though ifshe had done so, that would have been a mistake as well.
Moosbrugger was silent after such refusals, but the insults to which he was exposed formed, together with the stale boredom and his longing for a tavern, a tangle of revulsion whose spindle was the skinny girl who moved around him the entire day. He spoke only when he had to and disregarded all Rachel's attempts to bring the conversation back to the level of the first morning. Tortured in addition by her own cares, Rachel was very unhappy.
A few days later they had their first scene. After supper and a period ofyawning, Moosbrugger pulled over the little purse from which Rachel paid for their daily needs, and tried to fish out a coin with his thick fin- gers. Rachel, who immediately saw what he was up to, could not get her purse away from him in time; she ran around the table and fell on his arm. -No! she exclaimed. -You mustn't go to the tavern! You'll be- But she did not get to finish her sentence, for Moosbrugger's arm shoved her away so violently that she lost her balance and had to make
1698 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
strenuous efforts not to fall. Moosbrugger put on his hat and left the room, as unapproachable as a huge stone figure.
In desperation, Rachel thought over what she should do. She decided to do battle against Moosbrugger's indiscretion. She reproached herself with letting herselfbe frightened by the change in his behavior, which in the loneliness of reflection seemed to her understandable. As the weaker person, it was easy for her to be the cleverer, but she had to bend every effort to make clear to him that in this case she really was more clever; and if he saw that, then he might possibly accommodate himself to his situation; for Rachel understood quite well that it was no situation for a hero to be in. But when Moosbrugger came home he was drunk. The room filled with a bad smell, his shadow danced on the walls, Ra- chel was dispirited, and her words chased after this shadow with sharp reproaches she did not intend. Moosbrugger had landed on the bed and wasbeckoningherwithhisfinger. -No,neveragain! Rachelscreamed. Moosbrugger pulled from his pocket a bottle he had brought along. He had left the tavern at eleven, only one third filled with schnapps; the second third was filled with a bad conscience, and the third third with anger at having left. Rachel committed the strategic error of rushing at him in order to tear the bottle away. The next moment, she thought her head was bursting; the lamp revolved, and her body lost all connection to the world; Moosbrugger had warded off her attack with a powerful slap of his paw to her face, and when Rachel came to, she was lying far away from him on the floor; something was dripping out between her teeth, and her upper lip and nose seemed to have grown painfully to- gether. She saw how Moosbrugger was still staring at the bottle, which he then rudely smashed on the floor; after which he stood up and blew out the lamp.
Whether deliberately or merely in his stupor, Moosbrugger had taken the bed, and Rachel crept weeping onto the pile of blankets, near which she had fallen. The pain in her face and body did not let her sleep, but she did not dare light the lamp to make poultices for herself. She was cold, humiliation filled her mind with a hazy restlessness that closely re- sembled feverish fantasies, and the spilled schnapps covered the floor with a nauseating, paralyzing haze. All night she thought over as well as she could what had to be done. She had to find Clarisse, but she had no idea where Clarisse lived. She wanted to run away, but then she told herself that she would be betraying Clarisse's confidence if she left Moosbrugger in the lurch before Clarisse returned; she had taken money for this. It also occurred to her that she could go find Ulrich, but she was ashamed and put that off for later. She had never been beaten before, but aside from the pain it wasn't so bad; it simply expressed the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1699
fact that she was weaker than this giant whom she loved, that her entrea- ties did not penetrate to his ear, and that she had to be circumspect; he did not mean to harm her, she realized that quite well, and the most unpleasant thing remained the fear that her chastisement would be re- peated, an idea that robbed her breast of courage and made her totally miserable.
So day came before she reached any conclusions. Moosbrugger got up, and stumbling with inner emptiness, she had to follow his example. A glance in the mirror showed that her nose and mouth were badly swol- len in a discolored, greenish-yellow, half-extinguished face; the magic of this night had made Rachel ugly and unprepossessing. Neither she nor Moosbrugger said anything. Moosbrugger had a fuzzy head; in his sleep he had smelled the schnapps and woken up with the feeling of not hav- ing drunk enough. When he saw Rachel's swollen face, he had an inkling of what had happened the day before; a dim recollection that she had provoked him kept him from asking her about it. But he really would have liked to ask her; he just did not know how to go about it. And Ra- chel waited for a kind word from him the way any girl in love waits; when he let himself be served in silence, she became more and more sulky. Moosbrugger would have liked most of all to go straight back to the bar, but he was afraid of this girl, who would again make a scene, and he could not go on beating her every time. Her eyes, swollen with weeping, repelled him even more than her swollen mouth, which was visible every time she moistened the cloth she was holding to it. It was indeed his fault, he said to himself, what's right is right, but to have this around first thing in the morning was too much. Rachel's tender back and her slen- der arms, which she exposed as she washed, the devil take them, he didn't like them, they looked like chicken bones.
He summed it all up by finding himself in a really stupid situation that he had to stick out as honorably as he could. In the evenings he went to the tavern; he had made up his mind to risk it in this part of town where no one knew him, and Rachel no longer dared to refuse him the money or reproach him for it. Not even when he began to play cards and needed more. There was pretty good company in the bar; in this way, Moosbrugger thought, you can stick it out if you sleep a lot during the day. But Rachel did not sleep during the day, and bothered him like a bat. A few times he caught her in his arms. A few times, too, he made an attempt to begin a better life and to talk with her as the little Fraulein whom she indeed was. But then it came out that Rachel could do no more. She answered evasively and monosyllabically. Whenever Moos- brugger opened his mouth she froze, without meaning to, for she would have liked to talk with him; but he had poured something alien into her,
1700 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
violence, an<l the well that is the source of everything worth saying had frozen over. So there remained nothing for Moosbrugger to do but turn to the wall.
But there was one occasion when she always spoke up, and that was when Moosbrugger returned from the tavern. Ifhe was not drunk he did not respond, or merely growled incomprehensible answers, and Rachel pursued him into sleep with reproaches about his heedlessness. He had beaten her in the tension, the very unpleasant tension, that ruled in him as long as he had been tempted to leave the house but could not make up his mind to do so; now that this was no longer a problem, he was tender and well-mannered, and Rachel, sensing that she was not in any danger, became bolder and bolder. He stayed out longer from one day to the next, in the hope of returning only after she had gone to sleep. But Rachel had developed a strange habit of sleeping. When he left the house after dark she instantly fell asleep, and when he returned she woke up, and with an assurance as ifit were only the continuation ofher dream, she began to quarrel with him. Her poor soul, condemned to be unable to resolve her situation through reflection and thought, allowed itself to be borne upward by the drunken powers of sleep.
-Such a scrawny little chicken! Moosbrugger thought about her, and the insult that such a meager chicken was allowed to scratch around him, day in, day out, gnawed at him. But Rachel, as if she knew what he thought about her without his having said it aloud, and in almost tele- pathic (somnambulent) concord with the silent man who groped his way through the room in the night, felt an obsessive desire to cackle and argue. And when Moosbrugger came home drunk, which was not ex- actly seldom, his stumbling and tottering was like a large ship dancing on the same waves as the girl's small, excited sentences. And if one of these sentences struck too close to home, the powerfully drunken Christian Moosbrugger grabbed at her. As mentioned, it was never again the im- pulsive rage it had been the first time, when he had nearly crushed Ra- chel with a sweep of his hand, but he wanted to make this screeching, rebellious child shut up, and with cautiously measured force, the way a drunk carefully calculates his step over the curb, he let his hand fall on her. When Rachel was beaten she became still for a moment. A bound- less astonishment came over her, as at a totally unexpected, conclusive answer. Since leaving her parents' house she had not been religious; the way she had grown up, she thought religion was something for coarse people: but if Elohim, or better yet an evil spirit, had suddenly sat on a bench in the park among the dressed-up people, that was exactly how it seemed to her when she was beaten. She was drawn to observe this evil spirit closely once more and sought to set it in motion. Then she would
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 0 1
open her mouth again and say something about which she knew just as surely that it would irritate Moosbrugger as that if he would follow it it would be what he needed for his salvation. Then Moosbrugger would hit her with the back of his hand, or shove her to the wall. And Rachel, although again astonished, would find another expression, as sharp and penetrating as a knitting needle. And then of course Moosbrugger would have to increase the size of his gift. This giant, not wanting to kill her, beats her wildly on her back, her buttocks, tears her shift, throws her by the hair to the ground, or with a kick sends her flying into the comer; but he does all this with as much care in his wildness as his drunken condition permits, so that no bones will be broken. Rachel is amazed at the evil spirit of force and brutality that demolishes all words.
