No More Learning

"But maybe he wanted you to stroke his forehead? Or kneel by his bedside? Even if it was only because he had always read that it's the proper way to take leave ofa father for the last time. Only he couldn't bring himself to ask you. "
"Maybe," she said.
They had stopped for another look at him.
"How horrible it is, all of it! " Agathe said.
"Yes," Ulrich said. "And we know so little about it. "
As they were leaving the room Agathe stopped again and said to
Ulrich: ''I'm springing something on you that can't be of any concern to you, of course, but it was during Father's illness that I decided not to go back to my husband under any circumstances. "
Her brother could not help smiling at the stubbornness with which she said this, for Agathe had a vertical furrow between her brows and spoke vehemently; she seemed to fear that he would not be on her side, and reminded him of a terrified cat whose fright makes it leap bravely to the attack.
"Does he consent? '' Ulrich asked.
"He knows nothing about it yet," Agathe said. "But he won't con- sent! "
Her brother gave her a questioning look. She shook her head im- patiently. "Oh no, it's not what you think. There's no third person involved," she said.
With this, their conversation came to an end for the time being. Agathe apologized for having been so unmindful of Ulrich's hunger and fatigue, led him to a room where tea had been laid out, then went herself to fetch something that was missing from the tray. Left
738 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
to himself, Ulrich used the opportunity to concentrate on whatever he could recollect about her husband, the better to understand her. Professor Hagauer was a man of medium height with a ramrod bear- ing and plump legs in baggy trousers, rather fleshy lips under a bris- tly mustache, and a fondness for florid neckties, probably as a sign that he was no common schoolmaster but one who was future-ori- ented. Ulrich felt his cold misgivings about Agathe's choice re- awaken, but that Gottlieb Hagauer, with candor shining from his brow and eyes, would harbor secret vices was entirely out of the question. "He's the very model of the industrious, capable person, doing his best for humanity in his own field without meddling in mat- ters beyond his scope," Ulrich decided, remembering Hagauer's writings, as well, and falling into not entirely agreeable thoughts.
Such people can first be recognized for what they are even in their school days. They study not so much conscientiously-as it is called, confusing the effect with the cause-as in an orderly and practical fashion. They lay out every task beforehand, just as one has to lay out every piece of tomorrow's clothing, down to the last collar button, the night before if one wants to dress quickly and without a hitch in the morning. There is no chain of thought they cannot fix in their minds by using half a dozen such laid-out studs, and there is no deny- ing that the results do them credit and stand up to scrutiny. This takes them to the head of the class without their being perceived as prigs by their classmates, while people like Ulrich, who may be far more gifted but are given to overdoing a bit here and falling a bit short there, get gradually left behind in some imperceptibly fated way. It occurred to him that he was secretly somewhat in awe-Of these favored types, because the precision with which their minds worked made his own romantic enthusiasm for precision seem a bit windy. "They haven't a trace of soul," he thought, "and they're good- natured fellows. After the age of sixteen, when adolescents get worked up about intellectual problems, they seem to fall behind a little, not quite able to catch on to new ideas and feelings, but here, too, they work with their ten studs, and the day comes when they're able to prove that they have always understood everything, of course without going to any untenable extremes, and in the end they are the ones who introduce the new ideas into practical life when for every- one else those ideas have faded away with their long-past adoles-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 739
cence, or have become lonely eccentricities. " And so, by the time Agathe came back into the room, Ulrich could still not imagine what had actually happened to her, but he felt that entering the lists against her husband, even if it was unfair, was likely to offer him a most reprehensible pleasure.
Agathe seemed to see no point in trying to explain her decision rationally. Outwardly her marriage was in the most perfect order, as was only to be expected in the case of a man of Hagauer's character. No quarrels, hardly any differences of opinion; if only because Agathe, as she told Ulrich, never confided her opinion to him on any subject. Of course no vices: no drink, no gambling, not even bachelor habits. Income fairly apportioned. Orderly household. Smooth social life as well as unsocial life, when they were alone.
"So if you simply leave him for no reason at all," Ulrich said, "the divorce will be decided in his favor, provided he sues. "
"Let him sue! " Agathe said defiantly.
"Wouldn't it be a good idea to offer him a small financial compen- sation i f he'll agree to a friendly settlement? "
"All I took away with me," she replied, "was what I would need during an absence of three weeks, except for a few childish things and mementos from the time before Hagauer. He can keep all the rest; I don't want it. But for the future he's to get nothing more out of me-absolutely nothing! "
Again she had spoken with surprising vehemence. One could per- haps explain it by saying that Agathe wanted to revenge herself on this man for having let him take too much advantage of her in the past. Ulrich's fighting spirit, his sportsmanship, his inventiveness in surmounting obstacles, were now aroused, although he was not espe- cially pleased to feel it; it was too much like the effect of a stimulant that moves the superficial emotions while the deeper ones remain quite untouched. Groping for an overview, he gave the conversation a different turn:
"I've read some of his work, and I've heard of him too," he said. "As far as I can gather, he's regarded as a coming man in pedagogy and education. "
"Yes," Agatha said. "So he is. "
"Judging by what I know of his work, he's not only a sound educa- tor but a pioneer of reform in higher education. I remember one
740 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
book ofhis in which he discussed the unique value ofhistory and the humanities for a moral education on the one hand, and on the other the equally unique value of science and mathematics as intellectual discipline, and then, thirdly, the unique value ofthat brimming sense of life in sports and military exercise that makes one flt for action. Is that it? "
"I suppose so," Agatha said, "but did you notice his way with quo- tations? "
"Quotations? Let me see: I dimly remember noticing something there. He uses lots of quotations. He quotes the classics. Of course, he quotes the modems too. . . . Now I've got it: He does something positively revolutionary for a schoolmaster-he quotes not merely academic sources but even aircraft designers, political flgures, and artists of today. . . . But I've already said that, haven't I? " He ended on that uncertain note with which recollection runs into a dead end.
"What he does," Agatha added, "with music, for instance, is to go recklessly as far as Richard Strauss, or with painting as far as Picasso, but he will never, even if only to illustrate something that's wrong, cite a name that hasn't become more or less established currency in the newspapers, even ifit's only treated negatively. "
That was it. Just what he had been groping for in his memory. He looked up. He was pleased by the taste and the acuity shown in Agathe's reply.
"So he's become a leader, over time, by being among the fust to follow in time's train," he commented with a laugh. "All those who come after him see him already ahead of them! But do you like our leading flgures yourself? "
"I don't know. In any case, I don't quote them. "
"Still, we ought to give him his due," Ulrich said. "Your husband's name stands for a program that many people today regard as the most advanced. His achievement represents a solid small step for- ward. His rise cannot be long in coming. Sooner or later he will have at least a university chair, even though he has had to toil for his living as a schoolteacher, while as for me, all I ever had to do was go straight along the course laid out for me-and today I've come so far that I probably wouldn't even get a lectureship. "
Agathe was disappointed, which was probably why her face took
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 741
on a blank, porcelain-smooth, ladylike mask as she sweetly said: "Oh, I don't know; perhaps you ought to keep on his good side. "
"When do you expect him? " Ulrich asked.
"Not before the funeral; he has no time to spare. But under no circumstances is he to stay in this house--I won't have it! "
"As you like," Ulrich decided unexpectedly. "I shall meet him at the station and drop him off at some hotel. And if you want, I'll tell him, 'This is where you stay. ' "
Agathe was surprised and suddenly elated.
"That will make him furious, because he'll have to pay; he was of course counting on staying here with us! " Her expression had in- stantly changed and regained the look of a wild and mischievous child.
"What is the situation, actually? " her brother asked. "Does the house belong to you, me, or both of us? Is there a will? "
"Papa left a big package for me that's supposed to contain all we need to know. " They went to the study, which lay beyond the deceased.
Again they moved through candlelight and the scent of flowers, through the field of vision of those two eyes that no longer saw. In the flickering half-darkness Agathe was for the space of a second a shimmering haze of gold, gray, and pink. They found the package holding the will and took it back with them to the tea table, where they then forgot to open it.
For as they sat down again Agathe toldher brother that, to all in- tents and purposes, she had been living apart from her husband, though under the same roof; she didn't say how long this had been going on.
It made a bad impression on Ulrich at first. When a married woman sees a man as a possible lover, she is likely to treat him to this kind of confidence, and although his sister had come out with it in embarrassment, indeed with defiance, in a clumsy and palpable ef- fort to throw down a challenge, he was annoyed with her for not coming up with something more original; he thought she was making too much ofit.
"Frankly," he said, "I have never understood how you could have lived with such a man at all. "
742 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Agathe told him that it was their father's idea, and what could she have done to stop it?
"But you were a widow by then, not an underage virgin! "
"That's just it. I had come back to Papa. Everyone was saying that I was still too young to live on my own; even if I was a widow, I was only nineteen. And then I just couldn't stand it here. "
"Then why couldn't you have looked for another man? Or studied something and made yourself independent that way? " Ulrich de- manded relentlessly.
Agathe merely shook her head. There was a pause before she an- swered: ''I've told you already: I'm lazy. "
Ulrich felt that this was no answer. "So you had some special rea- son for marrying Hagauer? "
"Y es. "
"You were in love with someone you couldn't have? "
Agathe hesitated. "I loved my first husband. "
Ulrich regretted he had used the word "love" so glibly, as though
he regarded the importance of the social arrangement it refers to as inviolable. "Trying to comfort the grieving is no better than handing a dry crust to a beggar," he thought. Nevertheless, he felt tempted to go on in the same vein. "And then you realized what you'd let yourself in for, and you started to make trouble for Hagauer? " he suggested.
"Yes," she admitted, "but not right away-quite late," she added. "Very late, in fact. "
At this point they got into a little argument.
These confessions were visibly costing Agathe an effort, even though she was making them ofher own accord and evidently, as was to be expected at her age, saw in her sex life an important subject of general conversation. From the first she seemed ready to take her chances on his sympathy or lack of it; she wanted his trust and was determined, not without candor and passion, to win her brother over. But Ulrich, still in the mood to dispense moral guidance, could not yet meet her halfway. For all his strong-mindedness he was by no means always free of those same prejudices he rejected intellectu- ally, having too often let his life go one way and his mind another. For he had more than once exploited and misused his power over
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 743
women, with a hunter's delight in catching and observing his quany, so he had almost always seen the woman as the prey struck down by the amorous male spear. The lust ofhumiliation to which the woman in love subjects herself was fixed in his mind, while the man is very far from feeling a comparable surrender. This masculine notion of female weakness before male power is still quite common today, al- though with the successive waves of new generations more modem concepts have arisen, and the naturalness with which Agathe treated her dependence on Hagauer offended her brother. It seemed to him that his sister had suffered defilement without being quite aware ofit when she subjected herself to the influence of a man he disliked and went on enduring it for years. He did not say so, but Agathe must have read something of the kind in his face, for she suddenly said:
"After all, I couldn't simply bolt the moment I had married him; that would have been hysteria! "
Ulrich was suddenly jerked out of his role as elder brother and dispenser of edifying narrow-mindedness.
"Would it really be hysteria to feel disgusted and draw all the nec- essary conclusions? " He tried to soften this by following it up with a smile and looking at his sister in the friendliest possible manner.
Agathe looked back at him, her face somehow rendered defense- less with the effort of deciphering the expression on his.
"Surely a normal healthy person is not so sensitive to distasteful circumstances? " she persisted. "What does it matter, after all? "
Ulrich reacted by pulling himself together, not wanting to let his mind be ruled byone part ofhimself. He was once more all objective intelligence. "You're quite right," he said. ''What happens doesn't re- ally matter. What counts is the system of ideas by which we under- stand it, and the way it fits into our personal outlook. "
"How do you mean? " Agathe asked dubiously.
Ulrich apologized for putting it so abstractly, but while he was searching for a more easily accessible formulation, his brotherly jeal- ousy reasserted itself and influenced his choice of terms.
"Suppose that a woman we care about has been raped," he of- fered. "From a heroic perspective, we would have to be prepared for vengeance or suicide; from a cynical-empirical standpoint, we would expect her to shake it off like a duck shedding water; and what would
744 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
actually happen nowadays would probably be a mixture ofthese two. But this lack of a touchstone within ourselves is more sordid than all the rest. "
However, Agathe did not accept this way of putting it either. "Does it really seem so horrible to you? " she asked simply.
"I don't knqw. I thought it must be humiliating to live with a per- son one doesn't love. But now . . . just as you like. " ·
"Is it worse than a woman who wants to marry less than three months after a divorce having to submit to an examination by an offi- cially appointed gynecologist to see whether she's pregnant, because of the laws of inheritance? I read that somewhere. " Agathe's fore- head seemed to bulge with defensive anger, and the little vertical furrow between her eyebrows appeared again. "And they all put up with it, if they have to! " she said disdainfully.
"I don't deny it," Ulrich responded. "Everything that actually hap- pens passes over us like rain and sunshine. You're probably being much more sensible than I in regarding that as natural. But a man's nature isn't natural; it wants to change nature, so it sometimes goes to extremes. " His smile was a plea for friendship, and his eyes saw how young she looked. When she got excited her face did not pucker up but smoothed out even more under the stress going on behind it, like a glove within which the hand clenches into a fist.
''I've never thought about it in such general terms," she now said. "But after listening to you, I am again reminded that I've been lead- ing a dreadfully wrong kind of life. "
"It's only because you've already told me so much, of your own accord, without coming to the point," said her brother, lightly ac- knowledging this concession in response to his own. "How am I to judge the situation properly when you won't let me know anything about the man for whom you are, after all, really leaving Hagauer? "
Agathe stared at him like a child or a pupil whose teacher is being unfair. "Does there have to be a man? Can't it happen of itself? Did I do something wrong by leaving him without having a lover? I would be lying if I said that I've never had one; I don't want to be so absurd; but I haven't got a lover now, and I'd resent it very much if you thought I'd really need one in order to leave Hagauer! "
Her brother had no choice but to assure her that passionate
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 745
women were known to leave their husbands even without having a lover, and that he even regarded this as the more dignified course.
The tea they had come together to share merged into an informal and haphazard supper, at Ulrich's suggestion, because he was very tired and wanted to go to bed early to get a good night's sleep on account of the next day, which was likely to be busy with bothersome details. They smoked their final cigarettes before parting, and Ulrich still did not know what to make of his sister. She did not have any- thing either emancipated or bohemian about her, even if she was sit- ting there in those wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, as it now seemed to him; as she moved and gestured in talking, the light mas- culine outfit suggested the tender form beneath with the semitrans- parency of water, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, she wore her beautiful hair up, in true feminine style. But the center of this ambivalence was still her face, so rich in feminine charm yet with something missing, something held in reserve, whose nature he could not quite make out.
And that he knew so little about her and was sitting with her so intimately, though not at all as he would with a woman for whom he would count as a man, was something very pleasant in his present state of fatigue, to which he was now beginning to succumb.
"What a change from yesterday! " he thought.
He was· grateful for it and tried to think of something affection- ately brotherly to say to Agathe as they said goodnight, but as all this was something new to him, he could think of nothing to say. So he merely put his arm around her and kissed her.
3
START OF A NEW DAY IN A HOUSE OF MOURNING
The next morning Ulrich woke early as smoothly as a fish leaping out of water, from a dreamless sound sleep that had wiped out every trace of the previous day's fatigue. He prowled through the house looking for breakfast. The ritual of mourning had not yet fully resumed; only a scent ofit hung in all the rooms; it made him think of a shop that had opened its shutters early in the day, while the street is still empty of people. Then he got his scientific work out of his suit- case and took it into his father's study. As he sat there, with a fire in the grate, the room looked more human than on the previous eve- ning: Even though a pedantic mind, always weighing all pros and cons, had created it, right up to the plaster busts facing each other symmetrically on the top bookshelves, the many little personal things left lying about-pencils, eyeglass, thermometer, an open book, boxes of pen nibs, and the like-gave the room the touching empti- ness ofa habitat that had just been abandoned. Ulrich sat, not too far from the window, in the midst of it, at the desk, the room's nerve center, and felt a peculiar listlessness. The walls were hung with por- traits of his forebears, and some of the furniture dated from their time. The man who had lived here had formed the egg of his life from the shells of theirs; now he was dead, and his belongings stood as sharply there as if he had been chiseled out of the space; yet al- ready the order of things was about to crumble, adapt itself to his successor, and one sensed all these objects that had outlasted him quickening with a new life as yet almost imperceptible behind their fixedly mournful air.
In this mood Ulrich spread out his work, which he had interrupted weeks and months ago, and his eyes immediately alighted on the equations in hydrodynamics where he had stopped. He dimly re- membered having thought of Clarisse as he used the three basic states of water to exemplify a new mathematical operation, and Cia-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 747
risse having distracted him from it. There is a kind of recollection that evokes not the word itself but the atmosphere in which it was spoken, and so Ulrich suddenly thought: "Carbon . . . "and got the feeling, as if from nowhere, that at this instant all he needed to con- tinue was to know all the various states in which carbon occurred; but he could not remember, and thought instead: "The human being comes in twos. As man and as woman. " He paused at this for quite a while, evidently stunned with amazement, as if he had just made some earthshaking discovery. But beneath this stalling of his mind something different was concealed. For one can be hard, selfish, eager, sharply profiled against the world, as it were, and can sud- denly feel oneself, the same Ulrich What's-his-name, quite the oppo- site: deeply absorbed, a selfless, happy creature at one with an ineffably tender and somehow also selfless condition of everything around him. And he asked himself: "How long is it since I last felt like this? " To his surprise it turned out to be hardly more than twenty-four hours. The silence surrounding Ulrich was refreshing, and the condition he was reminded of did not seem as uncommon as he ordinarily thought. 'We're all organisms, after all," he thought, relaxing, "who have to strain all their energies and appetites in an unkind world to prevail against each other. But together with his enemies and victims each one of us is also a particle and an offspring of this world, not at all as detached from the others and as indepen- dent as he imagines. " In which case it was surely not incomprehensi- ble that at times an intimation of oneness and love arises from the world, almost a certainty that the normal exigencies of life keep us from seeing more than half of the great pattern of the interrelation- ships of being. There was nothing objectionable in this for a man of mathematical-scientific bent and precise feelings; on the contrary, it reminded Ulrich of a study by a psychologist whom he happened to know personally, which dealt with two main opposing groups of con- cepts, one based on a sense of being enveloped by the content of one's experiences, the other on one's enveloping them, and advanced the connection that such a "being on the inside" and "looking at something from the outside," a feeling of "concavity" and "convex- ity," a "spatiality" as well as a "corporeality," an "introspection" and an "observation," occurred in so many other pairs of opposites of ex- perience and in their linguistic tropes that one might assume a pri-
748 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mal dual form of human consciousness behind it all. It was not one of those strictly factual academic studies but one of the imaginative kind, a speculative groping into the future, that are prompted by some stimulus outside the scope of everyday scientific activity; but it was well grounded and its deductions were persuasive, moving to- ward a unity of feeling back in the mists of creation, whose tangled wreckage, Ulrich thought, might be the origin of the present-day at- titude that vaguely organizes our experience around the contrast be- tween a male and a female mode of experience but is secretly and mysteriously shadowed by ancient dreams.
Here Ulrich tried to secure his footing-literally, as one uses ropes and crampons for a descent down a dangerous rock face-and began to reflect further:
"The most ancient philosophies, obscure and almost incompre- hensible as they are to us, often speak of a male and a female princi- ple," he thought.
"The goddesses that existed alongside the gods in primitive reli- gions are in fact no longer within our emotional range," he thought. "Any relationship we might have to such superhuman women would be masochistic!
"But nature," he thought, "provides men with nipples and women with rudimentary male sex organs, which shouldn't lead us to con- clude that our ancestors were hermaphrodites. Nor need they have been psychological hybrids either. And so it must have been from outside that they received the double possibility of a giving and a re- ceiving vision, as a dual aspect of nature, and somehow all this is far older than the difference of gender, on which the sexes later drew to fill out their psychological wardrobe. . . . "
As he thought along these lines he remembered a detail from his childhood that distracted him, because-this had not happened for a long time-it gave him pleasure to remember. Here it must be men- tioned that his father had in earlier days been a horseman and had even kept riding horses, to which the empty stable by the garden wall, the first sight Ulrich had seen on his arrival, bore witness. Rid- ing was evidently the only aristocratic inclination his father had pre- sumed to adopt, out of admiration for his feudal friends' way of life. But Ulrich had been a little boy; now, in his musings, he experienced anew the sense of the infinite or at least something immeasurable
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 749
that the horse's high, muscular body aroused in the marveling child, like some awesome legendary mountain range covered with slopes of hair, across which the twitchings of the skin ran like the waves of a great wind. It was the kind of recollection, he realized, that owes its glamour to the child's powerlessness to make its wishes come true; but that hardly counts compared with the greatness of that splendor, which was no less than supernatural, or with the no less miraculous splendor little Ulrich touched shortly afteiWard with his fingertips in his quest for the first one. For at that time the town was placarded with circus posters showing not only horses but lions and tigers, too, and huge, splendid dogs that lived on good terms with the wild beasts. He had stared at these posters for a long time before he managed to get one ofthe richly colored pieces ofpaper for himself, cut the animals out, and stiffen them with little wooden supports so that they could stand up. What happened next can only be compared to drinking that never quenches one's thirst no matter how long one drinks, for there was no end to it, nor, stretching on for weeks, did it get anywhere; he was constantly being drawn to and into these adored creatures with the unutterable joy of the lonely child, who had the feeling every time he looked at them that he owned them, with the same intensity that he felt something ultimate was missing, some unattainable fulfillment the very lack ofwhich gave his yearn- ing the boundless radiance that seemed to flood his whole being. Along with this peculiarly boundless memory there arose unbidden from the oblivion ofthat early time another, slightly later experience, which now, despite its childish futility, took possession of the grown body dreaming with open eyes. It was the little girl who had only two qualities: one, that she had to belong to him, and the other, the fights with other boys this got him into. And of these two things only the fights were real, because there was no little girl. Strange time, when he used to go out like a knight errant to leap at some boy's throat, preferably when the boy was bigger than he, in some deserted street that might harbor a mystery, and wrestle with the surprised enemy! He had collected quite a few beatings, and sometimes won great vic- tories too, but no matter how it turned out he felt cheated ofhis satis- faction. Nor would his feelings accept any connection, obvious as it was, between the little girls he actually knew and the secret child he fought for, because, like all boys his age, he froze and became
750 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
tongue-tied in the presence of girls until, one day, an exception oc- curred. And now Ulrich remembered as clearly as if the circular image in the field of a telescope were trained across the years on that evening when Agathe was dressed up for a children's party. She wore a velvet dress, and her hair flowed over it like waves of bright velvet, so that the sight of her, even though he was himself encased in a terrifying knight's costume, suddenly filled him, in the same inde- scribable way as he had longed for the animals on the circus posters, with the longing to be a girl. At that age he still knew so little about men and women that he did not regard this as entirely impossible, but he knew enough not to try immediately, as children usually do, to force his wish to come true; rather, ifhe tried to define it now, it had been as if he were groping in darlmess for a door and suddenly came up against some blood-warm or warmly sweet resistance, pressing against it time and again as it yielded tenderly to his urge to pene- trate it without actually giving way. Perhaps it also resembled some harmless form of vampire passion, which sucks the desired being into itself, except that this infant male did not want to draw that in- fant female into himself but wanted to take her place entirely, and this happened with that dazzling tenderness present only in the first intimations of sexuality.
Ulrich stood up and stretched his arms, astonished at his day- dreaming. Not ten steps away, on the other side of the wall, his fa- ther's body was laid out, and he now noticed for the first time that around them both the place had been for some time swarming with people, as though they had shot up out of the ground, bustling about this dead house that went on living. Old women were laying down carpets and lighting fresh candles, there was hammering on the stair- case, floors were being waxed, flowers delivered, and now he was about to be drawn into these goings-on. People had come to sx. e him who were up and about at this early hour because they wanted ~me­ thing, or needed to lmow something, and from this moment\the chain of people never stopped. There were inquiries from the uni- versity about the funeral, a peddler came and shyly asked for cloth- ing, a German firm had commissioned a dealer in local antiquities, who with profuse apologies made on the firm's behalf an offer for a rare legal tome that the library of the deceased might contain; a chaplain needed to see Ulrich about some point that had to be
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 751
cleared up in the parish register, a man from the insurance company came with long and complicated questions, someone wanted a piano cheap, a real estate agent left his card in case the house might be for sale, a retired government clerk offered to address envelopes; and so they incessantly came, went, asked, and wanted all through the pre- cious morning hours: at the front door, where the old servant shook off as many as he could, and upstairs, where Ulrich had to see those that managed to slip through, each beginning with a matter-of-fact reference to the death, and each asserting, vocally or in writing, his own claim to life. Ulrich had never before realized how many people were politely waiting for someone to die, and how many hearts are set throbbing the moment one's own stops. It took him somewhat aback, and he saw a dead beetle lying in the woods, and other bee- tles, birds, and flapping butterflies gathering around.
For all this commotion of profit-seeking was shot through with the flickerings and flutterings of the forest-deep darkness. Through the lenses of eyes veiled with emotion the profit motive gleamed like a lantern left burning in bright daylight, as a man with black crepe on the black sleeve of something between mourner's garb and business suit entered, stopping at the door; he seemed to expect either Ulrich or himself to burst into tears. When neither happened, after a few seconds he seemed satisfied, for he came fozward and like any other businessman introduced himself as the funeral director, come to make sure that Ulrich was satisfied with the arrangements thus far. He assured Ulrich that everything else would be conducted in a manner that even the late lamented, who everyone knew had bee~ a gentleman none too easy to please, was bound to have approved. He pressed into Ulrich's hand a form covered with fine print and rectan- gles and made him read through what turned out to be a contract drawn to cover all possible classes of funerals, such as: eight horses or two horses . . . wreath carriage . . . number of . . . harness, style of . . . with outrider, silver-plated . . . attendants, style of . . . torches aIa Marienburg . . . aIa Admont . . . number ofattendants . . . style of lighting . . . for how long . . . coffin, kind ofwood . . . potted plants . . . name, date ofbirth, gender, occupation . . . disclaimer ofliability . . . Ulrich had no idea where these terms, some of them archaic, came from; he inquired; the funeral director looked at him in sur- prise; he had no idea either. He stood there facing Ulrich like a syn-
752 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
apse in the brain of mankind, linking stimulus and response while failing to generate any consciousness whatever. This merchant of mourning, who had been entrusted with centuries-old traditions which he could use as his stock-in-trade, felt that Ulrich had loos- ened the wrong screw, and quickly tried to cover this up with a re- mark intended to expedite the business in hand. He explained that all this terminology was unfortunately required by the statutes of the national association of undertakers, but that it really didn't matter if they were ignored in practice, as indeed they always were, and if Ulrich would just be good enough to sign the form-Madame, his sister, had refused to do so yesterday without consulting her brother-it would simply indicate that the client was in accord with the instructions left by his father, and he would be assured of a first- rate execution of the order.
While Ulrich signed, he asked the man whether he had already seen here in town one of those electrically powered sausage ma- chines with a picture of Saint Luke as patron of the guild of butchers and sausage makers; he himself had seen some once in Brussels- but there was no answer to wait for, because in the place of the fu- neral director stood another man who wanted something from him, a journalist from the leading local newspaper seeking information for the obituary. Ulrich gave it, dismissing the undertaker with the form; but as soon as he tried to provide an account of the most important aspects of his father's life, he realized that he did not lmow what was important and what was not, and the reporter had to come to his aid. Only then, in the grip of the forceps of a professional curiosity trained to extract what was worth lmowing, did the interview pro- ceed, and Ulrich felt as if he were present at the Creation. The jour- nalist, a young man, asked whether the old gentleman had died after a long illness or unexpectedly, and when Ulrich said that his father had continued lecturing right up to the last week of his life, this was framed as: ". . . working to the very end in the vigorous exercise of all his powers. " Then the chips began to fly off the old man's life until nothing was left but a few ribs and joints: Born in Protivin in 1844 . . . educated at . . . and the University of . . . appointed to the post of . . . on [date] . . . until, with the listing offive such appointments and honorary degrees, the basic facts were almost exhausted. Marriage at some point. A few books. Once nearly became Minister of Justice,
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 753
but someone's opposition prevailed. The reporter took notes, Ulrich checked them, they were in order. The reporter was pleased; he had the necessary number of lines. Ulrich was astonished at the little heap of ashes that remains of a human life. For every piece of infor- mation he had received, the reporter had had in readiness some six- or eight-cylinder phrase: distinguished scholar, wide sympathies, for- ward-looking but statesmanlike, mind oftruly universal scope, and so on, as if no one had died for a long time and the phrases had been unemployed for quite a while and were hungering to be used. Ulrich tried to think; he would have liked to add something worth saying about his father, but the chronicler had his facts and was putting his notebook away; what remained was like trying to pick up the con- tents of a glass of water without the glass.
The comings and goings had meanwhile slackened. All the flood of people who had, the day before, been told by Agathe to see him had now passed; so when the reporter took his leave, Ulrich found him- self alone. Something or other had put him in an embittered mood. Hadn't ·his father been right to drag along his sacks of knowledge, turning the piled grain of that knowledge now and then, and for the rest simply submitting to those powers of life that he regarded as the strongest? Ulrich thought ofhis own work, lying untouched in a desk drawer. Probably no one would even be able to say of him, someday, as they could of his father, that he had turned the grain pile over! Ulrich stepped into the little room where the dead man lay on his bier. This rigid, geometric cell surrounded by the ceaseless bustle to which it gave rise was incredibly eerie. The body floated stiff as a little wooden stick amid the floods of activity; but now and then for an instant the image would be reversed, and then all the life around him seemed petrifled and the body seemed to be gliding along with a peculiarly quiet motion. "What does the traveler care," it said at such moments, "for the cities he has left behind at the landings? Here I once lived, and I did what was expected of me, and now I'm on my way again. " Ulrich's heart constricted with the self-doubt of a man who in the midst of others wants something different than they do. He looked his father in the face. What if everything he regarded as his own personality was no more than a reaction against that face, originating in some childish antagonism? He looked around for a mirror, but there was none, only this blank face to reflect the light.
754 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
He scrutinized it for resemblances. Perhaps there were some. Per- haps it was all there: their race, their ties with the past, the imper- sonal element, the stream ofheredity in which the individual is only a ripple, the limitations, disillusionments, the endless repetitiveness of the mind going around in circles, which he hated with every fiber of his deepest will to live.
In a sudden fit of discouragement he thought of packing up and leaving even before the funeral. If there really was something he could still achieve in life, what was he doing here?
But in the doorway he bumped into his sister, who had come look- ingfor him.
4
OLD ACQUAINTANCE
For the first time Ulrich saw her dressed as a woman, and after his impression of her yesterday she seemed to be in disguise. Through the open door artificial light mingled with the tremulous gray of mid- morning, and this black apparition with blond hair seemed to be standing in an ethereal grotto through which radiant splendor flowed. Agathe's hair was drawn back closer to her head, making her face look more feminine than it had yesterday. Her delicate womanly breasts were embedded in the black of the severe dress in that per- fect balance between yielding and resistance characteristic of the feather-light hardness of a pearl; the slim long legs he had seen yes- terday as so like his own were now curtained by a skirt. Now that her appearance as a whole was less like his own, he could see how alike their faces were. He felt as if it were his own self that had entered through a door and was coming to meet him, though it was a more beautiful self, with an aura in which he never saw himself. For the first time it flashed on him that his sister was a dreamlike repetition and variant ofhimself, but as the impression lasted only a moment he forgot it again.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 755
Agathe had come to remind her brother ofcertain duties that were on the point of being delayed too long, for she had overslept. She held their father's will in her hands and drew Ulrich's attention to some dispositions in it that must be dealt with at once. Most urgent was a rather odd stipulation about the old man's decorations, which was also known to the servant Franz. Agathe had zealously, if some- what irreverently, underlined this point in the will in red pencil. The deceased had wanted to be buried with his decorations on his chest, and he had quite a few of them, but since it was not from vanity that he wanted this done he had added a long and ruminative justification of this wish. His daughter had read only the beginning, leaving it to her brother to explain the rest to her.
"Now, how shall I put it? " Ulrich said after he had read the pas- sage. "Papa wants to be buried with all his decorations because he considers the individualistic theory of the state to be false! He favors the universalist view: It is only through the creative community of the state that the individual gains a purpose that transcends the merely personal, a sense of value and justice. Alone he is nothing, which is why the monarch personifies a spiritual symbol. In short, when a man dies he should wrap himself in his decorations as a dead sailor is wrapped in the flag when his body is consigned to the sea! "
"But didn't I read somewhere that these medals have to be given back? "
"The heirs are obliged to return the medals to the Chamberlain's Office. So Papa had duplicates made. Still, he seems to feel that the ones he bought are not quite the real thing, so he wants us to substi- tute them for the originals only when they close the coffin; that's the trouble. Who knows, perhaps that's his silent protest against the reg- ulation, which he wouldn't express any other way. "
"But by that time there'll be hundreds of people here, and we'll forget! " Agathe worried.
'W e might just as well do it now. "
"There's no time now. You'd better read the next part, what he writes about Professor Schwung. Professor Schwung may be here at any moment; I was expecting him all day yesterday.