"
"Sounds like hard times for your husbands!
"Sounds like hard times for your husbands!
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
An all-embracing conviction, a law?
Or the finger of God?
Or, instead of that, the assumption that morality has up to now lacked an 'inductive stance,' that it is much harder to be good than we had believed, and that it will require an endless cooperative ef- fort, like every other science?
I think there is no morality, because it cannot be deduced from anything constant; all there are are rules for uselessly maintaining transitory conditions.
I also assume that there can be no profound happiness without a profound morality; yet my
Into the Millennium (The. Criminals) · 949
thinking about it strikes me as an unnatural, bloodless state, and it is absolutely not what I want! " Indeed, he might well have asked him- self much more simply, "What is this I have taken upon myself? '' which is what he now did. However, this question touched his sensi- bility more than his intellect; in fact, the question stopped his think- ing and diminished bit by bit his always keen delight in strategic planning before he had even formulated it. It began as a dark tone close to his ear, accompanying him; then it sounded inside him, an octave lower than everything else; finally, Ulrich had merged with his question and felt as though he himself were a strangely deep sound in the bright, hard world, surrounded by a wide interval. So what was it he had really taken on himself, what had he promised?
He thought hard. He knew that he had not merely been joking when he used the expression "the Millennium," even if it was only a figure of speech. If one took this promise seriously, it meant the de- sire to live, with the aid of mutual love, in a secular condition so tran- scendent that one could only feel and do whatever heightened and maintained that condition. He had always been certain that human beings showed hints of such a disposition. It had begun with the "af- fair of the major's wife," and though his subsequent experiences had not amounted to much, they had always been of the same kind. In sum, what it more or less came to was that Ulrich believed in the "Fall of Man" and in "Original Sin. " That is, he was inclined to think that at some time in the past, man's basic attitude had undergone a fundamental change that must have been roughly comparable to the moment when a lover regains his sobriety; he may then see the whole truth, but something greater has been tom to shreds, and the truth appears everywhere as a mere fragment left over and patched up again. Perhaps it was even the apple of "knowledge" that had caused this spiritual change and expelled mankind from a primal state to which it might find its way back only after becoming wise through countless experiences and through sin. But Ulrich believed in such myths not in their traditional form, but only in the way he had discov- ered them; he believed in them like an arithmetician who, with the system of his feelings spread out before him, concludes, from the fact that none of them could be justified, that he would have to intro- duce a fantastic hypothesis whose nature could be arrived at only in- tuitively. That was no trifle! He had turned over such thoughts in his
950 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mind often enough, but he had never yet been in the situation of having to decide within a few days whether to stake his life on it. A faint sweat broke out under his hat and collar, and he was bothered by the proximity of all the people jostling by him. What he was think- ing amounted to taking leave of most of his living relationships; he had no illusions about that. For today our lives are divided, and parts are entangled with other people; what we dream has to do with dreaming and also with what other people dream; what we do has sense, but more sense in relation with what others do; and what we believe is tied in with beliefs only a fraction ofwhich are our own. It is therefore quite unrealistic to insist upon acting out of the fullness of one's own personal reality. Especially for a man like himself, who had been imbued all his life with the thought that one's beliefs had to be shared, that one must have the courage to live in the midst of moral contradictions, because that was the price of great achieve- ment. Was he at least convinced of what he had just been thinking about the possibility and significance of another kind of life? Not at all! Nevertheless, he could not help being emotionally drawn to it, as though his feelings were facing the unmistakable signs of a reality they had been looking forward to for years.
At this point he did have to ask himself what, if anything, entitled him, like a veritable Narcissus, to wish not to do ever again anything that left his soul unmoved. Such a resolve runs counter to the princi- ples of the active life with which everyone is today imbued, and even if God-fearing times could have fostered such ambitions, they have melted away like the half-light of dawn as the sun grows stronger. There was an odor of something reclusive and syrupy clinging to him that Ulrich found increasingly distasteful. He bied to rein in his un- ruly thoughts as quickly as possible, and told himself-if not quite sincerely-that the promise of a Millennium he had so oddly given his sister, rationally considered, boiled down to no more than a kind of social work: living with Agathe would probably call for all the deli- cacy and selflessness he could muster-qualities that had been all too lacking in him. He recalled, the way one recalls an unusually transparent cloud flitting across the sky, certain moments of their re- cent time together that had already been of this kind. "Perhaps the content of the Millennium is merely the burgeoning of this energy, which at first shows itselfin two people, until it grows into a resound-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 951
ing universal communion," he wondered in some embarrassment. Again he resorted to his own "affair of the major's wife" for more light on the subject. Leaving aside the delusions oflove, since imma- turity had been at the root ofthat aberration, he focused all his atten- tion on the feelings of tender care and adoration of which he had been capable in his solitude at the time, and it seemed to him that feeling trust and affection, or living for another person, must be a happiness that could move one to tears, as lovely as the lambent sink- ing ofday into the peace ofevening and also, just a little, an impover- ishing of spirit and intellect to the point of tears. For there was also a funny side to their project, as of two elderly bachelors setting up house together, and such twitchings of his imagination warned him how little the notion of a life of service in brotherly love was likely to offer him fulfillment. With some detachment he could see that from the first there had been a large measure of the asocial intermingled in his relationship with Agathe. Not only the business with Hagauer and the will, but the whole emotional tone of their association, pointed to something impetuous, and there was no doubt that what brought them together was not so much love for each other as a re- pelling of the rest of the world.
"No! " Ulrich thought. "Wanting to live for another person is no more than egoism going bankrupt and then opening a new shop next door, with a partner! "
Actually, his inner concentration, despite this brilliantly honed in- sight, had already passed its peak at the moment ~hen he had been tempted to confine the diffuse illumination that filled him inside an earthly lamp, and now that this had shown itself to be a mistake, his thinking had lost the urge to press for a decision and was eager for some distraction. Not far from him two men had just collided and were shouting unpleasant remarks at each other as ifgetting ready to fight; Ulrich watched with a renewed interest, and had hardly turned away when his glance struck that of a woman giving him a look like a fat flower nodding on its stem. In that pleasant mood which is an equal blend of feeling and extroverted attention, he noted that real people pursue the ideal commandment to love one another in two parts, the first consisting in their detesting one another and the sec- ond in making up for it by entering into sexual relations with the half that is excepted. Without stopping to think he too turned, after a few
952 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
steps, to follow the woman; it was a quite mechanical consequence of their eye contact. He could see her body beneath her dress like a big white fish just under the surface of the water. He felt the male urge to harpoon the fish and watch it flap and struggle, and there was in this as much repugnance as desire. Some hardly perceptible signs made him certain this woman lmew he was prowling after her and was interested. He tried to work out her place on the social scale and decided on "upper-middle class," where it is hard to pinpoint the position with precision. "Business family? Government service? " he speculated. Various random images came to him, even including that of a pharmacy: he could feel the pungently sweet smell of the hus- band coming home, the compact atmosphere of the household be- traying no sign of the shifting beam from the burglar's flashlight that had just recently moved through it. It was vile, no doubt, but shame- fully exciting.
As Ulrich kept following the woman, actually afraid that she might stop at some shop window and so force him either to stumble fool- ishly past her or to pick her up, something in him was still undis- tracted and wide awake. "What exactly might Agathe want from me? " he asked himself for the first time. He did not lmow. He as- sumed that it would be something like what he wanted of her, but he had nothing to base this on but intuition. Wasn't it amazing how quickly and unexpectedly it had all happened? Other than a few childhood memories he had lmown nothing about her, and the little he had heard, such as her connection of some years with Hagauer, he found rather dis~teful. He now recalled the curious hesitancy, al- most reluctance, with which he had approached his father's house on his arrival. Suddenly the idea took hold of him: "My feeling for Agathe is just imagination! " In a man who continually wanted some- thing other than what those around him wanted-he was thinking seriously again-in such a man, who always felt strong dislikes and never got as far as liking, the usual kindliness and lukewarm human goodness can easily separate and tum into a cold hardness with a mist of impersonal love floating above it. Seraphic love, he had once named it. It could also, he thought, be called love without a partner. Or, just as well, love without sex. Sexual love was all the love there was nowadays: those alike in gender repelled each other, and in the sexual crossover people loved with a growing resentment of the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 953
overestimation of this compulsion. But seraphic love was free of both these defects. It was love cleansed of the crosscurrents of social and sexual aversions. This love, which makes itself felt everywhere in company with the cruelty of modem life, could truly be called the sisterly love of an age that has no room for brotherly love, he said to himself, wincing in irritation.
Yet having finally arrived at this conclusion, alongside it and alter- nately with it he went on dreaming of a woman who could not be attained at all. He had a vision of her like late-autumn days in the mountains, when the air is as ifdrained ofits lifeblood to the point of death, while the colors are aflame with fierce passion. He saw the blue vistas, without end in their mysterious gradations. He com- pletely forgot the woman who was actually walking ahead of him; he was far from desire and perhaps close to love.
He was distracted only by the lingering gaze of another woman, like that of the first, yet not so brazen and obvious; this one was well- bred and delicate as a pastel stroke that leaves its stamp in a fraction of a second. He looked up and in a state of utmost emotional exhaus- tion beheld a very beautiful lady in whom he recognized Bonadea.
The glorious day had lured her out for a walk. Ulrich glanced at his watch: he had been strolling along only fifteen minutes, and no more than forty-five had passed since he left the Palais Leinsdorf.
Bonadea said: ''I'm not free today. "
Ulrich thought: "How long, by comparison, is a whole day, a year, not to mention a resolution for a lifetime! " It was beyond calculation.
BONADEA; OR, THE RELAPSE
And so it happened that Ulrich received a visit soon afterward from his abandoned mistress. Their encounter on the street had not pro- vided him with an opportunity to call her to account for misusing his
954 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
name to win Diotima's friendship, nor had it given Bonadea enough time to reproach him for his long silence and not only defend herself from the charge of indiscretion and call Diotima "an ignoble snake" but even make up a story to prove it. Hence she and her retired lover had hurriedly agreed that they must meet once again and have it all out.
The visitor who appeared was no longer the Bonadea who coiled her hair until it gave her head something of a Grecian look when she studied it in the mirror with eyes narrowed, intending to be just as pure and noble as Diotima, nor was she the one who raved in the night, maddened by the withdrawal pains of such a cure for her ad- diction, cursing her exemplar shamelessly and with a woman's in- stinct for the lethal thrust; she was once again the dear old Bonadea whose curls hung down over her none-too-wise brow or were swept back from it, depending on the dictates of fashion, and in whose eyes there was always something reminiscent ofthe air rising above a fire. While Ulrich started to reprove her for having betrayed their rela- tionship to his cousin, she was carefully removing her hat before the mirror, and when he wanted to know exactly how much she had said, she smugly and in great detail told him a story she claimed to have made up for Diotima about having had a letter from him in which he asked her to see that Moosbrugger was not overlooked entirely, whereupon she had thought the best thing to do was to turn to the woman of whose high-mindedness the writer of the letter had so often spoken to her. Then she perched on the arm of Ulrich's chair, kissed his forehead, and meekly insisted that it was all perfectly true, except for the letter.
Her bosom emitted a great warmth.
"Then why did you call my cousin a snake? You were one your- self! " Ulrich said.
Bonadea pensively shifted her gaze from him to the wall. "Oh, I don't know," she answered. "She's so nice to me. She takes so much interest in me! "
"What is that supposed to mean? '' Ulrich asked. "Are you partici- pating in her efforts for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful? ''
Bonadea replied: "She explained to me that no woman can live for her love with all her might, she no more than I. And that is why every woman must do her duty in the place appointed to her by fate. She
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 955
really is so very decent," Bonadea went on, even more thoughtfully. "She keeps telling me to be more patient with my husband, and she insists that a superior woman can find considerable happiness in making the most ofher marriage; she puts far more value in that than in adultery. And after all, it's exactly what I've always thought my-
! " seIf.
It happened to be true, in fact; for Bonadea had never thought otherwise, she had merely always acted otherwise, and so she could agree with a good conscience. When Ulrich said as much to her, it earned him another kiss, this time somewhat lower than the fore- head. "You happen to upset my polygamous balance," she said with a little sigh of apology for the discrepancy that had arisen between her principles and her conduct.
It turned out, after some cross-examination, that she had meant to say "polyglandular balance"- a new physiological term at that time comprehensible only to initiates, which might be translated as bal- ance of secretions, on the assumption that certain glands which af- fected the blood had a stimulating or inhibiting effect, thereby influencing character and, more specifically, a person's tempera- ment, especially the kind of temperament Bonadea had to a degree that caused her much suffering in certain circumstances.
Ulrich raised his eyebrows in curiosity.
"Well, something to do with glands," Bonadea said. "It's rather a relief to know one can't help it! " She gave the lover she had lost a wistful smile. "A person who loses her balance easily is liable to have unsuccessful sexual experiences. "
"My dear Bonadea," Ulrich marveled, "what kind of talk is this? "
"It's what I've been learning to say. You are an unsuccessful sexual experience, your cousin says. But she also says that a person can es- cape the shattering physical and emotional effects by bearing in mind that nothing we do is merely our own personal affair. She's very nice to me. She says that my mistake is that I make too much of a single aspect of love instead of taking in the whole spectrum of the experience. You see, what she means by a single aspect is what she also calls 'the crude mechanics': it's often very interesting to see things in her light. But there's one thing about her I don't like. She may say that a strong woman sees her life's work in monogamy and should love it like an artist, but she does have three men, and, count-
956 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ing you, possibly four, on her string, and I have none at all now to make me happy! "
The gaze with which she scrutinized her AWOL reservist was warm and questioning. Ulrich did his best to ignore it.
"So the two of you talk about me? " he asked with some forebod- ing.
"Oh, only on and off," Bonadea replied. "When your cousin needs to exemplify something, or when your friend the General is present. "
"I suppose Amheim is in on this too? "
"He lends a dignified ear to what the gracious ladies have to say. " Bonadea made fun of him, not without talent for unobtrusive mim- icry, but she added seriously: "I don't like the way he treats your cousin at all. Most of the time he's off on some trip or other, and when he's present he talks too much to everyone, and when she is quoting Frau von Stem, for example-"
"Frau von Stein? " Ulrich corrected her by asking.
"Of course, I meant Stein: it isn't as if Diotima didn't talk about her often enough. Well, when she talks about Frau von Stein and Goethe's other woman, the Vul . . . What's her name? It sounds a little obscene, I think. . . . "
"Vulpius. "
"Oh yes. You know, I get to hear so many foreign words there that I'm beginning to forget the simplest ones! So when she's making her comparisons between Frau von Stein and the other, Amheim keeps staring at me as if, compared with his idol, I was no better than the kind you just said. "
Now Ulrich insisted on an explanation ofthese new developments.
It turned out that since Bonadea had claimed the status of Ulrich's confidante she had made great strides in her intimacy with Diotima. Her alleged nymphomania, which Ulrich had carelessly men- tioned to Diotima in a moment of pique, had had a far-reaching ef- fect on his cousin. She had begun by inviting the newcomer to her gatherings, in the role of a lady vaguely active in social welfare, and watched her covertly. This intruder, soaking up Diotima's domestic interiors with eyes soft as blotting paper, not only had been down-
right uncanny but had also aroused in her as much feminine curiosity as dread. To tell the truth, when Diotima pronounced the term "ve- nereal disease" she felt the same vague sensations as when she tried
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 957
to imagine what her new acquaintance actually did, and from one occasion to the next she was expecting, with an uneasy conscience, some impossible behavior, outrage, or scandal from her. Bonadea succeeded, however, in calming these suspicions by cloaking her am- bition in the kind of especially well-bred behavior that naughty chil- dren affect when their moral zeal is aroused by the tone of their surroundings. In the process she even managed to forget that she was jealous of Diotima, who was surprised to find that her disturbing protegee was just as much given over to "ideals" as she was herself. For the "fallen sister," as she thought ofher, had soon become a pro- tegee, in whom Diotima was moved to take an especially active inter- est because her own situation made her see the ignoble mystery of nymphomania as a kind of female sword of Damocles which, she said, might hang by a thin thread even over the head of a vestal vir- gin. "I know, my child," she consolingly instructed Bonadea, who was about her own age, "there is nothing so tragic as embracing a man ofwhom one is not entirely convinced! " and kissed her on that unchaste mouth with a heroic effort that would have been enough to make her press her lips on the blood-dripping bristles of a lion's beard.
Diotima's position at that time was midway between Arnheim and Tuzzi: a seesaw position, metaphorically speaking, one end ofwhich was weighted down too much, the other not enough. Even Ulrich had found her, on his return, with hot towels around her head and stomach; but these female complaints, the intensity of which she sensed to be her body's protest against the contradictory orders it was receiving from her soul, had also awakened in Diotima that noble resolve that was characteristic of her as soon as she refused to be just like every other woman. It was of course hard to decide, at first, whether it was her soul or her body that was called upon to take action, or whether a change in her attitude toward Arnheim or to- ward Tuzzi would be the better response; but this was settled with the world's help, for while her soul with its enigmas eluded her like a fish one tries to hold bare-handed, the suffering seeker was surprised to find plenty of advice in the books of the zeitgeist, once she had decided to deal with her fate from the physical angle, as represented by her husband. She had not known that our time, which has pre- sumably distanced itselffrom the concept ofpassionate love because
gs8 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
it is more of a religious than a sexual concept, regards love contemp- tuously as being too childish to still bother about, devoting all its en- ergies instead to marriage, the bodily operations of which in all their variants it investigates with zestful specificity. There was already at that time a spate of books that discussed the "sexual revolution" with the clean-mindedness of a gym teacher, and whose aim was to help people be happy though married. In these books man or wife were referred to only as "male and female procreators," and the boredom they were supposed to exorcise by all manner of mental and physical diversions was labeled "the sexual problem. " When Diotima first im- mersed herself in this literature she furrowed her brow, but it soon smoothed out again; for it was a spur to her ambition to discover that a great new movement of the zeitgeist was under way, which had so far escaped her notice. Transported, she finally clapped hands to brow in amazement that she who had it in her to set the world a great goal (though it was not yet clear what) had never before realized that even the unnerving discomfitures of marriage could be dealt with by using one's intellectual resources. This possibility coincided with her inclinations and suddenly opened the prospect of treating her rela- tionship with her husband, which she had so far regarded as some- thing to be endured, as a science and an art.
"Wherever we may roam, there's no place like home," Bonadea said, with her characteristic taste for platitudes and quotations. For it came about that Diotima, in the role of guardian angel, soon took on Bonadea as a pupil in these matters, in accordance with the pedagog- ical principle that one learns best by teaching. This enabled Diotima to go on extracting, from the still undirected and unclear impressions she gained from her new reading, points she could really believe i n - guided as she was by the happy secret of "intuition," that you are sure to hit the bull's-eye ifyou talk about anything long enough. At the same time it worked to Bonadea's advantage that she could bring to the dialogue that response without which the student remains bar- ren soil for even the best teacher: her rich practical experience, doled out with restraint, had served the theoretician Diotima as an anxiously studied source of information ever since she had set out to put her marriage in order with the aid of textbooks.
"Look, I'm sure I'm not nearly as bright as she is," Bonadea ex- plained, "but often there are things in her books that even I never
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 959
dreamed of, and that makes her so discouraged sometimes, and then she'll say things like: This can't be decided at the council table of the marriage bed, I'm afraid; it would, unfortunately, take an immense amount of trained sexual experience, a lot of real physical practice on living material! "
"But for heaven's sake," Ulrich exclaimed, convulsed with laugh- ter at the mere idea of his chaste cousin's straying into "sexology," "what on earth is she after? "
Bonadea gathered her memories of the happy conjunction be- tween the scientific interests of the time and unthinking utterance. "It's a question ofhow best to develop and manage her sex instinct," she finally responded, in the spirit ofher teacher. "And she stands for the principle that a joyous and harmonious sex life has to be achieved through the most severe self-discipline. "
"So you two are in training? Endurance training, at that? I'm im- pressed, I must say," Ulrich exclaimed. "But now will you kindly ex- plain just what it is Diotima is training for? "
"To begin with, she's training her husband, of course," Bonadea corrected him.
"The poor devil! " Ulrich could not help thinking. "In that case," he said, 'Td like to know how she does it. Please don't tum prudish on me all of a sudden. "
Under this grilling Bonadea did, in fact, feel inhibited by her am- bition to shine, like a prize pupil in an exam.
"Her sexual atmosphere is poisoned," she explained cautiously. "The only way to save it is for her and Tuzzi to make a most careful study of their behavior. There are no general rules for this. Each of them has to observe how the other reacts to life. To be a good ob- server, a person has to have some insight into sexual life. One has to be able to compare one's practical experience with the results ofthe- oretical research, Diotima says. Woman today happens to have a new and different attitude to the sex problem; she expects a man not only to act but to act with a real understanding of the feminine! " And for Ulrich's entertainment or even just to amuse herself, she gaily added: "Just imagine what it must be like for her husband, who hasn't the faintest inkling ofall this new stuffand gets to hear about it mostly at bedtime while they're undressing-let's say when Diotima is taking her hair down and fishing for hairpins, with her petticoats tucked be-
g6o · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
tween her knees, and then suddenly she starts talking about all that. I tried it out on my husband, and it drove him almost to apoplexy. One thing you must admit: If marriage is to be for a lifetime, at least there's the advantage that you have the opportunity of getting all the erotic possibilities in it out ofyour spouse. Which is what Diotima is trying to do with Tuzzi, who happens to be a bit crude!
"
"Sounds like hard times for your husbands! " Ulrich teased.
Bonadea laughed, and he could tell how glad she would be to oc- casionally play truant from the oppressive earnestness of her school of love.
But Ulrich's probing instincts would not let go; he sensed that his greatly changed friend was keeping quiet about something she would much rather have talked about. He professed to be mystified be- cause, from what he had heard, the two husbands involved had so far rather erred in overdoing the "erotic possibilities. "
"Of course, that's all you ever think! " Bonadea said reproachfully, giving him a long, pointed glance with a little hook at its end that could easily be interpreted as regret for the innocence she had ac- quired. "You take advantage of a woman's physiological feeblemind- edness yourself! "
"What do I take advantage of? You've found a splendid expression for the history of our love! "
Bonadea slapped his face lightly and, nervously, patted her hair in front of the mirror. Glancing at him out of the mirror, she said: "That's from a book. "
"Of course. A very well known book. "
"But Diotima disputes it. She found something in another book that speaks of 'the physiological inferiority of the male. ' The author is a woman. Do you think it really makes much difference? "
"How can I tell, since I've no idea what we're talking about? "
'Well then, listen! Diotima's starting point is the discovery that she calls 'a woman's constant readiness for sex. ' Can you see that? "
"Not in Diotima! "
"Don't be so crude! " she rebuked him. "It's a delicate theory, and it's hard for me to explain it to you so that you don't draw false con- clusions from the fact that I happen to be here alone with you in your house while I'm talking about it. So this theory has it that a woman
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g61
can be made love to even when she doesn't feel like it. Now do you see? "
"I do. "
"Unfortunately, it can't be denied either. On the other hand, they say that quite often a man can't make love even when he wants to. Diotima says this has been scientifically established. Do you believe that? "
"It's been known to happen. "
"Oh, I don't know," Bonadea said doubtfully. "But Diotima says that ifyou regard it in the light ofscience, it's obvious. For in contrast with a woman's constant readiness for sex, a man-well, in a word, a man's manliest part is easily discouraged. " Her face was the color of bronze as she now turned it away from the mirror.
"I never would have guessed it about Tuzzi," Ulrich said tactfully.
"I don't think it used to be the case, either," Bonadea said. "It's only happening now, as a belated confinnation of the theory, be- cause she lectures him on it day in, day out. She calls it the theory of the 'fiasco. ' Because the male procreator is so prone to this fiasco, he only feels sexually secure if he doesn't have to be afraid of a woman's being in some way or other spiritually superior, and that's why men hardly ever have the courage to try a relationship with a woman who's their equal as a human being. At least, they try right away to put them down. Diotima says that the guiding principle of all male love transactions, and especially of male arrogance, is fear. Great men show it-she means Arnheim, ofcourse. Lesser men hide it be- hind brutal physical aggression and abusing a woman's soul-I mean you! And she means Tuzzi. That sort of 'Now or never! ' you men so often use to make us give in is only a kind of overcomp--" She was about to say "compress"; "overcompensation," Ulrich said, coming to the rescue.
"Right. That's how you men manage to overcome the impression of your physiological inferiority! "
"What have you two decided to do, then? " Ulrich said meekly.
"We have to make an effort to be nice to men! That's why I've come to see you. We'll see how you take it. ''
"And Diotima? "
"Heavens, what do you care about Diotima? Arnheim's eyes pop
g62 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
out like a snail's when she tells him that the most intellectually supe- rior men unfortunately seem to find full satisfaction only with in- ferior women and fail with women who are their equals, as attested scientifically by the case of Frau von Stein and the Vulpius woman. You see, now I've got her name right, but of course I've always known she was the noted sex partner of the aging Olympian! "
Ulrich tried to steer the conversation away from himself and back to Tuzzi. Bonadea began to laugh; she was not without sympathy for the sony predicament ofthe diplomat, whom she found quite attrac- tive as a man, and felt a certain malicious and conspiratorial glee about his having to suffer under the castigations of the soul. She re- ported that Diotima was basing her treatment of Tuzzi on the as- sumption that she must cure him of his fear of her, which had also enabled her to come to terms somewhat with his "sexual brutality. " The great blunder of her life, she admitted, was in achieving an emi- nence too great for her male marriage partner's na! ve need to feel superior, so she had set about toning it down by hiding her spiritual superiority behind a more suitable erotic coquetry.
Ulrich broke in to ask, with lively interest, what she understood by that.
Bonadea's glance bored deeply into his face. "She might say to him, for instance, 'Up to now our life has been spoiled by our com- peting for status. ' And then she admits to him that the poisonous ef- fect of the male struggle for power dominates all of public life as well. . . :·
"But that's neither coquettish nor sexy! " Ulrich objected.
"Oh, but it is! You have to remember that a man in the grip of passion will behave toward a woman like an executioner toward his victim. That's part of his struggle for self-assertion, as it's now called. On the other hand, you won't deny that the sex drive is important to a woman too? "
"Certainly not! "
"Good. But a happy sexual relationship demands an equal give- and-take. To get a really rapturous response from the love partner, the partner must be respected as an equal and not just as a will-less extension of oneself," she went on, caught up in her mentor's mode of expression like someone sliding helplessly and anxiously across a polished surface, carried along by his own momentum. "If no other
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g63
human relationship is able to endure unremitting pressure and coun- terpressure, how much less can a sexual-"
"Oho! " Ulrich disagreed.
Bonadea pressed his arm, and her eye glittered like a falling star. "Hold your tongue! " she cried. "None of you have any firsthand ex- perience ofthe feminine psyche! And ifyou want me to go on telling you about your cousin . . . " But her energy was spent, and her eyes now had the glitter ofa tigress's as she watches fresh meat being car- ried past her cage. "No, I can't listen to any more ofthis myself! " she cried.
"Does she really talk like that? " Ulrich asked. "Did she actually say these things? "
"But it's all I hear every day, nothing but sexual practice, success- ful embraces, key principles of eroticism, glands, secretions, re- pressed urges, erotic training, and regulation of the sex drive! Apparently everyone has the sexuality he deserves, at least that's what your cousin claims, but do I deserve to be so overloaded with it? "
Her gaze firmly held his.
"I don't think so," Ulrich said slowly.
"After all, couldn't one just as easily say that my strong capacity for
experiencing represents a physiological superiority? " Bonadea asked with a gaily suggestive burst oflaughter.
There was no more discussion. When, some considerable time later, Ulrich became aware of a certain resistance in himself, living daylight was spraying through the chinks in the curtains, and if one glanced in that direction the darkened room resembled the sepul- cher of an emotion that had shriveled past the point of recognition. Bonadea lay there with her eyes closed, giving no sign of life. The feeling she now had of her body was not unlike that of a child whose defiance had been broken by a whipping. Every inch of that body, which was both completely satiated and battered, cried out for the tenderness of moral forgiveness. From whom? Certainly not from the man in whose bed she lay and whom she had implored to kill her, because her lust could not be appeased by any repetition or intensifi- cation. She kept her eyes shut to avoid having to see him. She tried thinking: ''I'm in his bed. " This-and 'T il never let myself be driven out of it again! "-was what she had been shouting inwardly just a
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short time before; now it merely expressed a situation she could not get out of without having to go through an embarrassing perform- ance, which was still ahead of her. Bonadea slowly and indolently picked up her thoughts where she had dropped them.
She thought of Diotima. Gradually, words came to mind, then whole sentences and fragments of sentences, but mainly only a sense of satisfaction at being where she was while words as incomprehensi- ble and hard to remember as hormones, lymphatic glands, chromo- somes, zygotes, and inner secretions thundered past her ear in a cascade of talk. For her mentor's chastity recognized no boundaries as soon as they were effaced by the glare of scientific illumination.
Diotima was capable of saying to her listeners: "One's sex life is not a craft that is to be learned; it should always be the highest art we may acquire in life! " while feeling as little unscientific emotion as when in her zeal she spoke of a "point of reference" or "a central point. " Her disciple now recalled these expressions exactly. Critical analysis of the embrace, clarification ofthe physical elements, erogenous zones, the way to highest fulfillment for the woman, men who have them- selves well under control and are considerate oftheir partner . . . Just an hour ago Bonadea, who normally admired these scientific, intel- lectual, and highly refined terms, had felt grossly deceived by them. To her surprise she had just now realized with returning conscious- ness that this jargon was meaningful not only for science but for the emotions too, when the flames were already licking out from the un- supervised emotional side. At that point she hated Diotima. "Talking that way about such things, it's enough to kill your appetite! " she had thought, feeling horribly vindictive toward Diotima, who evidently, with four men of her own, begrudged Bonadea anything at all and was deliberately hoodwinking her in this fashion. Indeed, Bonadea had actually considered the enlightenment with whose help sexual science cleans up the occult ways of the sexual process as a plot of Diotima's. Now she could not understand that any more than she could understand her passionate longing for Ulrich. She tried to re- member the moments in which all her thoughts and feelings had gone wild; it was as incomprehensible as if a man bleeding to death were to try to think back on the impatience that had led him to tear off his protective bandages. Bonadea thought of Count Leinsdorf, who had called marriage a high office and had compared Diotima's
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books on the subject with a manual for organizing official proce- dures. She thought of Arnheim, who was a multimillionaire and who had called the revival of marital fidelity, based on the idea of the body, a true necessity of the times. And she thought of all the other famous men she had recently met, without even remembering whether they had short legs or long ones, were fat or lean, for all she saw in them was the radiance of their celebrity rounded out by a vague physical mass, much as the delicate frame of a young roast pi- geon is given substance by a solid mass of herb stuffing. Sunk in these memories, Bonadea vowed that she would never again let her- selfbe prey to one ofthose sudden hurricanes that mix up above and below, and she swore this to herself so fervently that she could al- ready see herself-if only she could hold firmly enough to her re- solve-in fantasy and without physical particulars, as the mistress of the finest ofall her great friend's admirers, hers for the choosing. But since for the present there was no getting around the fact that she was still lying in Ulrich's bed with very little on, reluctant to open her eyes, this rich sense of eager contrition, instead of developing further into a comfort to her, turned into a wretched state of exasperation.
The passion whose workings split Bonadea's life irito such oppos- ing elements had its deepest roots not in sensuality but in ambition. Ulrich, who knew her well, thought about this but said nothing, to avoid bringing on her complaints, as he studied her face, while her eyes hid from him. The root of all her desires seemed to him a desire for distinction that had got on the wrong track, quite literally the wrong nerve track. And why shouldn't, really, an ambition to break social records that can be celebrated with triumph, such as drinking the most beer or hanging the most diamonds on one's neck, some- times manifest itself, as in Bonadea's case, as nymphomania? Now that it was over, she regretted this form of expression and wished she could undo it, he could see that; and he could also appreciate the fact that Diotima's elaborate artificiality must impress Bonadea, whom the devil had always ridden bareback, as divine. He looked at her lidded eyeballs resting exhausted and heavy in their sockets; he saw before him her tawny nose, turned decidedly upward at the tip, with its pink, pointed nostrils; he noticed in some bewilderment the vari- ous lines of her body, its large round breasts spreading on the straight corset of her ribs, the bulbous curve of hips, the hollow
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sweep of the back rising from them, the hard pointed nails shielding the soft tips of the fingers. And finally, as he gazed for some time in revulsion at a few tiny hairs sprouting before his eyes from his mis- tress's nostrils, he, too, wondered at recalling how his desires had been aroused only a short while ago by this person's seductive channs. The bright, mischievous smile with which Bonadea had ar- rived for their "talk," the natural ease with which she had fended off any rebukes or told the latest story about Arnheim, indeed her new, almost witty keenness of observation: she really had changed for the better; she seemed to have grown more independent, to have achieved a finer balance between the forces in her nature that pulled her up and those that pulled her down, and Ulrich found this lack of moral ponderousness particularly refreshing after his own recent bouts of seriousness. He still could feel the pleasure with which he had listened to her and watched the play of expression on her face, like sun and waves. Suddenly, while his gaze was still on Bonadea's now sulky face, it struck him that only serious people could really be evil. "One might safely say," he thought, "that lighthearted people are proof against wickedness. On the same principle that the villain in opera is always a bass! " Somehow this also implied an uncomfort- able link in his own case between "deep" and "dark. " Guilt is cer- tainly mitigated when incurred "lightly" by a cheerful person, but on the other hand this may apply only to love, where impassioned se- ducers seem to act far more destructively and unforgivably than friv- olous ones, even when they are doing the same thing. So his thoughts went this way and that, and if this hour of love, so lightly begun, left him a little downhearted, it had also unexpectedly stimulated him.
So thinking, he forgot, without quite knowing how, the Bonadea who was there; resting his head on his ann, he had pensively turned his back to Bonadea and was gazing through the walls at distant things, when his total silence moved her to open her eyes. All un- aware, he was at this moment remembering how he had once on a journey got off a train before reaching his destination; a translucent day that had mysteriously, seductively, swept the veils from the land- scape had lured him away from the station for a walk, only to desert him at nightfall, when he found himselfwithout his luggage in a ham- let hours away. Indeed, he seemed to recall that he had always had the quality ofstaying out for unpredictable lengths oftime and never
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g67
returning by the same road; and this suddenly brought back a far dis- tant memory, from a period in his childhood that he normally could not recall, which cast a light on his life. Through a tiny chink in time he seemed to feel again the mysterious yearning by which a child is drawn toward some object it sees, to touch it or even put it in its mouth, at which point the magic comes to a stop as in a blind alley. Just as briefly, he regarded it as possible that the longing of adults, which drives them toward any distance merely to transform it into nearness, is no better or worse-the same sort of longing that domi- nated him, a compulsion, to judge by a certain aimlessness that was merely masked by curiosity; and finally, this basic image changed to a third, emerging as this hasty and disappointing episode with Bona- dea, which neither of them had wanted to turn out as it had. Lying side by side in bed seemed utterly childish to him. "But what does its opposite mean, that motionless, hushed love at a great distance, as incorporeal as an early autumn day? " he wondered. "Probably only another version of child's play," he thought skeptically, and remem- bered the colorful animal prints he had loved more rapturously as a child than he had loved his mistress today.
Bonadea at this point had seen just about enough of his back to gauge her unhappiness, and she spoke up: "It was your fault! "
Ulrich turned to her with a smile and said spontaneously: "My sis- ter is coming here in a few days to staywith me-did I tell you? We'll hardly be able to see each other then. "
"For how long? " Bonadea asked.
"To stay," Ulrich answered, smiling again.
"Well? '' Bonadea said. "What difference will it make? Unless
you're trying to tell me that your sister won't let you have a lover? '' "That's just what I am trying to tell you," Ulrich said.
Bonadea laughed. "Here I came to see you today in all innocence,
and you never even let me finish my story! " she complained.
"I seem to have been designed as a machine for the relentless devaluation of life! I want to be different for once," Ulrich retorted. This was quite beyond her, but it made her remember defiantly that
she loved Ulrich. All at once she stopped being the helpless victim of her nerves and found a convincing naturalness; she said, simply: "You've started an affair with her! "
Ulrich warned her not to say such things; a little more grimly than
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he had meant to. "I intend for a long time to love no woman other- wise than ifshe were my sister," he said, and stopped. The length of his silence impressed Bonadea with a greater sense ofhis determina- tion than was perhaps justified by his words.
"You're really perverse! " she cried in a tone ofprophetic warning, and leapt out of bed in order to huny back to Diotima's academy of love, whose unsuspecting portals stood wide open to receive its re- pentant and refreshed disciple.
AGATHE ACTUALLY ARRIVES
That evening there was a telegram, and the next afternoon Agathe arrived.
Ulrich's sister brought only a few suitcases, in accordance with her plan to leave everything behind-not that the quantity ofher luggage was wholly in keeping with the precept "Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes. " When he heard about the precept, Ulrich laughed; there were even two hatboxes that had escaped the fire.
Agathe's forehead showed the charming furrow denoting hurt feelings and futile brooding over them.
Whether it was fair of Ulrich to find fault with the imperfect ex- pression of a grand and sweeping emotion was left undetermined, for Agathe did not raise the question. The cheerful fuss and upheaval that of necessity attended her arrival made an uproar in her ears and eyes like a dance swaying around a brass band. She was in fine spirits but faintly disappointed, although she had not been expecting any- thing in particular and had even made a point during her journey of not forming any expectations. It was only that when she remembered that she had stayed up all the previous night she was suddenly over- come with fatigue. She didn't mind when Ulrich had to tell her, after a while, that her telegram had come too late for him to postpone an
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g6g
appointment he had for the afternoon. He promised to be back in an hour, and settled his sister on the sofa in his study with such elabo- rate care that they both had to laugh.
When Agathe woke up, the hour was long gone, and Ulrich was not there. The room was sunk in deep twilight and was so alien that she felt suddenly dismayed at finding herself in the midst of the new life to which she had been looking forward. As far as she could make out, the walls were lined with books just as her father's had been, and the tables covered with papers. Curiosity led her to open a door and enter the adjacent room: here she found clothes closets, shoe boxes, the punching bag, barbells, and parallel bars. Beyond these were more books, the bathroom with its eau de cologne, bath salts, brushes, and combs, her brother's bedroom, and the hall, with its hunting trophies. Her passage was marked by lights flashing on and off, but as chance would have it, Ulrich noticed none of this, even though he was home by now. He had put off waking her to let her rest a while longer, and now he ran into her on the landing as he was coming up from the little-used basement kitchen.
Into the Millennium (The. Criminals) · 949
thinking about it strikes me as an unnatural, bloodless state, and it is absolutely not what I want! " Indeed, he might well have asked him- self much more simply, "What is this I have taken upon myself? '' which is what he now did. However, this question touched his sensi- bility more than his intellect; in fact, the question stopped his think- ing and diminished bit by bit his always keen delight in strategic planning before he had even formulated it. It began as a dark tone close to his ear, accompanying him; then it sounded inside him, an octave lower than everything else; finally, Ulrich had merged with his question and felt as though he himself were a strangely deep sound in the bright, hard world, surrounded by a wide interval. So what was it he had really taken on himself, what had he promised?
He thought hard. He knew that he had not merely been joking when he used the expression "the Millennium," even if it was only a figure of speech. If one took this promise seriously, it meant the de- sire to live, with the aid of mutual love, in a secular condition so tran- scendent that one could only feel and do whatever heightened and maintained that condition. He had always been certain that human beings showed hints of such a disposition. It had begun with the "af- fair of the major's wife," and though his subsequent experiences had not amounted to much, they had always been of the same kind. In sum, what it more or less came to was that Ulrich believed in the "Fall of Man" and in "Original Sin. " That is, he was inclined to think that at some time in the past, man's basic attitude had undergone a fundamental change that must have been roughly comparable to the moment when a lover regains his sobriety; he may then see the whole truth, but something greater has been tom to shreds, and the truth appears everywhere as a mere fragment left over and patched up again. Perhaps it was even the apple of "knowledge" that had caused this spiritual change and expelled mankind from a primal state to which it might find its way back only after becoming wise through countless experiences and through sin. But Ulrich believed in such myths not in their traditional form, but only in the way he had discov- ered them; he believed in them like an arithmetician who, with the system of his feelings spread out before him, concludes, from the fact that none of them could be justified, that he would have to intro- duce a fantastic hypothesis whose nature could be arrived at only in- tuitively. That was no trifle! He had turned over such thoughts in his
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mind often enough, but he had never yet been in the situation of having to decide within a few days whether to stake his life on it. A faint sweat broke out under his hat and collar, and he was bothered by the proximity of all the people jostling by him. What he was think- ing amounted to taking leave of most of his living relationships; he had no illusions about that. For today our lives are divided, and parts are entangled with other people; what we dream has to do with dreaming and also with what other people dream; what we do has sense, but more sense in relation with what others do; and what we believe is tied in with beliefs only a fraction ofwhich are our own. It is therefore quite unrealistic to insist upon acting out of the fullness of one's own personal reality. Especially for a man like himself, who had been imbued all his life with the thought that one's beliefs had to be shared, that one must have the courage to live in the midst of moral contradictions, because that was the price of great achieve- ment. Was he at least convinced of what he had just been thinking about the possibility and significance of another kind of life? Not at all! Nevertheless, he could not help being emotionally drawn to it, as though his feelings were facing the unmistakable signs of a reality they had been looking forward to for years.
At this point he did have to ask himself what, if anything, entitled him, like a veritable Narcissus, to wish not to do ever again anything that left his soul unmoved. Such a resolve runs counter to the princi- ples of the active life with which everyone is today imbued, and even if God-fearing times could have fostered such ambitions, they have melted away like the half-light of dawn as the sun grows stronger. There was an odor of something reclusive and syrupy clinging to him that Ulrich found increasingly distasteful. He bied to rein in his un- ruly thoughts as quickly as possible, and told himself-if not quite sincerely-that the promise of a Millennium he had so oddly given his sister, rationally considered, boiled down to no more than a kind of social work: living with Agathe would probably call for all the deli- cacy and selflessness he could muster-qualities that had been all too lacking in him. He recalled, the way one recalls an unusually transparent cloud flitting across the sky, certain moments of their re- cent time together that had already been of this kind. "Perhaps the content of the Millennium is merely the burgeoning of this energy, which at first shows itselfin two people, until it grows into a resound-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 951
ing universal communion," he wondered in some embarrassment. Again he resorted to his own "affair of the major's wife" for more light on the subject. Leaving aside the delusions oflove, since imma- turity had been at the root ofthat aberration, he focused all his atten- tion on the feelings of tender care and adoration of which he had been capable in his solitude at the time, and it seemed to him that feeling trust and affection, or living for another person, must be a happiness that could move one to tears, as lovely as the lambent sink- ing ofday into the peace ofevening and also, just a little, an impover- ishing of spirit and intellect to the point of tears. For there was also a funny side to their project, as of two elderly bachelors setting up house together, and such twitchings of his imagination warned him how little the notion of a life of service in brotherly love was likely to offer him fulfillment. With some detachment he could see that from the first there had been a large measure of the asocial intermingled in his relationship with Agathe. Not only the business with Hagauer and the will, but the whole emotional tone of their association, pointed to something impetuous, and there was no doubt that what brought them together was not so much love for each other as a re- pelling of the rest of the world.
"No! " Ulrich thought. "Wanting to live for another person is no more than egoism going bankrupt and then opening a new shop next door, with a partner! "
Actually, his inner concentration, despite this brilliantly honed in- sight, had already passed its peak at the moment ~hen he had been tempted to confine the diffuse illumination that filled him inside an earthly lamp, and now that this had shown itself to be a mistake, his thinking had lost the urge to press for a decision and was eager for some distraction. Not far from him two men had just collided and were shouting unpleasant remarks at each other as ifgetting ready to fight; Ulrich watched with a renewed interest, and had hardly turned away when his glance struck that of a woman giving him a look like a fat flower nodding on its stem. In that pleasant mood which is an equal blend of feeling and extroverted attention, he noted that real people pursue the ideal commandment to love one another in two parts, the first consisting in their detesting one another and the sec- ond in making up for it by entering into sexual relations with the half that is excepted. Without stopping to think he too turned, after a few
952 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
steps, to follow the woman; it was a quite mechanical consequence of their eye contact. He could see her body beneath her dress like a big white fish just under the surface of the water. He felt the male urge to harpoon the fish and watch it flap and struggle, and there was in this as much repugnance as desire. Some hardly perceptible signs made him certain this woman lmew he was prowling after her and was interested. He tried to work out her place on the social scale and decided on "upper-middle class," where it is hard to pinpoint the position with precision. "Business family? Government service? " he speculated. Various random images came to him, even including that of a pharmacy: he could feel the pungently sweet smell of the hus- band coming home, the compact atmosphere of the household be- traying no sign of the shifting beam from the burglar's flashlight that had just recently moved through it. It was vile, no doubt, but shame- fully exciting.
As Ulrich kept following the woman, actually afraid that she might stop at some shop window and so force him either to stumble fool- ishly past her or to pick her up, something in him was still undis- tracted and wide awake. "What exactly might Agathe want from me? " he asked himself for the first time. He did not lmow. He as- sumed that it would be something like what he wanted of her, but he had nothing to base this on but intuition. Wasn't it amazing how quickly and unexpectedly it had all happened? Other than a few childhood memories he had lmown nothing about her, and the little he had heard, such as her connection of some years with Hagauer, he found rather dis~teful. He now recalled the curious hesitancy, al- most reluctance, with which he had approached his father's house on his arrival. Suddenly the idea took hold of him: "My feeling for Agathe is just imagination! " In a man who continually wanted some- thing other than what those around him wanted-he was thinking seriously again-in such a man, who always felt strong dislikes and never got as far as liking, the usual kindliness and lukewarm human goodness can easily separate and tum into a cold hardness with a mist of impersonal love floating above it. Seraphic love, he had once named it. It could also, he thought, be called love without a partner. Or, just as well, love without sex. Sexual love was all the love there was nowadays: those alike in gender repelled each other, and in the sexual crossover people loved with a growing resentment of the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 953
overestimation of this compulsion. But seraphic love was free of both these defects. It was love cleansed of the crosscurrents of social and sexual aversions. This love, which makes itself felt everywhere in company with the cruelty of modem life, could truly be called the sisterly love of an age that has no room for brotherly love, he said to himself, wincing in irritation.
Yet having finally arrived at this conclusion, alongside it and alter- nately with it he went on dreaming of a woman who could not be attained at all. He had a vision of her like late-autumn days in the mountains, when the air is as ifdrained ofits lifeblood to the point of death, while the colors are aflame with fierce passion. He saw the blue vistas, without end in their mysterious gradations. He com- pletely forgot the woman who was actually walking ahead of him; he was far from desire and perhaps close to love.
He was distracted only by the lingering gaze of another woman, like that of the first, yet not so brazen and obvious; this one was well- bred and delicate as a pastel stroke that leaves its stamp in a fraction of a second. He looked up and in a state of utmost emotional exhaus- tion beheld a very beautiful lady in whom he recognized Bonadea.
The glorious day had lured her out for a walk. Ulrich glanced at his watch: he had been strolling along only fifteen minutes, and no more than forty-five had passed since he left the Palais Leinsdorf.
Bonadea said: ''I'm not free today. "
Ulrich thought: "How long, by comparison, is a whole day, a year, not to mention a resolution for a lifetime! " It was beyond calculation.
BONADEA; OR, THE RELAPSE
And so it happened that Ulrich received a visit soon afterward from his abandoned mistress. Their encounter on the street had not pro- vided him with an opportunity to call her to account for misusing his
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name to win Diotima's friendship, nor had it given Bonadea enough time to reproach him for his long silence and not only defend herself from the charge of indiscretion and call Diotima "an ignoble snake" but even make up a story to prove it. Hence she and her retired lover had hurriedly agreed that they must meet once again and have it all out.
The visitor who appeared was no longer the Bonadea who coiled her hair until it gave her head something of a Grecian look when she studied it in the mirror with eyes narrowed, intending to be just as pure and noble as Diotima, nor was she the one who raved in the night, maddened by the withdrawal pains of such a cure for her ad- diction, cursing her exemplar shamelessly and with a woman's in- stinct for the lethal thrust; she was once again the dear old Bonadea whose curls hung down over her none-too-wise brow or were swept back from it, depending on the dictates of fashion, and in whose eyes there was always something reminiscent ofthe air rising above a fire. While Ulrich started to reprove her for having betrayed their rela- tionship to his cousin, she was carefully removing her hat before the mirror, and when he wanted to know exactly how much she had said, she smugly and in great detail told him a story she claimed to have made up for Diotima about having had a letter from him in which he asked her to see that Moosbrugger was not overlooked entirely, whereupon she had thought the best thing to do was to turn to the woman of whose high-mindedness the writer of the letter had so often spoken to her. Then she perched on the arm of Ulrich's chair, kissed his forehead, and meekly insisted that it was all perfectly true, except for the letter.
Her bosom emitted a great warmth.
"Then why did you call my cousin a snake? You were one your- self! " Ulrich said.
Bonadea pensively shifted her gaze from him to the wall. "Oh, I don't know," she answered. "She's so nice to me. She takes so much interest in me! "
"What is that supposed to mean? '' Ulrich asked. "Are you partici- pating in her efforts for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful? ''
Bonadea replied: "She explained to me that no woman can live for her love with all her might, she no more than I. And that is why every woman must do her duty in the place appointed to her by fate. She
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 955
really is so very decent," Bonadea went on, even more thoughtfully. "She keeps telling me to be more patient with my husband, and she insists that a superior woman can find considerable happiness in making the most ofher marriage; she puts far more value in that than in adultery. And after all, it's exactly what I've always thought my-
! " seIf.
It happened to be true, in fact; for Bonadea had never thought otherwise, she had merely always acted otherwise, and so she could agree with a good conscience. When Ulrich said as much to her, it earned him another kiss, this time somewhat lower than the fore- head. "You happen to upset my polygamous balance," she said with a little sigh of apology for the discrepancy that had arisen between her principles and her conduct.
It turned out, after some cross-examination, that she had meant to say "polyglandular balance"- a new physiological term at that time comprehensible only to initiates, which might be translated as bal- ance of secretions, on the assumption that certain glands which af- fected the blood had a stimulating or inhibiting effect, thereby influencing character and, more specifically, a person's tempera- ment, especially the kind of temperament Bonadea had to a degree that caused her much suffering in certain circumstances.
Ulrich raised his eyebrows in curiosity.
"Well, something to do with glands," Bonadea said. "It's rather a relief to know one can't help it! " She gave the lover she had lost a wistful smile. "A person who loses her balance easily is liable to have unsuccessful sexual experiences. "
"My dear Bonadea," Ulrich marveled, "what kind of talk is this? "
"It's what I've been learning to say. You are an unsuccessful sexual experience, your cousin says. But she also says that a person can es- cape the shattering physical and emotional effects by bearing in mind that nothing we do is merely our own personal affair. She's very nice to me. She says that my mistake is that I make too much of a single aspect of love instead of taking in the whole spectrum of the experience. You see, what she means by a single aspect is what she also calls 'the crude mechanics': it's often very interesting to see things in her light. But there's one thing about her I don't like. She may say that a strong woman sees her life's work in monogamy and should love it like an artist, but she does have three men, and, count-
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ing you, possibly four, on her string, and I have none at all now to make me happy! "
The gaze with which she scrutinized her AWOL reservist was warm and questioning. Ulrich did his best to ignore it.
"So the two of you talk about me? " he asked with some forebod- ing.
"Oh, only on and off," Bonadea replied. "When your cousin needs to exemplify something, or when your friend the General is present. "
"I suppose Amheim is in on this too? "
"He lends a dignified ear to what the gracious ladies have to say. " Bonadea made fun of him, not without talent for unobtrusive mim- icry, but she added seriously: "I don't like the way he treats your cousin at all. Most of the time he's off on some trip or other, and when he's present he talks too much to everyone, and when she is quoting Frau von Stem, for example-"
"Frau von Stein? " Ulrich corrected her by asking.
"Of course, I meant Stein: it isn't as if Diotima didn't talk about her often enough. Well, when she talks about Frau von Stein and Goethe's other woman, the Vul . . . What's her name? It sounds a little obscene, I think. . . . "
"Vulpius. "
"Oh yes. You know, I get to hear so many foreign words there that I'm beginning to forget the simplest ones! So when she's making her comparisons between Frau von Stein and the other, Amheim keeps staring at me as if, compared with his idol, I was no better than the kind you just said. "
Now Ulrich insisted on an explanation ofthese new developments.
It turned out that since Bonadea had claimed the status of Ulrich's confidante she had made great strides in her intimacy with Diotima. Her alleged nymphomania, which Ulrich had carelessly men- tioned to Diotima in a moment of pique, had had a far-reaching ef- fect on his cousin. She had begun by inviting the newcomer to her gatherings, in the role of a lady vaguely active in social welfare, and watched her covertly. This intruder, soaking up Diotima's domestic interiors with eyes soft as blotting paper, not only had been down-
right uncanny but had also aroused in her as much feminine curiosity as dread. To tell the truth, when Diotima pronounced the term "ve- nereal disease" she felt the same vague sensations as when she tried
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 957
to imagine what her new acquaintance actually did, and from one occasion to the next she was expecting, with an uneasy conscience, some impossible behavior, outrage, or scandal from her. Bonadea succeeded, however, in calming these suspicions by cloaking her am- bition in the kind of especially well-bred behavior that naughty chil- dren affect when their moral zeal is aroused by the tone of their surroundings. In the process she even managed to forget that she was jealous of Diotima, who was surprised to find that her disturbing protegee was just as much given over to "ideals" as she was herself. For the "fallen sister," as she thought ofher, had soon become a pro- tegee, in whom Diotima was moved to take an especially active inter- est because her own situation made her see the ignoble mystery of nymphomania as a kind of female sword of Damocles which, she said, might hang by a thin thread even over the head of a vestal vir- gin. "I know, my child," she consolingly instructed Bonadea, who was about her own age, "there is nothing so tragic as embracing a man ofwhom one is not entirely convinced! " and kissed her on that unchaste mouth with a heroic effort that would have been enough to make her press her lips on the blood-dripping bristles of a lion's beard.
Diotima's position at that time was midway between Arnheim and Tuzzi: a seesaw position, metaphorically speaking, one end ofwhich was weighted down too much, the other not enough. Even Ulrich had found her, on his return, with hot towels around her head and stomach; but these female complaints, the intensity of which she sensed to be her body's protest against the contradictory orders it was receiving from her soul, had also awakened in Diotima that noble resolve that was characteristic of her as soon as she refused to be just like every other woman. It was of course hard to decide, at first, whether it was her soul or her body that was called upon to take action, or whether a change in her attitude toward Arnheim or to- ward Tuzzi would be the better response; but this was settled with the world's help, for while her soul with its enigmas eluded her like a fish one tries to hold bare-handed, the suffering seeker was surprised to find plenty of advice in the books of the zeitgeist, once she had decided to deal with her fate from the physical angle, as represented by her husband. She had not known that our time, which has pre- sumably distanced itselffrom the concept ofpassionate love because
gs8 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
it is more of a religious than a sexual concept, regards love contemp- tuously as being too childish to still bother about, devoting all its en- ergies instead to marriage, the bodily operations of which in all their variants it investigates with zestful specificity. There was already at that time a spate of books that discussed the "sexual revolution" with the clean-mindedness of a gym teacher, and whose aim was to help people be happy though married. In these books man or wife were referred to only as "male and female procreators," and the boredom they were supposed to exorcise by all manner of mental and physical diversions was labeled "the sexual problem. " When Diotima first im- mersed herself in this literature she furrowed her brow, but it soon smoothed out again; for it was a spur to her ambition to discover that a great new movement of the zeitgeist was under way, which had so far escaped her notice. Transported, she finally clapped hands to brow in amazement that she who had it in her to set the world a great goal (though it was not yet clear what) had never before realized that even the unnerving discomfitures of marriage could be dealt with by using one's intellectual resources. This possibility coincided with her inclinations and suddenly opened the prospect of treating her rela- tionship with her husband, which she had so far regarded as some- thing to be endured, as a science and an art.
"Wherever we may roam, there's no place like home," Bonadea said, with her characteristic taste for platitudes and quotations. For it came about that Diotima, in the role of guardian angel, soon took on Bonadea as a pupil in these matters, in accordance with the pedagog- ical principle that one learns best by teaching. This enabled Diotima to go on extracting, from the still undirected and unclear impressions she gained from her new reading, points she could really believe i n - guided as she was by the happy secret of "intuition," that you are sure to hit the bull's-eye ifyou talk about anything long enough. At the same time it worked to Bonadea's advantage that she could bring to the dialogue that response without which the student remains bar- ren soil for even the best teacher: her rich practical experience, doled out with restraint, had served the theoretician Diotima as an anxiously studied source of information ever since she had set out to put her marriage in order with the aid of textbooks.
"Look, I'm sure I'm not nearly as bright as she is," Bonadea ex- plained, "but often there are things in her books that even I never
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 959
dreamed of, and that makes her so discouraged sometimes, and then she'll say things like: This can't be decided at the council table of the marriage bed, I'm afraid; it would, unfortunately, take an immense amount of trained sexual experience, a lot of real physical practice on living material! "
"But for heaven's sake," Ulrich exclaimed, convulsed with laugh- ter at the mere idea of his chaste cousin's straying into "sexology," "what on earth is she after? "
Bonadea gathered her memories of the happy conjunction be- tween the scientific interests of the time and unthinking utterance. "It's a question ofhow best to develop and manage her sex instinct," she finally responded, in the spirit ofher teacher. "And she stands for the principle that a joyous and harmonious sex life has to be achieved through the most severe self-discipline. "
"So you two are in training? Endurance training, at that? I'm im- pressed, I must say," Ulrich exclaimed. "But now will you kindly ex- plain just what it is Diotima is training for? "
"To begin with, she's training her husband, of course," Bonadea corrected him.
"The poor devil! " Ulrich could not help thinking. "In that case," he said, 'Td like to know how she does it. Please don't tum prudish on me all of a sudden. "
Under this grilling Bonadea did, in fact, feel inhibited by her am- bition to shine, like a prize pupil in an exam.
"Her sexual atmosphere is poisoned," she explained cautiously. "The only way to save it is for her and Tuzzi to make a most careful study of their behavior. There are no general rules for this. Each of them has to observe how the other reacts to life. To be a good ob- server, a person has to have some insight into sexual life. One has to be able to compare one's practical experience with the results ofthe- oretical research, Diotima says. Woman today happens to have a new and different attitude to the sex problem; she expects a man not only to act but to act with a real understanding of the feminine! " And for Ulrich's entertainment or even just to amuse herself, she gaily added: "Just imagine what it must be like for her husband, who hasn't the faintest inkling ofall this new stuffand gets to hear about it mostly at bedtime while they're undressing-let's say when Diotima is taking her hair down and fishing for hairpins, with her petticoats tucked be-
g6o · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
tween her knees, and then suddenly she starts talking about all that. I tried it out on my husband, and it drove him almost to apoplexy. One thing you must admit: If marriage is to be for a lifetime, at least there's the advantage that you have the opportunity of getting all the erotic possibilities in it out ofyour spouse. Which is what Diotima is trying to do with Tuzzi, who happens to be a bit crude!
"
"Sounds like hard times for your husbands! " Ulrich teased.
Bonadea laughed, and he could tell how glad she would be to oc- casionally play truant from the oppressive earnestness of her school of love.
But Ulrich's probing instincts would not let go; he sensed that his greatly changed friend was keeping quiet about something she would much rather have talked about. He professed to be mystified be- cause, from what he had heard, the two husbands involved had so far rather erred in overdoing the "erotic possibilities. "
"Of course, that's all you ever think! " Bonadea said reproachfully, giving him a long, pointed glance with a little hook at its end that could easily be interpreted as regret for the innocence she had ac- quired. "You take advantage of a woman's physiological feeblemind- edness yourself! "
"What do I take advantage of? You've found a splendid expression for the history of our love! "
Bonadea slapped his face lightly and, nervously, patted her hair in front of the mirror. Glancing at him out of the mirror, she said: "That's from a book. "
"Of course. A very well known book. "
"But Diotima disputes it. She found something in another book that speaks of 'the physiological inferiority of the male. ' The author is a woman. Do you think it really makes much difference? "
"How can I tell, since I've no idea what we're talking about? "
'Well then, listen! Diotima's starting point is the discovery that she calls 'a woman's constant readiness for sex. ' Can you see that? "
"Not in Diotima! "
"Don't be so crude! " she rebuked him. "It's a delicate theory, and it's hard for me to explain it to you so that you don't draw false con- clusions from the fact that I happen to be here alone with you in your house while I'm talking about it. So this theory has it that a woman
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g61
can be made love to even when she doesn't feel like it. Now do you see? "
"I do. "
"Unfortunately, it can't be denied either. On the other hand, they say that quite often a man can't make love even when he wants to. Diotima says this has been scientifically established. Do you believe that? "
"It's been known to happen. "
"Oh, I don't know," Bonadea said doubtfully. "But Diotima says that ifyou regard it in the light ofscience, it's obvious. For in contrast with a woman's constant readiness for sex, a man-well, in a word, a man's manliest part is easily discouraged. " Her face was the color of bronze as she now turned it away from the mirror.
"I never would have guessed it about Tuzzi," Ulrich said tactfully.
"I don't think it used to be the case, either," Bonadea said. "It's only happening now, as a belated confinnation of the theory, be- cause she lectures him on it day in, day out. She calls it the theory of the 'fiasco. ' Because the male procreator is so prone to this fiasco, he only feels sexually secure if he doesn't have to be afraid of a woman's being in some way or other spiritually superior, and that's why men hardly ever have the courage to try a relationship with a woman who's their equal as a human being. At least, they try right away to put them down. Diotima says that the guiding principle of all male love transactions, and especially of male arrogance, is fear. Great men show it-she means Arnheim, ofcourse. Lesser men hide it be- hind brutal physical aggression and abusing a woman's soul-I mean you! And she means Tuzzi. That sort of 'Now or never! ' you men so often use to make us give in is only a kind of overcomp--" She was about to say "compress"; "overcompensation," Ulrich said, coming to the rescue.
"Right. That's how you men manage to overcome the impression of your physiological inferiority! "
"What have you two decided to do, then? " Ulrich said meekly.
"We have to make an effort to be nice to men! That's why I've come to see you. We'll see how you take it. ''
"And Diotima? "
"Heavens, what do you care about Diotima? Arnheim's eyes pop
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out like a snail's when she tells him that the most intellectually supe- rior men unfortunately seem to find full satisfaction only with in- ferior women and fail with women who are their equals, as attested scientifically by the case of Frau von Stein and the Vulpius woman. You see, now I've got her name right, but of course I've always known she was the noted sex partner of the aging Olympian! "
Ulrich tried to steer the conversation away from himself and back to Tuzzi. Bonadea began to laugh; she was not without sympathy for the sony predicament ofthe diplomat, whom she found quite attrac- tive as a man, and felt a certain malicious and conspiratorial glee about his having to suffer under the castigations of the soul. She re- ported that Diotima was basing her treatment of Tuzzi on the as- sumption that she must cure him of his fear of her, which had also enabled her to come to terms somewhat with his "sexual brutality. " The great blunder of her life, she admitted, was in achieving an emi- nence too great for her male marriage partner's na! ve need to feel superior, so she had set about toning it down by hiding her spiritual superiority behind a more suitable erotic coquetry.
Ulrich broke in to ask, with lively interest, what she understood by that.
Bonadea's glance bored deeply into his face. "She might say to him, for instance, 'Up to now our life has been spoiled by our com- peting for status. ' And then she admits to him that the poisonous ef- fect of the male struggle for power dominates all of public life as well. . . :·
"But that's neither coquettish nor sexy! " Ulrich objected.
"Oh, but it is! You have to remember that a man in the grip of passion will behave toward a woman like an executioner toward his victim. That's part of his struggle for self-assertion, as it's now called. On the other hand, you won't deny that the sex drive is important to a woman too? "
"Certainly not! "
"Good. But a happy sexual relationship demands an equal give- and-take. To get a really rapturous response from the love partner, the partner must be respected as an equal and not just as a will-less extension of oneself," she went on, caught up in her mentor's mode of expression like someone sliding helplessly and anxiously across a polished surface, carried along by his own momentum. "If no other
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g63
human relationship is able to endure unremitting pressure and coun- terpressure, how much less can a sexual-"
"Oho! " Ulrich disagreed.
Bonadea pressed his arm, and her eye glittered like a falling star. "Hold your tongue! " she cried. "None of you have any firsthand ex- perience ofthe feminine psyche! And ifyou want me to go on telling you about your cousin . . . " But her energy was spent, and her eyes now had the glitter ofa tigress's as she watches fresh meat being car- ried past her cage. "No, I can't listen to any more ofthis myself! " she cried.
"Does she really talk like that? " Ulrich asked. "Did she actually say these things? "
"But it's all I hear every day, nothing but sexual practice, success- ful embraces, key principles of eroticism, glands, secretions, re- pressed urges, erotic training, and regulation of the sex drive! Apparently everyone has the sexuality he deserves, at least that's what your cousin claims, but do I deserve to be so overloaded with it? "
Her gaze firmly held his.
"I don't think so," Ulrich said slowly.
"After all, couldn't one just as easily say that my strong capacity for
experiencing represents a physiological superiority? " Bonadea asked with a gaily suggestive burst oflaughter.
There was no more discussion. When, some considerable time later, Ulrich became aware of a certain resistance in himself, living daylight was spraying through the chinks in the curtains, and if one glanced in that direction the darkened room resembled the sepul- cher of an emotion that had shriveled past the point of recognition. Bonadea lay there with her eyes closed, giving no sign of life. The feeling she now had of her body was not unlike that of a child whose defiance had been broken by a whipping. Every inch of that body, which was both completely satiated and battered, cried out for the tenderness of moral forgiveness. From whom? Certainly not from the man in whose bed she lay and whom she had implored to kill her, because her lust could not be appeased by any repetition or intensifi- cation. She kept her eyes shut to avoid having to see him. She tried thinking: ''I'm in his bed. " This-and 'T il never let myself be driven out of it again! "-was what she had been shouting inwardly just a
964 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
short time before; now it merely expressed a situation she could not get out of without having to go through an embarrassing perform- ance, which was still ahead of her. Bonadea slowly and indolently picked up her thoughts where she had dropped them.
She thought of Diotima. Gradually, words came to mind, then whole sentences and fragments of sentences, but mainly only a sense of satisfaction at being where she was while words as incomprehensi- ble and hard to remember as hormones, lymphatic glands, chromo- somes, zygotes, and inner secretions thundered past her ear in a cascade of talk. For her mentor's chastity recognized no boundaries as soon as they were effaced by the glare of scientific illumination.
Diotima was capable of saying to her listeners: "One's sex life is not a craft that is to be learned; it should always be the highest art we may acquire in life! " while feeling as little unscientific emotion as when in her zeal she spoke of a "point of reference" or "a central point. " Her disciple now recalled these expressions exactly. Critical analysis of the embrace, clarification ofthe physical elements, erogenous zones, the way to highest fulfillment for the woman, men who have them- selves well under control and are considerate oftheir partner . . . Just an hour ago Bonadea, who normally admired these scientific, intel- lectual, and highly refined terms, had felt grossly deceived by them. To her surprise she had just now realized with returning conscious- ness that this jargon was meaningful not only for science but for the emotions too, when the flames were already licking out from the un- supervised emotional side. At that point she hated Diotima. "Talking that way about such things, it's enough to kill your appetite! " she had thought, feeling horribly vindictive toward Diotima, who evidently, with four men of her own, begrudged Bonadea anything at all and was deliberately hoodwinking her in this fashion. Indeed, Bonadea had actually considered the enlightenment with whose help sexual science cleans up the occult ways of the sexual process as a plot of Diotima's. Now she could not understand that any more than she could understand her passionate longing for Ulrich. She tried to re- member the moments in which all her thoughts and feelings had gone wild; it was as incomprehensible as if a man bleeding to death were to try to think back on the impatience that had led him to tear off his protective bandages. Bonadea thought of Count Leinsdorf, who had called marriage a high office and had compared Diotima's
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books on the subject with a manual for organizing official proce- dures. She thought of Arnheim, who was a multimillionaire and who had called the revival of marital fidelity, based on the idea of the body, a true necessity of the times. And she thought of all the other famous men she had recently met, without even remembering whether they had short legs or long ones, were fat or lean, for all she saw in them was the radiance of their celebrity rounded out by a vague physical mass, much as the delicate frame of a young roast pi- geon is given substance by a solid mass of herb stuffing. Sunk in these memories, Bonadea vowed that she would never again let her- selfbe prey to one ofthose sudden hurricanes that mix up above and below, and she swore this to herself so fervently that she could al- ready see herself-if only she could hold firmly enough to her re- solve-in fantasy and without physical particulars, as the mistress of the finest ofall her great friend's admirers, hers for the choosing. But since for the present there was no getting around the fact that she was still lying in Ulrich's bed with very little on, reluctant to open her eyes, this rich sense of eager contrition, instead of developing further into a comfort to her, turned into a wretched state of exasperation.
The passion whose workings split Bonadea's life irito such oppos- ing elements had its deepest roots not in sensuality but in ambition. Ulrich, who knew her well, thought about this but said nothing, to avoid bringing on her complaints, as he studied her face, while her eyes hid from him. The root of all her desires seemed to him a desire for distinction that had got on the wrong track, quite literally the wrong nerve track. And why shouldn't, really, an ambition to break social records that can be celebrated with triumph, such as drinking the most beer or hanging the most diamonds on one's neck, some- times manifest itself, as in Bonadea's case, as nymphomania? Now that it was over, she regretted this form of expression and wished she could undo it, he could see that; and he could also appreciate the fact that Diotima's elaborate artificiality must impress Bonadea, whom the devil had always ridden bareback, as divine. He looked at her lidded eyeballs resting exhausted and heavy in their sockets; he saw before him her tawny nose, turned decidedly upward at the tip, with its pink, pointed nostrils; he noticed in some bewilderment the vari- ous lines of her body, its large round breasts spreading on the straight corset of her ribs, the bulbous curve of hips, the hollow
g66 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
sweep of the back rising from them, the hard pointed nails shielding the soft tips of the fingers. And finally, as he gazed for some time in revulsion at a few tiny hairs sprouting before his eyes from his mis- tress's nostrils, he, too, wondered at recalling how his desires had been aroused only a short while ago by this person's seductive channs. The bright, mischievous smile with which Bonadea had ar- rived for their "talk," the natural ease with which she had fended off any rebukes or told the latest story about Arnheim, indeed her new, almost witty keenness of observation: she really had changed for the better; she seemed to have grown more independent, to have achieved a finer balance between the forces in her nature that pulled her up and those that pulled her down, and Ulrich found this lack of moral ponderousness particularly refreshing after his own recent bouts of seriousness. He still could feel the pleasure with which he had listened to her and watched the play of expression on her face, like sun and waves. Suddenly, while his gaze was still on Bonadea's now sulky face, it struck him that only serious people could really be evil. "One might safely say," he thought, "that lighthearted people are proof against wickedness. On the same principle that the villain in opera is always a bass! " Somehow this also implied an uncomfort- able link in his own case between "deep" and "dark. " Guilt is cer- tainly mitigated when incurred "lightly" by a cheerful person, but on the other hand this may apply only to love, where impassioned se- ducers seem to act far more destructively and unforgivably than friv- olous ones, even when they are doing the same thing. So his thoughts went this way and that, and if this hour of love, so lightly begun, left him a little downhearted, it had also unexpectedly stimulated him.
So thinking, he forgot, without quite knowing how, the Bonadea who was there; resting his head on his ann, he had pensively turned his back to Bonadea and was gazing through the walls at distant things, when his total silence moved her to open her eyes. All un- aware, he was at this moment remembering how he had once on a journey got off a train before reaching his destination; a translucent day that had mysteriously, seductively, swept the veils from the land- scape had lured him away from the station for a walk, only to desert him at nightfall, when he found himselfwithout his luggage in a ham- let hours away. Indeed, he seemed to recall that he had always had the quality ofstaying out for unpredictable lengths oftime and never
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g67
returning by the same road; and this suddenly brought back a far dis- tant memory, from a period in his childhood that he normally could not recall, which cast a light on his life. Through a tiny chink in time he seemed to feel again the mysterious yearning by which a child is drawn toward some object it sees, to touch it or even put it in its mouth, at which point the magic comes to a stop as in a blind alley. Just as briefly, he regarded it as possible that the longing of adults, which drives them toward any distance merely to transform it into nearness, is no better or worse-the same sort of longing that domi- nated him, a compulsion, to judge by a certain aimlessness that was merely masked by curiosity; and finally, this basic image changed to a third, emerging as this hasty and disappointing episode with Bona- dea, which neither of them had wanted to turn out as it had. Lying side by side in bed seemed utterly childish to him. "But what does its opposite mean, that motionless, hushed love at a great distance, as incorporeal as an early autumn day? " he wondered. "Probably only another version of child's play," he thought skeptically, and remem- bered the colorful animal prints he had loved more rapturously as a child than he had loved his mistress today.
Bonadea at this point had seen just about enough of his back to gauge her unhappiness, and she spoke up: "It was your fault! "
Ulrich turned to her with a smile and said spontaneously: "My sis- ter is coming here in a few days to staywith me-did I tell you? We'll hardly be able to see each other then. "
"For how long? " Bonadea asked.
"To stay," Ulrich answered, smiling again.
"Well? '' Bonadea said. "What difference will it make? Unless
you're trying to tell me that your sister won't let you have a lover? '' "That's just what I am trying to tell you," Ulrich said.
Bonadea laughed. "Here I came to see you today in all innocence,
and you never even let me finish my story! " she complained.
"I seem to have been designed as a machine for the relentless devaluation of life! I want to be different for once," Ulrich retorted. This was quite beyond her, but it made her remember defiantly that
she loved Ulrich. All at once she stopped being the helpless victim of her nerves and found a convincing naturalness; she said, simply: "You've started an affair with her! "
Ulrich warned her not to say such things; a little more grimly than
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he had meant to. "I intend for a long time to love no woman other- wise than ifshe were my sister," he said, and stopped. The length of his silence impressed Bonadea with a greater sense ofhis determina- tion than was perhaps justified by his words.
"You're really perverse! " she cried in a tone ofprophetic warning, and leapt out of bed in order to huny back to Diotima's academy of love, whose unsuspecting portals stood wide open to receive its re- pentant and refreshed disciple.
AGATHE ACTUALLY ARRIVES
That evening there was a telegram, and the next afternoon Agathe arrived.
Ulrich's sister brought only a few suitcases, in accordance with her plan to leave everything behind-not that the quantity ofher luggage was wholly in keeping with the precept "Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes. " When he heard about the precept, Ulrich laughed; there were even two hatboxes that had escaped the fire.
Agathe's forehead showed the charming furrow denoting hurt feelings and futile brooding over them.
Whether it was fair of Ulrich to find fault with the imperfect ex- pression of a grand and sweeping emotion was left undetermined, for Agathe did not raise the question. The cheerful fuss and upheaval that of necessity attended her arrival made an uproar in her ears and eyes like a dance swaying around a brass band. She was in fine spirits but faintly disappointed, although she had not been expecting any- thing in particular and had even made a point during her journey of not forming any expectations. It was only that when she remembered that she had stayed up all the previous night she was suddenly over- come with fatigue. She didn't mind when Ulrich had to tell her, after a while, that her telegram had come too late for him to postpone an
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · g6g
appointment he had for the afternoon. He promised to be back in an hour, and settled his sister on the sofa in his study with such elabo- rate care that they both had to laugh.
When Agathe woke up, the hour was long gone, and Ulrich was not there. The room was sunk in deep twilight and was so alien that she felt suddenly dismayed at finding herself in the midst of the new life to which she had been looking forward. As far as she could make out, the walls were lined with books just as her father's had been, and the tables covered with papers. Curiosity led her to open a door and enter the adjacent room: here she found clothes closets, shoe boxes, the punching bag, barbells, and parallel bars. Beyond these were more books, the bathroom with its eau de cologne, bath salts, brushes, and combs, her brother's bedroom, and the hall, with its hunting trophies. Her passage was marked by lights flashing on and off, but as chance would have it, Ulrich noticed none of this, even though he was home by now. He had put off waking her to let her rest a while longer, and now he ran into her on the landing as he was coming up from the little-used basement kitchen.
