No More Learning

Clarisse was not quite sure whether her struggles with Walter still mattered. Meanwhile life was racing by like this music that was vanishing under her hands. In a wink it would be over! She was gradually overcome by hopeless terror. At this moment she noticed that Walter's playing
was becoming unsure. His feelings were splashing like big raindrops on the keys. She instantly guessed what he was thinking of: the child. She knew that he wanted to bind her to himself with a child. They argued about it day in, day out. And the music did not stop for a second. The music knew no denial. Like a net whose entangling meshes she had not noticed, it was pulling shut with lightning speed.
Clarisse leapt up in mid-chord and banged the piano shut; Walter barely managed to save his fingers.
Oh, how that hurt! Still shocked, he understood everything. It was Ulrich's coming, the mere news of which was enough to throw her mind into a frenzy! Ulrich was bad for Clarisse in that he callously roused in her something that Walter himselfhardly dared touch, that wretched streak ofgenius in Clarisse. The secret cavern where some- thing calamitous was tearing at chains that might one day give way.
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He did not stir, but only gave Clarisse a dumbfounded stare.
And Clarisse offered no explanations, stood there, and breathed hard.
She was definitely not at all in love with Ulrich, she assured Walter after he had spoken. Ifshe were in love with him, she would say so at once. But she did feel kindled by him, like a light. She felt she shone more herself, amounted to more, when he was near; Walter on the. other hand always wanted only to close the shutters. Besides, her feelings were nobody else's business, not-Ulrich's and not Walter's!
Yet Walter thought that between the fury and indignation that breathed from her words he could scent a narcotic, deadly kernel of something that was not fury.
Dusk had fallen. The room was black. The piano was black. The silhouettes of two people who loved each other were black. Clarisse's eyes gleamed in the dark, kindled like a light, and in Walter's mouth, restless with pain, the enamel on a tooth shone like ivory. Regardless of the greatest affairs of state occurring in the world outside, and de- spite its vexations, this seemed to be one of those moments for which God had created the ear:th.
39
A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES CONSISTS OF
QUALITIES WITHOUT A MAN
But Ulrich did not come that evening. After Director Fischel had left him in such haste, he fell to mulling over the question of his youth: why the world so uncannily favored inauthentic and-in a higher sense-untrue statements. "One always gets one step ahead pre- cisely when one lies," he thought. "That's another thing I should have told him. "
Ulrich was a passionate man, but not in the sense of passions as commonly understood. There must indeed have been something
that drove him again and again into this stat~. and it was perhaps passion, but when he was actually excited or behaving in an excited manner, his attitude was both passionate and detached at the same time. He had run the gamut of experience, more or less, and felt that he might still now at any time plunge into something that ! . teed not mean anything to him personally so long as it stimulated his urge to action. So without much exaggeration he was able to say of his life that everything in it had fulfilled itself as if it belonged together more than it belonged to him. B had always followed A, whether in battle or in lov,e. Therefore he had to suppose that the personal qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him; that every one of them, in fact, looked at closely, was no more intimately bound up with him than with anyone else who also hap- pened to possess them.
Nevertheless, one is undoubtedly conditioned by one's qualities and is made up ofthem, even ifone is not identical with them, and so one can sometimes seem just as much a stranger to oneself at rest as in motion. If Ulrich had been asked to say what he was really like he would have been at a loss, for like so many people he had never tested himself other than by a task and his relation to it. His self- confidence had not been damaged, nor was it coddled and vain; it never needed that overhauling and lubrication that is called probing one's conscience. Was he a strong person? He didn't know; on that point he was perhaps fatefully mistaken. But he had surely always been a person with faith in his own strength. Even now he did not doubt that the differences between identifying with one's own expe- riences and qualities and distancing oneself from them was only a difference in attitud~, in a sense a deliberate decision or a choice of
the degree to which one saw one's life as a general manifestation or an individual one. Put simply, one can take what one does or what happens to one either personally or impersonally. One can feel a blow as an insult as well as a pain, in which case it becomes unbeara- bly intensified; but one can also take it in a sporting sense, as a set- back by which one should not let oneself be either intimidated or enraged, and then, often enough, one never even notices it. But in this second case, all that has happened is that the blow has been put in a general context, that of combat, so that it is seen to depend on the purpose it is meant to serve. And it is just this-that an experi~
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ence derives its meaning, even its content, only from its position in a chain of logically consistent events-which is apparent when a man sees his experience not only as a personal event but as a challenge to his spiritual powers. He will also be less emotionally affected by what he does. But oddly enough, what we consider a sign of superior intel- ligence in a boxer is judged to be cold and callous in people who can't box but incline to an intellectual way of life. Whether we apply and demand a general or a personal attitude in a given situation is gov- erned by all sorts of distinctions. A murderer who goes coolly about his business is likely to be judged particularly vicious; a professor who continues to work out a problem in the arms of his wife is seen as a dry-as-dust pedant; a politician who climbs to high office over the bodies of those he has destroyed will be called a monster or a hero, depending on his success; but soldiers, hangmen, or surgeons, on the other hand, are expected to behave with the same impassivity that is condemned in others. Without going further into the morality of these examples, we cannot overlook the uncertainty that leads in every case to a compromise between the objectively and the subjec- tively proper attitude.
This uncertainty gave Ulrich's personal problem a broader con- text. In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a per- son than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pes- tilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a re- gion, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk-all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility's center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into
ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense ofothers as ifthey are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say now- adays th2t his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private
experience is a thing ofthe past, and that the friendly burden ofper- sonal responsibility is to dissolve into a system offormulas ofpossible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the "I" itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naive. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say "We saw the So-and-sos yester- day" or 'We'll do this . or that today" and enjoy it without its needing to have any content or significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why.
And suddenly, in view ofthese reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without hav- ing one.
A MAN WITH ALL THE QUALITIES, BUT HE IS INDIFFERENT TO THEM.
A PRINCE OF INTELLECT IS ARRESTED, AND THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN GETS ITS HONORARY SECRETARY
It is not difficult to describe the basic traits ofthis thirty-two-year-old man Ulrich, even though all he knows about himself is that he is as close to as he is far from all qualities, and that they are all, whether or not he has made them his own, in a curious fashion indifferent to him. With a suppleness of mind, owing simply to his being gifted in
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various directions, he combines a certain aggressiveness. His is a masculine mind. He is not sensitive toward other people and rarely puts himself in their place, except to get to know them for his own purposes. He is no respecter of rights unless he respects the person whose rights they are, which is not very often. With the passage of time, a certain inclination toward the negative has developed in him, a flexible dialectic of feeling that easily leads him to discover a flaw in something widely approved or, conversely, to defend the forbidden and to refuse responsibilities with a resentment that springs from the desire to create his own responsibilities. Despite this need, however, and apart from certain self-indtilgences, he lets himself be 'guided morally by the chivalrous code that is followed by almost all men as long as they live in secure circumstances in middle-class society, and so, with all the arrogance, ruthlessness, and negligence of a man called to his vocation, he leads the life ofanother man who has made of his inclinations and abilities more or less ordinary, practical and social use. He was accustomed, instinctively and without vanity, to regard himself as the instrument of a not unimportant purpose,
which he intended to discover in good time; even now, early in this year of groping unrest, after he realized how his life had been drift- ing, the feeling that he waS on his way somewhere was soon restored, and he made no special effort with his plans. It is none too easy to recognize in such a temperament the passion that drives it; ambigu- ously formed by predisposition and circumstances, its fate has not yet been laid bare by any really tough counterpressure. But the main thing is that the missing element needed in order to crystallize a de- cision is still unknown. Ulrich was a man forced somehow to live against himself, though outwardly he appeared to be indulging his inclinations without constraint.
Comparing the world to a laboratory had rekindled an old idea in his mind. Formerly he had thought of the kind of life that would ap- peal to him as a vast experimental station for trying out the best ways of being a man and discovering new ones. That the great existing lab- oratory was functioning rather haphazardly, lacking visible directors or theoreticians at the top, was another matter. It might even be said that he himself would have wanted to become something like a phi- losopher king; who wouldn't? It is so natural to regard the mind as the highest power, the supreme ruler of everything. That is what we
are taught. Anybody who can dresses up in intellect, decks himself out in it. Mind and spirit, in· combination with a -numinous other something, is the most ubiquitous thing there is. The spirit ofloyalty, the spirit of love, a masculine mind, a cultivated mind, the greatest living mind, keeping up the spirit of one cause or another, acting in the spirit of this or that movement: how solid and unexceptionable it sounds, right down to its lowest levels. Beside it everything else, be it humdrum crime or the hot pursuit ofprofits, seems inadmissible, the dirt God removes from His toenails.
But what of "spirit" standing by itself, a naked noun, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? One can read the poets, study the philosophers, buy paintings, hold all-night discus- sions-does all this bestow spirit on us? 0 Ifit does, do we then pos- sess it? And even if we should, this spirit is so firmly bound up with the accidental form in which it happens to manifest itself! It passes right through the person who wants to absorb it, leaving only a small tremor behind. What can we do with all this spirit? It is constantly being spewed out in truly astronomical quantities on masses of paper, stone, and canvas, and just as ceaselessly consumed at a tre- mendous cost in nervous energy. But what becomes of it then? Does it vanish like a mirage? Does it dissolve into particles? Does it evade the earthly law of conservation? The inotes of dust that sink and slowly settle down to rest inside us bear no relation to all that ex- pense. Where has it gone, where and what is it? If we knew more about it there might be an awkward silence around this noun, "spirit. "
Evening had come; buildings as if broken out of pure space, as- phalt, steel rails, formed the cooling shell that was the city. The mother shell, full of childlike, joyful, angry human movement. Where every drop begins as a droplet sprayed or squirted; a tiny ex- plosion caught by the walls, cooling, calming, and slowing down, hanging quietly, tenderly, on the slope of the mother shell, harden- ing at last into a little grain on its wall. ·
"Why," Ulrich thought suddenly, "didn't I become a pilgrim? " A
"The Gennan word Geist is variously rendered in this chapter as "mind," "spirit," and "intellect. " A powerful concept in Gennan culture, Geist embraces all three. - E D .
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pure, uncontingent way of life, as piercingly fresh as ozone, pre- sented itself to his senses; whoever cannot say ''Yes" to life should at least utter the "No" of the saint. And yet it was simply impossible to consider this seriously. . Nor could he see himselfbecoming an adven- turer, though it might feel rather like an everlasting honeymoon, and appealed to his limbs and his temperament. He had not been able to become a poet or one ofthose disillusioned souls who believe only in money and power, although he had the makings of either. He forgot his age, he imagined he was twenty, but even so, something inside him was just as certain that he could become none of those things; every possibility beckoned him, but something stronger kept him from yielding to the attraction. Why was he living in this dim and undecided fashion? Obviously, he said to himself, what was keeping him spellbound in this aloof and nameless way of life was nothing other than the compulsion to that loosening and binding ofthe world that is known by a word we do not care to encounter by itself: spirit, or mind. Without knowing why, Ulrich suddenly felt sad, and thought: "I simply don't love myself. " Within the frozen, petrified body of the city he felt his heart beatiilg in its innermost depths. There was something in him that had never wanted to remain any- where, had groped its way along the walls of the world, thinking: There are still millions of other walls; it was this slowly cooling, ab- surd drop "I" that refused to give up its fire, its tiny glowing core.
The mind has learned that beauty makes things or people good, bad, stupid, or enchanting. It dissects a sheep and a penitent and finds humility and patience in both. It analyzes a substance and notes that it is a poison in large quantities, a stimulant in smaller ones. It knows that the mucous membrane of the lips is related to the m~­ cous membrane of the intestine, but also knows that the humility of those lips is related to the humility of all that is saintly. it jumbles things up, sorts them out, and forms new combinations. To the mind, good and evil, above and below, are not skeptical, relative concepts, but terms of a function, values that depend on the context they find themselves in. The centuries have taught it that vices can turn into virtues and virtues into vices, so the mind concludes that basically only ineptitude prevents the transformation of a criminal into a use- ful person within the space ofa lifetime. It does not accept anything as permissible or impermissible, since everything may have some
quality that may someday make it part of a great new context. · It secretly detests everything with pretensions to permanence, all the great ideals and laws and their little fossilized imprint, the well- adjusted character. It regards nothing as fixed, no personality, no order of things; because our knowledge may change from day to day, it regards nothing as binding; everything has the value it has only until the next act of creation, as a face changes with the words we are
. speaking to it.
And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible
to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power lead- ing only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit. Ulrich thought of that body of facts and discoveries, growing almost by the hour, out of which the mind must peer today if it wishes to scrutinize any given problem closely. This body grows away from its inner life. Countless views, opinions, systems of ideas from every age and latitude, from all sorts of sick and sound, waking and dreaming brains run through it like thousands of small sensitive nerve strands, but the central nodal point tying them all together is missing. Man feels dangerously close to repeating the fate of those gigantic primeval species that perished because of their size; but he cannot stop himself.
This reminded Ulrich of that rather dubious notion in which he had long believed a'nd even now had not quite uprooted from him- self: that the world would be best governed by a senate of the wisest, the most advanced. It is after all very natural to think that man, who calls in professionally trained doctors rather than shepherds to treat him when sick, has no reason, when well, to let public affairs be con- ducted by windbags no better qualified than shepherds. This is why the young, who care about the essentials in life, begin by regarding everything in the world that is neither true nor good nor beautiful, such as the Internal Revenue Service or a debate in the legislature, as irrelevant; at least they used to. Nowadays, thanks to their education in politics and economics, they are said to be different. But even at that time, as one got older and on longer acquaintance with the smokehouse of the mind, in which the world cures the bacon of its daily affairs, one learned to adapt oneself to reality, and a person with
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a trained mind would finally end up limiting himself to his specialty and spend the rest of his life convinced that the whole of life should perhaps be different, but there was no point in thinking about it. This is more or less how people who follow intellectual pursuits maintain their equilibrium. Suddenly Ulrich saw th~ whole thing in the comi- callight of the question whether, given that there was certainly an abundance of mind around, the only thing wrong was that mind itself was devoid of mind.
He felt like laughing. He was himself, after all, one of those spe- cialists who had renounced responsibility for the larger questions. But disappointed, still-burning ambition went through him like a sword. At this moment there were two Ulrichs, walking side by side. One took in the scene with a smile and thought: So this is the stage on which I once hoped to play a part. One day I woke up, no Ionge~ snug in mother's crib, but with the firm conviction that there was something I had to accomplish. They gave me cues, but I felt they had nothing to do with me. Like a kind of feverish stagefright, every- thing in those days was filled with my own plans and expectations. Meanwhile the stage has continued revolving unobtrusively, I am somewhat farther along on my way, and I may already be standing near the exit. Soon I shall be turned out, and the only lines of my great part that I will have uttered are "The horses are saddled! The devil take all ofyou! "
But while the Ulrich smiling at these. reflections walked on through the hovering evening, the other had his fists clenched in pain and rage. He was the less visible of the two and was searching for a magic formula, a possible handle to grasp, the real mind of the mind, the missing piece, perhaps only a small one, that would close the broken circle. This second Ulrich had no words at his disposal. Words leap like monkeys from tree to tree, but in that dark place where·a man has his roots he is deprived oftheir kind mediation. The ground streamed away under his feet. He could hardly open his eyes. Can a feeling rage like a storm and yet not be a stormy feeling at all? By a storm of feeling we mean something that makes our trunk groan and our branches flail to the verge ofbreaking. But this storm left the surface quite undisturbed. It was almost a state of conversion, of turning back. There was no flicker of change in his facial expression, yet inside him not an atom seemed to stay in place. Ulrich's senses
were unclouded, and yet each person he passed was perceived in some out-of-the-ordinaxy way by his eye, each sound differently by his ear. He could not have said more sharply, nor more deeply either, nor more softly, nor more naturally or unnaturally. Ulrich could not say anything at all, but at this moment he thought of that curious experience, "spirit," as he would of a beloved who had deceived him all his life without his loving her less, and it bound him to everything that came his way. For in love everything is love, even pain and revul- sion. The tiny twig on the tree and the pale windowpane in the eve- ning light became an experience deeply embedded in his own nature, barely expressible in words. Things seemed to consist not of wood and stone but ofsome grandiose and infinitely tender immoral- ity that, the moment it came·in contact with him, turned into a deep moral shock.
All this lasted no longer than a smile, and just as Ulric;! h was think- ing, "Now for once I shall remain wherever it has carried me," he had the misfortune to run into an obstacle that shattered this tension.
What happened now came out of a wholly different world than the one in which Ulrich had just been experiencing trees and stones as a sensitive extension of his own body.
A left-wing tabloid had slavered its venomous spittle all over the Great Idea, as Count Leinsdorf might have put it, calling it just an- other sensation for the ruling class in the wake of the latest sex mur- der, and this caused an honest workingman who had been drinking to lose his temper. He had brushed up against two solid citizens pleased with their day's business who, convinced that a contented frame of mind could express itself anywhere, were rather loudly air- ing their approval of the great patriotic campaign they had read about in their paper. Words were exchanged, and as the proximity of a policeman encouraged the citizens as much as it provoked their attacker, the scene became increasingly impassioned. The policeman began by watching it over his shoulder, subsequently turning to face it and then coming closer; he attended as an obseiVer, like a protrud- ing offshoot of the iron machinery of the state, which ends in buttons and other metal trim. There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a streetcar without touching the bal- anced levers of a gigantic apparatus oflaws and interrelations, setting
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them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful exis- tence; one knows hardly any of these levers, which reach de~p into the inner workings and, coming out the other side, lose themselves in a network whose structure has never yet been unraveled by anyone. So one denies their existence, just as the average citizen denies the air, maintaining that it is empty space. But all these things that one denied, these colorless, odorless, tasteless, weightless, and morally indefinable things such as water, air, space, money, and the passing of fime, tum out in truth to be the most important things of all, and this gives life a certain spooky quality. Sometimes a man may be seized by panic, helpless as in a dream, thrashing about wildly like an animal that has blundered into the incomprehensible mechanism of a net. Such was the effect ofthe policeman's buttons on the working- man, and it was at this moment that the arm of the state, feeling that it was not being respected in the proper manner, proceeded to make an arrest.
It was not made without resistance and repeated pronouncements of rebellious sentiments. Flattered by the sensation he was creating, the drunk unleashed a previously hidden, total antipathy toward his fellowman. An impassioned struggle for self-assertion began.
A heightened sense· of self had to contend in him with the uncanny feeling that he was not settled inside his own skin. The world, too, was unsettled; it was a wavering mist continually losing and changing shape. Buildings stood slanted, broken out of space; between them people were ridiculous, swarming, yet fraternal ninnies. I have been called to straighten things out here, the staggering drunk felt. The whole scene was fllled with something shimmering, and some piece of what was happening was clearly getting through to him, but then the walls started spinning· again. His eyes were popping out of his head like stalks, whUe the soles of his feet still clung to the ground. An amazing stream had begun to pour from his mouth; words came from somewhere deep inside; there was no comprehending how they had ever got in there in the first place; possibly they were abusive. It was hard to-tell. Outsid~and inside were all tangled up together. The anger was not an inner anger, but only the physical shell of anger roused to frenzy, and the face of a policeman came very slowly for- ward to meet a clenched fist until it bled.
But the policeman, too, had meanwhile turned into three police-
men. With the other policemen a crowd had come running; the drunk had thrown himself to the ground and was resisting arrest. Ul- rich now did something rash. He had picked up the words "offense against the Crown" and remarked that the man was in no condition to be held responsible for insulting anyone and should be sent home to sleep it off. He said it casually enough, but to the wrong people. The fellow now shouted that Ulrich was welcome to join His Majesty in kissing his I and a policeman who obviously blamed this re- lapse on Ulrich's interference barked at him to clear out. But Ulrich was unaccustomed to regarding the state as other than a hotel in which one was entitled to polite service, and objected to being ad- dressed in such a tone; whereupon the police unexpectedly decided that one drunk did not justify the presence of three policemen and arrested Ulrich as well.
The hand of a uniformed man now clutched his arm. Ulrich's arm was considerably stronger than this offensive grip, but he did not dare break it; it would have meant letting himself in for a hopeless boxing match With the armed power of the state, so he had no other recourse than a polite request that they let him go along voluntarily. The station was in the district headquarters, and as he entered, Ul- rich was reminded by the floor and walls of an army barracks. They were filled With the same grim struggle between relentlessly dragged-in dirt and crude detergents. The next thing he noticed was the appointed symbol of civil authority, two writing desks-writing crates, really-topped by a balustrade With several of its little col- umns missing, and covered With tom and scorched cloth and resting on very low, ball-shaped feet With only the last peeling traces of browriish-yellow varnish clinging to the wood it had once coated, back in the reign of the Emperor Ferdinand. Third, the place was filled With a heavy intimation that here one was expected to wait, Without asking any questions. His policeman, after stating the grounds of the arrest, stood beside Ulrich like a column. Ulrich im- mediately tried to give some sort of explanation. The sergeant in command of this fortress raised an eye from the form he had been filling in when the convoy arrived, looked Ulrich up and down, then dropped his eye again and Without a word went on filling in his form. Ulrich had a sense of infinity. Then the sergeant pushed the form aside, took a volume from the shelf, made an entry, sprinkled sand on
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it, put the book back, took down another, made an entry, sprinkled sand, pulled a file out of a bundle of similar files, and continued as before. Ulrich felt a second infmity unfolding during which the con- stellations moved in their predetermined orbits and he did not exist.
From this office an open door led into a corridor lined with cells. Ulrich's protege had been taken there immediately on arrival, and as nothing more was heard from him, his intoxication had probably blessed him with sleep. But there was a sense of ominous other things going on. The corridor with the cells must have had a second entrance; Ulrich kept hearing heavy-footed comings and goings, doors slamming, muffled voices, and suddenly, as someone else was brought in, one ofthose voices rose in a desperate plea: "Ifyou have a spark of human feeling, don't arrest me! " The voice broke, and there was something curiously out ofplace, almost ridiculous, in this appeal to a functionary's feelings, since functions are only carried out impersonally. The sergeant raised his head for a moment, without entirely abandoning his flle. Ulrich heard the determined shuffle of many feet, whose bodies were presumably mutely pushing a resistant body along. Then came the sound of two feet alone, stumbling as after a shove. A door slammed shut loudly, a bolt clicked, the uni- formed man at the desk had bent his head again, and in the air lay the silence of a full stop set in its proper place at the end of a sentence.
Ulrich seemed to have been mistaken, however, in assuming that he himself did not yet exist in the cosmos of the police, for the next time the sergeant raised his head he looked straight at Ulrich; the last lines he had written gleamed damply, unblotted with sand, and Ul- rich's case suddenly appeared to have been officially in this bureau- cratic existence for some time. Name? Age? Occupation? Address? Ulrich was being questioned.
He felt as though he had been sucked into a machine that was dis- membering him into impersonal, general components before the question of his guilt or innocence came up at all. His name, the most intellectually meaningless yet most emotionally charged words in the language for him, meant nothing here. His works, which had secured his reputation in the scientific world, a world ordinarily of such solid standing, here did not exist; he was not asked about them even once. His face counted only as an aggregate of officially describable fea- tures-it'seemed to him that he had never before pondered the fact
that his eyes were gray eyes, one of the four officially recognized kinds of eyes, one pair among millions; his hair was blond, his build tall, his face oval, and his distinguishing marks none, although he had his own opinion on that point. His own feeling was that he was tall and broad-shouldered, with a chest curving like a filled sail on the mast, and joints fastening his muscles like small links of steel when- ever he was angry or fighting or when Bonadea was clinging to him; but that he was slender, fine-boned, dark, and as soft as a jellyfish floating in the water whenever he was reading a book that moved him or felt touched by a breath of that great homeless love whose presence in the world he had never been able to understand. So he could, even at such a moment as this, himself appreciate this statisti- cal demystification ofhis person and feel inspired by the quantitative and descriptive procedures applied to him by the police apparatus as if it were a love lyric invented by Satan. The most amazing thing about it was that the police could not only dismantle a man so that nothing was left of him, they could also put him together again, ·rec- ognizably and unmistakably, out of the same worthless components. All this achievement takes is that something imponderable be added, which they call "suspicion. "
All at once, Ulrich realized that it would take the coolest wit he could muster to extricate himself from the fix his feolishness had got him into. The questioning continued. He tried to imagine their reac- tion if he were to answer that his address was that of a stranger. Or if he replied, in answer to the question why he had done what he had done, that he always did something other than what he was really interested in doing? But outWardly he gave the proper answers as to street and house number, and tried to make up an acceptable version of his conduct. The feebleness of ~is mind's inward authority vis-a- vis the police sergeant's outward authority was acutely embarrassing; nevertheless, he finally glimpsed a chance of saving the situation. Even as he responded to the query "Occupation? " with "Indepen- dent"-he could not have brought himself to say "Engaged in inde- pendent research"-he saw, in the eye that was fix~d on him, the same lackluster expression a,s if he had said "homeless," but then, when in the list of particulars his father's status came up and it ap- peared that his father was a member of the Upper House, the look changed. It was still mistrustful, but something in it immediately
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gave Ulrich the feeling of a swimmer, tossed this way and that by huge waves, who suddenly feels his big toe scraping solid ground.
With quickening presence of mind he seized his advantage. He instantly qualified everything he had so far admitted; he confronted this authority of ears bound by their oath of office with the express demand to be heard by the Commissioner himself, and when this merely evoked a smile he lied-quite casually, with a happily recov- ered naturalness, prepared to talk himselfout ofit ifthreatened with a noose ofdemands for precise details-and said that he was a friend of Count Leinsdorf's and secretary of the great patriotic campaign one read so much about in the newspapers. He could see immedi- ately that this had the effect, previously un~used, of causing him to be taken seriously as a person, and he pressed his advantage.
The result was that the sergeant now eyed him indignantly, be- cause he did not want to take the responsibility either of detaining this catch or of letting it go. As there was no higher official in the building at this hour he resorted to an expedient that showed, to the simple sergeant's credit, how much he had learned from his superi- ors about handling awkward cases. He made a solemn face and ex- pressed grave misgivings that Ulrich apparently not only had been g u i l t y o f i n s u l t i n g a n o f f i c e r o f t h e 1aw a n d i n t e r f e r i n g w i t h t h e e x e c u - tion of his duty but, considering the position he claimed to hold, also came under suspicion of being involved in obscure, possibly political, machinations and would therefore have to submit to being trans- ferred to the political divis. ion at central police headquarters.
So a few minutes later Ulrich was on his way through the night, in a cab he had been permitted to hire, at his side a plainclothesman not much inclined to conversation. As they approached police headquar- ters the prisoner saw the brightly lit windows on the second floor, where at this late hour an important conference was still going on in the Chief Commissioner's office. This building was no gloomy hole but rather more like a Ministry, and Ulrich was already breathing a more familiar air. He soon noticed, too, that the officer on night duty quickly recognized what an absurd blunder the exasperated periph- eral apparatus had made in arresting Ulrich; still, it was quite inadvis- able to release from the clutches ofthe law someone so reckless as to run into them uninvited. The next-higher official at headquarters also had an iron machine for a face and insisted that the prisoner's
own rashness made it extremely difficult for the police to take re- sponsibility for his release. Ulrich had already twice gone over all the points that had worked so well with the sergeant, but with no effect on this higher official, and he was about to give up hope when sud- denly his judge's face underwent a ·remarkable, almost happy, change. Reading the charge again with care, he asked Ulrich to re- peat his name, made sure of his address, politely asked him to wait a moment, and left the room. Mter ten minutes he came back, looking like a man who had remembered something that pleased him, and with striking courtesy invited the arrested gentleman to follow him. At the door of one of the well-lit rooms on the upper floor he said only: "The Chief Commissioner would like to speak with you person- ally," and the next moment Ulrich found himself facing a gentleman with the muttonchop whiskers he knew so well by now, who had just come from the conference room next door.
He was about to explain, in a tone of gentle reproach, his presence as the consequence ofan error at the local police office but was antic- ipated by the Chief Commissioner, who greeted him with the words: "An unfortunate misunderstanding, my dear Herr Doktor, the In- spector has already told me all about it. All the same, a slight penalty is in order, in view of . . . ,"and he looked at Ulrich roguishly (if such a word may be used at all of the highest police official), as though giving him a chance to guess the answer himself.
Ulrich was totally stumped by the riddle. ·
"His Grace! " the Commissioner offered by way of assistance. "His Grace Count Leinsdorf," he went on, "asked me most ur-
gently for your whereabouts, just a few hours ago. "
Ulrich still did not quite follow.
"You are not in the directory, my dear sir," the Commissioner ex-
plained in a tone of mock reproach, and as though this were Ulrich's only crime.
Ulrich bowed, with a formal smile.
"I gather that you are expected to call on His Grace tomorrow on a matter of great public importance; and I cannot bring myself to pre- vent you from doing so by locking you up," the master of the iron machine concluded his little joke.
It may be assumed that the Chief Commissioner would have re- garded Ulrich's arrest as unwarranted in any case, since the Inspec-
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tor who had happened to recall Ulrich's name coming up the first time at central police headquarters a few hours before had repre- sented the incident to the Chief Commissioner in such a way as to make the conclusion inevitable that no one had actually interfered with the law arbitrarily. His G~ce, incidentally, never heard how Ul- rich had been tracked down. Ulrich felt obliged to pay his call the day following this evening of lese-majeste, and during this visit was im- mediately appointed Honorary Secretary to the great patriotic cam- paign. Count Leinsdorf, had he known how it had all come about, would not have been able to say otherwise than that it was like a miracle.
RACHEL AND DIOTIMA
Shortly afterward the first session ofthe great patriotic campaign was held at Diotima's.
The dining room had been transformed into a conference room. The dining table, fully extended and covered with green baize, occu- pied the center of the room. Sheets of bone-white ministry paper with pencils of varying degrees of hardness were laid at each place. The sideboard had been removed. The corners of the room were empty and austere. The walls were reverently bare but for a portrait of His Majesty hung by Diotima and that of a wasp-waisted lady which Tuzzi in his consular. days had brought home from somewhere and which might pass for an ancestral portrait. Diotima would have loved to put a crucifix at the head of the table, but Tuzzi had laughed her out ofit before tactfully absenting himselffrom his house for the day.
For the Parallel Campaign was to be inaugurated quite privately. No government ministers or official bigwigs appeared, nor any politi- cians. The intention was to start with a small, select group of none
but selfless seJVants of the Idea: The head of the International Bank, Herr von Holtzkopf and Baron Wisnieczky, a few ladies of the high nobility, some well-known figures associated with the city's great charities, and, in accord with Count Leinsdorf's principle of"capital and culture," representatives of the great universities, the art acade- mies, industry, the landowning families, and the Church were ex- pe,cted. The government was represented by a few unobtrusive young ministry officials who fitted into this social circle and enjoyed their chiefs' confidence. This mixture was in keeping with the wishes of Count Leinsdorf, who had dreamed of a spontaneous manifesta- tion arising from the midst of the people but who found it a great relief, after his experience with their reformist zeal, to know with whom one was dealing.
The little maid Rachel (somewhat freely translated by her mistress into a French "Rachelle") had been up. and about since six o'clock that morning. She had extended the big dining table, pushed two card tables up to it, covered the whole with green baize, and dusted with special care, carrying out all these burdensome tasks in great excitement. Diotima had said to her the previous evening: "Tomor- row we may be making world history here! " and Rachel's whole body
'was aglow with happiness at being part of a household where such an event could take place--a great compliment to the event, since Ra- chel's body, beneath its black uniform, was as exquisite as Meissen porcelain.
Rachel was nineteen and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards. She had been cursed and driven out of the door, her mother standing. by with a helpless look on her face, her brothers and sisters grinning with fear. She had pleaded for mercy on her knees, her heart strangled with shame, but to no avail. An unscrupulous young fellow had se- duced her; she no longer knew how; she had had to give birth to her child in the house of strangers arid then had left the country. Rachel had traveled; despair rolled along with her under the filthy cart in which she rode until, wept out, she saw the capital city, toward which some instinct had driven her, as some great wall of fire into which she wanted to hurl herself to die. But-:-ah true miracle--this wall parted and took her in. Since then, Rachel had always felt as though
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she were living in the interior ofa golden flame. Chance had brought her to Diotima's house, and Diotima regarded running away from home in Galicia as quite natural, ifit led to her. After they had got to know each other well, Diotima sometimes told the little girl about the famous and important people who regularly visited the house where "Rachelle" had the privilege of seiving; she had even told her a few things about the Parallel Campaign for the pleasure of seei. J:lg Rachel's eyes light up like a pair of golden mirrors radiantly reflect- ing her mistress's image.
For even if she had been cursed by her father because of some unscrupulous fellow, Rachel was an honorable girl and loved simply everything about Diotima: her soft dark hair, which Rachel was al- lowed to brush mornings and evenings; the dresses she helped her into; the Chinese lacqu~rworkand the little carved Indian tables; the books in foreign languages lying about, of which she understood not a word; she also loved Herr Tuzzi and, most recently, the nabob who had paid a call on her mistress the second day after his arrival in town-she made it out to be the first day. Rachel had stared at him in the hall with a rapture worthy of the Christian Savior descending from his golden shrine, and the only thing that vexed her was that he had not bi:ought along his Soliman to pay his respects to her mistress.
But today, with so historic an event in the offing, she felt confident that something wonderful would happen to her too, and she sup- posed that this time Soliman would probably be in attendance, as the solemnity of the occasion demanded. Not that everything hinged on this expectation, but it was a necessary flourish, part of the plot of amorous intrigue present in every novel Rachel read to improve her mind. For Rachel was allowed to read the novels Diotima had put aside, just as she was allowed to cut down and alter for herself Di- otima's discarded lingerie. Rachel sewed well and read fluently- that was her Jewish heritage-but when she was reading a novel Diotima had recommended as a great work of art (these were her favorites) she understood what was ·happening in it only as one per- ceives a lively event from a distance, or in a strange country; she was engrossed and moved by goings-on she did not understand and that she could not influence, and this she enjoyed enormously. She en- joyed in the same way, when sent out on an errand or when distin- guished visitors came to the house, the imposing and exciting
demeanor of an imperial city, its superabundance of brilliant detail, surpassing her understanding, in which she shared simply by being in a privileged place in its midst. She was not at all interested in under. :. standing it better; she had forgotten, in her anger, the basic teachings of her Jewish home, the wise maxims heard there, and felt as little need for them as a flower needs a spoon and fork in order to nourish itself with the juices of earth and air.
So now she collected all the pencils once more and carefully slipped their shiny points into the little machine affixed to the comer ofthe table, which peeled offthe wood so perfectly when you turned the handle that, when you repeated the process, not the tiniest chip fell off. Then she put the pencils back beside the velvety sheets of paper, three different kinds in each place, reflecting that this perfect machine she was allowed to use had been brought over yesterday evening with the pencils and the paper from the Foreign Ministry and the Imperial household by a uniformed messenger. It was now seven o'clock. Rachel quickly cast a general's glance over all the de- tails of the arrangement and hurried out of the room to waken Di- otima, for the meeting was set for a quarter past ten, and Diotima had stayed in bed awhile after the master had left the house.
These mqrnings with Diotima were a special treat for Rachel. The word "love" does not Ht the case; the word "veneration" is closer, if one pictures it in its full meaning, in which the honor conferred so completely penetrates a person that it Hils his inmost being and pushes him, so to speak, out of his own place within himself. From her adventure back home Rachel had a little daughter, now eighteen months old, whom she saw when she regularly took a large portion of her wages to the foster mother on the fust Sunday of every month. But although she did not neglect her duty as a mother, she saw in it only a punishment incurred in the past, and her feelings had again become those of a girl whose chaste body had not yet been opened by love.
She approached Diotima's bed, and her gaze, adoring as that of a mountain climber catching sight of the snowy peak rising out of the morning darkness into the Hrst blue of dawn, glided over Diotima's shoulder before she touched the tender mother-of-pearl warmth of her mistress's skin with her fingers. Then she savored the subtly min- gled scent of the hand that came sleepily out from under the covers
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to be kissed, smelling of the previous day's colognes but also of the faint steaminess of the night's rest. Rachel held the slipper for . the groping, naked foot and received the awakening glance. But the sen- sual contact with that magnificent female body would not have been so thrilling by far had it not been wholly irradiated by Diotima's moral significance.
"Did you remember to place the chair with the armrests for His Grace? And the little silver bell for me? Did you put out twelve sheets of paper for the secretary? And six pencils, Raclielle, six, not just three, for him? " was what Diotima said on this occasion. At each of these questions, Rachel inwardly ticked off on her fingers all she had done, with a frightened thrill ofambition, as though her life were at stake. Her mistress had thrown on a dressing gown and went into the conference room. Her way of training "Rachelle" involved re- minding her that it was not enough to regard everything done or un- done as one's personal concern, but to consider its general import. If Rachel broke a glass, "Rachelle" was told that the damage in itself signified nothing but that the transparent glass was a symbol of the daily little duties the eye barely perceived because it gladly dwelled on higher things, which was all the more reason that one had to pay the most particular attention to these duties. To fmd herself treated with such ministerial courtesy could bring remorse and happiness to Rachel's eyes as she swept up the fragments. Her cooks, from whom Diotima expected right thinking and recognition of errors they had committed, had come and gone often enough since Rachel had en- tered her service, but Rachel loved Diotima's sublime phrases with all her heart, just as she loved the Emperor, the state funerals, and the flaming candles in the darkness of the Catholic churches. She might fib a little to get out of a scrape, but she was thoroughly ashamed ofherselfafteiWard. Perhaps she'even took a perverse plea- sure in her little lies because they made her feel how really bad she was, compared with Diotima; but she usually indulged herself in this only when she hoped to be able to tum the falsehood, secretly and quickly, into a truth.
When one human being looks up to another so much in every way, it happens that his body is, so to speak, taken away from him and plunges like a little meteorite into the sun of the other body. Diotima had no fault to fmd with Rachel's performance and kindly patted her
little maid on the shoulder. Then they both went into the bathroom to dress Diotima for the great day. When Rachel tempered the bath- water, lathered the soap, and was permitted to rub Diotima's body down with the bath towel as boldly as though it were her own, it gave her much more pleasure than ifit really were merely her own, which seemed of no account, inspired no confidence; she was far from thinking of it even for comparison,. but felt, in touching Diotima's statuesque abundance, rather like an oafofa recruit who belongedto a dazzling regiment.
So was Diotima girded for the great day.
THE GREA T SESSION
On the minute of the appointed hour, Count Leinsdorf appeared, accompanied by Ulrich. Rachel, already aglow from admitting an uninterrupted stream of guests for whom she had to open the door and help with their coats, recognized Ulrich at once and noted with satisfaction that he, too, had been no casual visitor but a man brought to her mistress's house by a significant' chain of events, as was now demonstrated by his arrival in the company of His Grace. She flut- tered to the door, which she opened ceremmiiously, and then crouched down at the keyhole to see what would now happen inside. It was a large keyhole, and she saw the banker's clean-shaven chin and the prelate Niedomansky's violet neckband, as well as the golden sword knot of General Stumm von Bordwehr, who had been sent by the War Ministry although it really had not been invited; the Minis- try had declared, in a letter to Count Leinsdorf, that it did not wish to be absent on "so highly patriotic" an occasion, . though not directly involved in bringing it about or in the foreseeable course it would take. Diotima had forgotten to mention this to Rachel, who was quite excited by the presence of a general at this gathering but could-make out nothing more, for the present, about what was going on.
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Diotima, meanwhile, had welcomed His Grace, not paying much attention to Ulrich, as she was introducing other guests to the Count, beginning with. Dr. Paul Arnheim. She explained to His Grace that a lucky chance had brought this distinguished friend ofher house, and even though as a non-Austrian he could not expect to take a fonrial part in their conference, she hoped he would be permitted to stay as her personal adviser, because-here she appended a gentle threat- his great experience and connections in the field ofinternational cul- ture and its relations with economic questions were an invaluable support to her, considering that she had so far been obliged to take sole responsibility for covering these areas and could not soon be re- placed even in the future, although she was only too aware of her inadequacy.
Count Leinsdorf found himself ambushed; it was the first time since he had known her that his middle-class friend had surprised him by committing an indiscretion. Arnheim, too, felt taken aback, likea sovereign whose entrance has not been staged with the proper fanfare; he had of course been certain that Count Leinsdorf had known and approved of his being invited. But Diotima, with an obsti- nate look on her flushed face, din not give an inch; like all women with too clear a conscience in the matter of marital fidelity, she could develop an insufferable feminine persistence in a good cause.
She was at that time already in love with Arnheim, who had by this time called on her more than once, but in her inexperience she had no inkling of the nature of her feeling. They talked about what it is that moves the soul, that ennobles the flesh between the sole of the foot and the crown of the head and transforms the confused impres- sions of civilized life into harmonious spiritual vibrations. But even this was a great deal, and because Diotima was inclined to caution and always on guard against compromising herself, this intimacy struck her as too sudden, and she had to mobilize truly great emo- tions, the very greatest, in fact, and where were they most likely to be found? Where everyone has shifted them, to the drama of history. For Diotima and Arnheim, the Parallel Campaign was, so to speak, a safety island in the swelling traffic of their souls. They regarded it as clearly fated that they should have been brought together at such an important moment, arid they could not agree more that the great pa- triotic enterprise was an immense opportunity and responsibility for
intellectual people. Arnheim said so too, though he never forgot to add that it depended primarily upon people with strong personalities who had experience in economics as well as the world ofideas, and only secondarily on the scope of the organization. So in Diotima the Parallel Campaign had become inextricably bound up with Arnheim; the void it had presented to her imagination at the beginning had given way to a copious abundance. Her hope that the great treasures of feeling embodied in the Austrian heritage could be strengthened by Prussian intellectual discipline was now most happily justified, and these impressions were so strong that this normally very correct woman had not realized what a breach of protocol she had commit- ted in undertaking to invite Arnheim to the inaugural conference. Now there was no retreat; anyway, Arnheim, who sensed how it had happened, found it essentially disarming, however annoyed he was at finding himself in a false position; and His Grace was basically too fond ofhis friend Diotima to show his surprise beyond his first, invol- untary, recoil. He met Diotima's explanation with silence and after an awkward little pause amiably held out his hand to Arnheim, assur- ing him in the most civil and complimentary terms that he was wel- come, as in fact he was. Most of the others present had probably noticed the Uttle scene and wondered about Arnheim's presence in- sofar as they knew who he was; but among well-bred people it is gen- erally assumed that there is a sufficient reason for everything, and it is considered poor taste to ask too many prying questions.
Diotima had meanwhile recovered her statuesque impassivity. After a few moments she called the meeting to order and asked His Grace to honor her house by taking a chair.
His Grace made a speech. He had been preparing it for days, and his cast of mind was much too fixed to let him change anything at the last minute; he could only just manage to tone down the most out- spoken allusions to the Prussian needle gun, which (an underhanded trick) had got the better of the Austrian muzzle-loaders in '66.
"What has brought us together," Count Leinsdorf said, "is the shared conviction that a great testimonial arising from the midst of the people themselves must not be left to chance but needs guidance by an influence that sees far into the future from a place with a broad perspective-in other words, from the top. His Majesty, our beloved Emperor and Sovereign, will in the year 1918 celebrate the almost
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unique jubilee of the seventieth year since his richly blessed ascent to the throne with 'all the strength and vigor, please God, we have always been accustomed to admire in him. We are certain that this occasion will be celebrated by the grateful people of Austria in a manner to show the world not only our deep love for him, but also that the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy stands together, grouped firm as a rock around its Sovereign. " . .