No More Learning

Even inside her little room it was he who bolted the door, but then they did not dare tum on the light but stood there blindly facing each other as though the loss of sight had deprived them of all their other senses as well, like two statues in the park at night. Soliman naturally thought . of pressing Rachel's hand or pinching her leg to make her shriek, his way of conducting his male conquest of her thus far, but he had to refrain from causing any noise, and when at last he made' some clumsy pass at her, there was only Rachel's impatient indiffer- ence in response. For Rachel felt the hand offate on her spine, push- ing her ahead, and her nose and forehead were ice cold, as though she had already been drained of all her illusions. It made Soliman feel quite at a loss too; he was all thumbs, and there was no telling how long it would take them to break the deadlock oftheir rigid pos- ture face-to-face in the dark. In the end, it had to be the civilized and more experienced Rachel who took the part of th~ seducer. What helped her was the resentment she now felt in place of her former love for Diotima; ever since she had ceased to be content to enjoy vicariously her mistress's exaltations and was involved in her own love affair, she had greatly changed. She not only told lies to cover up
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her encounters with Soliman, she even pulled Diotima's hair when she combed it, to revenge herself for the vigilance with which her innocence was being guarded. But what enraged her most was some- thing i,n which she had formerly delighted: having to wear Diotima's cast-off chemises, panties, and stockings, for even though she cut these things down to a third of their former size and remodeled them, she felt imprisoned in them, as though wearing the yoke of propriety on her bare body. But this lingerie now gave her the inspi- ration she needed in this situation. For she had told Soliman earlier abopt the changes she had been noticing for some time in her mis- tress's underthings, and now she could break their deadlock by sim- ply showiTig him.
"Here, you can see for yourselfwhat they're really up to," she said in the darkness, showing Soliman the moonbeam frill of her little panties. "And if they're carrying on together like this, then they're certainly also making a fool of the master about that war they're cooking up in our house. " And as the boy gingerly fmgered the fine- textured and dangerous panties, she added somewhat breathlessly, "I bet that your pants are as black as you are, Soliman; that's what they're all saying. " Now Soliman vengefully but gently dug his nails into her thigh, and Rachel had to move closer to free herself, and had to do and say one thing and another, all of which produced no ·real result, until she finally used her sharp little teeth on Soliman's face (which was pressed childishly against her own and at every move- ment she made kept on clumsily getting itself in the way),·as if it were
'a large apple. At which point she forgot to feel embarrassed at what she was doing, . and Soliman forgot to feel self-conscious, and love raged like a storm through the darkness.
When it was over, it dropped the lovers with a thud, vanished through the w. alls, and the darkness between them was like a lump of coal with which the sinners had blackened themselves. They had lost track of time, overestimated the time they had tak~n. and were afraid. Rachel's halfhearted final kiss was a mere annoyance to Soli- man; he wanted the light switched on, and behaved like a burglar who has his loot and is now wholly intent upon making his getaway. Rachel, who had quickly and shamefacedly straightened her clothes,
. gave him a look that was fathomless and aimless at once. Her tousled hair hung down over her eyes, and behind them she saw again all the
great images ofher ideal self, forgotten until this moment. Her fanta- sies had been filled with her wish not only for every possible desir- able trait in herself but also for a handsome, rich, and exciting lover-and now here in front of her stood Soliman, still half un- dressed, looking hopelessly ugly, and she didn't believe a single word of all the stories he had told her. She might have liked to take advan- tage of the dark to craille his tense, plump face in her anns a little while longer before they let go of each other. But now that the light was on, he was only her new lover, a thousand possibilities shrunken into one somewhat ludicrous little wretch, whose existence excluded all others. And Rachel herself was back to being a servant girl who had let herself be seduced and was now beginning to be terrified·of having a baby, which would bring it all to light. She was simply too crushed by this transformation even to give a sigh. She helped Soli- man to finish dressing, for in his confusion the boy had flung off his tight little jacket with all those buttons, but she was helping him not out of tenderness but only so that they could hurry downstairs. She had paid far more than it was worth, and to be caught out now would be the last straw. All the same, when they had finished, Soliman turned round and flashed her a dazzling smile that turned into a whinny of self-satisfaction. Rachel quickly picked up a box of match~s, turned out the light, softly drew the bolt, and whispered, before opening the door: "You must give me one more kiss. " For that was the right way to do things, but it tasted to both of them like toothpowder on their lips.
Back down in the front hall, they were amazed to find they still had time. The voices on the other side of the door were running on as before. By the time the guests were dispersing, Soliman had disap-· peared, and half an hour later Rachel was combing her mistress's hair with great attentiveness and almost with her former humble devotion.
"I am glad that my little lecture seems to have done you some good," Diotima said with approval, and this woman who in so many ways never quite achieved any real satisfaction kindly patted her little maid's hand.
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Walter had changed out of his office suit into a better one and was knotting his tie at Clarisse's dresser mirror, which despite its irregu- larly curving art nouveau framf" showed a shallow, distorted image in its cheap glass.
''They're absolutely right," he said gmffly. "The famous campaign is nothing but a fake. "
"But what's the point of marching and screaming? " Clarisse said.
"What's the point of anything these days? Marching together, at least they're forming a procession, feeling each other's physical pres- ence. And at least they're not thinktng, and at least they're not writ- ing; something may come of it. "
"Do you really think the campaign is worth all that indignation? "
Walter shrugged his shoulders. "Haven't you read that resolution by the German faction in the paper? Haranguing the Prime Minister about defamation and unfairness to the German population {Uld so on? ·And the sneering proclamation of the Czech League? Or the lit- tle item about the Polish delegates returning to their voting districts? For anyone who can read between the lines, that one's the most re- vealing story, because so much depends on the Poles, and now they've left the government in the lurch! This was no time to provoke everyone by coming out with this patriotic campaign. "
"This morning in town," Clarisse said, "I saw mounted police go by, a whole regiment of them. A woman said they're being kept in reserve somewhere. "
"Of course. There are troops standing by in the barracks too. " "Do you suppose there'll be trouble? "
"Who can tell? " .
"Will they run the people down? How awful, all those horses' bod-
ies jammed in among the people . . . "
Walter had undone his tie and was reknotting it all over again.
"Have you ever been mixed up in anything of this kind? " Clarisse asked. 1
"As a student. "
"Never since then? "
Walter shook his head.
"Didn't you say just now that if there's trouble, it will all be Ul-
ri<'h's fault? "
''I said nothing of the kind," Walter protested. "He takes no inter-
est at all in politics, unfortunately. All I said was that it's just like him to start up something of this sort; he's involved with the people who arP n·sponsible for all this. "
· 'Td like to come into town with you," Clarisse announced. "That's out of the question. It would upset you too much. " Walter spoke with great firmness. He had heard all sorts of things in the offl<·e about what might happen at the demonstration, and he wanted to k<·ep Clarisse away from it. It wouldn't do at all to expose her to the hysteria of a large crowd; Clarisse had to be treated with care, like a pregnant woman. He almost got a lump in his throat at the word "pregnant," even though he did not actually pronounce it, so unexpectedly had it cqme to mind, warming him with the thought of motherhood, however foolishly, considering his wife's ill-tempered refusal of herself. Well, life is full of such contradictions, he told him- self, not without some pride, and offered: 'Til stay home, if you'd
ra:ther. "
"No," she said. "You should be there, at least. "
She wanted to be left to herself. When Walter had told her of the
upcoming demonstration and described what it would be like, it had made her think of a huge serpent covered with scales, each in sepa- rate motion, and she had wanted to see this for herself, but without the fuss of a long argument about it.
Walter put his arm around her. "I'll stay home too? " he repeated, in a questioning tone.
She brushed his arm off, took a book from the shelf, and ignored him. It was a volume of her Nietzsche. But instead of going, Walter pleaded: "Let me see what you're up to. "
The afternoon was ending. A vague foretaste of spring made itself felt in the house, like birdsong muted by walls and glass; an illusory
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scent of flowers rose from the varnish on the floor, the upholstery, the polished brass doorknobs. Walter held out his hand for her book. Clarisse clutched it with two hands, one fmger between the pages where she had opened it.
And now they had one of their "terrible scenes," of which this marriage had seen so many. They were all on the same pattern. Imagine a theater with the stage blacked out, and the lights going on in two boxes on opposite sides ofthe proscenium, with Walter in one of them and Clarisse in the other, singled out among all the men and women, and between them the deep black abyss, warm with the bod- ies of invisible human beings. Now Clarisse opens her lips and speaks, and Walter replies, and the whole audience listens in breath- less suspense, for never before has human talent produced such a spectacle ofson et lumiere, sturm und drang. . . . Such was the scene, once more, with Walter stretching out his arm, imploring her, and Clarisse, a few steps aw11y from him, with her finger wedged between the pages ofher book Opening it at random, she had hit on that fine passage where the master speaks of the impoverishment that follows the decay of the will and manifests itself in every form of life as a proliferation of detail at the expense of the whole. "Life driven back into the most minute forms, leaving the rest devitalized . . . " was what she remembered, though she had only a vague sense ofthe gen- eral drift of the context over which she had run her eye before Wal- ter had again interrupted her; and yet, despite the unfavorable circumstances, she had made a great discovery. For although in this passage the master spoke of all the arts, and even of all the forms taken by human life, his examples were all literary ones, and since· Clarisse did not understand generalizations, she saw that Nietzsche had not· grasped the full implication of his own ideas-for they ap- plied to music as well! She could hear her husband's morbid piano playing as though he were ~ctuallyplaying there beside her, his exag- gerated pauses, choked with emotion, the halting way his notes came from under his fmgertips when his thoughts were straying toward her and when-to use another ofthe master's expt:essions-"the sec- ondary moral element" overwhelmed the artist in him. Clarisse had come to recognize the sound Walter made when he was full of unut- tered desire for her, and she could see the music draining out of his
face, leaving only his lips shining, so that he looked as though he had
cut his fmger and was about to faint. This was how he looked now, with that nervous ~mile as he held his arm stretched out toward her. Nietzsche, of course, could not have known any of this, and yet it was like a sign that she had been led to open the book, by chance, at the place t<tuching on this very thing, and as she suddenly saw, heard, and grasped it all, she was struck by the lightning flash of inspiration where she stood, on a high mountain called Nietzsche, which had buried Walter although it reached no higher than the soles of her feet. The "practical philosophy and poetry" of most people, who are neither originators nor on the other hand unsusceptible to ideas, consists of just such shimmering fusions of someone else's great thought with their own small private modifications.
Walter had meanwhile stood and was coming toward Clarisse. He had decided to forget the demonstration he had intended to join and stay home with her. He saw her leaning back against the wall in re- pugnance as he approached her, yet this deliberate gesture of a woman shrinking from a man unfortunately did not infect him with the same abhorrence but only aroused in him those male urges that might have been precisely what she shrank from. For a man must be capable of taking charge and of'imposing his will on whoever resists him, and the need to prove his manhood suddenly meant just as much to Walter as the need to fight offthe last shreds ofhis youthful superstition that a man must amount to something special. One doesn't have to be something special! he thought defiantly. It was somehow cowardly not to be able to get along without that illusion. We are all inclined to excesses, he thought dismissively. We all have something morbid, some horror, withdrawal, malevolence, in our makeup; each one of us could do something that he alor;te could do, but what of it? He resented the mania for fostering the extraordinary in oneself instead of reabsorbing those all too corruptible outgrowths and, by assimilating them organically, injecting some new life into the bloodstream of the civilization, which was far too inclined to grow sluggish. So he thought now, and he was looking fmward to the day when music and painting would no longer mean anything more to him than a refined form of amusement. Wanting a child was part of this new sense of mission; the dominant desire of his youth to become a titan, a new Prometheus, had ended in his coming to be- lieve, somewhat overemphatically, that one must first become like
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everyone else. He was now ashamed ofhaving no children; he would have liked at least five, ifClarisse and his income had permitted it, so that he could be the center of a warm circle of life; he 'wanted to surpass in mediocrity that great mediocre mass of humanity which transmits life itself, paradoxical as his desire was.
But whether he had taken too long to think, or had slept too late . before starting to dress and beginning this conversation, his cheeks were glowing now, and Clarisse showed that she instantly under- stood why he was moving closer to her book; and this fine attune- ment to each other's moods, despite the painful signs ofher aversion to him, immediately subdued the brute in him and broke down the
simplicity of his impulse.
"Why won't you show me what you're reading? Can't we just
talk? " he pleaded, intimidated.
'W e can't 'just talk'! " Clarisse hissed at him.
"You're hysterical! " Walter exclaimed. He tried to get the book,
open as it was, away from her. She stubbornly clung to it. After they had been wrestling over it silently for a while, Walter started wonder- ing, 'What on earth do I want the book for? '' and let go. At this point the incident would have been closed if Clarisse had not, at the very moment she was released, pressed herself up against the wall even more fiercely than before, as though she had to force her body back- ward through a stiffhedge to escape some threat ofviolence. She was fighting for breath, her face white, and hoarsely screamed: "Instead of amounting to something yourself, you just want to make a child to do it for you! "
Her lips spat these words at him venomously, and all Walter could do was gasp his "Let's talk! " at her again.
"I won't talk; you make me sick! " Clarissl! ' answered, suddenly in full possession of her voice again, and using it with such sharpness that it crashed like heavy china to the floor, midway between them. Walter took a step backward and stared at her in amazement.
Clarisse did not really mean it. She was merely afraid ofgiving in, from good nature or· recklessness, and letting Walter bind her to him with swaddling bands, which must not happen, not now when she was ready to settle the whole question once and for all. The situation' had come to a head. She thought ofthis term, heavily underlined-it was the one Walter had used to explain why the populace was
demonstrating in the streets; for Ulrich, who was linked to Nietzsche by dint of having given her the philosopher's works as a wedding present, was on the other side of the conflict, the side against which this spearhead would be directed, if there was trouble. Now Nietz- sche had just given her a sign, and if she was standing on a high mountain, what was a high mountain other than the earth coming to a point-to a head? The way things were interrelated was truly amazing, like a code that hardly anyone could decipher; even Cla- risse didn't have too clear a perception of it, but that was just why she needed to be alone and had to get Walter out of the house. The wild hatred that flared up in her face at this point in her thoughts was an expression of a physical rage in which she as a person was only vaguely involved, a kind of pianist'sfurioso such as Walter also had at his fingertips, so that he too, after having stared at his wife in bewil- derment, suddenly went white in the face, bared his teeth, and, re- sponding to the loathing ofhim she had expressed, shouted: "Beware of genius! You in particular, just watch out! "
He was screaming even louder than she had been, and his dark prophecy, which had burst from his throat with a force beyond any he knew himself to have, so horrified him that everything turned black as though there had been ~ eclipse ofthe sun.
Clarisse was in shock, too, and struck dumb by it. An emotion with the impact of a solar eclipse is certainly no trifle, and whatever had brought it on, at the heart ofit was the quite unexpected explosion of Walter's jealousy of Ulrich. Why was he driven to call Ulrich a ge- nius? All he had meant was hubris, the pride that comes before the fall. Images from the past cam~ to his inner eye: Ulrich returning home in uniform, that barbarian who had already been carrying on with real women when Walter, who was the older, was still writing poems to statues in the park. Later on, Ulrich the engineer bringing home the latest reports on the exact sciences, the world of precision, speed, steel; for Walter, the humanist, it was another invasion by the Mongol horde. With his younger friend, Walter had always felt the obscure uneasiness of being the weaker man, both physically and in initiative, although he had seen himself as the life of the mind incar- nate while the other stood merely for raw will. Wasn't Walter always being moved by the Beautiful or the Good, while Ulrich stood by shaking his head? Such impressions leave their mark, they confirm
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and define the relationship. Had Walter succeeded in seeing that passage in the book for which he had wrestled with Clarisse, he would certainly not have understood it as she did; to her the deca- dence NietZsche described as driving the will to life away from the whole and into the realm of detail fitted Walter's tendency to brood over the problems ofthe artist,while Walter would have seen it as an excellent characterization of his friend Ulrich, beginning with his overestimation of facts, in accord with the modem superstition of empiricism, which led directly to the barbaric fragmentation of the very self that was what made Ulrich a man without qualities, or quali- ties without a man, according to Walter's diagnosis, which Ulrich, in his megalomania, had had the gall to accept wholeheartedly.
It was this that Walter had meant by denouncing Ulrich as a "ge- nius," for if anyone was entitled to call himself a solitary original it was Walter himself, and yet he had given this up in order to rejoin the rest of the human race in fulfilling its shared mission; in this he was a whole generation ahead of his friend. But as Clarisse did not utter a sound in answer to his violent outburst, he was thinking: "If she says one word in his favor now, I couldn't stand it! " and he shook with hatred, as though it were Ulrich's arm shaking him.
In his fury he imagined himself snatching up his hat and dashing out the door to rush blindly through the streets, the houses bending in the wind as he ran. Only after a while did he slow down and look into the faces of the people he was passing; as they met his stare in a friendly fashion, he began to calm down. At this point he tried, to the extent his consciousness had not been swallowed up altogether by his fantasy, to explain himself to Clarisse. But his words only shone in his eyes instead of coming from his lips. How was a man to describe the joy of being with his own kind, with his brothers? Clarisse would say he was not enough of an individual. But there was something inhu- man about Clarisse's towering self-confidence, and he'd had enough oftrying to live up to its arrogant demands. He ached to take refuge with her within some broader human order, instead of this lonely drifting in a boundless delusion of love and personal anarchy. "Un- derneath everything one is and do~, and even when' one happens to be in opposition to one's fellowmen, one needs to feel that one is basically moving toward union with them" was more or less what he would have liked to say to her now. For Walter had always been lucky
in getting along with people; even in the midst of an argument they felt his attraction, and he theirs, and so the somewhat banal notion that there is, inherent in the human community, something that keeps things in balance, that rewards soundness and always comes through in the end, had become a solid conviction in his life. The example came to mind of the kind of person who could make birds come flying to him of their own accord, and who often had a rather birdlike look about them. For every human being there was some animal mysteriously akin to him, he felt; it was a theory he had once worked out for himself, though not scientifically. He believed that musical people are i. ntuitively aware ofa great deal that is beyond the ken of science, and from childhood on, Walter's animal kinship had undoubtedly been with fish. Fish had always held a powerful attrac- tion for him, though mixed with dread, and at the start of his school vacations he always acted as ifpossessed; he would stand for hours at the water's edge angling for fish, pulling them out of their element and laying their corpses beside him on the grass, until it all ended with a fit of revulsion close to panic. Fish in the kitchen, too, were among his earliest passions. There the bones from the filleted fish were put into a boat-shaped receptacle, glazed green and white, like grass and clouds, and halffull ofwater, where, for some reasori hav- ing to do with the laws of the kitchen, the fish skeletons were kept until after the meal had been prepared, when the fish bones went into the garbage. This dish drew the boy like a magnet; he would always find childish excuses for hovering over it for hours at a time, and when anyone asked him outright what he was doing there, he was struck dumb. When he thought about it now, the answer that occurred to him was that the magic of fish lay in their belonging wholly to one element, never to more than one. Again he saw them as he had often seen them in the deep mirror of the water, moving not as he did both on the earth and within a second, intangible element (and at home in neither the one nor the othe~. Walter thought, spin- ning out the image this way and that: one belongs to the earth, with which one shares no more than the bare space occupied by the soles of one's feet; the rest of one's body is upright in air that it merely displaces, that gives no support but lets one fall). The fishes' ground, their air, food, and drink, their recoil from enemies as well as their shadowy advances in love and their grave, were all one, wholly en-
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closing them; they moved within the element that moved them, something a human being can experience only in a dream or in the longing to return to the sheltering tenderness of the womb (the be- lief in this universal longing was just coming into fashion). But in that case, why did he rip the fish from their element and kill them? Why did he get such an. unutterable, awesome thrill out of that? Well, he did not want to know the answer. He, Walter, could admit that he was an enigma.
But Clarisse had once said that fish were the aquatic bourgeoisie. Walter winced at this insult. As he kept hastening th'rough the streets in his ongoing fantasy, looking into the faces of the passersby, it was turning into good fishing weather, not actually raining, but-some moisture was coming down, and the streets, as he now saw for the first time, had already been darkly glistening for a while. The men were all dressed in black, with bowler hats but no collars and ties, which did not surprise him, as they were not middle class but were evidently coming from afactory, walking in easy groupings, while others, who had not yet finished their day's work, were hastily pushing through these clusters, just as Walter himself was doing, and it all made him feel very happy, except for those bare necks that reminded him of something troubling and not quite right. Suddenly the rain came pouring down, the people scattered and ran as something came slashing through the air, a flash of white, fish raining down, and then a trembling, tender single voice that seemed to have nothing to do with anything called a little dog by name! .
These last images were so independent of him that they took him entirely by surprise. He had not been aware that his thoughts had gone dreaming on their own, drifting along with incredible speed on a flood of images. He raised his eyes and found himself staring into. his young wife's·face, which was still twisted with dislike. He felt deeply unsure of himself, remembered that he had been about to register a complaint, in detail and at length; his mouth was still open. But he had no idea whether minutes had passed since then, or sec- onds, or only milliseconds. Yet he also felt a warmth of pride, as after an ice-cold bath an ambiguous shuddering of the skin signalizes more or less: "Look at me, see what I can stand. " There was shame as well at such an eruption of buried feeling, when he had been on the point of praising everything that knows its place, keeps a tight rein on itself, and is content with its modest part as a link in the great scheme
of things, as being far superior to the deviant-and here his inner- most convictions lay prone with their roots up in the air, mired in life's volcanic mud. Mainly he felt terrified, sure that something hor- rible was about to befall him. This fear had no rational basis; he was still thinking in images and was obsessed with the notion that Cla- risse and Ulrich were intent on tearing him out of his picture. He made an effort to shake off his waking dream and find something to say that would pull the conversation which his loss of control had brought to a a standstill back onto a sensible track, and actually had something on the tip of his tongue, but a suspicion that his words came too late, that meanwhile something else had been said and done without his being aware of it, restrained him, and then, in the midst of catching up with the time-lapse, he suddenly heard Clarisse saying to him:
"If you want to kill Ulrich, why don't you? You're a slave of con- science. An artist can't make good music when he's saddled with a conscience. "
It took a long time for this to sink in. Some things are soonest un- derstood by means of one's own answer to them, and Walter was holding back his answer for fear of betraying his absence of mind. And in this moment of indecision he understood, or let himself be persuaded, that Clarisse had actually put into words the source ofthe terrifying fugue of ideas he had just been through. She was right: if Walter could have had his wish, it would often have been none other than to see Ulrich dead. That sort of thing is not too uncommon in a friendship (which does not dissolve as easily as love) when there is something in it that threatens a person's self-esteP. m. Nor was there real murder in his heart, for the momf'nt lw imagined Ulrich dead, his old boyhood love for his lost friend instantly revived, at least in part, and just as in the theater the civilized inhibition against a mon-
strous act is temporarily suspended by some pumped-up emotion, Walter almost felt that the thought ofa tragic solution ennobled even the intended victim. He felt rather uplifted, despite his physical ti- midity and his squeamishness at the thought of seeing blood. Whilt> he would have liked 'to see Ulrich's arrogance broken down, he would have done nothing toward bringing even this about. But thoughts are not logical by nature, however much we like to think they are; only the unimaginative resistance of reality alerts us to the
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paradoxes inherent in the poem called man. So perhaps Clarisse was right in saying that too much of a civilized conscience got in an art- ist's way. All of this was going through Walter's head as he faced his wife with a baffled, reluctant expression.
"If he hampers you in your work," Clarisse repeated with zeal, "then you have the right to get him out of the way. " She seemed to offer this as a stimulating and entertaining idea.
Walter wanted to hold out his hands to her, and although his arms felt pinned to his sides, he seemed to have come closer to her. "Nietzsche and Christ only failed because they were halfhearted in the end," she whispered in his ear. What awful nonsense she was talking. How could she drag Christ into this? What was that sup- posed to mean-that Christ failed because he was halfhearted? Such analogies were merely embarrassing. And yet Walter felt an inde- scribable prompting issuing from those moving lips of hers. Evi- dently his own hard-won resolution to make common cause with the majority was being steadily undermined by the irrepressible need to be someone in his own right. He laid hands on Clarisse and held her fast with all his strength, so that she could not move. Her eyes met his like two tiny disks. "How can you let such ideas enter your head? '' he said, over and over, but got no answer. He must have uncon- sciously drawn her closer to him, for Clarisse now set the nails of her outspread ten fingers on his face like a bird's claws, keeping it from getting any closer to hers. She's crazy, Walter felt, but he couldn't let her go. An ugliness beyond all comprehension distorted her face; he had never seen a lunatic in his life, but this, he thought, must be what they looked like.
And suddenly he groaned: "You're in love with him! " It was not a particularly original remark, nor was this the first time they had ar- gued the point; it was only that he did not want to believe that Cla- risse was mad but preferred to believe that she loved Ulrich. This act of self-sacrifice was perhaps not quite uninfluenced by the fact that Clarisse, whose thin-lipped Early Renaissance beauty he had always admired, now for the first time looked ugly to him, an ugliness possi- bly related to her face being no longer tenderly veiled by love for him but stripped bare by the brutal love for his rival. Here was a suffi- ciency of complications, trembling between his heart and his eye as something quite new to him, full of meaning both general and per-
sonal. But what if his groaning out "You're in love with him! " in that subhuman voice was a sign ofhis being already infected by Clarisse's madness? The thought gave him a start.
Clarisse had gently freed herself from his grasp but then moved close to him of her own accord and said several times, in answer to his question, as though she were chanting something: "I don't want a child from you! I don't want a child from you! " kissing him lightly and quickly as she spoke.
Then she was gone.
Had she really also said, "He wants a child from me? " Walter could not be sure, but he heard it as a sort ofpossibility. He stood at the piano, jealous to the bursting point, sensing a breath of some- thing warm and something cold blowing on him from either side. Were these the currents ofgenius and madness? Ofsurrender and of hatred? Of love and rationality? He could imagine himself leaving the way open for Clarisse and oflaying his heart down on the road for her to walk over, and he could also imagine himself annihilating her and Ulrich with the power ofwords. He could not decide whether to rush off to Ulrich or begin composing his symphony, which might in this moment become the eternal struggle between the earth and the stars, or whether it might be a good idea to cool himself off first in the water-nymph pool ofWagner's forbidden music. By dint of these considerations, the indescribable state in which he had found him- self began to clear up.
He opened the piano and lit a cigarette, and while his thoughts were scattering farther afield, his fmgers on the keyboard were be- ginning to play the billowing, spine-melting music of the Saxon wiz- ard. After this slow discharge of emotion had been going on for a while, he came to realize that he and his wife had both been in a state in which they could not be held responsible for their actions; embar- rassing as it was, he knew it was too soon to go after Clarisse and make her understand. Now he needed to be with other people. He clapped on his hat and went off to town to carry out his original in- tention and immerse himself in the general excitement, if he could find it. As he walked he felt as though he were a captain bringing with him a demonic fighting force to link up with the others. But once he was on the trolley to town, life resumed its ordinary appear- ance. That Ulrich would have to be among the opposing forces, that
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Count Leinsdorf's town house might be stormed by the marchers, that he might see Ulrich hanging from a streetlamp or being tram- pled by an onrushing mob or, alternatively, being defended by Wal- ter and brought, trembling, to safety-these possibilities were at most fleeting shadows on the bright daylight pattern of the orderly train ride, with its set ticket prices, regular stops, and warning bells, a pattern with which Walter, his breathing now restored to a calmer rhythm, felt so much at home.
119
A COUNTERMINE AND A SEDUCTION
It now looked as though things were coming to a head, and even for Director Leo Fischel, who had been patiently biding his time and laying his countermine against Amheim, tlie moment of satisfaction came. Too bad that Frau Clementine happened to be out, so that he had to content himself with walking into his daughter Gerda's room, in his hand the afternoon paper that usually carried the latest news of the Stock Exchange. He settled himself comfortably in a chair, pointed to an item on the page, and asked genially: "Well now, my child, do you know to what we are indebted for the presence of that highbrow financier among us? "
At home he never referred to Arnheim in any other terms, to show that as a· serious man of business he was not impressed by his womenfolk's admiration for this rich windbag. Hatred may not give a man second sight, but there's often a grain of truth in a Stock Ex- change rumor, and the hint of one in the news item, combined with Fischel's dislike of the man, instantly made him see the whole picture.
·'Well, my dear, do you? " he repeated, trying to catch his daugh- ter's eye and hold it in the triumphant beam ofhis own. "He wants to get control of the Galician oil fields, that's what! "
With this Fischel got up again, grabbed his paper as one might grab a dog by the scruff of his neck, and walked out, because it had just occurred to him that there were several men he might can to check his information. He felt as though what he had just learned from the paper was what he had been thinking all along-which shows that news from the Stock Exchange has quite the same effect as the higher forms of literature-and he now approved of Arnheim as a sensible man of whom nothing less should have been expected, quite forgetting that he had till then been calling him nothing but a windbag. He could not be bothered to elucidate to Gerda the mean- ing of his announcement; every further w~rdwould only have weak- ened the impact of the facts, which spoke so eloquently for themselves. "He wants control of the Galician oil fields! " With the weight of this blunt statement on his tongue he left the scene, think- ing only: "The man who can afford to play a waiting game always wins in the end. " This is axiomatic on the Stock Exchange, among other such truths, which most perfectly complement the eternal verities.
Gerda waited until he was out of her room to give vent to hei: feel- ings-she would not give her father the satisfaction ofseeing her dis- concerted or even surprised-but now she hastily flung open the closet, grabbed her hat and coat, and straightened her hair and dress at the mirror, where she sat still for a bit, doubtfully studying her face. She had decided to rush directly to Ulrich with her f~ther's dis- closure, which she thought Ulrich ofall people should hear as soon as possible, since she knew enough about what was going on in Di- otima's circle to realize its importance to him. She sensed a world of feeling coming into motion, like a crowd that has been hesitating on the brink of something for a long time. Up to this point she had forced herself to behave as if she had forgotten Ulrich's invitation, but her first impulses had no sooner begun to detach themselves from the dark mass of feeling and slowly to move forward than the ones farther back were irresistibly impelled to run and push forward, and while she hesitated to make up her mind, her mind made itself up without paying any attention to her.
"He doesn't love mel" she told herself while studying her face, grown even more haggard in the last few days, in the mirror. "How could he love me, when I look like this," she thought listlessly, and
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added at once, in defiance: "He's not worth it; it's all in my imagina- tion anyway. "
She sat there in utter discouragement, feeling drained, feeling also that for years they had both worked hard at complicating something that was basically quite simple. Meanwhile Hans was only adding to her netvous strain with his immature attempts at making love to her. She treated . him harshly and sometimes, of late, contemptuously, which only made Hans more violent, behaving like a boy who threat- ens to do himself in, and when she had to calm him down, he fell back to putting his arms around her and touching her in his vague way, so that her shoulders grew bony and her skin turned dull. All these torments she had put behind her when she opened her closet to take out her hat, and her anxiety in front of the mirror only led to her jumping up again and rushing out, without in the least getting rid of the anxiety itself.
When Ulrich saw her coming in, h~ saw everything; to top it off, she had even tied on a veil such as Bonadea wore to visit him. Gerda was trembling in every limb and tried to mask her condition by as- sumirig an unnaturally casual manner, which only made her seem ab- surdly stiff.
"The reason I came, Ulrich, is that I've just had some important information from my father. "
"How peculiar," Ulrich thought; "she's never called me by my first name before. " Her forced tone of intimacy infuriated him, but he tried to keep her from seeing this byattributing her theatrical behav- ior to her wish to make her visit look less portentous, more like a normal, if slightly belated, occurrence, though the effort it cost her was bound to have the opposite effect on him, suggesting that her intentions were clearly to go to the limit.
'We've been close friends for a long time," she explained, "and the only reason we never used first names was to avoid the implica- tions. " It was a rehearsed entrance, and she was prepared to surprise him with it.
But Ulrich cut it short by putting an arm around her and giving her a kiss. Gerda gave way like a melting candle. Her breathing, her fin- gers fumbling for him, were those ofa person who has lost conscious- ness. He was instantly moved tO behave with the ruthlessness of a seducer who senses the vacillation of a soul being dragged along by
its body like a prisoner in the grip ofhis captors. Fro. m the windows a faint glimmer of wintry afternoon light entered the darkening room, where he stood outlined against one of these bright rectangles with the girl in his arms; her head was yellow and sharply contoured against the soft pillow of light, and her complexion had an oily shine, so that the whole effect was corpselike. He had to overcome a slight revulsion as he kissed her slowly everywhere on her bare skin be- tween her hair and her neckline until he came to her lips, which met his in a manner reminiscent of the frail little arms a child puts around a grownup's neck. He thought of Bonadea's beautiful face, which, in the grip of passion, resembled a dove with its feathers ruffled in the claws of a bird of prey, and of Diotima's statuesque loveliness, which he had never enjoyed; how strange that instead of the beauty these two women had to offer he should be loolting at Gerda's hbmely face, grim with passion.
But Gerda did not remain in her waking swoon for long. She had meant to shut her eyes for only a fleeting moment but lost all sense of time while Ulrich was kissing her, as if the stars were standing still in the infinite; as soon as he began to pause in his labors, however, she awakened and got firmly to her feet again. These were the first' kisses of real, not merely would-be passion she had ever given and, as she thought, received, and the reverberations in her body were as ex- traordinary as though this moment had already made a woman of her. It is a process much like having a tooth pulled: although immedi- ately afterward there is less of one's body than before, one actually feels more complete because a source of disquiet has been defini- tively removed. Hence, when Gerda felt the inner resolution of this chord, she pulled herself up, full of fresh determination.
"You haven't even asked me what I came to tell you," she said. "That you love me," Ulrich said in some embarrassment.
"Oh no; only that your friend Arnheim is making a fool of your
cousin, carrying on like a lover when what he's really after is some- thing quite different," and Gerda told him what her papa had found out.
The news in all its simplicity made a deep impression on Ulrich. He felt obliged to warn Diotima, who was sailing with wings out- spread into a ludicrous disappointment. For despite the malicious satisfaction he took in dwelling on this image, he felt sorry for his
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beautiful cousin. But most of all he was overcome with heartfelt ap- preciation for Papa Fischel, although he was on the verge of doing him a great wrong; he sincerely admired the man's reliable old-fash- ioned business sense, with its decorative border of fine sturdy con- victions, which had hit on the simplest explanation for all the mysteries surrounding that modish Great Mind. Ulrich's mood had been altered, leaving far behind the tender demands made on him by Gerda's presence. He couldn't believe that only a few days ago he had been able to think that he could open his heart to this girl. Sur- mounting the inner ramparts, he thought, is what Hans calls his sac- rilegious notion of two lovesick angels coming together, and he savored, as though he were running his fingers over it in his mind, the wonderfully smooth, hard surface of the matter-of-fact form life had taken on nowadays, thtmks to the good sense of Leo Fischel and his like. All he could find to say was "Your papa is a wonder. "
Gerda was so full of the importance of her news that she had ex- pected something more-she didn't know exactly what, but some- thing like the moment when all the instruments in the orchestra, winds and strings, strike up in unison-and Ulrich's indifference was a painful reminder of how he had always made a point of siding with the average, the ordinary, the- matter-of-fact aspect of things to de- flate her. She had tried to see this as a prickly kind of making ad- vances, something not altogether alien to her own young girl's ways, but now, "when they had really begun to love each other," a~ her somewhat childish formula went, she felt it ao; a clear warning that the man to whom she was giving herself so recklessly wa'i not taking her seriously enough. It was a blow to her new self-confidence, and yet she was also oddly pleased by "not being taken se1iously t>nough. " It was a relief, compared with the strain in kP<'ping up her relation- ship with Hans, and while she did not und<'rstand Ulrich's praise of her father, it somehow restored an order of things she had disturbed by hurting Papa Leo becaus~! of Hans. This mild sense of making a somewhat unusual reentry into the bosom of her family by way of
losing her virtue so distracted her that she gently resisted the pres- sure of Ulrich's arm and said to him: "Let's understand each other first as human beings, and the rest will take care of itself. " These words came from a manifesto of her group, the so-called Community
in Action, and was all that was left at the moment of Hans Sepp and his circle. •
But Ulrich had put his arm around her again because, knowing that he had something important to do since hearing the news about Arnheim, he first had to finish this episode with Gerda. He was not at all reconciled to having to go through everything the situation called for, but he immediately put the rejected arm around her again, this time in that wordless language which, without force, states more firmly than words can do that any further resistance is useless. Gerda felt the virility of that arm all the way down her spine. She had low- ered her head, with her eyes fixeq on her lap as though it held, gath- ered as in an apron, all the thoughts that would help her to reach that "human understanding" with Ulrich before anything could be al- lowed to happen as a crowning act. But she felt her face looking duller and more vacuous by the moment until, like an empty husk, it finally floated upward, with her eyes directly below the eyes of the seducer.
He bent down and covered this face with the ruthless kisses that stir the flesh. Gerda straightened up as if she had no will of her own and let herself be led the ten steps or so tp Ulrich's bedroom, leaning heavily on him as though she Wt're wounded or sick. Her feet moved, one ahead of the other, as if she had nothing to do with it, even though she did not let herself be dragged along but went of her own accord. Stwh an imwr void despite all that excitement was something Gerda had nt·vt>r known before; it was as if all the blood had been drained from hl'r; she was freezing, yet in passing a mirror that seemed to mlleet h<·r image from a great distance she could see that her face was a copp<~ry red, with flecks of white. Suddenly, as in a street accident when the eye is hypersensitive to the'whole scene, she took in the man's bedroom with all its detail-;. It came to her that, had she bec•n wis<•r and more calculating, she might have moved in here as Uhich's wife. It would haw made Iter very happy, but she was groping for words to say that she was uot out li>t· any advantage and had come only to give herself to him; yet the words did not come, and she told herself that this had to happen, and opened the collar of her dress. _
Ulrich had released her. He (•ould not bring himself to help un-
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dress her like a fond lover and stood apart, flinging off his own clothes. Gerda saw the man's tall, straight body, powerfully poised between violence and beauty. Panic-stricken, she noticed that her own body, still standing there in her underthings, was covered with gooseflesh. Again she groped for words that might help her, that might make her less of a miserable figure where she stood. She longed to say something that would turn Ulrich into her lover in a way she vaguely imagined as dissolving in infinite sweetness, some- thing one could achieve without having to do what she was about to do, something as blissful as it was indefinable. For an instant she saw herself standing with him in a field of candles growing out of the earth, row upon row to infinity, like so many pansies, all bursting into
· flame at her feet on signal. But as she could not utter a single word of all this, she went on feeling painfully unattractive and miserable, her arms trembling, unable to finish undressing; she had to clamp her bloodless lips together to keep them from twitching weirdly without a sound.
At this point Ulrich, who saw her agony and realized that the whole struggle up to now might come to nothing, went over to her and slipped off her shoulder straps. Gerda slid into bed like a boy. For an instant Ulrich saw a naked adolescent in motion; it affected him no more, sexually, than the sudden blinking of a fish. He guessed that Gerda had made up her mind to get it over with because it was too late to get out of it, and he had never yet perceived as clearly as in the instant he followed her into bed how much the passionate intru- sion into another body is a sequel to a child's liking for secret and forbidden hiding places. His hands encountered the girl's skin, still bristling with fear, and he felt frightened too, instead of attracted. This body, al~eadyflabby while still unripe, repelled him; it made no sense to do what he was doing, and he would have liked nothing bet- ter than to escape from this bed, so that he had to call to mind every- thing he could think of that would help him to see it through. In his frantic haste he ~ummoned up all the usual reasons people find now- adays to justify their acting without sincerity, or faith, or scruple, or satisfaction; and in abandoning himself to this effort he found, not, of course, any feeling of love, but a half-crazy anticipation of something like a massacre, a sex murder or, ifthere is such a thing, a lustful suicide, inspired by the demons of the void who lurk behind all of
life's images. This reminded him of his brawl with the hoodlums that night" he met Bonadea, and he decided to be quicker this time. But now something awful happened. Gerda had been gathering up all her inner resources to alchemize them into willpower with which to resist the shameful terror she was suffering, as though she were fac- ing her execution; but the instant she felt Ulrich beside her, so strangely naked, his hands on her bare skin, her body flung off all her will. Even while somewhere deep inside her she still felt a friendship beyond words for him, a trembling, tender longing to put her arms around him, kiss his hair, follow his voice to its source with her lips; and imagined that to touch his real self would make her rrielt like a fragment of snow on a warm hand-but it would have to be the Ul- rich she knew, dressed as usual, as he appeared in the familiar setting of her parental home, not this naked stranger whose hostility she sensed and who did not take her sacrifice seriously even as he gave her no time to think what she was doing-Gerda suddenly heard herself screaming. like a little cloud, a soap bubble, a scream hung in the air, and others·followed, little screams expelled from her chest as though she were wrestling with something, a whimpering from which high-pitched cries of ee-ee bubbled and floated off, from lips that grimaced and twisted and were wet as if with deadly lust. She wanted to jump up, but she couldn't move. Her eyes would not obey her and kept sending out signals without permission. Gerda was pleading to be let off, like a child facing some punishment or being taken to the doctor, who cannot go one step farther because it is being tom and convulsed by its own shrieks of terror. Her hands w~re up over her breasts, and she was menacing Ulrich with her naus while frantically pressing her long thighs together. This revolt of her body against herself was frightful. She perceived it with utmost clar- ity as a kind of theater, but she was also the audience sitting alone and desolate in the dark auditorium and could do nothing to prevent her fate from being acted out before her, in a screaming frenzy; nothing to keep herself from taking the lead in the performance.
Ulrich stared in horror into the tiny pupils of her veiled eyes, with their strangely unbending gaze, and watched, aghast, those weird motions in which desire and taboo, the soul and the soulless, were indescribably intertwined. His eye caught a fleeting glimpse of her pale fair skin and the short black hairs that shaded into red where
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they grew more densely. It occurred to him that he was facing a fit of hysteria, and he had no idea how to handle it. He was afraid that these horribly distressing screams might get even louder, and re- membered that such a fit might be stopped by an angry shout or . even by a sudden, vicious slap. Then the thought tha~ this horror might have been avoided somehow led him to think that a younger man might persist in going further with Gerda even in these circum- stances. "That might be a way of getting her over it," he thought, "perhaps it's a mistake to give in to her, now that the silly goose has let herself in too deep. " He did nothing of the sort; it was only that such irritable thoughts kept zigzagging through his mind while he was instinctively whispering an uninterrupted stream of comforting words, promising not to do anything to her, assuring her that nothing had really happened, asking her to forgive him, at the same time that all his words, swept up like chaffin his loathing ofthe scene she was making, seemed to him so absurd and undignified that he had to fight off a temptation to grab an armful of pillows to press on her mouth and choke off these shrieks that wouldn't stop.
At long last her fit began to wear off and her body quieted down. Her eyes brimming with tears, she sat up in the bed, her little breasts drooping slackly from a body not yet under the mind's full control. Ulrich took a deep breath, again overcome with repugnance at the inhuman, merely physical aspects of the experience. Gerda was re- gaining normal consciousness; something bloomed in her eyes, like the first actual awakening after the eyes have been open for some time, and she stared blankly ahead for a second, then noticed that she was sitting up stark naked and glanced at Ulrich; the blood cam~ in great waves back to her face. Ulrich couldn't think of anything bet- ter to do than whisper the same reassurances to her again; he put his arm around her shoulder, drew her to his chest, and told her to think nothing of it. Gerda found herself back in the situation that had driven her to hysteria, but. now everything looked strangely pale and forlorn: the tumbled bed, her nude body in the arms of a man in- tently whispering to her, the feelings that had brought her to this. She was fully aware ofwhat it all meant, but she also knew that some- thing horrible had happened, something she would rather not focus on, and while she could tell that Ulrich's voice sounded more tender, all it meant was that he regarded her as a sick person, but it was he
who had made her sick! Still, it no longer mattered; all she wanted was to be gone from this place, to get away without having to say a word.
She dropped her head and pushed Ulrich away, felt for her cami- sole, and pulled it over her head like a child or someone who did not care how she looked. Ulrich helped her to dress, he even pulled her stockings up over her legs, and he also felt as though he were dress- ing a child. Gerda was a bit unsteady on her feet when she stood up. She thought of how she had felt earlier in the day when she left home, the home to which she was about to return, and felt, in deep misery and shame, that she had not passed the test. She did not utter a word in answer to anything Ulrich was saying. A very distant mem- ory came back to her, of Ulrich once saying, as a joke on himself, that solitude sometimes led him into excess. · She did not feel angry at him. She simply wanted never again to hear him say anything what- soever.