No More Learning

The tea they had come together to share merged into an informal and haphazard supper, at Ulrich's suggestion, because he was very tired and wanted to go to bed early to get a good night's sleep on account of the next day, which was likely to be busy with bothersome details. They smoked their final cigarettes before parting, and Ulrich still did not know what to make of his sister. She did not have any- thing either emancipated or bohemian about her, even if she was sit- ting there in those wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, as it now seemed to him; as she moved and gestured in talking, the light mas- culine outfit suggested the tender form beneath with the semitrans- parency of water, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, she wore her beautiful hair up, in true feminine style. But the center of this ambivalence was still her face, so rich in feminine charm yet with something missing, something held in reserve, whose nature he could not quite make out.
And that he knew so little about her and was sitting with her so intimately, though not at all as he would with a woman for whom he would count as a man, was something very pleasant in his present state of fatigue, to which he was now beginning to succumb.
"What a change from yesterday! " he thought.
He was· grateful for it and tried to think of something affection- ately brotherly to say to Agathe as they said goodnight, but as all this was something new to him, he could think of nothing to say. So he merely put his arm around her and kissed her.
3
START OF A NEW DAY IN A HOUSE OF MOURNING
The next morning Ulrich woke early as smoothly as a fish leaping out of water, from a dreamless sound sleep that had wiped out every trace of the previous day's fatigue. He prowled through the house looking for breakfast. The ritual of mourning had not yet fully resumed; only a scent ofit hung in all the rooms; it made him think of a shop that had opened its shutters early in the day, while the street is still empty of people. Then he got his scientific work out of his suit- case and took it into his father's study. As he sat there, with a fire in the grate, the room looked more human than on the previous eve- ning: Even though a pedantic mind, always weighing all pros and cons, had created it, right up to the plaster busts facing each other symmetrically on the top bookshelves, the many little personal things left lying about-pencils, eyeglass, thermometer, an open book, boxes of pen nibs, and the like-gave the room the touching empti- ness ofa habitat that had just been abandoned. Ulrich sat, not too far from the window, in the midst of it, at the desk, the room's nerve center, and felt a peculiar listlessness. The walls were hung with por- traits of his forebears, and some of the furniture dated from their time. The man who had lived here had formed the egg of his life from the shells of theirs; now he was dead, and his belongings stood as sharply there as if he had been chiseled out of the space; yet al- ready the order of things was about to crumble, adapt itself to his successor, and one sensed all these objects that had outlasted him quickening with a new life as yet almost imperceptible behind their fixedly mournful air.
In this mood Ulrich spread out his work, which he had interrupted weeks and months ago, and his eyes immediately alighted on the equations in hydrodynamics where he had stopped. He dimly re- membered having thought of Clarisse as he used the three basic states of water to exemplify a new mathematical operation, and Cia-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 747
risse having distracted him from it. There is a kind of recollection that evokes not the word itself but the atmosphere in which it was spoken, and so Ulrich suddenly thought: "Carbon . . . "and got the feeling, as if from nowhere, that at this instant all he needed to con- tinue was to know all the various states in which carbon occurred; but he could not remember, and thought instead: "The human being comes in twos. As man and as woman. " He paused at this for quite a while, evidently stunned with amazement, as if he had just made some earthshaking discovery. But beneath this stalling of his mind something different was concealed. For one can be hard, selfish, eager, sharply profiled against the world, as it were, and can sud- denly feel oneself, the same Ulrich What's-his-name, quite the oppo- site: deeply absorbed, a selfless, happy creature at one with an ineffably tender and somehow also selfless condition of everything around him. And he asked himself: "How long is it since I last felt like this? " To his surprise it turned out to be hardly more than twenty-four hours. The silence surrounding Ulrich was refreshing, and the condition he was reminded of did not seem as uncommon as he ordinarily thought. 'We're all organisms, after all," he thought, relaxing, "who have to strain all their energies and appetites in an unkind world to prevail against each other. But together with his enemies and victims each one of us is also a particle and an offspring of this world, not at all as detached from the others and as indepen- dent as he imagines. " In which case it was surely not incomprehensi- ble that at times an intimation of oneness and love arises from the world, almost a certainty that the normal exigencies of life keep us from seeing more than half of the great pattern of the interrelation- ships of being. There was nothing objectionable in this for a man of mathematical-scientific bent and precise feelings; on the contrary, it reminded Ulrich of a study by a psychologist whom he happened to know personally, which dealt with two main opposing groups of con- cepts, one based on a sense of being enveloped by the content of one's experiences, the other on one's enveloping them, and advanced the connection that such a "being on the inside" and "looking at something from the outside," a feeling of "concavity" and "convex- ity," a "spatiality" as well as a "corporeality," an "introspection" and an "observation," occurred in so many other pairs of opposites of ex- perience and in their linguistic tropes that one might assume a pri-
748 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mal dual form of human consciousness behind it all. It was not one of those strictly factual academic studies but one of the imaginative kind, a speculative groping into the future, that are prompted by some stimulus outside the scope of everyday scientific activity; but it was well grounded and its deductions were persuasive, moving to- ward a unity of feeling back in the mists of creation, whose tangled wreckage, Ulrich thought, might be the origin of the present-day at- titude that vaguely organizes our experience around the contrast be- tween a male and a female mode of experience but is secretly and mysteriously shadowed by ancient dreams.
Here Ulrich tried to secure his footing-literally, as one uses ropes and crampons for a descent down a dangerous rock face-and began to reflect further:
"The most ancient philosophies, obscure and almost incompre- hensible as they are to us, often speak of a male and a female princi- ple," he thought.
"The goddesses that existed alongside the gods in primitive reli- gions are in fact no longer within our emotional range," he thought. "Any relationship we might have to such superhuman women would be masochistic!
"But nature," he thought, "provides men with nipples and women with rudimentary male sex organs, which shouldn't lead us to con- clude that our ancestors were hermaphrodites. Nor need they have been psychological hybrids either. And so it must have been from outside that they received the double possibility of a giving and a re- ceiving vision, as a dual aspect of nature, and somehow all this is far older than the difference of gender, on which the sexes later drew to fill out their psychological wardrobe. . . . "
As he thought along these lines he remembered a detail from his childhood that distracted him, because-this had not happened for a long time-it gave him pleasure to remember. Here it must be men- tioned that his father had in earlier days been a horseman and had even kept riding horses, to which the empty stable by the garden wall, the first sight Ulrich had seen on his arrival, bore witness. Rid- ing was evidently the only aristocratic inclination his father had pre- sumed to adopt, out of admiration for his feudal friends' way of life. But Ulrich had been a little boy; now, in his musings, he experienced anew the sense of the infinite or at least something immeasurable
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 749
that the horse's high, muscular body aroused in the marveling child, like some awesome legendary mountain range covered with slopes of hair, across which the twitchings of the skin ran like the waves of a great wind. It was the kind of recollection, he realized, that owes its glamour to the child's powerlessness to make its wishes come true; but that hardly counts compared with the greatness of that splendor, which was no less than supernatural, or with the no less miraculous splendor little Ulrich touched shortly afteiWard with his fingertips in his quest for the first one. For at that time the town was placarded with circus posters showing not only horses but lions and tigers, too, and huge, splendid dogs that lived on good terms with the wild beasts. He had stared at these posters for a long time before he managed to get one ofthe richly colored pieces ofpaper for himself, cut the animals out, and stiffen them with little wooden supports so that they could stand up. What happened next can only be compared to drinking that never quenches one's thirst no matter how long one drinks, for there was no end to it, nor, stretching on for weeks, did it get anywhere; he was constantly being drawn to and into these adored creatures with the unutterable joy of the lonely child, who had the feeling every time he looked at them that he owned them, with the same intensity that he felt something ultimate was missing, some unattainable fulfillment the very lack ofwhich gave his yearn- ing the boundless radiance that seemed to flood his whole being. Along with this peculiarly boundless memory there arose unbidden from the oblivion ofthat early time another, slightly later experience, which now, despite its childish futility, took possession of the grown body dreaming with open eyes. It was the little girl who had only two qualities: one, that she had to belong to him, and the other, the fights with other boys this got him into. And of these two things only the fights were real, because there was no little girl. Strange time, when he used to go out like a knight errant to leap at some boy's throat, preferably when the boy was bigger than he, in some deserted street that might harbor a mystery, and wrestle with the surprised enemy! He had collected quite a few beatings, and sometimes won great vic- tories too, but no matter how it turned out he felt cheated ofhis satis- faction. Nor would his feelings accept any connection, obvious as it was, between the little girls he actually knew and the secret child he fought for, because, like all boys his age, he froze and became
750 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
tongue-tied in the presence of girls until, one day, an exception oc- curred. And now Ulrich remembered as clearly as if the circular image in the field of a telescope were trained across the years on that evening when Agathe was dressed up for a children's party. She wore a velvet dress, and her hair flowed over it like waves of bright velvet, so that the sight of her, even though he was himself encased in a terrifying knight's costume, suddenly filled him, in the same inde- scribable way as he had longed for the animals on the circus posters, with the longing to be a girl. At that age he still knew so little about men and women that he did not regard this as entirely impossible, but he knew enough not to try immediately, as children usually do, to force his wish to come true; rather, ifhe tried to define it now, it had been as if he were groping in darlmess for a door and suddenly came up against some blood-warm or warmly sweet resistance, pressing against it time and again as it yielded tenderly to his urge to pene- trate it without actually giving way. Perhaps it also resembled some harmless form of vampire passion, which sucks the desired being into itself, except that this infant male did not want to draw that in- fant female into himself but wanted to take her place entirely, and this happened with that dazzling tenderness present only in the first intimations of sexuality.
Ulrich stood up and stretched his arms, astonished at his day- dreaming. Not ten steps away, on the other side of the wall, his fa- ther's body was laid out, and he now noticed for the first time that around them both the place had been for some time swarming with people, as though they had shot up out of the ground, bustling about this dead house that went on living. Old women were laying down carpets and lighting fresh candles, there was hammering on the stair- case, floors were being waxed, flowers delivered, and now he was about to be drawn into these goings-on. People had come to sx. e him who were up and about at this early hour because they wanted ~me­ thing, or needed to lmow something, and from this moment\the chain of people never stopped. There were inquiries from the uni- versity about the funeral, a peddler came and shyly asked for cloth- ing, a German firm had commissioned a dealer in local antiquities, who with profuse apologies made on the firm's behalf an offer for a rare legal tome that the library of the deceased might contain; a chaplain needed to see Ulrich about some point that had to be
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 751
cleared up in the parish register, a man from the insurance company came with long and complicated questions, someone wanted a piano cheap, a real estate agent left his card in case the house might be for sale, a retired government clerk offered to address envelopes; and so they incessantly came, went, asked, and wanted all through the pre- cious morning hours: at the front door, where the old servant shook off as many as he could, and upstairs, where Ulrich had to see those that managed to slip through, each beginning with a matter-of-fact reference to the death, and each asserting, vocally or in writing, his own claim to life. Ulrich had never before realized how many people were politely waiting for someone to die, and how many hearts are set throbbing the moment one's own stops. It took him somewhat aback, and he saw a dead beetle lying in the woods, and other bee- tles, birds, and flapping butterflies gathering around.
For all this commotion of profit-seeking was shot through with the flickerings and flutterings of the forest-deep darkness. Through the lenses of eyes veiled with emotion the profit motive gleamed like a lantern left burning in bright daylight, as a man with black crepe on the black sleeve of something between mourner's garb and business suit entered, stopping at the door; he seemed to expect either Ulrich or himself to burst into tears. When neither happened, after a few seconds he seemed satisfied, for he came fozward and like any other businessman introduced himself as the funeral director, come to make sure that Ulrich was satisfied with the arrangements thus far. He assured Ulrich that everything else would be conducted in a manner that even the late lamented, who everyone knew had bee~ a gentleman none too easy to please, was bound to have approved. He pressed into Ulrich's hand a form covered with fine print and rectan- gles and made him read through what turned out to be a contract drawn to cover all possible classes of funerals, such as: eight horses or two horses . . . wreath carriage . . . number of . . . harness, style of . . . with outrider, silver-plated . . . attendants, style of . . . torches aIa Marienburg . . . aIa Admont . . . number ofattendants . . . style of lighting . . . for how long . . . coffin, kind ofwood . . . potted plants . . . name, date ofbirth, gender, occupation . . . disclaimer ofliability . . . Ulrich had no idea where these terms, some of them archaic, came from; he inquired; the funeral director looked at him in sur- prise; he had no idea either. He stood there facing Ulrich like a syn-
752 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
apse in the brain of mankind, linking stimulus and response while failing to generate any consciousness whatever. This merchant of mourning, who had been entrusted with centuries-old traditions which he could use as his stock-in-trade, felt that Ulrich had loos- ened the wrong screw, and quickly tried to cover this up with a re- mark intended to expedite the business in hand. He explained that all this terminology was unfortunately required by the statutes of the national association of undertakers, but that it really didn't matter if they were ignored in practice, as indeed they always were, and if Ulrich would just be good enough to sign the form-Madame, his sister, had refused to do so yesterday without consulting her brother-it would simply indicate that the client was in accord with the instructions left by his father, and he would be assured of a first- rate execution of the order.
While Ulrich signed, he asked the man whether he had already seen here in town one of those electrically powered sausage ma- chines with a picture of Saint Luke as patron of the guild of butchers and sausage makers; he himself had seen some once in Brussels- but there was no answer to wait for, because in the place of the fu- neral director stood another man who wanted something from him, a journalist from the leading local newspaper seeking information for the obituary. Ulrich gave it, dismissing the undertaker with the form; but as soon as he tried to provide an account of the most important aspects of his father's life, he realized that he did not lmow what was important and what was not, and the reporter had to come to his aid. Only then, in the grip of the forceps of a professional curiosity trained to extract what was worth lmowing, did the interview pro- ceed, and Ulrich felt as if he were present at the Creation. The jour- nalist, a young man, asked whether the old gentleman had died after a long illness or unexpectedly, and when Ulrich said that his father had continued lecturing right up to the last week of his life, this was framed as: ". . . working to the very end in the vigorous exercise of all his powers. " Then the chips began to fly off the old man's life until nothing was left but a few ribs and joints: Born in Protivin in 1844 . . . educated at . . . and the University of . . . appointed to the post of . . . on [date] . . . until, with the listing offive such appointments and honorary degrees, the basic facts were almost exhausted. Marriage at some point. A few books. Once nearly became Minister of Justice,
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 753
but someone's opposition prevailed. The reporter took notes, Ulrich checked them, they were in order. The reporter was pleased; he had the necessary number of lines. Ulrich was astonished at the little heap of ashes that remains of a human life. For every piece of infor- mation he had received, the reporter had had in readiness some six- or eight-cylinder phrase: distinguished scholar, wide sympathies, for- ward-looking but statesmanlike, mind oftruly universal scope, and so on, as if no one had died for a long time and the phrases had been unemployed for quite a while and were hungering to be used. Ulrich tried to think; he would have liked to add something worth saying about his father, but the chronicler had his facts and was putting his notebook away; what remained was like trying to pick up the con- tents of a glass of water without the glass.
The comings and goings had meanwhile slackened. All the flood of people who had, the day before, been told by Agathe to see him had now passed; so when the reporter took his leave, Ulrich found him- self alone. Something or other had put him in an embittered mood. Hadn't ·his father been right to drag along his sacks of knowledge, turning the piled grain of that knowledge now and then, and for the rest simply submitting to those powers of life that he regarded as the strongest? Ulrich thought ofhis own work, lying untouched in a desk drawer. Probably no one would even be able to say of him, someday, as they could of his father, that he had turned the grain pile over! Ulrich stepped into the little room where the dead man lay on his bier. This rigid, geometric cell surrounded by the ceaseless bustle to which it gave rise was incredibly eerie. The body floated stiff as a little wooden stick amid the floods of activity; but now and then for an instant the image would be reversed, and then all the life around him seemed petrifled and the body seemed to be gliding along with a peculiarly quiet motion. "What does the traveler care," it said at such moments, "for the cities he has left behind at the landings? Here I once lived, and I did what was expected of me, and now I'm on my way again. " Ulrich's heart constricted with the self-doubt of a man who in the midst of others wants something different than they do. He looked his father in the face. What if everything he regarded as his own personality was no more than a reaction against that face, originating in some childish antagonism? He looked around for a mirror, but there was none, only this blank face to reflect the light.
754 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
He scrutinized it for resemblances. Perhaps there were some. Per- haps it was all there: their race, their ties with the past, the imper- sonal element, the stream ofheredity in which the individual is only a ripple, the limitations, disillusionments, the endless repetitiveness of the mind going around in circles, which he hated with every fiber of his deepest will to live.
In a sudden fit of discouragement he thought of packing up and leaving even before the funeral. If there really was something he could still achieve in life, what was he doing here?
But in the doorway he bumped into his sister, who had come look- ingfor him.
4
OLD ACQUAINTANCE
For the first time Ulrich saw her dressed as a woman, and after his impression of her yesterday she seemed to be in disguise. Through the open door artificial light mingled with the tremulous gray of mid- morning, and this black apparition with blond hair seemed to be standing in an ethereal grotto through which radiant splendor flowed. Agathe's hair was drawn back closer to her head, making her face look more feminine than it had yesterday. Her delicate womanly breasts were embedded in the black of the severe dress in that per- fect balance between yielding and resistance characteristic of the feather-light hardness of a pearl; the slim long legs he had seen yes- terday as so like his own were now curtained by a skirt. Now that her appearance as a whole was less like his own, he could see how alike their faces were. He felt as if it were his own self that had entered through a door and was coming to meet him, though it was a more beautiful self, with an aura in which he never saw himself. For the first time it flashed on him that his sister was a dreamlike repetition and variant ofhimself, but as the impression lasted only a moment he forgot it again.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 755
Agathe had come to remind her brother ofcertain duties that were on the point of being delayed too long, for she had overslept. She held their father's will in her hands and drew Ulrich's attention to some dispositions in it that must be dealt with at once. Most urgent was a rather odd stipulation about the old man's decorations, which was also known to the servant Franz. Agathe had zealously, if some- what irreverently, underlined this point in the will in red pencil. The deceased had wanted to be buried with his decorations on his chest, and he had quite a few of them, but since it was not from vanity that he wanted this done he had added a long and ruminative justification of this wish. His daughter had read only the beginning, leaving it to her brother to explain the rest to her.
"Now, how shall I put it? " Ulrich said after he had read the pas- sage. "Papa wants to be buried with all his decorations because he considers the individualistic theory of the state to be false! He favors the universalist view: It is only through the creative community of the state that the individual gains a purpose that transcends the merely personal, a sense of value and justice. Alone he is nothing, which is why the monarch personifies a spiritual symbol. In short, when a man dies he should wrap himself in his decorations as a dead sailor is wrapped in the flag when his body is consigned to the sea! "
"But didn't I read somewhere that these medals have to be given back? "
"The heirs are obliged to return the medals to the Chamberlain's Office. So Papa had duplicates made. Still, he seems to feel that the ones he bought are not quite the real thing, so he wants us to substi- tute them for the originals only when they close the coffin; that's the trouble. Who knows, perhaps that's his silent protest against the reg- ulation, which he wouldn't express any other way.
"
"But by that time there'll be hundreds of people here, and we'll forget! " Agathe worried.
'W e might just as well do it now. "
"There's no time now. You'd better read the next part, what he writes about Professor Schwung. Professor Schwung may be here at any moment; I was expecting him all day yesterday. "
"Then let's do it after Schwung leaves. "
"But it's not very nice," Agathe objected, "not to let him have his wish. "
756 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"He'll never know it. "
She looked at him doubtfully. "A:re you sure of that? "
"Oh? " Ulrich laughed. "A:re you not quite sure, by any chance? " 'Tm not sure about anything," Agathe answered.
"Even if it weren't sure, he was never satisfied with us anyway. " "That's true," Agathe said. "All right, let's do it later. But tell me
something," she added. "Don't you ever bother about what's ex- pected of you? "
Ulrich hesitated. "She has a good dressmaker," he thought. "I needn't have worried that she might be provincial! " But because these words somehow brought back all yesterday evening, he tried to think of an answer that would really be appropriate and helpful to her; but he could not find a way to put it that would not cause misun- derstanding, so he ended up with. involuntarily youthful brashness:
"It's not only Father who's dead; all the ceremonials around him are dead too. His will is dead. The people who tum up here are dead. I'm not trying to be nasty; God knows we probably ought to be grate- ful to all those who shore up the world we live in: but all that is the limestone of life, not its oceans! " He noticed a puzzled glance from his sister and realized how obscurely he was talking. "Society's vir- tues are vices to the saint," he ended with a laugh.
He put his hands on her shoulders, in a gesture that could have been construed as either patronizing or high-spirited but sprang only from embarrassment. Yet Agathe stepped back with a serious face and would not go along.
"Did you make that up yourself? " she asked.
"No; a man whom I love said it. "
She had the sullenness ofa child forcing itselfto think hard as she
tried to sum up his responses in one statement: "So you would hardly call a man who is honest out of habit a good man? But a thief who steals f~r the first time, with his heart pounding, you'll call a good man? "
These odd words took Ulrich aback, and he became more serious.
"I really don't know," he said abruptly. "In some situations I per- sonally don't very much care whether something is considered right or wrong, but I can't give you any rules you could go by. "
Agathe slowly turned her questioning gaze away from him and
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 757
picked up the will again. 'We must get on with this; here's another marked passage," she admonished herself.
Before taking to his bed for the last time the old gentleman had written a number ofletters, and his will contained explanations eluci- dating them and directions for sending them. The marked passage referred to Professor Schwung, one of his old colleagues, who after a lifelong friendship had so galled the last year of his life by opposing his view on the statute relating to diminished responsibility. Ulrich immediately recognized the familiar long-drawn-out arguments about illusion and will, the sharpness of law and the ambiguity of na- ture, which his father had summarized for him again before his death. Indeed, nothing seemed to have been so much on his mind in his final days as Schwung's denunciation of the social school of thought, which his father had joined, as an emanation of Prussian influence. He had just begun to outline a pamphlet that was to have been titled "The State and the Law; or, Consistency and Denuncia- tion," when he felt his strength beginning to fail and saw with bitter- ness the enemy left in sole possession of the field. In solemn words such as are inspired only by the imminence of death and the struggle to preserve that sacred possession, one's reputation, he enjoined his children not to let his work fall into oblivion, and most particularly charged his son to cultivate the influential connections he owed to his father's tireless efforts, in order to crush totally all Professor Schwung's hopes of realizing his aims.
Once one has expressed oneself in this fashion, then after one's task is done, or at least the way is paved for its completion, it by no means precludes one's feeling the urge to forgive a former friend such errors as have arisen from gross vanity. When a man is seriously ill and feels his mortal coil quietly uncoiling, he is inclined to forgive and ask forgiveness; but when he feels better he takes it all back, because the healthy body is by nature implacable. The old gentleman must have experienced both these states of mind as his condition fluctuated during his last illness, and the one must have seemed as justified as the other. But such a situation is unbearable for a distin- guished jurist, and so his logically trained mind had devised a means of leaving his last will unassailably valid, impervious to the influence of any last-minute emotional waverings: He wrote a letter of forgive-
758 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ness but left it unsigned and undated, with instructions for Ulrich to date it at the hour of his father's death, then sign it together with his sister Agathe as proxies, as can be done with an oral will when a dying man no longer has the strength to sign his name. Actually, he was, without wanting to admit it, an odd fish, this little old man who had always submitted to the hierarchies of existence and defended them as their most zealous servant while stifling within himself all sorts of rebellious impulses, for which, in his chosen course of life, he could never find an outlet. Ulrich was reminded of the death notice he had received, which had probably been dictated in the same frame of mind; he even almost recognized a certain kinship with himself in it, though not resentfully this time but with compassion, at least in the sense that he could see how the old man's lifelong frustration at not being able to express his feelings must have led to his being in- furiated to the point of hatred by this son who made life easy for himself by taking unpardonable liberties. For this is how the ways of sons always appear to fathers, and Ulrich felt a twinge offilial sympa- thy as he thought of all that was still unresolved inside himself. But he no longer had time to find some appropriate expression for all this that Agathe would also understand; he had just begun when a man swung with great energy into the twilit room. He strode in, hurled forward by his own energy right into the shimmer of the candlelight, before the derailed old servant could catch up to announce him. He lifted his arm in another wide sweep to shield his eyes with his hand, one step from the bier.
"My revered friend! " the visitor intoned sonorously. And the little old man lay with clenched jaws in the presence of his enemy Schwung.
"Ah, my dear young friends," Professor Schwung continued: "Above us the majesty of the stany firmament, within us the majesty of the moral law! " With veiled eyes he gazed down upon his faculty colleague. 'Within this breast now cold there lived the majesty ofthe moral law! " Only then did he turn around to shake hands with the brother and sister.
Ulrich took this first opportunity to acquit himself of his charge.
"You and my father were unfortunately at odds with each other lately, sir? " he opened cautiously.
For a moment the graybeard did not seem to catch his meaning.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 759
"Differences of opinion, hardly worth mentioning! " he replied mag- nanimously, gazing earnestly at the deceased. But when Ulrich po- litely persisted, hinting that a last will was involved, the situation in the room suddenly became tense, the way it does in a low-down dive when everyone knows someone has just drawn a knife under the table and in a moment all hell will break loose. So even with his last gasp the old boy had managed to gall his colleague Schwung! Enmity of such long standing had of course long since ceased to be a feeling and become a habit; provided something or other did not happen to stir up the hostility afresh, it simply ceased to exist. There was only the accumulated experience of countless grating episodes in the past, which had coagulated into a contemptuous opinion each held of the other, an opinion as unaffected by the flux of emotion as any unbiased truth would be. Professor Schwung felt this just as his an- tagonist, now dead, had felt it. Forgiveness seemed to him quite childish and beside the point, for that one relenting impulse before the end-merely a feeling at that, not a professional admission of error-naturally counted for nothing against the experiences ofyears of controversy and, as Schwung saw it, could only serve, and rather brazenly, to put him in the wrong if he should take advantage of his victory. But this had nothing to do with Professor Schwung's need to take leave of his dead friend. Good Lord, they had known each other back at the start of their academic careers, before either of them was married! Do you remember that evening in the Burggarten, how we drank to the setting sun and argued about Hegel? However many sunsets there may have been since then, that's the one I always re- member. And do you remember our first professional disagreement, which almost made enemies of us way back then? Those were the days! Now you are dead, and I'm still on my feet, I'm glad to say, even though I'm standing by your coffin.
Such are the feelings, as everyone knows, of elderly people faced with the death of their contemporaries. When we come into the sere and yellow leaf, poetry breaks out. Many people who have not turned a verse since their seventeenth year suddenly write a poem at sev- enty-seven, when drawing up their last will. Just as at the Last Judg- ment the dead shall be called forth one by one, even though they have long been at rest at the bottom of time together with their cen- turies, like the cargoes of foundered ships, so too, in the last will,
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things are summoned by name and have their personalities, worn away by use, restored to them: "The Bokhara rug with the cigar burn, in my study . . . " is the sort of thing one reads in such final disposi- tions, or "The umbrella with the rhinoceros-hom handle that I bought at Sunshine & Winter's in May 1887 . . . "Even the bundles of securities are named and invoked individually by number.
Nor is it chance that, as each object lights up again for the last time, the longing should arise to attach to it a moral, an admonition, a blessing, a principle, to cast one last spell on so many unreckoned things that rise up once more as one feels oneself sinking. And so, together with the poetry of testament-making time, philosophy too awakens; usually an ancient and dusty philosophy, understandably enough, hauled out from where it had been forgotten fifty years ear- lier. Ulrich suddenly realized that neither of these two old men could possibly have given way. "Let life take care of itself, as long as princi- ples remain intact! " is an appropriate sentiment when a person knows that in a few months or years he will be outlived by those very principles. And it was plain to see how the two impulses were still contending with each other in the old academician: His romanticism, his youth, his poetic side, demanded a fine, sweeping gesture and a noble statement; his philosophy, on the other hand, insisted on keep- ing the law of reason untainted by sudden eruptions of feeling and sentimental lapses such as his dead opponent had placed on his path like a snare. For the last two days Schwung had been thinking: 'Well, now he's dead, and there'll no longer be anything to interfere with the Schwungian view of diminished responsibility"; his feelings flowed in great waves toward his old friend, and he had worked out his scene of farewell like a carefully regulated plan of mobilization, waiting only for the signal to be put into operation. But a drop of vinegar had fallen into his scenario, with sobering effect. Schwung had begun on a great wave of sentiment, but now he felt like some- one suddenly coming to his senses in the middle of a poem, and the last lines won't come. And so they confronted each other, a white stubby beard and white beard stubble, each with jaws implacably clenched.
'What's he going to do now? " Ulrich wondered, intent on the scene before him. But finally Hofrat Schwung's happy certainty that Paragraph 318 of the Penal Code would now be formulated in ac-
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cordance with his own proposals prevailed over his irritation, and freed from angry thoughts, he would most have liked to start singing "Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . . "so as to give vent to his now entirely benevolent and undivided feelings. But since this was out of the question, he turned to Ulrich and said: "Listen to me, my friend's young son: It is the moral crisis that comes first; social decay is its consequence! " Then, turning to Agathe, he added: "It was the mark of greatness in your father that he was always ready to support an idealistic view struggling to prevail in the foundation of our laws. "
Then he seized one of Agathe's hands and one of Ulrich's, pressed them both, and exclaimed:
"Your father attached far too much importance to minor differ- ences of opinion, which are sometimes unavoidable in long years of collaboration. I was always convinced that he did so in order not to expose his delicate sense of justice to the slightest reproach. Many eminent scholars will be coming tomorrow to take their leave of him, but none of them will be the man he was! "
And so the encounter ended on a conciliatory note. When he left, Schwung even assured Ulrich that he might count on his father's friends in case he should still decide to take up an academic career.
Agathe had listened wide-eyed, contemplating the uncanny final form life gives to human beings. "It was like being in a forest of plas- ter trees! " she said to her brother afterward.
Ulrich smiled and said: ''I'm feeling as sentimental as a dog in moonlight. "
5
THEY DO WRONG
"Do you remember," Agathe asked him after a while, "how once when I was still very small, you were playing with some boys and fell into the water right up to your waist and tried to hide it? You sat at
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lunch, with your visible top half dry, but your bottom half made your teeth start chattering! "
When he had been a boy home from boarding school on vaca- tion-this had actually been the only instance over a long period- and when the small shriveled corpse here had still been an almost all-powerful man for both of them, it was not uncommon for Ulrich to balk at admitting some fault, and he resisted showing remorse even when he could not deny what he had done. As a result, he had, on one occasion, caught a chill and had to be packed off to bed with an impressive fever.
"And all you got to eat was soup," Agathe said.
"That's true," her brother confirmed with a smile. At this moment the memory ofhis punishment, something ofno concern to him now, seemed no different than ifhe were seeing on the floor his tiny baby shoes, also of no concern to him now.
"Soup was all you would have got anyway, on account of your fever," Agathe said. "Still, it was also prescribed for you as a punish- ment. "
"That's true," Ulrich agreed again. "But of course it was done not in anger but in fulfillment of some idea of duty. " He didn't know what his sister was getting at. He was still seeing those baby shoes. Or not seeing them: he merely saw them as if he were seeing them. Feeling likewise the humiliations he had outgrown. And he thought: ''This having-nothing-to-do-with-me-anymore somehow expresses the fact that all our lives, we're somehow only half integrated with ourselves! "
"But you wouldn't have been allowed to eat anything but soup anyway! " Agathe reiterated, and added: "I think I've spent my whole life being afraid I might be the only person in the world who couldn't understand that sort of thing. "
Can the memories of two people talking of a past familiar to both not only supplement each other but coalesce even before they are uttered? Something of the kind was happening at this moment. A shared state of mind surprised and confused both brother and sister, like hands that come out of coats in places one would never expect and suddenly grasp each other. All at once they both knew more of the past than they had supposed they knew, and Ulrich was again seeing the fever light creeping up the walls like the glittering of the
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candles in this room where they were now standing. And then his father had come in, waded through the cone oflight cast by the table lamp, and sat down by his bed.
"Ifyou did it without realizing the full extent of the consequences, your deed might well appear in a milder light. But in that case you would first have had to admit to yourself that it was so. " Perhaps these were phrases from the will or from those letters about Para- graph 318 foisted back onto that memory. Normally he could notre- member details or the way things were put, so there was something quite unusual in this recollection ofwhole sentences in formal array; it had something to do with his sister standing there before him, as though it were her proximity that was bringing about this change in him.
" 'Ifyou were capable, spontaneously and independent ofany out- ward necessity, of choosing to do something wrong, then you must also realize that you have behaved culpably,' " he continued, quoting his father aloud. "He must have talked that way to you too. "
"Perhaps not quite the same way," Agathe qualified this. 'With me, he usually allowed for mitigating circumstances arising from my psychological constitution. He was always instructing me that an act of the will is linked with a thought, that it is not a matter of acting on instinct. "
" 'It is the will,' " Ulrich quoted, " 'that, in the process of the grad- ual development of the understanding and the reason, must domi- nate the desires and, relative to them, the instincts, by means of reflection and the resolves consequent thereon. ' "
"Is that true? " his sister asked. 'Why do you ask? "
"Because I'm stupid, I suppose. '' "You're not stupid! "
"Learning always came hard to me, and I never quite understand. " "That hardly proves anything. "
"Then there must be something wrong with me, because I don't
assimilate what I do understand. "
They were close together, face-to-face, leaning against the jamb of
the doorway that had been left open when Professor Schwung took his departure. Daylight and candlelight played over their faces, and their voices intertwined as in a responsory. Ulrich went on intoning
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his sentences like a liturgy, and Agathe's lips moved quietly in re- sponse. The old ordeal ofthose admonitions, which consisted in im- printing a hard, alien pattern on the tender, uncomprehending mind ofchildhood, gave them pleasure now, and they played with it.
And then, without having been prompted by anything preceding, Agathe exclaimed: "Just imagine this applied to the whole thing, and you have Gottlieb Hagauer. " And she proceeded to mimic her hus- band like a schoolgirl:" 'You mean to say you really don't know that Lamium album is the white dead nettle? ' 'But how else can we make progress except through the same hard process of induction that has brought our human race step by step through thousands ofyears, by painful labor full oferror, to our present level ofunderstanding, as at the hand of a faithful guide? ' 'Can't you see, my dear Agathe, that thinking is also a moral obligation? To concentrate is a constant struggle against one's indolence. ' 'Mental discipline is that training of the mind by means ofwhich a man becomes steadily more capable of working out a growing series of concepts rationally, always consist- ently questioning his own ideas, that is by means of flawless syllo- gisms categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive, or by induction, and finally of submitting the conclusions gained to verification for as long as is necessary to bring all the concepts into agreement! ' "
Ulrich marveled at his sister's feat of memory. Agathe seemed to revel in the impeccable recitation ofthese pedantic dicta she had ap- propriated from God knew where, some book perhaps. She claimed that this was how Hagauer talked.
Ulrich did not believe it. "How could you remember such long, complicated sentences from only hearing them in conversation? ''
"They stuck in my mind," Agathe replied. "That's how I am. "
"Do you have any idea," Ulrich asked, astonished, "what a cate- gorical syllogism is, or a verification? ''
"Not the slightest! " Agathe admitted with a laugh. "Maybe he only read that somewhere himself. But that's the way he talks. I learned it by heart as a series of meaningless words by listening to him. I think it was out of anger because he talks like that. You're different from me; things lie inert in my mind because I don't know what to do with them-so much for my good memory. Because I'm stupid, I have a terrific memory! " She acted as though this contained a sad truth she would have to shake off in order to go on in her exuberant vein: "It's
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the same even when he's playing tennis. 'When, in learning to play tennis, I deliberately for the first time place my racket in a certain position in order to give a specific new direction to the ball, which up to that point had been following the precise course I intended, then I intervene in the flow of phenomena: I am experimenting! ' "
"Is he a good tennis player? "
"I beat him six-love. "
They laughed.
"Do you realize," Ulrich said, "that with all the things you're mak-
ing Hagauer say, he's actually quite right? It just sounds funny. " "He may be right, for all I know," Agathe replied. "I don't under- stand any of it. But do you know that a boy in his class once translated a passage from Shakespeare quite literally, and the effect was touch- ing, beginning with 'Cowards die many times before their deaths,' and without any feeling for what the boy had done, Hagauer simply crossed it out and replaced it, word for word, with the old Schlegel
version!
"And I remember another instance, a passage from Pindar, I
think: 'The law of nature, King of all mortals and immortals, reigns supreme, approving extreme violence, with almighty hand,' and Hagauer polished it: 'The law of nature, that reigns over all mortals and immortals, rules with almighty hand, even approving violence. '
"And wasn't it lovely," she urged, "the way that little boy, whom he criticized, translated the words so literally it gave one the shivers, just the way he found them lying there like a collapsed heap of stones. " And she recited: " 'Cowards die so much before they die, I The brave ones just die once.