by Robert Musil
Suddenly Agathe felt miserable again, for after they had managed this so well, her husband had after all come to her room, together with her brother, to say goodbye to her. Agathe had behaved as coldly as she could and said that there was no way of telling when she would be returning home. Knowing him as she did, she could tell at once that he had not been prepared for this and resented the fact that his decision to leave right away was now casting him in the role of the unfeeling husband; in retrospect he was suddenly offended at having been expected to stay at a hotel and by the cool reception accorded him. But since he was a man who did everything according to plan he said nothing, decided to have it out with his wife when the time came, and kissed her, after he had picked up his hat, dutifully on the lips.
And this kiss, which Ulrich had seen, now seemed to demolish Agathe. “How could it happen,” she asked herself in consternation, “that I stood this man for so long? But then, haven’t I put up with things all my life without resisting?” She furiously reproached herself: “If I were any good at all, things could never have gone this far!”
Agathe turned her face away from Ulrich, whom she had been watching, and stared out the window. Low suburban buildings, icy streets, muffled-up people—images of an ugly wilderness rolling past, holding up to her the wasteland of the life into which she felt she had fecklessly allowed herself to drift. She was no longer sitting upright but had let herself slide down into the cab’s musty-smelling upholstery; it was easier to look out the window in this position, and she remained in this ungraceful posture, in which she was rudely jolted and shaken to the very bowels. This body of hers, being tossed about like a bundle of rags, gave her an uncanny feeling, for it was the only thing she owned. Sometimes, when as a schoolgirl she awakened in the gray light of dawn, she had felt as though she were drifting into the future inside her body as if inside the hull of a wooden skiff. Now she was just about twice as old as she had been then, and the light in the cab was equally dim. But she still could not picture her life, had no idea what it ought to be. Men were a complement to one’s body, but they were no spiritual fulfillment; one took them as they took oneself. Her body told her that in only a few years it would begin to lose its beauty, which meant losing the feelings that, because they arise directly out of its self-assurance, can only barely be expressed in words or thoughts. Then it would be all over, without anything having ever been there. It occurred to her that Ulrich had spoken in a similar vein about the futility of his athletics, and while she doggedly kept her face turned away to the window, she planned to make him talk about it.
10
FURTHER COURSE OF THE EXCURSION TO THE SWEDISH RAMPARTS.
THE MORALITY OF THE NEXT STEP
Brother and sister had left the cab at the last, low, and already quite rural-looking houses on the edge of the town and set off along a wide, furrowed country road that rose steadily uphill. The frozen earth of the wheel tracks crumbled beneath their tread. Their shoes were soon covered with the miserable gray of this parquet for carters and peasants, in sharp contrast with their smart city clothes, and although it was not cold, a cutting wind blowing toward them from the top of the hill made their cheeks glow, and the glazed brittleness of their lips made it hard to talk.
The memory of Hagauer drove Agathe to explain herself to her brother. She was convinced that he could not possibly understand her bad marriage from any point of view, not even in the simplest of social terms. The words were already there within her, but she could not make up her mind to overcome the resistance of the climb, the cold, and the wind lashing her face. Ulrich was striding ahead, in a broad track left by a dragging brake, which they were using as their path; looking at his lean, broad-shouldered form, she hesitated. She had always imagined him hard, unyielding, a bit wild, perhaps only because of the critical remarks she had heard from her father and occasionally also from Hagauer; thinking of her brother, estranged and escaped from the family, had made her ashamed of her own subservience. “He was right not to bother about me!” she thought, and her dismay at having continually submitted to demeaning situations returned. But in fact she was full of those same tempestuous, conflicting feelings that had made her break out with those wild lines of poetry between the doorposts of her father’s death chamber. She caught up with Ulrich, which left her out of breath, and suddenly questions such as this workaday road had probably never heard before rang out, and the wind was torn to ribbons by words whose sounds no other wind had ever carried in these rural hills.
“You surely remember…,” she exclaimed, and named several well-known instances from literature: “You didn’t tell me whether you could forgive a thief, but do you mean you’d regard these murderers as good people?”
“Of course!” Ulrich shouted back. “No—wait. Perhaps they’re just potentially good people, valuable people. They still are, even afterward, as criminals. But they don’t stay good!”
“Then why do you still like them after their crime? Surely not because of their earlier potentiality but because you still find them attractive?”
“But that’s always the way it is,” Ulrich said. “It’s the person who gives character to the deed; it doesn’t happen the other way round. We separate good and evil, but in our hearts we know they’re a whole!”
Agathe’s wind-whipped cheeks flushed an even brighter red because the passion of her questions, which words both revealed and hid, had forced her to resort to books for examples. The misuse of “cultural problems” is so extreme that one could feel them out of place wherever the wind blows and trees stand, as though human culture did not include all of nature’s manifestations! But she had struggled bravely, linked her arm through her brother’s, and now replied, close to his ear so as not to have to raise her voice anymore and with a flicker of bravado in her face: “I suppose that’s why we execute bad men but cordially serve them a hearty breakfast first.”
Ulrich, sensing some of the agitation at his side, leaned down to speak in his sister’s ear, though in a normal voice: “Everyone likes to think that he couldn’t do anything evil, because he himself is good.”
With these words they had reached the top, where the road no longer climbed but cut across a rolling, treeless plateau. The wind had suddenly dropped and it was no longer cold, but in this pleasant stillness the conversation stopped as if severed, and would not start up again.
“What on earth got you onto Dostoyevsky and Stendhal in the middle of that gale?” Ulrich asked a while later. “If anybody had seen us they’d have thought we were crazy.”
Agathe laughed. “They wouldn’t have understood us anymore than the cries of the birds….Anyway, you were talking to me the other day about Moosbrugger.”
They walked on.
After a while, Agathe said: “I don’t like him at all!”
“And I’d nearly forgotten him,” Ulrich replied.
After they had again walked on in silence, Agathe stopped. “Tell me,” she asked. “You’ve surely done some irresponsible things yourself. I remember, for instance, that you were in the hospital once with a bullet wound. You certainly don’t always look before you leap…?”
“What a lot of questions you’re asking today!” Ulrich said. “What do you expect me to say to that?”
“Are you never sorry for anything you do?” Agathe asked quickly. “I have the impression that you never regret anything. You even said something like that once.”
“Good God,” Ulrich answered, beginning to walk on again. “There’s a plus in every minus. Maybe I did say something like that, but you don’t have to take it so literally.”
“A plus in every minus?”
“Some good in everything bad. Or at least in much of the bad. A human minus-variant is likely to contain an unrecognized plus-variant—that’s probably what I meant to say. Having something to regret may be just the thing to give you the strength to do something far better than you might ever have done otherwise. It’s never what one does that counts, but only what one does next
!”
“Suppose you’ve killed someone: what can you do next?”
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He was tempted to answer, for the sake of the argument: “It might enable me to write a poem that would enrich the inner life of thousands of people, or to come up with a great invention!” But he checked himself. “That would never happen,” he thought. “Only a lunatic could imagine it. Or an eighteen-year-old aesthete. God knows why, but those are ideas that contradict the laws of nature. On the other hand,” he conceded, “it did work that way for primitive man. He killed because human sacrifice was a great religious poem!”
He said neither the one thing nor the other aloud, but Agathe went on: “You may regard my objections as silly, but the first time I heard you say that what matters isn’t the step one takes but always the next step after that, I thought: So if a person could fly inwardly, fly morally, as it were, and could keep flying at high speed from one improvement to the next, then he would know no remorse! I was madly envious of you!”
“That’s nonsense!” Ulrich said emphatically. “What I said was that one false step doesn’t matter, only the next step after that. But then what matters after the next step? Evidently the one that follows after that And after the nth step, the n-plus-one step! Such a person would have to live without ever coming to an end or to a decision, indeed without achieving reality. And yet it is still true that what counts is always only the next step. The truth is, we have no proper method of dealing with this unending series. Dear Agathe,” he said abruptly, “I sometimes regret my entire life.”
“But that’s just what you can’t do!” his sister said.
“And why not? Why not that in particular?”
“I have never really done anything,” Agathe replied, “and so I’ve always had time to regret the little I have done. I’m sure you don’t know what that’s like: such a dim state of mind! The shadows come, and what was has power over me. It’s present in the smallest detail, and I can forget nothing and understand nothing. It’s an unpleasant state of mind.…” Her tone was unemotional, quite unassuming. Ulrich had in fact never known this backwash of life, since his own had always been oriented toward expansion, and it merely reminded him that his sister had several times already expressed dissatisfaction with herself in strong terms. But he failed to question her because they had meanwhile reached a hilltop that he had chosen as their destination and stepped toward its edge. It was a huge mound associated by legend with a Swedish siege in the Thirty Years’ War because it looked like a fortification, even though it was far too big for that: a green rampart of nature, without bush or tree, that broke off to a high, bright rock face on the side overlooking the town. A low, empty world of hills surrounded this mound; no village, no house was to be seen, only the shadows of clouds and gray pastures. Once again Ulrich felt the spell of this place, which he remembered from his youth: the town was still lying there, far below in the distance, anxiously huddled around a few churches that looked like hens herding their chicks, so that one suddenly felt like leaping into their midst with one bound and laying about one, or scooping them up in the grip of a giant hand.
“What a glorious feeling it must have been for those Swedish adventurers to reach such a place after trotting relentlessly for weeks, and then from their saddles catch sight of their quarry,” he said to his sister after telling her the story of the place. “It is only at such moments that the weight of life, the burden of our secret grievance— that we must all die, that it’s all been so brief and probably for nothing—is ever really lifted from us.”
“What moments do you mean?”
Ulrich did not know what to answer. He did not want to answer at all. He remembered that as a young man he had always felt the need in this place to clench his teeth and keep silent. Finally, he replied: “Those romantic moments when events run away with us—the senseless moments!” He felt as if his head were a hollow nut on his neck, full of old saws like “Death be not proud” or “I care for nobody, no, not I,” and with them the faded fortissimo of those years when there was not yet a boundary between life’s expectations and life itself. He thought: “What single-minded and happy experiences have I had since then? None.”
Agathe responded: “I’ve always acted senselessly, and it only makes one unhappy.”
She had walked ahead, to the very edge. Her ears were deaf to her brother’s words; she did not understand them, and saw a somber, barren landscape before her whose sadness harmonized with her own. When she turned around she said: “It’s a place to kill oneself,” and smiled. “The emptiness in my head could melt with sweet peace into the emptiness of this view!” She took a few steps back to Ulrich. “All my life,” she went on, “I’ve been reproached with having no willpower, with loving nothing, respecting nothing; in short, for being a person with no real will to live. Papa used to scold me for it, and Hagauer blamed me for it. So now I wish you would tell me, for God’s sake, tell me at long last, in which moments does something in life strike us as necessary?”
‘When one turns over in bed!” Ulrich said gruffly.
“What does that mean?”
“Excuse the mundane example,” he said. “But it’s a fact: You’re in an uncomfortable position; you incessantly think of changing it and decide on one move and then another, without doing anything; finally, you give up; and then all at once you’ve turned over! One really should say you’ve been turned over. That’s the one pattern we act on, whether in a fit of passion or after long reflection.” He did not look at her as he spoke; he was answering himself. He still had the feeling: Here I stood and longed for something that has never been satisfied.
Agathe smiled again, but the smile twisted her mouth as if in pain. She returned to where she had been standing and stared silently into the romantic distance. Her fur coat made a dark outline against the sky, and her slender form presented a sharp contrast to the broad silence of the landscape and the shadows of the clouds flying over it. Looking at her, Ulrich had an indescribably strong sense that something was happening. He was almost ashamed to be standing there in the company of a woman instead of beside a saddled horse. And although he was perfectly aware that the cause of this was the tranquil image emanating at this moment from his sister, he had the impression that something was happening, not to him, but somewhere in the world, and he was missing it. He felt he was being ridiculous. And yet there had been something true in his blurting out that he regretted the way he had lived his life. He sometimes longed to be wholly involved in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were meaningless or criminal, as long as they were valid, absolute, without the everlasting tentativeness they have when a person is superior to his experiences. “Something an end in itself, authentic,” Ulrich thought, seriously looking for the right expression, and, unawares, his thoughts stopped pursuing imaginary events and focused on the sight that Agathe herself now presented, as nothing but the mirror of her self. So brother and sister stood for quite a while, apart and solitary, immobilized by a hesitancy filled with conflicting feelings. Most curious of all, perhaps, was that it never occurred to Ulrich that something had indeed already happened when, at Agathe’s behest and in his own desire to get rid of him, he had palmed off on his unsuspecting brother-in-law the lie that there was a sealed testament that could not be opened for several days, and had assured him, also against his better knowledge, that Agathe would look after his interests: something Hagauer would subsequently refer to as “aiding and abetting.”
Eventually they did move away from this spot, where each had been sunk in thought, and walked on together without having talked things out. The wind had freshened again, and because Agathe seemed fatigued, Ulrich suggested stopping to rest at a shepherd’s cottage he knew of nearby. They soon found the stone cabin, and they had to duck their heads as they went in, while the shepherd’s wife, staring, fended them off in embarrassment. In the mixture of German and Slavic that prevailed in this part of the country and that he still vaguely remembered, Ulr
ich asked if they might come in for a while to warm themselves and eat their provisions indoors, and supported this request with a tip so generous that the involuntary hostess broke out into horrified lamentations that her wretched poverty did not enable her to offer better hospitality to such “fine gentry.” She wiped off the greasy table by the window, fanned a fire of twigs on the hearth, and put on some goat’s milk to heat. Agathe had immediately squeezed past the table to the window without paying any attention to these efforts, as if it were a matter of course that one would find shelter somewhere, no matter where. She looked out through the dim little square of four panes at the landscape here, on the far side of the rampart, which without the wide extent of the view they had had from the top was more reminiscent of what a swimmer sees, surrounded by green crests. Though it was not yet evening, the day had passed its zenith and the light was fading.
Suddenly Agathe asked: ‘‘Why don’t you ever talk to me seriously?”
How could Ulrich have found a better answer to this other than to glance up at her with an air of innocence and surprise? He was busy laying out ham, sausage, and boiled eggs on a piece of paper between himself and his sister.
But Agathe continued: “If one accidentally bumps into you it hurts, and one feels a shock at the terrific difference. But when I try to ask you something crucial you dissolve into thin air!”
She did not touch the food he pushed toward her—indeed, in her aversion to winding up the day with a rural picnic, her back was so straight that she was not even touching the table. And now something recurred that was like their climb up the country road. Ulrich shoved aside the mugs of goat’s milk that had just been brought to the table from the stove and were emitting a very disagreeable smell to noses unaccustomed to it; the faint nausea it produced in him had a sobering, stimulating effect such as comes from a sudden rush of bitterness.
“I’ve always spoken seriously to you,” he retorted. “If you don’t like what I say, it’s not my fault; what you don’t like in my responses is the morality of our time.” He suddenly realized that he wanted to explain to his sister as completely as possible all she would have to know in order to understand herself, and to some extent her brother as well. And with the firmness of a man who will brook no idle interruptions, he launched on a lengthy speech.
