The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  When she had thought this over and recovered her nerve, she discovered that the meaning of her experience did not he in that “solar eclipse” of her physical sensations, but was mainly a moral matter. A sudden change of her inmost condition, and hence of all her relations with the world, had for a moment given her that “unity of the conscience with the senses” which she had so far experienced so fleetingly that it was barely sufficient to impart to her ordinary life a tinge of something disconsolate and murkily passionate, whether Agathe tried to behave well or badly. This change seemed to her an incomparable outpouring that emanated as much from her surroundings toward her as from herself toward them, a oneness of the highest significance through the smallest mental motion, a motion that was barely distinguishable from the objects themselves. The objects were perfused by her sensations and the sensations by the objects in a way so convincing that Agathe felt she had never before been remotely touched by anything for which she had formerly used the word “convincing.” And this had happened in circumstances that would normally be expected to rule out the possibility of her being convinced. So the meaning of what she experienced in her solitude did not lie in its possible psychological import, as an indication of a high-strung or overly fragile personality, for it did not lie in the person at all but in something general, or perhaps in the link between his generality and the person, something Agathe not unjustly regarded as a moral conclusion in the sense that it seemed to the young woman—disappointed as she was in herself—that if she could always live as she did in such exceptional moments, and if she was not too weak to keep it up, she could love the world and willingly accommodate herself to it—something she would never be able to do otherwise! Now she was filled with a fierce longing to recover that mood, but such moments of highest intensity cannot be willed by force. It was only when her furious efforts proved useless that she realized, with the clarity which a pale day takes on after sunset, that the only thing she could hope for, and what in fact she was waiting for, with an impatience merely masked by her solitude, was the strange prospect that her brother had once half-humorously called the Millennium. He could just as well have chosen another word for it, for what it meant to Agathe was the convincing and confident ring of something that was coming. She would never have dared make this assertion. Even now she did not know whether it was truly possible. She had no idea what it could be. She had at the moment again forgotten all the words with which her brother had proved to her that beyond what filled her spirit with nebulous light, possibility stretched onward into the uncharted. As long as she had been in his company she had simply felt that a country was crystallizing out of his words, crystallizing not in her head but actually under her feet. The very fact that he often spoke of it only ironically, and his usual way of alternating between coolness and emotion, which had so often confused her in the beginning, now gladdened her in her loneliness, and she took it as a kind of guarantee that he meant it—antagonistic states of soul being more convincing than rapturous ones. “I was apparently thinking of death only because I was afraid he was not being serious enough,” she confessed to herself.

  The last day she had to spend in absentia took her by surprise. All at once everything in the house was cleared out and tidied up; nothing was left to do but hand the keys over to the old couple who were being pensioned off under the provisions of the will and were to go on living in the servants’ lodge until the property found a new owner. Agathe refused to go to a hotel, intending to stay at her post until her train left in the small hours. The house was packed up and shrouded. One naked bulb was lit. Some crates, pushed together, served as table and chair. She had them set her table for supper on the edge of a ravine on a terrace of crates. Her father’s old factotum juggled a loaded tray through light and shadow; he and his wife had insisted on cooking a dinner in their own kitchen, so that, as they expressed it, “the young lady” should be properly taken care of for her last meal at home. Suddenly Agathe thought, completely outside the state of mind in which she had spent the last few days: “Can they possibly have noticed anything?” She could easily have neglected to destroy every last scrap of paper on which she had practiced changing the will. She felt cold terror, a nightmarish weight that hung on all her limbs: the miserly dread of reality that holds no nourishment for the spirit but only consumes it. Now she perceived with fierce intensity her newly awakened desire to live; it furiously resisted the possibility of anything getting in her way. When the old servant returned, she scrutinized his face intently. But the old man, with his discreet smile, went about his business unsuspecting, seeming to feel something or other that was mute and ceremonious. She could not see into him any more than she could see into a wall, and did not know what else there might be in him behind his blank polish. Now she, too, felt something muted, ceremonious, and sad. He had always been her

  father’s confidant, unfailingly ready to betray to him his children’s every secret as soon as he had discovered it. But Agathe had been born in this house, and everything that had happened since was coming to an end this day: Agathe was moved to find herself and him here now, solemnly alone. She made up her mind to give him a special little gift of money, and in a fit of sudden weakness she planned to tell him that it came from Professor Hagauer; not from some calculating motive but as an act of atonement, with the intention of leaving nothing undone, even though she realized this was as unnecessary as it was superstitious. Before the old man returned again, she also took out her locket and capsule. The locket with the portrait of her never-forgotten beloved she slipped, after one last frowning look at his face, under the loosely nailed lid of a crate destined to go into storage indefinitely; it appeared to contain kitchen utensils or lamps, for she heard the clink of metal on metal, like branches falling from a tree. Then she placed the capsule with the poison where she had formerly worn the portrait.

  “How old-fashioned of me!” she thought with a smile as she did this. “I’m sure there are things more important than one’s love life!” But she did not believe it.

  At this moment it would have been as untrue to say that she was disinclined to enter into illicit relations with her brother as that she desired to. That might depend on how things turned out; but in her present state of mind nothing corresponded to the clarity of such a problem.

  The light painted the bare boards of the crates between which she was sitting a glaring white and deep black. And a similar tragic mask gave an eerie touch to the otherwise simple thought that she was now spending her last evening in the house where she had been born of a woman she had never been able to remember, who had also given birth to Ulrich. An old impression came to her of clowns with dead-serious faces and strange instruments standing around her. They began to play. Agathe recognized it as a childhood daydream of hers. She could not hear the music, but all the clowns were looking at her. She told herself that at this moment her death would be no loss to anyone or anything, and for herself it would mean no more than the outward end of an inner dying. So she thought while the clowns were sending their music up to the ceiling and she seemed to be sitting on a circus floor strewn with sawdust, tears dropping on her finger. It was a feeling of utter futility she had known often as a girl, and she thought: “I suppose I’ve remained childish to this day,” which did not prevent her from thinking at the same time of something that loomed vastly magnified by her tears: how, in the first hour of their reunion, she and her brother had come face-to-face in just such clown costumes. “What does it mean that it is my brother, of all people, who seems to hold the key to what’s inside me?” she wondered. And suddenly she was really weeping. It seemed to be happening for no other reason she knew of but sheer pleasure, and she shook her head hard, as though there were something here she could neither undo nor put together.

  At the same time she was thinking with a native ingenuousness that Ulrich would find the answers to all problems…until the old man came back again and was moved at seeing her so moved. “Oh my, the dear young lady!” he sai
d, also shaking his head.

  Agathe looked at him in confusion, but when she realized the misunderstanding behind this compassion, that it had been aroused by her appearance of childlike grief, her youthful high spirits rose again.

  “Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes. When thou has nothing left, think not even on thy shroud, but cast thyself naked into the fire!” she said to him.

  It was an ancient saying that Ulrich had read to her delightedly, and the old man showed the stumps of his teeth in a smile at the grave and mellow lilt of the words she recited to him, her eyes aglow with tears; with his eyes he followed her hand pointing at the high-piled crates—she was trying to help his understanding by misleading it—suggesting something like a pyre. He had nodded at the word “shroud,” eager to follow even though the path of the words was none too smooth, but he’d stiffened from the word “naked” on, and when she repeated her maxim, his face had reverted to the mask of the well-trained servant whose expression gives assurance that he can be trusted not to hear, see, or judge his betters.

  In all his years with his old master that word had never once been uttered in his hearing; “undressed” would have been the closest permissible. But young people were different nowadays, and he would probably not be able to give them satisfaction in any case. Serenely, as one who has earned his retirement, he felt that his career was over. But Agathes last thought before she left was: “Would Ulrich really cast everything into the fire?”

  22

  FROM KONIATOWSKI’S CRITIQUE OF

  DANIELLL’S THEOREM TO THE FALL OF MAN.

  FROM THE FALL OF MAN TO THE EMOTIONAL

  RIDDLE POSED BY A MAN’S SISTER

  The state in which Ulrich emerged into the street on leaving the Palais Leinsdorf was rather like the down-to-earth sensation of hunger. He stopped in front of a billboard and stilled his hunger for bourgeois normality by taking in the announcements and advertisements. The billboard was several yards wide and covered with words. “Actually,” it occurred to him, “one might assume that these particular words, which are met with in every corner of the city, have a great deal to tell us.” The language seemed to him akin to the clichés uttered by the characters in popular novels at important points in their lives. He read: “Have you ever worn anything so flattering yet so durable as Topinam silk stockings?” “His Excellency Goes Out on the Town!” “Saint Bartholomew’s Night—A Brand-New Production!” “For Fun and Food Come to the Black Pony!” “Hot Sex Show & Dancing at the Red Pony!” Next to this he noticed a political poster: “Criminal Intrigues!” but it referred to the price of bread, not to the Parallel Campaign. He turned away and, a few steps farther along, looked into the window of a bookshop. “The Great Authors Latest Work,” said a cardboard sign beside a row of fifteen copies of the same book. In the opposite corner of the display window, a sign accompanying another book read: “Love’s Tower of Babel by ——— makes gripping reading for men and women.”

  “The Great Author?” Ulrich thought. He remembered having read one book by him and resolved never to read another; but since then the man had nevertheless become famous. Considering the window display of German intellect, Ulrich was reminded of an old army joke: “Mortadella!” During Ulrich’s military service this had been the nickname of an unpopular general, after the popular Italian sausage, and if anyone wondered why, the answer was: “Part pig, part donkey.” He was prevented from pursuing this stimulating analogy by the voice of a woman asking him:

  “Are you waiting for the streetcar too?” Only then did he realize that he was no longer standing in front of the bookshop. He also had not realized that he was now standing immobile at a streetcar stop. The woman who had called this to his attention wore a knapsack and glasses, and turned out to be an acquaintance from the staff of the Astronomical Institute, one of the few women of accomplishment in this man’s profession. He looked at her nose and the bags under her eyes, which the strain of unremitting intellectual effort had turned into something resembling underarm dress shields made of guttapercha. Then he glanced down and noticed her short tweed skirt, then up and saw a black rooster feather in a green mountaineer’s hat that floated over her learned features, and he smiled.

  “Are you off to the mountains?” he asked.

  Dr. Strastil was going to the mountains for three days to “relax.” “What do you think of Koniatowski’s paper?” she asked Ulrich. Ulrich had nothing to say. “Kneppler will be furious,” she said, “but Koniatowski’s critique of Kneppler’s deduction from Danielli’s theorem is interesting, don’t you agree? Do you think Kneppler’s deduction is possible?”

  Ulrich shrugged his shoulders.

  He was one of those mathematicians called logicians, for whom nothing was ever “correct” and who were working out new theoretical principles. But he was not entirely satisfied with the logic of the logicians either. Had he continued his work, he would have gone right back to Aristotle; he had his own views of all that.

  “For my part, I don’t think Kneppler’s deduction is mistaken, it’s just that it’s wrong,” Dr. Strastil confessed. She might have said with the same firmness that she did consider the deduction mistaken but nevertheless not essentially wrong. She knew what she meant, but in ordinary language, where the terms are undefined, one cannot express oneself unequivocally. Using this holiday language under her tourist hat made her feel something of the timid haughtiness that might be aroused in a cloistered monk who was rash enough to let himself come in contact with the sensual world of the laity.

  Ulrich got into the streetcar with Fraulein Strastil; he didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because she cared so much about Koniatowski’s criticism of Kneppler. Perhaps he felt like talking to her about literature, about which she knew nothing.

  “What will you do in the mountains?” he asked.

  She was going up to the Hochschwab.

  “There’ll still be too much snow up there.” He knew the mountains. “It’s too late for skis, and too early to go up there without them.”

  “Then I’ll stay down,” Fraulein Strastil declared. “I once spent three days in a cabin at the foot of the Farsenalm. I only want to get back to nature for a bit!”

  The expression on the worthy astronomer’s face as she uttered the word “nature” provoked Ulrich to ask her what she needed nature for.

  Dr. Strastil was sincerely indignant. She could He on the mountain meadow for three whole days without stirring—”just like a boulder!” she declared.

  “That’s because you’re a scientist,” Ulrich pointed out. “A peasant would be bored.”

  Dr. Strastil did not see it that way. She spoke of the thousands who sought nature every holiday, on foot, on wheels, or by boat.

  Ulrich spoke of the peasants deserting the countryside in droves for the attractions of the city.

  Fraulein Strastil doubted that he was feeling on a sufficiently elementary level.

  Ulrich claimed that the only elementary level, besides eating and love, was to make oneself comfortable, not to seek out an alpine meadow. The natural feeling that was supposed to drive people to do such things was actually a modern Rousseauism, a complicated and sentimental attitude.

  He was not at all pleased with the way he was expressing himself, but he did not care what he said, and merely kept on talking because he had not yet come to what he wanted to get out of his system. Fraulein Strastil gave him a mistrustful look. She could not make him out. Here her considerable experience in abstract thinking was of no use to her; she could neither keep separate nor fit together the ideas he seemed merely to be juggling so nimbly; she guessed that he was talking without thinking. She took some comfort in listening to him with a rooster feather on her hat, and it reinforced her joy in the solitude she was heading for.

  At this point Ulrich’s eye happened to light on the newspaper of the man opposite him, and he read the opening line of an advertisement, in heavy type: “Our time asks questions—Our time gives answers.” It co
uld have been the announcement of a new arch support or of a forthcoming lecture—who could tell these days?—but his mind suddenly leapt onto the track he had been seeking.

  His companion struggled to be objective. “I’m afraid,” she admitted with some hesitation, “that I don’t know much about literature; people like us never have time. Perhaps I don’t know the right things, either. But “—she mentioned a popular name—”means a great deal to me. A writer who can make us feel things so intensely is surely what we mean by a great writer!”

  However, since Ulrich felt he had now profited enough from Dr. Strastil’s combination of an exceptionally developed capacity for abstract thought and a notably retarded understanding of the soul, he stood up cheerfully, treated his colleague to a bit of outrageous flattery, and hastily got off, excusing himself on the grounds that he had gone two stops past his destination. When he stood on the street, raising his hat to her once more, Fraulein Strastil remembered that she had recently heard some disparaging remarks about his own work; but she also felt herself blushing in response to his charming parting words to her, which, to her way of thinking, was not exactly to his credit. But he now knew, without yet being fully conscious of it, why his thoughts were revolving on the subject of literature and what it was they were after, from the interrupted “Mortadella” comparison to his unintentionally leading the good Strastil on to those confidences. After all, literature had been no concern of his since he had written his last poem, at twenty; still, before that, writing secretly had been a fairly regular habit, which he had given up not because he had grown older or had realized he didn’t have enough talent, but for reasons that now, with his current impressions, he would have liked to define by some kind of word suggesting much effort culminating in a void.