The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  When he had found the tavern, Ulrich did everything as Fraulein Hornlicher had indicated. He mentioned her name, told the proprietor what he wanted, was asked to sit down and told that he might have to wait quite a while. He inspected the guests, many of whom spoke to the proprietor as they entered and left; felt himself observed, but could not make out a great deal himself. It was an hour at which the patrons were intermingled with workers and petit bourgeois. Finally, he thought he could make out the criminals among the guests by the peculiarly ridiculous elegance of their clothes.

  Ulrich had not made out Herr Biziste, who, when he came in, spoke with the proprietor like the others after glancing quickly around the room and, after he had sat down, was looked at in the same way by everyone else around the room, and who was dressed with an equally counterfeit elegance / with a somewhat different elegance. Nor did the owner give Ulrich any sign. Biziste was drinking with several men, then stood up to go, stopped as if idly by Ulrich’s table, and asked him dismissively what it was he was after. Ulrich had the tact not to stand, but to look up carelessly and offer Biziste a chair. This was of course presumptuous, but since he could be certain that Biziste was still interested in Moosbrugger, he could permit himself to meet the great man on the same level. He told him that Moosbrugger would be executed within a few weeks if no one helped him. For some reason or other, Ulrich seemed to himself like a spoiled boy who is playing with street urchins and is showing off with fairy tales he has invented. Biziste seemed to disapprove of Ulrich as of an incorrigible blockhead. Still dismissive, he asked Ulrich how he thought this could be done. Ulrich quickly emptied his glass and by a rather vague gesture left it to the proprietor whether he was to bring another glass for himself and his tablemate as well. Then he related that arranging an escape from the observation clinic would not be all that difficult. Herr Biziste was interested in this new milieu that Ulrich described to him. Ulrich became inventive; it amused him to think it out in front of a hardened criminal, and on the spot he made up a specific plan in which only the hour remained unfixed but that otherwise, thanks to Ulrich’s exact knowledge of the place, didn’t seem at all bad. Three men would be needed, one as a lookout outside the garden wall they had to climb over, so that on their way out they would not fall into the hands of a police patrol or give themselves away to passersby; the other two would be enough to bring Moosbrugger civilian clothes and hold off any guard who might come by until Moosbrugger had changed.

  The arrogant irony with which Biziste listened to this plan, as Ulrich spoke faster and faster from nervousness, was striking.

  Then Biziste stood up and said: If you come to such and such a place on Wednesday, perhaps we can talk about it some more.

  Will you bring along a third person?

  Biziste shrugged his shoulders, and Ulrich was dismissed.

  It gave Ulrich a peculiar, bitter pleasure that in the meantime everything else went on inexorably.

  On the day Biziste had set, he had gone to the rendezvous but did not meet the third man. Biziste, treating the whole business casually, merely said to him that for a certain sum this third man had declared himself willing. He mentioned a day and time, and revealed that Ulrich would have to go over the wall too, since he was the only one who knew the layout.

  All Biziste probably wanted to do was frighten him, and for money a new partner could have been found, but the bizarre situation attracted Ulrich; since one could also break one’s neck skiing, why should he not climb over a wall in the night with criminals? Incidentally, he heartily wished the police on this puffed-up Biziste.

  He put on his oldest suit, omitted a collar, and topped it off with a sports cap; in this way his silhouette in the shadows of the night was not conspicuously different from that of the other people one might encounter on the remote street along which the wall of the asylum garden ran. Moosbrugger had been alerted; over time, three linen sheets had disappeared in die hospital, to serve as a rope on which he was to let himself down. Ulrich could probably have smuggled in a climbers rope, but he wanted to avoid anything that might betray the assistance supplied, since it was not out of the question that suspicion would fall on him. On this night the window of Moosbrugger’s room was dimly lit; Ulrich had got him the stump of a candle so that they would be able to orient themselves in the darkness of the moonless night.

  Biziste had climbed onto the back of the second “gentleman,” swung himself up on top of the wall, and could be heard jumping down into the leaves on the other side. As Ulrich was about to follow, voices were heard; the “gentleman” stood up so inconsiderately that Ulrich, who had already got a foot up to mount on his back, nearly fell, and the other man strolled, hands in pockets, into the night.

  Ulrich’s heart was pounding and he felt a need to run, which he controlled with effort; but in order not to attract attention by behaving oddly, he imagined that he ought not to be walking alone, caught up with the “gentleman,” and took his arm like that of a drinking companion, which the “gentleman” seemed to find ridiculously overdone.

  The voices died away, and the “gentleman” again offered his back; Ulrich grasped the mortar and brick dust, felt the stab of a pulled muscle in his leg, so forcefully had he swung it up in his excitement, hung there, let himself fall into the darkness, and ended in an applauding sound of dead leaves such as he had not heard since his boyhood. He stood up in total darkness, unable to discern the slightest trace of Biziste. He groped right and left, in the hope that another noise would answer his own, but it remained as quiet as it was dark. He had to make up his mind to go in the direction of the building alone, hoping that he would meet up with Biziste on the way.

  Again Ulrich’s heart pounded; the bushes scratched, as if in his fear he was making only inappropriate movements. Distances, odors, physical contacts, sounds—everything was new, never experienced. He had to stop, collect his will, and tell himself that he had no other recourse than to see this stupid adventure through. He stumbled onto a path and deduced which direction would lead to the building most quickly, but was suddenly overcome by the problem of whether he should walk on the crunching gravel or go on working his way through the bushes.

  That damned Biziste ought to have waited for him, but at the same time he longed for him as if he were a stronger brother. If he would not have been ashamed of himself because of the fellow on the other side of the wall, Ulrich would have turned around. But he did not even know what signal he was supposed to give to find out whether all was clear on the other side. He realized that he was a fool, and gained some respect for these rogues. But he was not a man to let himself be defeated so easily; it would have been ridiculous for an intellectual not to be able to cope with this too. Ulrich marched forward straight through the shrubbery; the excitement he was in and the self-control his progress required (entirely without reflection; it was simply moral pains) made him ruthlessly crack, break, and rustle the bushes. To have slunk forward like an Indian seemed to him just then incredibly silly and childish, and this was the moment in which the normal person in him began to reawaken.

  When he came to the edge, Biziste, as Ulrich really might have expected from the first, was squatting there observing the building, and he turned a witheringly punitive glance toward his noisy arrival. Moosbrugger’s window was dimly lit; Biziste whistled through his teeth. The huge shoulders of the murderer filled the rectangle of the window, the rope fashioned from the sheets rolled down; but Moosbrugger was not skilled in crime and had underestimated the strength of the rescue line required for his enormous weight; hardly had he suspended himself from it when it broke, and the force of his landing exploded the stillness with a muffled detonation. At this moment two guards materialized in the half-light that illuminated the wall.

  Two days earlier, two mentally ill prisoners had escaped from another observation clinic, but Ulrich had neither heard nor read about it. And so he had not known that since yesterday security had been generally tightened and old, long-forgotten measures wer
e again being enforced for a while. Among these was the two-man patrol, which, perhaps drawn by the noises Ulrich had made and now alarmed by the muffled fall, stopped, looked around, recognized in the sand a heavy body that with great effort was trying to get up, rushed over, saw a rope hanging from die window, and with all their lung power signaled for help through shrill little whistles. Moosbrugger had dislocated his shoulder and broken an ankle, otherwise it would have been an unhappy encounter for the guards who jumped on him; as it was, he knocked one bleeding into the sand, but when he tried to straighten up to shake off the second, pain deprived him of his footing. The guard hung on his neck and whisded piercingly; the second man, full of pain and rage, pounced on him, and at this moment Biziste sprang out of the bushes. With a powerful blow of his fist, he smashed one guard’s whistle between his teeth so that he tumbled off Moosbrugger, but now the other whisded like mad and rushed at Biziste. Such guards are strong men, and Biziste was not exceptionally powerful. If at this instant Ulrich had come forward to help, with his considerable trained strength, they would no doubt have succeeded in rendering both attackers mute and motionless for a while, but Ulrich did not feel die slightest desire to do so. In the tangle before him his sympathies lay quite honestly with the men unexpectedly set upon, who were fighting for their duty, and if he had only followed his emotions, he would have grabbed this Biziste by the collar and given him a solid hook to the chin. But perhaps that was also merely the somewhat comical maternal voice of bourgeois order in him, and as the situation tensed his muscles and nerves, so his mind ebbed, filling him with disgust at contradictions whose resolution was not worth the effort. Another semi-event, Ulrich said to himself. A very painful sensation of the awful ludicrousness of his situation came over him.

  Biziste reached for his knife. But before he raised it to thrust, his glance, practiced in weighing risk and advantage, revealed to him the hopelessness of the outcome: Moosbrugger could not stand up without assistance, the noise of the alarmed people on night duty was already coming out of the darkness from the wing of the building, flight was the only recourse. The guard, who would not let him go, screamed, hit by a stab in the arm. Biziste disappeared, leaving Ulrich behind, as Ulrich ascertained with cheerful satisfaction in spite of the quite awkward situation. He had meantime been thinking how he himself might get out of this stupid business. The way over the wall was blocked, for he hadn’t the slightest desire to meet Herr Biziste and his friend ever again in his life, nor did he feel like climbing over the wall alone and perhaps being detained by the curious drawn to the scene by the shouts of the guards, who would certainly be chasing after Biziste. He settled on the only thing that occurred to him, a very stupid thing: to run a little farther, quickly find a bench, and pretend to be asleep in case he was found. He raised the collar of his coat so his bare neck could not be seen, took off his cap, and “awoke” with as much surprise as possible when, surrounded by a maze of lights, he was knocked from the bench by an incredible fist and his arms grabbed by six men. He did not know whether he gave a good performance as the righteous person drunk with sleep; it was his good fortune that one of the guards immediately recognized him, upon which he was released with reluctant respect. He was taken for a doctor who was doing studies at the clinic. He now tried to make credible that after a visit he had been walking in the grounds and had fallen asleep here. To this end, he involuntarily looked at his watch, remembered that he had left it at home but could no longer take back the gesture and therefore found it missing; reached into his jacket and pants pockets and immediately found his money missing too, for he had of course also not brought it along; and as stupid as this comedy was, as he told himself, there was an even stupider guard who believed it, or really just one whose servile officiousness and desire to please Ulrich suggested what Ulrich wanted him to believe, so that he immediately called out: The rascals have also robbed the Herr Doktor. Ulrich did not say either yes or no, but only went on like someone who missed his belongings without knowing anything about what had happened and now found out the entire drama backward and in snatches. As an object of respect and the remaining center of interest, he left the clinic in this feigned role as quickly as he could; he was not to enter it again as long as it sheltered Moosbrugger.

  For after this attempted flight Moosbrugger was placed under heavy guard, and Ulrich, on the orders of the head of the clinic, was no longer allowed to visit him. Nor did Ulrich have the slightest desire to. Still, the unpleasant uncertainty, whether the doctor…

  The very unpleasant doubt remained whether, upon investigating the circumstances, they had not come to suspect him, which of course they would not express but were just as httle ready to abandon.

  In mania, this would be a depressive cycle of short duration.

  LATE 1920s

  Her brothers conduct, the restlessness that the visit to Lindner had intensified in her, stimulated Agathe to a degree that remained hidden even from herself. She did not know how it had happened, or when; suddenly her soul was transported out of her body and looked around curiously in the alien world. This world pleased her soul uncommonly. Anything that might have disturbed it was lost in the completeness of its pleasure.

  Agathe dreamed.

  Her body lay on the bed without stirring, though it was breathing. She looked at it and felt a joy like polished marble at the sight. Then she observed the objects that stood farther back in her room; she recognized them all, but they were not exactly the things that otherwise were hers. For the objects lay outside her in the same way as her body, which she saw resting among them. That gave her a sweet pain!

  Why did it hurt? Apparently because there was something deathlike about it; she could not act and could not stir, and her tongue was as if cut off, so that she was also unable to say anything about it. But she felt a great energy. Whatever her senses lit upon she grasped immediately, for everything was visible and shone the way sun, moon, and stars are reflected in water. Agathe said to herself: “You have wounded my body with a rose”—and turned to the bed in order to take refuge in her body.

  Then she discovered that it was her brothers body. He, too, was lying in the reflecting glorious light as in a crypt; she saw him not disntinctly but more penetratingly than usual, and touched him in the secrecy of the night. She raised him up; he was a heavy burden in her arms, but she nevertheless had the strength to carry and hold him, and this embrace had a supranatural charm. Her brother’s body nestled so lovably and indulgently against her that she rested in him; as he in her; nothing stirred in her, not even now the beautiful desire. And because in this suspension they were one and without distinctions, and also without distinctions within themselves, so that her understanding was as if lost and her memory thought of nothing and her will had no activity, she stood in this calm as if facing a sunrise, and melted into it with her earthly details. But while this was happening, joyously, Agathe perceived surrounding her a wild crowd of people who, as it appeared, found themselves around her in great fear. They were running excitedly back and forth, and gesturing warningly and resentfully with increasing din. In the manner of a dream, this was happening quite close to her but without involving her, but only until the noise and fright suddenly intruded violently into her mind. Then Agathe was afraid, and quickly stepped back into her sleeping body; she had no idea at all how everything might have been changed, and for a time left off dreaming.

  But after a while she began again. Again she left her body, but this time met her brother immediately. And again her body was lying naked on the bed; they both looked at it, and indeed the hair over the genitals of this unconscious body that had been left behind burned like a small golden fire on a marble tomb. Because there was no “I” or “you” between them, this being three did not surprise her. Ulrich was looking at her softly and earnestly in a way she did not recognize as his. They also looked at their surroundings together, and it was their house in which they found themselves, but although Agathe knew all the objects quite well, she c
ould not have said in which room this was happening, and that again had a peculiar charm, for there was neither right nor left, earlier nor later, but when they looked at something together they were united like water and wine, a union that was more golden or silver, depending on whichever was poured in in greater quantity. Agathe knew immediately: “This is what we have so often talked of, total love,” and paid close attention so as not to miss anything. But she still missed how it was happening. She looked at her brother, but he was looking in front of him with a stiff and embarrassed smile. At this moment she heard a voice somewhere, a voice so exceedingly beautiful that it had nothing to compare with earthly things, and it said: “Cast everything you have into the fire, down to your shoes; and when you no longer have anything don’t even think of a shroud, but cast yourself naked into the fire!” And while she was listening to this voice and remembering that she knew this sentence, a splendor rose into her eyes and radiated from them, a splendor that took away precise earthly definition even from Ulrich, though she had no impression that anything was missing from him, and her every limb received from it in the manner of its special pleasure great grace and bliss. Involuntarily she took some steps toward her brother. He was coming toward her from the other side in the same way.

  Now there was only a narrow chasm between their bodies, and Agathe felt that something must be done. At this place in her dream she began, too, with the greatest effort, to think again. “If he loves something and receives and enjoys it,” she said to herself, “then he is no longer he, but his love is my love!” She doubtless sensed that this sentence, the way she had uttered it, was somehow distorted and emasculated, but still she understood it through and through, and it took on a significance that clarified everything. “In the dream,” she explained it to herself, “one must not think about things, then everything will happen!” For everything she was thinking she believed to see transpiring, or rather, what happened and partook of the desire of matter also partook of the desire of the spirit, which penetrated it as thought in the profoundest possible way. This seemed to her to give her a great superiority over Ulrich; for while he was now standing there helplessly, without stirring, not only did the same splendor as before rise into her eyes and fill them, but its moist fire suddenly broke out from her breasts and veiled everything that faced her in an indescribable sensation. Her brother was now seized by this fire and began to burn in it, without the fire growing more or less. “Now you see!” Agathe thought. “We’ve always done it wrong! One always builds a bridge of hard material and always crosses over to the other at a single place: but one must cross the abyss at every place!” She had seized her brother by the hands and tried to draw him to her; but as she pulled, the burning naked male body, without really being changed, dissolved into a bush or a wall of glorious flowers and, in this form, came loosely closer. All intentions and thoughts vanished in Agathe; she lay fainting with desire in her bed, and as the wall strode through her she also believed that she had to wander through large brooks of soft-skinned flowers, and she walked without being able to make the spell vanish. “I am in love!” she thought, as someone finds a moment when he is able to draw breath, for she could hardly still bear this incredible excitement that did not want to end. Since the last transformation she also no longer saw her brother, but he had not disappeared.