by Robert Musil
—Get away from me with this lie! he begged.
—The will? Agathe said. —It’s not a lie. I’ve falsified a will.
Lindner seized her by the arm in sudden anger as if she were a pupil and shouted: “Out!”
“No,” Agathe replied. “In our struggle against each other we have a secret pact to drive out each others devils!”
—You are arrogant and vain! Lindner exclaimed. —But behind it lies suffering and disappointment and humiliation! And again he nearly had it right.
But he only nearly had it right, and Agathe suddenly became tired of it (him) and left him standing.
Museum Pre-Chapter
At the lawyers
Were their souls two doves in a world of hawks and owls? Ulrich would never have been able to contemplate letting such a view prevail, and he was therefore fond of remarking, and even found a land of security in doing so, that external events took no account of the ravishments and anxieties of the soul but followed their own logic. Since Hagauer’s letters had compelled him to consult a lawyer, Hagauer too had turned to a counselor, and since both attorneys were now exchanging letters, a “case” had begun, independent of personal origins and furnished, as it were, with suprapersonal powers of attorney. This case compelled Ul-rich’s lawyer to ask for a personal consultation with Agathe and to be surprised when she did not appear and, later, when she still did not appear, to raise serious questions that finally put Ulrich in the extreme position of having to overcome his sisters resistance by painting the unpleasant consequences. When they appeared at their advisers, this already put the course of events on a certain path. They found before them a secure and adroit man not much older than they, who was accustomed to smiling and preserving a polite composure even in the halls of the court and who, in consulting with his clients, proceeded from the principle that the first thing to do was gain his own picture of all things and people and take care to let himself be influenced as little as possible by the client, who was always undependable and wasted time.
And indeed Agathe did declare afterward that the whole time, she had felt like a “law patient,” and this was true to the extent that all her answers to the introductory and basic questions of her lawyer were of a nature to reinforce the latter’s doubts. His task was difficult. A departure from “bed and board,” the easily arranged “separation,” did not suffice for his client’s wishes, and a divorce “of the conjugal bond,” the true annulment of the Catholic marriage concluded with Hagauer, was, according to the laws of the land, impossible; it could be managed only by a roundabout route through various other countries and their legal interconnections, as well as through complicated acquisitions and renunciations of citizenship, which did open a path that ought to lead safely to the goal but was by no means without difficulty or easily surveyed in advance. So Agathe’s lawyer had undertaken to substitute a more valid reason for her all too ordinary grounds for divorce, which she indicated simply as aversion.
“Insurmountable aversion wouldn’t be enough; don’t you have something else against your husband?” he probed.
Agathe said, curtly, no. There was much she could have reproached Hagauer with, but she became red and pale, for it all belonged in this place as little as she did herself. She was angry with Ulrich.
The lawyer looked at her attentively. “Impolite treatment, frivolous management of property, flagrant neglect of conjugal obligations…how about those?” He tried to get her to have an idea. “The surest grounds for divorce, of course, is always marital infidelity!”
Agathe looked at her interlocutor and answered in a clear, composed, low voice: “I have none of those grounds!”
Perhaps she ought to have smiled. Then the man who sat opposite her, in impeccably correct clothes that in no way contradicted his capacity for high spirits, would have been convinced that he had before him a lovely and undefinably captivating woman. But the seriousness of her expression left him no room at all, and his lawyer’s brain became dull. He recalled from the files, which contained not only the correspondence of the opposing attorney but also the letters from Hagauer to Ulrich, Hagauer’s carefully documented complaints that the desire for a divorce was unjustified and capriciously frivolous, and the thought went through his mind that he would much rather be representing this apparently reasonable and dependable man. Then it occurred to him that somewhere the term “psychopathic woman” occurred, but he rejected it not so much on account of Agathe as because it might have prevented him from taking on this rewarding commission. “Nervous, of course: The kind of nervousness that’s capable of anything, not at all uncommon!” he thought, and cautiously began to direct his questioning at the point that had impressed him as most in need of explanation when he had gone over the situation. In the correspondence in the files there were—both in Hagauer’s letters to Ulrich and, more significantly, in the correspondence of the opposing lawyer—more or less clear allusions that gave the sense that the two men might know of irregularities which had taken place in the management of the estate, or might even be of a mind to suspect the relations that had since ensued between brother and sister: these results, noted from the point-by-point checklist of Ulrich’s brother-in-law’s reflections, were intended to be understood as indicating that the pair might well consider whether it would not be better to change their resolve before they went too far in an affair that held all sorts of danger for them. Agathe’s new adviser now brought up these unambiguous allusions by turning to Ulrich, as the person more familiar to him, with the politeness of a man who cannot spare another the repetition of a superfluous unpleasantness; but every so often he turned to Agathe and gave her to understand that although it was only a question of pure formality, still she, too, as his client, had to give him some assurance about these objections, which in certain circumstances, when brought unscrupulously out into the open, could weigh so heavily, an assurance on which he could base his further actions.
But Agathe had neither read Hagauer’s letters nor informed Ulrich of what she had been doing during the time she had been alone following the “so-called falsifying of the will”—involuntarily, at this moment, he was speaking thus cautiously to himself! This led to a short, embarrassed pause that had a quite peculiar effect. Ulrich sought to bring it to an end by a gesture whose calm superciliousness sought to characterize the lawyer’s request as superfluous and already accommodated, but his sister disturbed this plan somewhat by asking the lawyer out of curiosity what her husband really thought he knew. The lawyer looked from one to the other. “My sister will, of course, give you the assurance you desire in any form,” Ulrich declared quickly and with the greatest indifference. “I have informed her of the precise content of the letters, but for quite personal reasons she herself has read them only in part.” Agathe now smiled in time, having caught her error, and confirmed that this was so. “I was too out of sorts,” she asserted calmly.
The attorney reflected for a moment. It went through his mind that this incident could quite well be an unwished-for confirmation of the adversary’s assertion that Agathe was under her brother’s baleful influence. Of course he did not believe this to be the case, but felt, even so, a slight aversion toward Ulrich. This moved him to answer Agathe with the greatest politeness: “I must sincerely beg your pardon, madame, but my profession compels me to insist on the request that you examine the matter for yourself.” And with these words, gently insisting, he handed the file over to her.
Agathe hesitated.
Ulrich said: “You must formally examine it yourself.”
The lawyer smiled politely and added: “I beg your pardon, not only formally.”
Agathe let her glance dip twice into the pages, pulled a wry face, and slapped the file shut again.
The lawyer was satisfied. “These allusions are meaningless,” he assured her. “That’s what I assumed from the start. My colleague simply should not have given in to his client’s unpleasant irritability. But it would of course be embarrassing if during the c
ivil procedure a criminal indictment should suddenly be entered. If that happens, one would immediately have to respond with a counter-complaint on grounds of slander, or something similar.” Seemingly without his wishing it, what he was saying again passed from the unreal to the possible, and it seemed to Ulrich that in these assurances a question was still lurking.
“Of course it would be extremely embarrassing,” he confirmed dryly, and thought he would consult, aside from this celebrated divorce lawyer, a proper criminal lawyer, one with whom one could speak more openly in order to address all the possibilities contained in such an unfortunate story. But he did not know how to find such a man. “A battle of this dirty kind is always embarrassing for people who are clean,” he added. “But is there something else one can do besides wait?”
The lawyer acted as if he needed to think this over for a moment, smiled, and said that he was sorry, but he must very strongly advise that they go back to his original proposal and show that their adversary had transgressed marital fidelity. The length of time the separation had already lasted gave grounds for assuming the factual basis of such a complaint; there was no lack of investigators who took care of these things dependably and discreedy, and with this, as it were, classical ground for divorce, one would inevitably and most rapidly arrive at their goal, which would be of the greatest advantage in a struggle where one must not leave the adversary any time to develop his intrigues.
Ulrich also seemed to see the necessity of this.
But Agathe, who had completely lost the confidence she had once had in her dealings with lawyers and other persons of the law, said no. Whether she had imagined that one orders a divorce from a lawyer the way one orders a cake from the baker, which is selected and delivered to one’s house, or whether it happened that she held it against Ulrich for having put her in a situation where her sense of responsibility for the embarrassments being visited upon the innocent Hagauer was awakened, or whether she simply could not bear the collapse of her world in the continuance of such conferences; enough, she refused vehemendy.
She also considered this proposal to be a convenience on the part of the lawyer, and might perhaps have let herself be talked out of it; but Ulrich did not do so, merely excusing her smilingly with the jest that even through a detective she had no desire to find out any more about her husband, and the divorce lawyer suddenly gave a sigh of chivalric defeat, for he wanted to bring the conference to an end. He now assured them that they would try to attain their goal this way, and pushed over to Agathe the power of attorney for her to sign.
Addendum. Possibly: Ulrich asks whether there were any proposals from Hagauer for an amicable settlement, and declares the continuation of the conference in this sense otherwise undesirable.
Even as they were descending the steps, Ulrich took Agathe’s arm in his, and in that moment they involuntarily stopped.
“We were in reality for an hour!” he said.
Agathe looked at him. Pain closed off the background of her light eyes like a stone wall.
“Are you very depressed?” he asked sympathetically.
“It involves such humiliation that we must withdraw from it,” she replied slowly.
“That’s very much the question,” Ulrich said.
“A real humiliation, like falling with one’s mouth in the dust! Something we have forgotten how to imagine lately!” Agathe added in a soft, urgent voice.
“I mean, the question is whether we will be allowed to withdraw from this humiliation,” Ulrich responded. “Perhaps there are even greater ones threatening us. I must confess to you that my sense of our situation today is that it’s bad. For, granted we give in: perhaps we could claim it had been an error, hastily repair it, cover things up. But it would be up to him to accept it or not, and he isn’t going to give you up; indeed, now that he’s become suspicious, he won’t put down his weapons until you’ve submitted to him unconditionally. That’s simply his sense of order!” Ulrich said, since Agathe did not seem to want to wait for him to finish. “On the other hand, we could of course follow our lawyer’s proposal or some similar plan and try to wear him down. But what does that get us? Increased danger, for the enemy will feel himself absolved from all restraint by our attack, and in the best case our success would be that besides the divorce we would have maliciously harmed a person to whom we are profoundly indifferent.”
“And the guilt of existence?” Agathe objected passionately, although she violently forced herself to make a jest of it. “What you yourself have often said, that the only woman who remains pure is the one who has her lover’s head chopped off?”
“Did I say that? One would have to blow up the planet,” Ulrich said calmly, “if one wanted to get rid of all the witnesses to one’s mistakes!” And he added seriously: “You’re still misjudging the degree of ordinariness, the tangible difficulty, of the situation we’re in: one way or the other, we’re threatened with disaster and have only the choice of remaining so or—”
“Killing ourselves!” Agathe said curtly and decisively.
“Oh come on! How that echoes in the stones of such a staircase! I hope no one heard it!” he rebuked her angrily, and looked cautiously around. “You’re so stupid! It’s not even sure that death is better than prison. But we could remove ourselves from the choice by running away.”
Agathe looked at him, and in this split second her eyes involuntarily resembled those of a child who has been romping wildly and been picked up.
“To an island in the South Seas,” Ulrich said, and smiled. “But perhaps an island in the Adriatic would do as well. Where once a week a boat will bring us what we need.”
When they stood below at the gateway, they were benumbed and struck by the shock of the summery street. A whitish fire in which bright shadows lived seemed to be waiting for them. People, animals, curbs, even they themselves lost something of their bodily constraints in the hot rays of light. Agathe had said: “You’ve never wanted to! For that I mean too little to you?” Ulrich responded: “Oh, let’s not talk about it this way! It’s harder than the resolve to deny the world. For once we’ve run away, everything here in the real world, which was imposed on us as ours, will turn really bad, and there’s hardly any turning back, although we have no idea whether where we want to go there’s solid ground on which people can stand differently from the way they do in dreams. If I still keep thinking about it, it’s because I have doubts not about you or myself but about what’s possible!”
[?] But on the other hand it’s also quite practical! The lawyer has his instructions, the client is away: either both attorneys will come to an agreement in order to wind it up, or they’ll procrastinate.
When they finally do come back, everything is in quite good shape: the automatism of life that protects itself against catastrophes. They were merely on a trip, the lawyers were still procrastinating, etc.
C. 1932
52
THE THREE SISTERS
Ulrich asked: “What is it you want from me: my clothes, my books, my house, my views about the future? What should I give you? I’d like to give you everything I have.”
Agathe replied: “Cut off your arm for me, or at least a finger!”
They were in the reception room on the ground floor, whose high, narrow windows, arched at the top, let in the soft new morning light, which mingled with the shade of trees as it fell into its own reflection on the floor. If one looked down at oneself it was like seeing beneath one’s feet the discolored sky with its brightness and clouds through a brownish glass. Brother and sister had so retired from the world that there was hardly danger any longer of their being disturbed by a visit.
“You’re too modest!” Ulrich went on. “Go ahead, ask for my life! I believe I could discard it for you. But a finger? I must confess: a finger is of no importance to me at all!”
He laughed, his sister along with him; but her face retained the expression of someone who sees another joking about something that is serious to him.
&nbs
p; Now Ulrich turned the tables: “When one loves one bestows, one ‘keeps nothing for oneself,’ one doesn’t want to possess anything by oneself: why do you want to possess Lindner for yourself?” he asked.
“But I don’t possess him at all!” Agathe retorted.
“You possess your secret emotions for him and your secret thoughts about him. Your error about him!”
“And why don’t you cut off an arm?” Agathe challenged.
“We will cut it off,” was Ulrich’s response. “But for the moment I’m still asking myself what land of life would result if I really gave up my sense of self, and others did likewise? Everyone would have a self in common with everyone else; not only the feeding bowl and the bed would be shared, but truly the self, so that every one would love his neighbor as himself and no one would be his own neighbor.”
