The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “A happy-anxious soul”: that had been in one of Feuermaul’s poems, as if the poet had uttered this expression for no one else but her, the unknown girl. From far away word was dispatched to her, a man who knew nothing about her had sent out this word and still had no idea that the word had already found her; but she knew it, for she bore his word in her breast, which he would never see: That seemed to her like a marriage through magic. Gerda thought over whether she really had a happily anxious soul. She had one that constantly hovered between happiness and fear, without quite making contact with either. Was that the same thing? She was not certain of it, but she felt herself really hovering like a moonbeam in the roaring night, filled with love and free of all misfortune, which rarely happened to her. She squinted over at Ulrich, who was walking mutely beside her; he frightened her and only occasionally gave her a little happiness. Ulrich noticed that she was looking at him; he was angry with her. —The first time some blockhead babbles at you in verses you overflow! he said, smiling; but there was really some pain in this smile. —Didn’t you notice that this person is the most vain and selfish creature in the world?

  Gerda answered quite seriously. —You’re right, he’s weak; Stefan George is greater. She named her favorite poet—she knew that Ulrich had an aversion to him as well. She was a little drunk with happiness and felt: —I can love two people who hate each other. At this moment she was all love.

  But at this moment Hans Sepp pushed forward from the other side; jealous restlessness impelled him, for Gerda and Ulrich had been speaking softly, and he only half understood; he did not want to be left out.

  —Feuermaul is a prattler! he exclaimed angrily.

  —Oh, why! Ulrich said.

  —Because!

  They were just passing beneath a streetlamp. Hans wanted to stop, because his mouth was full of words. But Ulrich did not stop. Hans was dragged on like a screaming child and emptied his words into the darkness. Gerda knew them all. The Beyond, contemplation, Christ, Edda, Gautama Buddha, and then the punishment meant for her: Feuermaul, as a Jew, had appropriated these things with his intelligence but inwardly had no idea what they were about. She looked straight ahead, and even at the next streetlamp did not look at Hans. In the darkness she felt his dark mouth wide open at her side. It made her shudder. She did not understand that Hans no longer knew what he was saying. The darkness was terrible for him. He imagined that the two of them were laughing at him. He knew no bounds, and his words poured out as if each were trying to trample the next, the way people do in a panic.

  In between, Gerda heard Ulrich speaking quietly and objectively, seeking to divert this storm. —The emotional scribbler—he said—is in himself the most vain and self-seeking person in the world; something like women who have no understanding, only their love. What would happen if these people became you-seeking? …

  Gerda liked Ulrich’s words rather better than Hans’s, but they, too, made her cold. With a hasty goodbye, she left the two of them standing there and ran up the steps. Hans gasped for air, hardly touched his hat, and left Ulrich.

  ***

  But he stopped at the next corner and under cover of darkness looked to see what Ulrich was going to do. Ulrich went home, and Hans began to have regrets. He knew that Gerda’s parents would be home late today; Gerda was alone, and he could imagine how much his churlish behavior must be eating at her. He saw light in a window and ran away in order not to go weak. But he only ran around the block, then without stopping went up the steps. He was still excited; his clothes sat on him angrily, the dark-blond hair over his forehead was standing crookedly in the air, and his cheeks had disappeared beneath his cheekbones.

  —Forgive me! he begged. —I’ve behaved badly.

  Gerda looked at him without understanding why he was there; her emotions had grown deaf.

  —I don’t know what I said, Hans went on. —It was probably something ugly. But you’re so far gone that you can’t even separate Jewish spuriousness and your ideals!

  —Ulrich’s not a Jew! Gerda said spontaneously. —And I forbid you— she added—to speak that way about Jews! For the first time she dared to say such a thing.

  —I was speaking of Feuermaul! Hans corrected her. —But this Jewish poet we heard today might at least be said to have great and honest feelings if his race permitted it, but Ulrich, your father’s friend, is ten times worse! Gerda was sitting in an easy chair and looked at Hans doubtingly. Hans was standing in front of her; her behavior unnerved him. —If someone acts—he said—like Feuermaul, as if he had seized hold of the true life, he’s a swindler. The Beyond withholds itself; out-of-body contemplation reveals itself only rarely and intermittently. There are whole centuries that know nothing about it. But it is Germanic, nevertheless, never to lose the feeling here below of the Beyond that shimmers through.

  —Since I have known you, every second thing you’ve said has been about out-of-body contemplation—Gerda countered, eager to attack— but you haven’t ever, not one single time, really seen anything! Tell me what you’ve seen! Words!

  Hans implored Gerda not to lose her strength! She ought not to be so sensitive, not want to be so clever! She should get away from this Ulrich!

  —Where does “sensitive” come from? he exclaimed. —From the senses! It’s sensualistic and base!

  For heaven’s sake, Gerda knew that; but it had never seemed to her so hurdy-gurdy. —If I want, I will also love a Jew, she thought, and thought of Feuermaul. A very gentle smile struggled with the anger in her face. Hans misunderstood it; he thought the tenderness in the resistance was for him. He was so excited by everything that had gone on before that he thought he would break into pieces right then and there. Over Gerda’s face there is a breath of the Orient, it occurred to him at this moment, and in the same moment he thought he understood that what he loved most secretly about her was the other-racial, the Jewish; he, with his melancholy, who never felt sure of himself! Hans broke down. He hardly knew what was happening to him; he hid his face against Gerda’s legs, and she felt that he was weeping in despair. That tore at her breast like the wild, covetous fingers of a small child; she, too, was suddenly excited, and tears were running down her cheeks without her knowing whether she was weeping over Hans, Feuermaul, herself, or Ulrich. So they gazed into each other’s eyes with crumpled faces, when Hans raised his from her lap. He lifted himself half up and reached for her face. Youth’s ecstatic desire for words came from his mouth. —There are only three ways back to the Great Truth, he exclaimed. —Suicide, madness, or making ourselves a symbol! She did not understand that. Why suicide or madness? She connected no filled-out notions with these words. —Perhaps Hans doesn’t ever know exactly what he means, went through her head. But somehow, if one got free of oneself through suicide or madness, it seemed to be almost as high as being uplifted by some mystic union. Madness, death, and love have always been closely linked in the consciousness of humanity. She did not know why; she did not even think of posing such a question. But the three words, which made no sense as an idea, had somehow come together at this moment in a trembling young person who was holding Gerda’s face in his hands as if he were holding in them the deepest import of his life. What they then went on talking about did not matter at all; the great experience was that they said to each other what shook them. Whoever would have heard them wouldn’t have understood them; entwined, they pressed forward to God’s knee and thought they saw His finger. It was possible, since this scene was being played out in the Fischels’ dining room, that this finger pointing the way out of the world and into their own consisted partly of the tasteless selfconscious pictures and furnishings that gave them the feeling of having nothing to do with the universe of the bourgeois.

  One evening several days after this (the) musical evening in the studio, Gerda appeared at Ulrich’s, after having called excitedly on the telephone. With a dramatic swoop she removed her hat from her head and threw it on a chair. To the question of what was up, she answered: —No
w everything’s been blown sky-high!

  —Has Hans run off?

  —Papa’s broke! Gerda laughed nervously at her slangy expression. Ulrich recalled that the last time he had been with Director Fischel he had wondered at the kind of telephone conversations the latter had been conducting from his house; but this recollection was not vivid enough to enable him to take Gerda’s exclamation with complete seriousness.

  —Papa was a gambler—imagine! the excited girl, struggling between merriment and despair, went on to explain. —We all thought he was a solid bank official with no great prospects, but yesterday evening it came out that the whole time he had been making the riskiest stock speculations! You ought to have been there for the blowup! Gerda threw herself on the chair beside her hat and boldly swung one leg over the other. —He came home as if he’d been pulled out of the river. Mama rushed at him with bicarbonate and chamomile, because she thought he was feeling ill. It was eleven-thirty at night; we were already asleep. Then he confessed that in three days he had to come up with lots of money and had no idea where it was to come from. Mama, splendid, offered him her dowry. Mama is always splendid; what would the few thousand crowns have meant to a gambler! But Papa went on to confess that Mama’s little fortune had long since been lost along with everything else. What can I tell you? Mama screamed like a dog that’s been run over. She had on nothing but her nightgown and slippers. Papa lay in an armchair and moaned. His job of course is also gone once this gets out. I tell you, it was pitiable!

  —Shall I speak to your father? Ulrich asked. —I don’t understand much about such things. Do you think he might do something to himself?

  Gerda shrugged her shoulders. —Today he’s trying to convince one of his unsullied business friends to help him. She suddenly turned gloomy. —I hope you don’t think that that’s why I’ve come to you? Mama moved out to her brother’s today; she wanted to take me with her, but I won’t go; I’ve run away from home—she had become cheerful again. —Do you know that behind the whole thing there’s a woman, some sort of chanteuse? Mama found that out, and that was the last straw. Good for Papa! Who would ever have thought him capable of all that! And no, I don’t think he’ll kill himself, she went on. —Because when it afterward came out about the woman, today, in the course of the day, he said some remarkable things: he would rather let himself be locked up and afterward earn his bread by hawking pornographic books than go on being Director Fischel with family!

  —But what’s most important to me—Ulrich asked—what do you intend to do?

  —I’m staying with friends, Gerda said saucily. —You don’t need to worry!

  —With Hans Sepp and his friends! Ulrich exclaimed reproachfully.

  —No one’s going to bother me there!

  Gerda inspected Ulrich’s house. Like shadows, the memory of what had once happened here stepped out of the walls. Gerda felt herself to be a poor girl who possessed nothing outside of a few crowns, which in leaving she had, with amazing ease and freedom, taken from her mother’s desk. She was sorry for herself. She was inclined to weep over herself as over a tragic figure on the stage. One really ought to do something good for her, she thought, but she hardly expected that Ulrich would take her comfortingly in his arms. Except that if he had, she would not have been such a coward as she had been the first time. But Ulrich said: —You won’t let me help you now, Gerda, I see that; you’re still much too proud of your new adventure. I can only say that I fear a bad outcome for you. Remember, please, that you always, without hesitation, can call upon me if you need to. He said this reflectively and hesi-tandy, for he really could have said something else that would have been more kind. Gerda had stood up, fiddled with her hat before the mirror, and smiled at Ulrich. She would have liked to kiss him goodbye, but then it might well not have come to a goodbye; and the stream of tears that was running invisibly behind her eyes bore her like a tenderly tragic music that one cannot interrupt out into the new life which she could still not quite picture to herself.

  ***

  Hans Sepp was forced to double-step, kneel down in puddles in the barracks yard, present arms and put them down again until his arms fell off. The corporal torturing him was a green peasant boy, and Hans stared uncomprehendingly into his apoplectic young face, which expressed not only anger, which would have been understandable because he was forced to do extra duty with this recruit, but all the malice of which a person is capable when he lets himself go. If Hans let his glance roam across the breadth of the yard—and a barracks yard has in and of itself something inhuman, some locked-in regularity of the sort the dead world of crystals has—it rested on squatting and stiffly running blue figures painted on all the walls, meant to be assaulted with one’s weapon; and this universal goal of being shot at was expressed in the abstract manner of these paintings well enough to drive one to despair. This had already weighed down Hans Sepp’s heart in the first hour of his arrival. The people in these pictures painted on the barracks walls had no faces, but instead of faces only a bright area. Nor did they have bodies that the painter had captured in one of those positions such as people and animals, following the play of their needs, assume of themselves, but bodies that consisted of a crude outline filled in with dark-blue paint, capturing for an eternity the attitude of a man running with a weapon in his hand, or a man kneeling and shooting, an eternity in which there will never again be anything so superfluous as the drawing of individual people. This was by no means unreasonable; the technical term for these figures was “target surfaces,” and if a person is regarded as a target surface, that is the way he looks; this cannot be explained away (changed). From this one might conclude that one should never be allowed to regard a person as a target surface; but for heaven’s sake, if that is the way he looks the minute you lay eyes on him, the temptation to look at him that way is enormous! Hans felt drawn again and again, during the tedium of his punishment drill, by the demonic nature of these pictures, as if he were being tortured by devils; the corporal screamed at him that he was not to gawk around but to look straight ahead; with such raw language he literally seized him by the eyes, and when Hans’s glance then fell straight ahead, on the corporal’s red face, this face looked warm and human.

  Hans had the primitive sensation of having fallen into the hands of a strange tribe and been made a slave. Whenever an officer appeared and glided past on the other side of the yard, an uninvolved, slender silhouette, he seemed to Hans Sepp like one of the inexorable gods of this alien tribe. Hans was treated severely and badly. An official communication from the civil authorities had come to the army at the same time he had, characterizing him as “politically unreliable,” and in Kakania that was the term used for individuals hostile to the state. He had no idea who or what had gained him this reputation. Except for his participation in the demonstration against Count Leinsdorf, he had never undertaken anything against the state, and Count Leinsdorf was not the state; since he had become a student, Hans Sepp had spoken only of the community of Germanic peoples, of symbols, and of chastity. But something must have come to the ear of the authorities, and the ear of the authorities is like a piano from which seven of every eight strings have been removed.

  Perhaps his reputation had been exaggerated; at any rate, he came to the army with the reputation of being an enemy of war, the military, religion, the Habsburgs, and the Austrian state, suspected of plotting in secret associations and pan-German intrigues directed at “the goal of overthrowing the existing order of the state.”

  But the situation in the Kakanian military with regard to all these crimes was such that the greatest part of all capable reserve officers could be accused of them without further ado. Almost every German Austrian had the natural sentiment of solidarity with the Germans in the Reich and of being only provisionally separated from it by the sluggish capacity of the historical process, while every non-German Austrian had (making the necessary allowances) twice as much feeling of this land directed against Kakania; patriotism in Kakania, t
o the extent that it was not limited to purveyors to the Court, was distinctly a phenomenon of opposition, betraying either a spirit of contradiction or that tepid opposition to life which constantly has need of something finer and higher. The only exception to this was Count Leinsdorf and his friends, who had the “higher” in their blood. But the active officers (of the standing army) were also just as implicated in these reproaches that an unknown authority had raised against Hans Sepp. These officers were for the most part German Austrians, and insofar as they were not, they admired the German army; and since the Kakanian parliament did not appropriate half as many soldiers or warships as the German Reichstag, they all felt that not everything about the pan-Germanic claims could be reprehensible. Then too, they were all antidemocratic and latent revolutionaries. They had been raised from childhood to be the bulwark of patriotism, with the result that this word aroused in them a silent nausea. They had finally got used to leading their soldiers in the Corpus Christi procession and letting the recruits practice “kneel down for prayers” in the barracks yard, but among themselves they called the regimental chaplain Corporal Christ, and for the rank of field bishop, which was associated with a certain fullness of body, these heathens had thought up the army name “skyball.”