Agathe

by Robert Musil

  Thus the scene ended on a conciliatory note, and on leaving, Schwung even assured Ulrich that he might count on his father’s friends in case he should still decide to take up an academic career.

  Agathe had listened, wide-eyed, contemplating the uncanny final form that life gives to a human being. “That was like being in a forest of plaster trees!” she said to her brother afterward.

  Ulrich smiled and responded: “I feel as sentimental as a dog in moonlight!”

  5

  THEY DO WRONG

  “DO YOU remember,” Agathe asked him after a while, “Once when I was still little you were playing with other boys and fell into the water up to your waist, and you wanted to hide it, so you sat at the table with your dry upper half, but the chattering of your teeth led to the discovery of the lower half?”

  When he had been a boy home from boarding school for the holidays—which over a long period had actually only happened that one time—and when the small, shriveled cadaver was still an almost omnipotent man for both of them, Ulrich would not infrequently balk at admitting some misdemeanor and refuse to show any remorse, even when he could not deny the evidence of what he had done. That was how, on that day, he caught a fever and had to be quickly put to bed. “And all you got to eat was soup!” Agathe said.

  “That’s true,” her brother confirmed, smiling. The memory of his punishment, which had nothing to do with him now, seemed no different than if he saw standing on the floor the small shoes he had worn as a child, which had nothing to do with him either.

  “Soup was all you would have got anyway, on account of your fever,” Agathe continued, “but all the same it was administered as a punishment for you!”

  “True!” Ulrich agreed again. “But of course that was not done out of malice, but in the fulfillment of a so-called duty.” He didn’t know what his sister was getting at. He himself was still seeing the child’s shoes. Not seeing them but seeing them as if he were seeing them. Feeling as well the insults and humiliations he had outgrown. And thinking: “Somehow this ‘nothing-to-do-with-me-now’ expresses the fact that at no time in our lives are we completely inside ourselves!”

  “But you wouldn’t have been allowed to eat anything but soup anyway!” Agathe repeated, and added: “I think I’ve spent my whole life being afraid that I might be the only person who can’t understand this!”

  Can the memories of two people talking of a past familiar to both not only supplement each other but also meld even before they are uttered? Something of the kind was happening at that moment! A shared state of mind surprised, even bewildered, the siblings, like hands coming out of coats in places one would never expect and suddenly grasping each other. Each of them suddenly knew more of the past than either of them thought they knew, and Ulrich was feeling again the fever light creeping up the walls from the floor, similarly to the glistening of the candles in the room they were standing in now. Then his father had come, waded through the cone of light cast by the table lamp, and sat down by his bed. “If your moral sense was notably troubled by the possible consequences of what you intended to do, a milder view might be taken of the deed, but in that case you will first have to admit it to yourself!” Perhaps those were words from the will or from the letters about ¶318 that had insinuated themselves into Ulrich’s memory. Normally he had no memory for detail, nor for the wording of phrases; so it was something quite unusual that suddenly in his recollection entire groups of sentences stood before him, and it had to do with his sister standing before him, as if it were her proximity that was bringing about this change in him. “If you had the strength to decide upon a wicked deed of your own free will, independent of any compelling need, then you must also realize that you acted wrongly!” Ulrich continued aloud. “He must have talked that way to you too.”

  “Maybe not quite the same way,” Agathe replied. “He usually told me my faults were ‘mitigated by my inner constitution.’ He was always reproaching me for not understanding that will is connected to thought and is not about acting on instinct.”

  “It is the will,” Ulrich quoted, “that, with the gradual development of the faculties of understanding and reason, must subjugate desire, which is to say instinct, by means of reflection and the resolution that follows upon it.”

  “Is that true?” his sister asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Probably because I’m stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid.”

  “I was always a slow learner and never really understood what I learned.”

  “That doesn’t prove much.”

  “Then I’m probably spoiled, because I don’t assimilate what I do understand.”

  They were standing face-to-face, close to each other, leaning against the posts of the door to the side room, which had been left open when Professor Schwung departed; daylight and candlelight played on their faces, and their voices intertwined as in a responsory, Ulrich intoning his phrases like liturgy and Agathe’s lips serenely following. The old ordeal of those admonitions, which consisted in forcing a harsh and alien system into the tender, uncomprehending brain of a child, amused them now, and they were playing with it.

  And suddenly, unprompted by anything they had said, Agathe cried out: “Now just imagine all of this extended to everything, and you have Gottlieb Hagauer!” And she began to imitate her husband like a schoolgirl: “Do you really not know that Lamium album is the white dead nettle?” “And how else could we make any progress, if not by walking the same arduous path of induction, at the hand of a faithful guide, that brought the human race through many thousands of years of strenuous labor, with many mistakes, to its present state of knowledge?” “Can’t you see, my dear Agathe, that thinking is also a moral obligation? What is concentration if not a constant conquest of indolence?” “And intellectual discipline is that training of the mind by which man becomes steadily more capable of working out long series of concepts rationally and with constant skepticism toward his own notions, which is to say, by means of flawless syllogisms, by chain inferences and inference chains, by induction or by demonstrations per signum, and by submitting the conclusions thus gained to verification until all the concepts have been brought into conformity.” —Ulrich marveled at his sister’s feat of memory. Agathe seemed to take enormous pleasure in reciting these pedantries, which she had appropriated God knows where, perhaps from a book, in perfect word order. She claimed that was how Hagauer talked.

  Ulrich did not believe her. “How could you have memorized such long, complicated sentences just from hearing them?”

  “They stuck in my mind,” Agathe replied. “That’s how I am.”

  “Do you even know,” Ulrich asked, astonished, “what verification and demonstrations per signum are?”

  “No idea!” Agathe admitted with a laugh. “Maybe he only read it somewhere too. But he talks that way. And I learned it by heart as a series of meaningless words by listening to him. I think I did it out of anger at him, for talking like that. You’re different from me; with me, things just stay inside me because I don’t know what to do with them—that’s my good memory. It’s due to being stupid that I have a frightfully good memory!” She acted as if this state of affairs were a sad truth that she would have to shake off in order to continue in her exuberant manner: “With Hagauer, this even goes on when he plays tennis: ‘When, in learning to play tennis, I deliberately for the first time place my racket in a certain position in order to give the ball, which up to that point was sailing across the net to my satisfaction, a particular direction, I am intervening in the course of the phenomenal world: I am experimenting!’”

  “Is he a good tennis player?”

  “I always beat him six–love.”

  They laughed.

  “Do you realize,” Ulrich said, “that Hagauer is factually quite right about everything you have him say? It just sounds comical.”

  “It may well be that he’s right,” Agathe replied. “I don’t understand any of it. But you
know, there was a boy in his school who translated a passage from Shakespeare, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths,’ literally, word for word, and Hagauer crossed it all out and replaced it with the old Schlegel-Tieck version, line by line, word for word! And there’s another passage I remember, I think it’s by Pindar, which went: ‘The law of nature, King of all mortals and immortals, reigns supreme, approving the most violent things, with almighty hand!’ and he decided to give it a final polish: “The law of nature, reigning over mortals and immortals, rules with almighty hand, approving even violence.’ And wasn’t it beautiful, the way that little boy he corrected translated the words exactly the way he found them, like a heap of stones spilled out from a mosaic, with such spine-chilling directness?” Raising an arm and wrapping her hand around the doorpost as if around the trunk of a tree, she recited the rough-hewn verses again, hurling out the words with wild and beautiful fervor, her eyes reflecting the pride of youth, undeterred by the hapless shrunken body that lay beneath her gaze.

  Frowning, Ulrich stared at his sister. “A person who will not polish an ancient poem, preferring to leave it weather-beaten, with half its meaning destroyed, is the same as the one who will never put a marble nose where a nose is missing on an ancient statue,” he thought. “You could call that a sense of style, but that’s not what it is. Nor is it a person with such a lively imagination that he doesn’t mind when something is missing. Rather, it’s the person who attaches no importance at all to completeness and therefore won’t demand of his feelings that they be ‘whole.’ She has probably kissed,” he concluded in a sudden turn, “without feeling herself swept away in body and soul.” It seemed to him at this moment that those ardent verses were all he needed to know of his sister to realize that she was never “completely inside” of anything, that she too was a person of “passionate incompleteness” like himself. This even made him forget the other half of his nature, which required moderation and control. He could now have told his sister with certainty that none of her actions ever corresponded to her nearest surroundings, but were all dependent on a much vaster surrounding that is highly subject to caution, indeed one could venture to say a surrounding that does not begin or end anywhere, and the conflicting impressions of their first evening would have found a satisfactory explanation. But his customary reserve proved to be stronger, and so he waited, curious and even a little doubtful, to see how Agathe would come down from the high limb she had ventured out on. She was still standing with her arm raised against the doorpost, and just a moment too much could spoil the whole scene. He despised women who behave as if they have been placed into the world by a painter or a stage director, or whose tune fades away in an artful pianissimo after a moment of exaltation like Agathe’s. “One possibility,” he thought, “would be for her to suddenly let herself slide down from her peak of enthusiasm with the benumbed, somnambulant look of a medium coming out of a trance; she probably has no other option, and even that will be embarrassing!” But Agathe seemed to know this herself, or else she had glimpsed the danger lurking in her brother’s eyes: she gaily leapt from the high limb she had ventured out on, landed on both feet, and stuck out her tongue at Ulrich.

  But then she was grave and quiet again, and without saying a word went to fetch the medals. And so the siblings set about acting against their father’s last will.

  It was Agathe who carried out the plan. Ulrich was shy of touching the old man lying there defenseless, but Agathe had a way of doing wrong that did not permit the thought of wrongdoing to arise. The movements of her eyes and hands resembled those of a woman ministering to an invalid, and at times they also had the unspoiled endearing quality of young animals that briefly pause in their play to make sure their master is watching. Ulrich collected the medals as they were removed and handed Agathe the replicas. He was reminded of the thief who steals for the first time with his heart leaping out of his chest. And if it seemed to him that the stars and crosses shone more brightly in his sister’s hand than the ones in his own, indeed that they virtually turned into magical devices, perhaps it was really so in the black-green room filled with many reflections of large leafy plants, but perhaps it was also an effect of his sister’s will seizing hold of his own, leading hesitantly but with youthful eagerness; and since there was no evident plan in this, there arose again at these moments of unalloyed contact an almost extensionless and therefore intangibly powerful feeling of their joint existence.

  Agathe stopped; she was done. But there was something that had not happened yet, and after reflecting a little while she said, smiling: “Why don’t we, each of us, write something beautiful on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket?” This time Ulrich immediately knew what she meant, for there were not many such shared memories, and he recalled how at a certain age they had both been very fond of sad poems and stories in which someone died and was forgotten by every­one. Perhaps it was the desolation of their childhood that caused this; and often they made up such stories together. But even then Agathe was already inclined to act the stories out, while Ulrich only took the lead in the more masculine undertakings, which were audacious and heartless. So it was Agathe’s idea that each of them cut off a fingernail in order to bury it in the garden, and then she added to the nails a small bundle of her blond hair. Ulrich declared proudly that in a hundred years someone might come across these relics and wonder who it might have been, a notion influenced by his intention to live on in posterity; but for little Agathe, what mattered was the burial as such, for it gave her the feeling of hiding a part of herself and withdrawing it permanently from the supervision of the world, whose pedagogic demands intimidated her even though she did not think highly of them. And because at that time the cottage for the servants was being built by the edge of the garden, they agreed to do something unusual together. They would write some wonderful poems on two pieces of paper and add who they were, and this was going to be bricked up in the walls; but when they set about writing the verses, which were supposed to be especially beautiful, they couldn’t think of any, day after day, and the walls were already growing out of the foundations. Then at last, with time pressing, Agathe copied a sentence from her math primer and Ulrich wrote, “I am ——,” followed by his name. Nevertheless their hearts were pounding violently when they sneaked up on the two bricklayers who were at work there, and Agathe simply threw her piece of paper into the pit where the workers were standing and ran away. But Ulrich, being bigger and a man, was of course even more afraid of being stopped and questioned by the astonished bricklayers and was so agitated he could move neither arm nor leg. Then Agathe, emboldened by the fact that nothing had happened to her, came back and took his piece of paper from him. Assuming the air of a guileless stroller, she advanced with it, sauntering, to inspect a brick at the far end of a row that had just been laid, lifted it, and pushed Ulrich’s name into the wall before someone could send her away. Ulrich himself followed her hesitantly and at the moment of the deed felt the terrible grip of anxiety turn into a wheel with sharp knives whirling inside his chest so fast that at the next moment it became a spurting sun, like those fireworks that spin around as they burn. It was to this, then, that Agathe had alluded, and for the longest time Ulrich gave no answer and only smiled his demur, for to reenact this game with the dead man struck him as not allowable.

  But Agathe had already bent down and slid a wide silk garter off her leg, lifted the magnificent shroud, and pushed the garter into her father’s pocket.

  Ulrich? At first he could not believe his eyes to see this memory returned to life. Then he almost jumped forward to stop her, simply because it was so contrary to all order. But then he caught in his sister’s eyes a flash of the pure dewy freshness of early morning before the bleakness of a day’s work has set in, and it held him back. “What on earth are you doing?” he said in gentle remonstration. He did not know whether she wanted to conciliate the dead man because he had been wronged, or whether she wanted to give him something good to take with him
because he himself had done so much wrong: he could have asked, but the barbaric idea of sending the frigid dead man on his way with a garter still warm from his daughter’s thigh constricted his throat and started all sorts of disorder in his brain.

  6

  THE OLD GENTLEMAN IS FINALLY LEFT IN PEACE

  The short time that was available until the funeral had been filled with countless unaccustomed little tasks and passed quickly; finally, in the last half hour before the departure of the deceased, the steady arrival of callers that had run like a black thread through all the hours became a black gala. The undertaker’s men had intensified their hammering and scraping with the same earnestness as a surgeon who cannot be argued with once one has placed one’s life into his hands, and had laid, through the otherwise untouched quotidian normalcy of the rest of the house, a pathway of reverent solemnity leading from the entrance up the stairs into the room where the body lay in state. The flowers and potted plants, black cloth and crepe hangings, and silver candelabra with trembling little gold tongues of flame that received the visitors knew their assignments better than Ulrich and Agathe, who were obliged to represent the family and greet all who had come to pay their last respects to the deceased, and who scarcely knew who anyone was except when their father’s old servant inconspicuously drew their attention to particularly eminent guests. And all those who appeared glided up to them, glided away, and dropped anchor somewhere in the room, either singly or in small groups, to stand motionless and observe the brother and sister, whose faces in turn assumed masklike demeanors of grave introversion, until finally the owner of the funeral home, who may also have been in charge of the horses—the same man who had presented his printed forms to Ulrich and who during the last half hour had run up and down the stairs at least twenty times—hurried up to Ulrich in a kind of sidelong canter and, with a tactfully modulated display of his own importance, like an adjutant addressing his general on parade, informed him that everything was now ready.