by Robert Musil
“Above all I do not believe in the constraint of evil by good, which is the hallmark of our cultural farrago: I find this repugnant!
“So I believe and do not believe!
“But maybe I believe that in a not-too-far-off future human beings will on the one hand become highly intelligent, and on the other hand be mystics. Maybe it is already happening, and our morality is splitting into these two components. I could also say: into mathematics and mysticism. Into practical melioration and adventuring in the unknown!”
He had not been so openly excited in years. He did not notice the “maybes” in his speech; they seemed only natural to him.
Agathe meanwhile had kneeled down in front of the stove; she had placed the packet of pictures and writings on the floor beside her, looked at each object one more time, and then pushed it into the fire. She was not entirely unsusceptible to the crude sensuality of the obscenities she was looking at. She felt her body being aroused by them. It seemed to her that this was no more herself than if in some barren solitude one sees a rabbit flitting past. She did not know if she would be ashamed to tell her brother about this; but she was profoundly tired and did not want to talk. She was no longer listening to what he was saying; her heart had by now been too shaken by these ups and downs and could no longer follow. Others had always known better than she what was right; she thought of this, but because she was ashamed, she thought it with secret defiance. To walk a forbidden or secret path: in this she felt superior to Ulrich. She heard how, again and again, he took back everything he allowed himself be carried away into saying, and his words struck against her ear like big drops of happiness and grief.
12
THE WILL
Ulrich has temporarily taken leave of Agathe and gone to Vienna to take care of various business, but finds himself preoccupied with recent developments involving his sister.
Ulrich . . . no longer wanted to put off a decision and tried to recall the “incident” as precisely as he possibly could. That was his mitigating term for what had taken place during his last hours with Agathe and a few days after their big conversation.
Ulrich had packed and was ready to leave on a sleeper train that came through the town late in the evening, and the siblings had met for a final supper. They had agreed earlier that Agathe was to follow him after a short time, and they had somewhat vaguely estimated this separation at five days to two weeks.
At the table Agathe said: “But there’s something we still have to do before you leave.”
“What?” Ulrich asked.
“We have to change the will.”
Ulrich remembered looking at his sister without surprise: despite all their previous discussions he had assumed she was leading up to a joke. But Agathe was gazing down at her plate and had the familiar wrinkle above the root of her nose that always appeared when she was mulling something over. Slowly she said: “He shouldn’t keep as much of me between his fingers as would be left if a woolen thread had burnt away between them. . . !”
Something must have been furiously at work in her over the last few days. Ulrich was about to tell her that he regarded these deliberations on how to damage Hagauer as impermissible and that he didn’t want to talk about it again: but just then the old servant came in to bring them their meal and they could go on talking only in allusions.
“Aunt Malvina,” Agathe said, smiling at her brother, “do you remember Aunt Malvina? She had intended to leave her entire estate to our cousin; that was all settled and everyone knew about it! Consequently, all that the girl was left in her parents’ will was the minimum she was entitled to by law, while the rest went to her brother. That way neither of the children, whose father loved them both equally, would receive more than the other. Surely you remember this? The annuity that cousin Agathe—I mean Alexandra,” she corrected herself, laughing, “has been receiving since she got married was discounted against this obligatory inheritance until further notice. It was a complicated business, to give Aunt Malvina time to die...”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Ulrich had muttered.
“But it’s easy to understand! Aunt Malvina is dead today, but she had already lost everything she had before she died; she even had to be supported. Now Papa only needs to have forgotten to revoke that change he himself made in his will, and Alexandra gets absolutely nothing, even if her marriage contract stipulates joint ownership of property!”
“I don’t know, I think that would be far from certain,” Ulrich said impulsively. “Also, Father must have given certain assurances. He couldn’t have done all this without discussing it with his son-in-law!”
Yes, he remembered only too well having answered like that, because he simply couldn’t keep silent listening to his sister’s dangerous mistake. He remembered vividly, too, the smile with which she had looked at him then: “That’s how he is!” she seemed to be thinking. “All you need to do is present a case to him as if it weren’t flesh and blood but some general state of affairs, and you can lead him around by the nose!” And then she had curtly asked: “Were any of these assurances left in writing?” and answered herself: “I never heard anything about it, and if it were the case, I certainly should have known. The fact is, Papa was strange about everything.”
At this moment food was being served, and she took advantage of Ulrich’s helplessness to add: “Verbal agreements can always be reneged. But if the will was in fact changed again after Aunt Malvina had lost her money, there is every indication that this second codicil has been lost.”
And again Ulrich let himself be gulled into correcting her: “But there’s still the obligatory inheritance, which is a considerable amount; this can’t be taken away from biological children!”
“But I already told you that this was paid out during the father’s lifetime! Alexandra was married twice, after all!”
They were alone for a moment, and Agathe hastily added: “I looked at that passage carefully. Only a few words need to be changed, then it looks as if the obligatory inheritance was already paid out to me earlier. Who knows anything about it now?! When Papa went back to leaving us equal shares after our aunt’s losses, it was put in a codicil, which can be destroyed; besides, who’s to say I couldn’t have waived my legal share to leave it to you for some reason!”
Ulrich looked at his sister dumbfounded and missed his chance to counter her inventions as he felt duty-bound to do; by the time he was ready, they were no longer alone, and he had to veil his words:
“One really shouldn’t,” he began hesitantly, “even think such things!”
“Why not?” Agathe retorted.
Such questions are very simple when they are at rest; but as soon as they rear their heads, what was previously a harmless-looking smudge becomes a monstrous serpent: Ulrich remembered answering: “Even Nietzsche obliges ‘free spirits’ to respect certain outer rules for the sake of inner freedom!” He had said it with a smile, but at the same time with the feeling that it was cowardly to hide behind someone else’s words.
“That’s a lame principle!” Agathe curtly determined. “I was married according to this principle!”
And Ulrich thought: “It really is a lame principle.” It seems that people who have new and revolutionary answers to particular problems strike a balance by making a compromise with everything else, which allows them to live a respectable morality in slippers; the more so as such an approach, which aims at keeping all conditions constant except for the one that is to be changed, corresponds entirely to the creative economy of thought they are at home with. Ulrich himself had always regarded this as a rigorous rather than lax way of going about things, but when that conversation took place between himself and his sister, he felt she had touched a nerve; he could no longer bear the undecidedness he had loved, and it seemed to him it was precisely Agathe’s mission to bring him to this point. And while he nonetheless continued to expostulate with her about the “rule of free spirits,” she laughed and asked him whether he didn’t notice that the m
oment he tried to set up general rules, a different man stepped into his place.
“And even though I’m sure you’re right to admire him, basically you couldn’t care less about him,” she asserted, giving her brother a willful and challenging look. Again he felt himself prevented from answering her and remained silent, expecting an interruption at any moment, yet he couldn’t make up his mind to break off the conversation. This situation gave her courage. “In the short time we’ve been together,” she continued, “you have given me such wonderful advice about how I should live, things I would never have dared to imagine on my own, but then, every time, you’ve asked whether what you said was really true! It seems to me that the truth, the way you use it, is a force that abuses people!”
She did not know what gave her the right to reproach him in this way; her own life seemed so worthless to her that she really should have kept silent. But she drew her strength from Ulrich himself, and that was such a curiously feminine state, this leaning on him even as she attacked him, that he felt it too.
“You don’t understand the desire to combine ideas into large, articulated masses,” Ulrich said. “The combat experiences of the mind are unknown to you; all you see in them are columns marching in some kind of formation, the impersonal lockstep of many feet whirling up truth like a dust cloud!”
“But didn’t you yourself describe to me, more clearly and precisely than I ever could, the two states in which you can live?” she answered.
A glowing cloud with swiftly changing outlines passed over her face. She longed to bring her brother to a point where he could no longer turn back. The thought of it filled her with fervor, but she did not know yet whether she would have enough courage, and so she postponed finishing her meal.
All this Ulrich knew, he guessed it; but now he had roused himself and addressed her resolutely. Sitting opposite her with an absent gaze, forcing his mouth to speak, he had the impression that he was not really in himself but had been left somewhere behind himself and was now calling out to himself the words he was saying. “Imagine,” he said, “that while traveling it occurs to me to steal a stranger’s golden cigarette case. Now I ask you, isn’t that simply unthinkable?! So I don’t even want to discuss whether the kind of decision you have in mind can be justified on the grounds of some higher freedom of the mind. It may even be right to do Hagauer an injury. But imagine me in a hotel, neither penniless nor a professional thief, nor a mental defective with a deformed head or body, nor do I have a hysteric for a mother or a drinker for a father, nor am I confused or stigmatized by anything else, but I steal nonetheless: I tell you again, this is a case that does not exist anywhere in the world. It simply doesn’t happen! It can be ruled out with positively scientific certainty!”
Agathe laughed out loud: “But Ulo! What if one does it anyway?!”
Ulrich himself had to laugh at this answer, which he had not expected; he leapt to his feet and hastily pushed back his chair, for he did not want to encourage her with his compliance. Agathe rose from the table. “You can’t do this!” he begged her.
“But Uli,” she replied, “Do you think even when you dream, or do you dream that something is happening?”
This question reminded him of the assertion he had made a few days ago, that all the demands of morality point to a kind of dream state that has fled by the time they are formulated. But Agathe had already gone into her father’s study, which could now be seen, lamp lit, behind two opened doors, and Ulrich, who had not followed her, saw her standing in this frame. She was holding a sheet of paper to the light and reading it. “Does she have any idea what she is taking upon herself?” he wondered. But none of the diagnostic keys that were in current use, such as nervous inferiority, neurological deficit, emotional debility and the like, seemed to fit, and in the lovely picture Agathe presented while committing her crime not a trace of greed or vengefulness or any other inner ugliness could be seen. And though with the aid of such concepts even the actions of a criminal or semipsychotic would have seemed relatively tame and civilized to Ulrich, for there the distorted and displaced motives of ordinary life glimmer in the depths, his sister’s gently savage resoluteness, in which purity and crime were indistinguishably mixed, had a stunning effect on him. He was unable to accommodate the thought that this person, who was about to commit a bad act, could be a bad person, and had to watch while Agathe took one paper after another from the desk, read it, and placed it aside as she earnestly searched for a specific document. Her determination gave the impression of having descended from another world to the plane of ordinary decisions.
As he made these observations, Ulrich was additionally disturbed by the question of why he had talked Hagauer into leaving without suspecting anything. It seemed to him that he had acted from the start as an instrument of his sister’s will, and to the very last, even when he contradicted her, he had given her answers that helped her to move forward. The truth abuses people, she had said: “Very well put, but she has no idea what truth means!” Ulrich mused. “With advancing years, it gives you the gout; when you’re young it’s all hunting and sailing.” He had sat down again. Suddenly it struck him that not only had Agathe somehow got from him what she said about truth, but also that what she was doing in the room next door was something for which he had prepared the outlines. Hadn’t he said that in the highest state attainable to man there is no good and evil but only faith and doubt? That inflexible rules are inimical to the innermost nature of morality and that faith must never be more than an hour old? That in the state of faith it is not possible to do anything base? That intuition is a more passionate state than truth? And now Agathe was about to leave the sanctuary of moral constraint and venture into that boundless depth where the only choice is that between rising and sinking. She was carrying out her plan in the same way as, earlier, she had taken the medals from his hesitant hand in order to exchange the originals for the replicas, and at this moment he loved her despite her lack of conscience with the strange feeling that his own thoughts had gone from him to her and were now returning from her to him, having become poorer in deliberation but all the more redolent of the balsamic scent of freedom, like a creature of the wild. And trembling from the effort to restrain himself, he cautiously made a suggestion: “I will stay another day and consult a notary or a lawyer. What you’re doing may be terribly transparent!”
But Agathe had already found out that the notary her father had employed was no longer alive. “No one knows about this any longer,” she said. “Don’t touch it!”
Ulrich noticed that she had taken a piece of paper and was making an attempt to imitate her father’s handwriting.
Attracted by this, he had stepped closer to stand behind her. There, in a pile, lay the sheets of paper on which his father’s hand had lived, its movement still palpable; and there was Agathe conjuring something almost identical onto fresh sheets of paper, like an inspired actress. It was strange watching this. The purpose for which it was happening, the thought that it was forgery, vanished. And in truth Agathe had not given this any thought at all. An aura of justice with flames instead of logic surrounded her. Goodness, decency, and law-abidance, as she had experienced these virtues in the people she knew, Hagauer in particular, had always seemed to her as if a stain had been removed from a dress; but the wrong that hovered around her at this moment was like the drowning of the world in the light of a rising sun. It seemed to her as if right and wrong were no longer general terms and a compromise arranged for millions of people, but the magical encounter of Me and You, the madness of a first creation, not yet comparable with any thing, not measurable by any standard. Essentially she was making Ulrich the gift of a crime, by placing herself in his hands, fully trusting that he would understand her rashness, much as children will come up with the most unexpected solutions when they want to give a present and have nothing to give. And Ulrich guessed most of this. As his eyes followed her movements, he experienced a pleasure he had never known, for there was an enchanting
absurdity in succumbing, for once entirely and without caution, to what another being was doing. Even as the memory that harm was being done to a third person intervened, it merely flashed by for a second like an ax, and he quickly reassured himself that it really wasn’t anyone’s business what his sister was doing there; it was by no means certain that these handwriting experiments would actually be used, and what Agathe did inside her own four walls remained her own affair as long it had no effect beyond them.
She now called out to her brother, turned around, and was surprised to find him standing behind her. She awoke. She had written everything she wanted to write, and now resolutely held the page over the candle flame in order to make the document look old. She held out her free hand to Ulrich, who did not take it, but he was also unable to shroud his face entirely in a dark frown. Thereupon she said: “Listen! When something is a contradiction and you love it for both its sides—really love it!—doesn’t that already resolve the contradiction, like it or not?!”
“This question is much too frivolously posed,” Ulrich grumbled. But Agathe knew how he would judge it in his “second way of thinking.” She took a clean sheet of paper and cheerfully wrote in the old-fashioned script she was so good at imitating: “My bad daughter Agathe provides no reason for changing the above provisions to the disadvantage of my good son Ulrich!” Not yet satisfied with this, she wrote on a second sheet: “My daughter Agathe is to be educated by my good son Uli for some time.”
• • •
So that was how it had happened, but after Ulrich had resurrected it with all its details, he ended up knowing just as little what to do as he had before he began.
He should not have left without straightening the situation out: no doubt about that! And obviously the present-day superstition that one must not take anything too seriously had played a trick when it prompted him to withdraw for the time being and not increase the value of that contentious episode with sentimental resistance. Things are never as bad as they seem; the most overblown situations, left to themselves, eventually level off to a new mediocrity; you couldn’t board a train or walk in the street without having a loaded gun at the ready if you couldn’t count on the law of averages, which automatically makes extreme possibilities improbable: this was the European faith in empirical knowledge that Ulrich had obeyed when, despite all his scruples, he had taken the trip home. At bottom he was even glad that Agathe had shown a different side of herself.