Agathe

by Robert Musil

  This Nothing had a definite, albeit undefinable, content. For a long time, on many occasions, she had recited to herself a saying by Novalis: “What, then, can I do for my soul, which dwells within me like an unsolved riddle, granting the visible man the utmost license, because it cannot govern him in any way?” But always the flickering light of these words fell back into darkness after a lightning-swift flash of recognition, for she did not believe in a soul, as that seemed too presumptuous and also too definite a notion to apply to herself. But neither could she believe in the earthly domain. To understand this rightly, one need only to realize that this turning away from the earthly order without a belief in a supernatural order is something profoundly natural, for in every mind, the strict and simple order of logic, which mirrors the outer conditions, is accompanied by an affective order whose logic, if one may call it that, corresponds to the nature of feelings, passions, and moods. The laws governing these two bear roughly the same relationship to each other as those of a lumberyard where chunks of wood are hewn into rectangular blocks and stacked ready for transport and the laws of the forest in their dark convolutions and mysterious rustling commotion. And since the objects of our thinking are by no means independent of the state our thinking is in, these two modes of thought not only mingle in each person, but can to a certain degree confront him with two worlds, at least immediately before and after that “first occult and indescribable instant” that, according to a famous religious thinker, occurs in every sense perception before feeling and view separate and occupy the places where one is accustomed to find them: as a thing in space and a contemplation that is now locked into the observer.

  Whatever the relationship between things and feelings in the mature weltanschauung of civilized man may be, everyone knows those moments of ardor in which a split has not yet occurred, as though the waters had not yet been divided from the land and the waves of feeling still shared the same horizon with the heights and valleys that form the appearance of things. One need not even assume that Agathe experienced such moments unusually often or with uncommon intensity; she just apprehended them more vividly, or if one prefers, more superstitiously, for she was always prepared to believe the world and then again not to believe it, just as she had done since her school days, nor had she unlearned this habit after coming into closer contact with the logic of men. In this sense, which is far removed from whim and caprice, Agathe, had she been more self-confident, would have been entitled to claim that she was the most illogical of women. But it had never occurred to her to regard the averted feelings she experienced as more than a personal idiosyncrasy. It was only the encounter with her brother that brought about a change in her. In those cavernous rooms, hollowed out in the shadows of solitude and just recently filled with talk and a fellowship that touched the innermost core of the soul, the distinction between physical separation and spiritual presence fell away, and as the days glided along without a mark or a trace, Agathe felt, more intensely than ever before, the peculiar attraction of omnipresence and omnipotence that arises when the felt world crosses over into the world of perceptions. Her attention now seemed to be not with the senses but wide open deep within her heart, which could and would not receive anything as true that did not shine with the same radiance as its own, and as she remembered the words she had heard from her brother, she reckoned that, in spite of the ignorance of which she usually accused herself, she understood everything that mattered without having to think about it. And now that her spirit was so filled with itself that even the liveliest insight had something of the soundless floating quality of a memory, everything that came her way expanded into a limitless presence; even when she did something, all that actually happened was that some difference between herself as the agent and the act that was being performed melted away, and her movement seemed to be the path by which things came toward her of themselves when her arm reached out to them. But this gentle power, her knowing, and the speaking presence of the world were, when she smilingly asked herself what she was doing, hardly distinguishable from a complete absence of power and a wordless silence of the mind. With only a slight exaggeration of what she was experiencing, Agathe could have said that she no longer knew where she was. On all sides she was in a state of suspension in which she felt herself to be simultaneously lifted up and vanished from the scene. She might have said: I am in love, but I don’t know with whom. She was filled with a clear will, which she had always felt a lack of, but she could not imagine what she could possibly do in this clarity, for all the good and evil there had been in her life had no meaning.

  So it was not only while contemplating the capsule with the poison but every day that Agathe thought that she would like to die, or that the happiness of death must be something like the happiness in which she was spending these days while she was waiting to go and join her brother and meanwhile doing precisely what he had begged her to refrain from doing. She had no idea what would happen once she was with her brother in the capital. Almost reproachfully she remembered that from time to time he would casually intimate that he expected she would be successful there and soon find a new husband or at least a lover; but that was precisely how it was not going to be, this she knew! Love, children, happy days, lighthearted company, trips and a little art—: the good life was so simple, she understood and was not unresponsive to its appeal. But ready though she was to regard herself as useless, Agathe harbored all the born rebel’s contempt for such homespun simplicity. She recognized it as an imposture. The life supposedly lived to the full is in reality “without rhyme or reason,” and in the end, and truly at the real end, death, something is always missing in it. It is—she searched for a way to express it—like lots of things heaped together, instead of being ordered by a higher aspiration: unfulfilled in its fullness, the opposite of simplicity, just a jumble that one accepts with habitual pleasure! And suddenly going off on a tangent, she thought: “It’s like a crowd of unknown children you look at with conventional friendliness, filled with growing anxiety because you can’t find your own child among them!”

  It calmed her that she had resolved to put an end to her life if the new turn that was still in store for her did not bring about a change. Like the fermentation in wine, there was a streaming anticipation in her that death and terror would not be the last word of truth. She felt no need to think about it. She even felt afraid of this need, to which Ulrich so readily yielded, and it was a belligerent fear. For she sensed that everything that took hold of her with such power was not entirely free of a persistent hint that it was merely an illusion. But it was just as certain that within the illusion there was a flowing, diffuse reality: perhaps a reality that had not yet become earth, she thought: and in one of those wonderful moments when the place where she stood seemed to dissolve into the unknown, she was able to believe that behind her, in the space one could never see, maybe God was standing. It was too much, and it frightened her. An immense vastness and emptiness suddenly flooded her, a shoreless radiance darkened her mind and instilled terror in her heart. Her youth—easily given to the anxieties of inexperience—whispered warnings that she was in danger of allowing an incipient madness to grow: She struggled to turn back. Fiercely she remonstrated with herself that she did not believe in God at all. And in fact she had not believed in God ever since she had been taught to do so—a subdivision of the mistrust she had developed toward everything she had been taught. She was not in the least religious in that concrete sense that suffices for an otherworldly or even just a moral conviction. But, exhausted and trembling, she had to admit after a while that she had felt “God” as clearly as she would a man standing behind her and placing a coat around her shoulders.

  After she had thought about it enough to regain her boldness, she discovered that the meaning of what she had experienced did not lie in that “solar eclipse” of her physical sensations; rather, its meaning was mainly a moral one. A sudden transformation of her innermost condition and consequently of all her relations with the wor
ld had for a moment lent her that “unity of the conscience with the senses” that she had previously only known through intimations so faint that its evidence in her ordinary life amounted to little more than a tinge of something desolate and dolefully passionate, no matter if Agathe tried to act in a good way or a bad way. It seemed to her that this transformation had been an incomparable surging flow that emanated both from her surroundings toward her and from herself toward them, a oneness of the most exalted meaning with the slightest movements of the mind, which were scarcely distinguishable from the things around her. Things had become pervaded by feelings and feelings by things in such a convincing manner that Agathe felt she had never been so much as touched by anything to which previously she would have applied the word “conviction.” And this had happened in circumstances that by ordinary standards ruled out the possibility of being convinced.

  So the meaning of what she experienced in her solitude did not lie in the psychological role it might have played as a sign of a high-strung or fragile personality, for it did not lie in the personal sphere at all, but in something universal, or in the nexus between the personal and the universal, which Agathe not unjustly regarded as a moral one, in the sense that it seemed to this young woman who was so deeply disappointed in herself that if she were granted the ability to always live as she did in those minutes of exception, and if she were not too weak to persist in that state, she would be able to love the world and comply with its ways in good grace; and that otherwise she would not be able to do so! Now she was filled with a passionate longing to return there, but such moments of supreme intensity cannot be recovered by force; and it was only when her tempestuous efforts proved futile that she realized, with the clarity a pale day assumes after the sun has gone down, that the only thing she could hope for, and was in fact waiting for with an impatience that had merely concealed itself beneath her solitude, was that strange prospect her brother had once half-jokingly proclaimed as the Thousand-Year Kingdom, or the Millennium. He could just as well have chosen a different word for it, for what it meant to Agathe was only the convincing and confident ring of something that is on its way. She would not have said this out loud. After all, even now she was not sure yet if it was truly possible. She did not even know what it was. At this moment she had forgotten all the words her brother had used to prove that beyond what was imbuing her spirit with mere shining nebulae, the realm of possibility extended beyond measure. But for as long as she had been with him she had always had the feeling that a country was taking shape from his words, and that this land was not forming in her head, but truly beneath her feet. The very fact that he often only talked about it ironically, and in general his alternations between coolness and emotion, which had often confused her in the past, now gladdened Agathe in her solitude as a warrant that he meant it in earnest, which is an advantage all unfriendly states of mind have over moods of rapture. “I was probably only thinking of death because I’m afraid he doesn’t mean it seriously enough,” she admitted to herself.

  The last day she had to spend in absentia took her by surprise; suddenly everything in the house was tidied up and cleared out, and all that remained was to hand over the keys to the old couple, who were being pensioned off under the provisions of the will and would stay behind in the servants’ cottage until the property found a new owner. Agathe had refused to move into the hotel and wanted to stay at the house until it was time to go to the train station between midnight and morning. The whole house was packed up and shrouded. A single bulb was lit. Some crates had been pushed together to serve as a table and a chair. At the edge of a ravine, on a terrace of crates, a tablecloth and cutlery had been laid out for dinner. Her father’s old servant balanced a loaded tray through light and shadow; he and his wife had insisted on helping from their own kitchen, so that the “gracious young lady,” as they put it, should be properly served when dining for the last time in her parental home. And suddenly Agathe thought, completely outside the spirit in which she had spent these days: “Could they have noticed something after all?” It was not inconceivable that she had neglected to destroy all the sheets of paper on which she had practiced before changing the will. She felt cold terror, the nightmare weight of fear that clings to every limb, the miserly fear of reality that gives nothing to the spirit but only depletes it. At that moment she became fiercely aware of her newly awakened desire to live. It rebelled violently against the possibility of her being prevented from doing so. When the old servant returned, she searched his face. But the old man went unsuspectingly to and fro with his cautious smile, steeped in a silent and solemn emotion of his own. She could not peer into him any more than she could see the inside of a wall; impossible to know whether there was anything else behind that blank glitter. She too now felt a mute solemnity and sadness. He had always been her father’s confidant, always ready to betray every one of his children’s secrets to him: but Agathe had been born in this house, and everything that had happened since was coming to an end today, and it moved her that she and he were now solemn and alone. She formed the resolution to give him a special small gift of money, and in sudden weakness decided to say it was from Professor Hagauer—not out of cunning, but as an act of atonement and with the intention of leaving nothing undone, even though it was clear to her that this was as inexpedient as it was superstitious. Before the old man returned, she also took out her two little containers, the poison capsule and the locket with the image of her unforgotten beloved. The locket she pushed, after a last frowning look at the young man, under the cover of a loosely nailed crate destined to go into storage indefinitely and apparently filled with kitchenware or lighting fixtures, for she heard metal clinking against metal, like branches falling from a tree; but the capsule with the poison she put in the place where she had formerly worn the portrait.

  “How unmodern I am!” she thought with a smile as she did so. “I’m sure there are more important things than experiences with love!” But she didn’t believe it.

  At this moment it could no more be said that she rejected the thought of entering into illicit relations with her brother than that it was something she wished for. That might depend on the future; but nothing in her present state of mind was definite enough to formulate such a question.

  The light painted the crates surrounding her a glaring white and deep black. And a thought came, wearing a similar tragic mask that gave its otherwise simple meaning an uncanny expression, that she was now spending her last evening in the house where she had been born of a woman she had never been able to remember, and of whom Ulrich had also been born. An impression crept up on her from her earliest days, that clowns with deadly serious faces and strange instruments were standing around her. They began to play. Agathe recognized it as a waking dream from her childhood. She could not hear this music, but all the clowns were looking at her. She told herself that at this moment her death would be no loss to anyone or anything, and that for herself it might mean no more than the outer conclusion of an inner extinction. So she thought while the clowns made their music swell all the way up to the ceiling, and she seemed to be sitting on a circus floor covered with sawdust, and tears dropped onto her fingers. It was a feeling of profound futility that she had often felt as a young girl, and she thought: “I suppose I never stopped being childish,” which however did not prevent her from thinking, as of something that looked immeasurably great through her tears, that right at the start of their reunion she and her brother had come face-to-face wearing clown garments much like these. “What does it mean that what I have inside me should have attached itself to my brother, of all people?” she asked herself. And suddenly she was really weeping—out of sheer happiness, it seemed: she could not have given any other reason for it. She shook her head violently, as though there were something inside it that she could neither pull apart nor bring together.

  All the while she imagined with natural naivete that Ulrich would surely find an answer to all questions, until the old man came back into the r
oom and was moved by the sight of her emotion. “The gracious young lady. . . ,” he said, likewise shaking his head. Agathe looked at him in confusion, but as soon as she realized the misunderstanding that underlay this expression of sympathy, which had gone out to what he took be her childlike grief, her youthful exuberance returned. “Throw everything you have into the fire, down to your shoes. When you have nothing more, think not even of a shroud and throw yourself naked into the fire,” she said to him. It was an ancient saying which Ulrich had read aloud to her with great delight, and the old man bared his damaged teeth in a smile that betokened understanding of the grave and gentle sweep of the words, which she recited to him with eyes that glowed beneath her tears, and following the movement of his mistress’s hand, which was intended to facilitate his understanding by misdirecting it, he looked at the steep tower of crates that were heaped up almost like a pyre. At the mention of the shroud, he had nodded comprehendingly, eager to follow, though the path the words took seemed to him not quite level; but at the word “naked” he stiffened, and when Agathe repeated her saying, his face had reverted to the mask of the well-trained servant whose expression conveys assurance that he will neither see, hear, nor judge.