Agathe

by Robert Musil

  But all he said was: “It’s such fun to watch you!”

  Agathe blushed and said: “Why is it ‘fun’?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you’re self-conscious in my presence,” Ulrich said. “But then you remember that I’m ‘only your brother.’ And at other times when I catch you in circumstances that would be very appealing to a strange man, you’re not embarrassed at all, but then suddenly it occurs to you that this is not for my eyes and tell me to look away...”

  “And what’s fun about that?” Agathe asked.

  “Maybe it makes one happy to follow someone else with one’s eyes without knowing why,” Ulrich said. “It’s like a child’s love for his things; without the child’s mental powerlessness...”

  “Maybe it’s only fun for you,” Agathe replied, “to play brother and sister because you’re sick of playing man and woman?”

  “That too,” Ulrich said, watching her. “Love, at its origin, is simply the drive toward closeness and the grasping instinct. It has been divided into two poles, lady and gentleman, with all sorts of mad tensions, frustrations, spasms, and perversions arising in between. We’ve seen enough of this bloated ideology, which is almost as ridiculous as a gastrosophy. I’m convinced most people would be happy if this connection between an epidermal stimulus and the whole of human nature could be canceled out, Agathe! And sooner or later there will come an age of simple sexual companionship, where boy and girl will stand, like-minded and perplexed, before an old heap of broken springs that once drove the mechanisms called Man and Woman!”

  “But if I were to tell you that Hagauer and I were pioneers of that age, you would hold it against me!” Agathe replied with a smile as astringent as good unsugared wine.

  “I no longer resent anything,” Ulrich said. He smiled. “A warrior unbuckled from his armor. For the first time in ages he feels the air of nature instead of hammered iron on his skin and sees his body becoming so wan and frail that the birds might carry it away!”

  And thus, smiling, and simply forgetting to stop smiling, he contemplated his sister sitting on the edge of a table, swinging one leg dressed in a black silk stocking; except for her chemise, all she was wearing was a pair of short panties: but these impressions had detached themselves from their intrinsic meaning, as it were, and become separate, isolated images. “She is my friend who, adorably, represents a woman to me,” Ulrich thought. “What a realistic complication it is that she really is one.”

  And Agathe asked: “Is there really no love?”

  “There is!” Ulrich said. “But it’s an exceptional case. We need to make some distinctions: First, there is a physical experience that belongs to the class of epidermal stimuli; this can be aroused without any moral paraphernalia, even without emotions, as something purely agreeable and pleasant. In the second case there are usually emotions that become intensely associated with the physical experience, but only in ways that, with small variations, are the same for everyone; these peak moments of love I would be inclined to regard as belonging to the physical-mechanical domain rather than that of the soul. And finally there is the soul’s own experience of loving: but that has no necessary connection with the two other parts. One can love God, one can love the world; and maybe one can only love God or the world. At any rate, love of a human being is not necessarily involved. But if it is, the physical side pulls the whole world in toward itself, turning it inside out, so to speak—” Ulrich interrupted himself.

  Agathe had flushed a deep red.

  If Ulrich had deliberately selected and arranged his words with the intention of surreptitiously suggesting to Agathe the act of physical love they inescapably connoted, he would have achieved his purpose.

  He looked around for matches, merely to interrupt the unintended shift in their relationship that had occurred.

  “At any rate,” he said, “love, when it is love, is an exceptional case and can’t serve as a model for everyday behavior.”

  Agathe had reached for the corners of the tablecloth and wrapped it around her legs. “Wouldn’t strangers, if they could see and hear us, think there was something perverse in our feelings?” she suddenly asked.

  “Nonsense!” Ulrich maintained. “What each of us feels is the shadowy doubling of one’s own self in the other’s opposite nature. I am a man, you are a woman; it’s widely believed that every human being bears within himself or herself the shadowlike or repressed opposite of each of his or her qualities: at any rate one possesses the longing for it, if one is not hopelessly satisfied with oneself. So here my counterself has come to light and slipped into you, and yours into me, and they feel grand in their transposed bodies, simply because they don’t have a great deal of respect for their former environs and the view to be had from there.”

  Agathe thought: “He’s said a lot more about all this before. Why is he diluting it?”

  What Ulrich said was, of course, consistent with the life they were leading as companions who occasionally, when the company of others leaves them free, marvel at the fact that they are a man and a woman but at the same time twins. When such an understanding exists between two people, their separate relations with the world take on the charm of an invisible game of hide-and-seek involving swapped clothes and bodies and a cheerful hoodwinking of those who do not suspect their two-in-one, one-in-two duplicity. But this playful and all-too-emphatic merriment—the way children sometimes deliberately amplify the noise they are naturally making!—belied the gravity that sometimes, from a great height, laid its shadow on the hearts of brother and sister, making them fall inadvertently silent. One evening, for instance, when by chance they encountered each other again before going to bed and Ulrich saw his sister in a long nightgown, he wanted to make a joke and said: “If this were a hundred years ago, I would have wanted to cry out: ‘My angel!’ Too bad that expression is out of fashion!” Then he fell silent, taken aback, and thought: “Isn’t that the only word I should use for her?! Not friend, not woman! Also: ‘Heavenly creature’! People used to say that. Ridiculously high-flown, but it’s still better than not having the courage to believe oneself.”

  And Agathe thought: “A man in pajamas doesn’t look like an angel!” But he looked fierce and broad-shouldered, and she was suddenly ashamed of the wish that this powerful face framed by dense hair would darken her sight. She had, in a carnal and innocent way, been sensually aroused; her blood rushed through her body in vehement waves and spread out into her skin, robbing her inner self of all its strength. Since she was not such a fanatical person as her brother, she felt what she felt. When she felt tenderness, she was tender, not lit up with ideas or moral inspirations, although that was something she loved in him as much as she shied away from it. And again and again, day by day, Ulrich summed it all up in the idea: Basically it’s a protest against life! They walked arm in arm through the city. Matched in height, matched in age, matched in their views and values. Strolling along side by side, they could not see much of one another. Tall figures, pleasing to each other, they took to the street out of pure enjoyment, feeling at every step the breath of their contact in the midst of alien surroundings. We belong together! This feeling, which is far from uncommon, made them happy, and half given over to it, half against it, Ulrich said: “It’s funny that we’re so content to be brother and sister. For the rest of the world it’s an ordinary relationship, and we’re making something special out of it, aren’t we?”

  Perhaps he had hurt her by saying this. He added: “But it’s what I always wished for. When I was a boy, I made up my mind to marry only a woman I had already adopted as a little girl and brought up myself. I’m fairly sure many men have such fantasies, they’re downright banal. But as an adult I once actually fell in love with such a child, even though it was only for two or three hours!” And he went on to tell her about it: “It happened on a streetcar. A young girl got on, maybe twelve years old, together with her very young father or an older brother. The way she steps in, sits down, casually hands the con
ductor the fare for both of them, she’s a lady; but totally, and without any childish affectation. There was the same quality in the way she spoke with her companion or silently listened to him. She was stunningly beautiful; suntanned, full lips, strong eyebrows, a slightly upturned nose: maybe a dark-haired Polish girl or a southern Slav. I believe she was wearing a dress that suggested some national costume, but with a long, narrow-waisted jacket that had corded trim and ruffles at the throat and hands and was in its way just as perfect as that whole little person. Maybe she was Albanian? I was sitting too far away to hear what she was saying. It struck me that the features of her serious face were mature beyond her years, so that she seemed fully adult. And yet this was not the face of a dwarfishly small woman. It was a child’s face, without question. On the other hand, this child’s face was not at all the immature preliminary to an adult’s face. It seems that sometimes a woman’s face is complete at the age of twelve, even spiritually, fully formed as if by masterful brushstrokes in a first draft, so that everything added by subsequent touches only spoils the original greatness. It’s possible to fall passionately in love with such an apparition, mortally, and essentially without desire. I remember looking around shyly at the other passengers, because I felt as if all order was shrinking away from me. When the little girl got out, I followed her, but I lost sight of her in the crowded street,” he said, ending his little account.

  After resting with this in silence for a while, Agathe asked, smiling: “And how does this fit in with the age of love being over and only sex and comradeship being left?”

  “It doesn’t fit in with that at all!” Ulrich exclaimed, laughing as well.

  His sister, after some reflection, remarked with startling harshness—it seemed to be an intentional repetition of the words he had used on the evening of their reunion: “All men want to play little brother and little sister. There really must be something stupid behind it. These little brothers and sisters call each other Daddy and Mommy when they’re a little tipsy.”

  Ulrich was taken aback. It was not merely that Agathe was right: Gifted women are also merciless observers of the men they love; they just don’t have theories and hence make no use of their discoveries unless provoked. He felt somewhat affronted. “This has been explained psychologically, of course,” he said hesitantly. “And it couldn’t be more obvious that the two of us are psychologically suspect. Incestuous tendencies, demonstrable in early childhood, along with an anti­social mentality and a rebellious stance toward life. Maybe even insufficiently stable monosexuality, though in my case—”

  “Mine too!” Agathe interrupted, laughing again, though not entirely willingly. “I don’t like women at all!”

  “It makes no difference,” Ulrich said. “Psychic entrails, in any case. You can also say there’s a sultanic need to be the only one who adores and is adored, to the exclusion of the rest of the world; in the ancient Orient this brought forth the harem, and today we have family, love, and the dog. And I can say that the craving to possess a person so exclusively that no one else can come near is a sign of personal loneliness in the human community that even socialists rarely deny. If you want to see it that way, we are nothing but a bourgeois abnormality. —Oh look, how magnificent!” he broke off, pulling on her arm.

  They were standing at the edge of a small marketplace surrounded by old houses. Round about the neoclassical statue of some mental giant they could see the many-colored vegetables, the large canvas umbrellas above the market stands, pieces of fruit rolling on the ground, baskets being dragged, dogs being chased away from the splendors in their crates, the red faces of rough-hewn men and women. The air rumbled and shrilled with the industrious clamor of voices and smelled of sun shining on the welter of earthly things. “Just seeing and smelling the world, how can one not love it?” Ulrich asked exuberantly. “And we can’t love it, because we are not in agreement with what is going on in their heads,” he added.

  This separation was not exactly to Agathe’s taste, and she did not respond. But she pressed her body against her brother’s arm, and they both understood that to mean the same as if she had gently put her hand on his mouth.

  Ulrich said laughing: “Look, I don’t like myself either! This is what happens when one always finds fault with other people. But even I have to be able to love something, and so a Siamese sister who is neither me nor herself, and just as much me as herself, is clearly the only point where everything intersects!”

  He had cheered up again. And as often happened, his mood swept Agathe along. But they never again talked as they had on the first night of their recent reunion or before. That had disappeared like castles in the clouds: when they loom above city streets teeming with life instead of over the solitary countryside, they are hard to believe in. Perhaps the cause of this was only that Ulrich did not know what degree of solidity might be ascribed to the experiences that moved him; but Agathe often believed that all he saw in them was a fantastical aberration. And she could not prove to him that it was not so: for she always spoke less than he did, never struck the right note, and did not feel confident enough to try. She merely felt that he was evading the decision, and that he must not do that. And so in effect they were both hiding in their amusement and pleasure without depth or weight, and Agathe grew sadder day by day, even though she laughed just as often as her brother.

  *Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus (born ca. 519 BC) was a Roman statesman who, according to legend, was working a plow on the farm to which he had retired when he was approached by a delegation from Rome begging him to assume the reins of government at a time of crisis for the republic.

  19

  PROFESSOR HAGAUER PUTS PEN TO PAPER

  But this changed, thanks to Agathe’s husband, to whom all along they had given so little consideration.

  On a morning that put an end to those days of mirth, she received a heavy letter in a foolscap envelope stamped with a large round yellow seal bearing the white imprint of the Imperial and Royal Rudolfs­gymnasium in ——. Instantly, even while she still held the missive unopened in her hand, out of nothing there arose houses, two-storied: with the mute mirroring of well-polished windows; with white thermo­meters on the outside of their brown frames, one on each floor, for reading the weather; with Greek pediments and baroque scallops over the windows, heads projecting from the walls and other such mythological sentinels that looked as if they had been made in a cabinetmaker’s workshop and painted to look like stone. The streets ran through the town the way they had entered, as brown and wet country roads with deep ruts, and the stores standing on either side with their brand-new window displays looked like ladies of thirty years earlier who have lifted their long skirts but cannot make up their minds to step from the sidewalk into the dirt of the street. The provinces in Agathe’s head! Ghosts inside Agathe’s head! Incomprehensible not-quite-disappearedness, even though she had thought herself unmoored from it forever! Even more incomprehensible: that she had ever been bound to it in the first place! She saw the way leading from her front door past the walls of familiar houses to the school, a route she had often taken when she accompanied Hagauer from his home to his place of work in the early days, when she was still intent on not missing a single drop of the bitter healing potion. “Is Hagauer now eating lunch at the hotel?” she wondered. “Does he now tear the pages off the calendar the way I used to do every morning?” All this had suddenly assumed again such mindless hyperreality that it seemed it could never die, and with quiet horror she saw awakening within her the familiar feeling of intimidation, consisting of indifference, lost courage, satiation with ugliness, and the state of her own tenuous, aerial nature. With a kind of avidity she opened the thick letter her husband had addressed to her.

  When Professor Hagauer had returned to his home and workplace from his father-in-law’s funeral and a brief visit to the capital, his environment received him exactly as it always did after his short trips, and he in turn, pleasantly conscious of having properly settled a matter
and now exchanging his traveling shoes for the house slippers in which a man works twice as well, turned his attention to his surroundings. He betook himself to his school; he was deferentially greeted by the janitor; he felt himself welcomed when he encountered the teachers subordinate to him; in the principal’s office the files and problems no one had dared to tackle in his absence awaited him; as he hastened along the corridors, he was accompanied by a sense that his steps lent wings to the building: Gottlieb Hagauer was a personage and knew it; encouragement and good cheer beamed from his brow throughout the institution of learning he was in charge of, and whenever outside the school someone asked him how his wife was doing or where she was, he would answer with the serenity of a man who knows himself to be respectably married. It is well known that so long as a man is capable of procreation, he experiences brief interruptions of his married life as if a light yoke has been lifted, even when he has no intentions of taking illicit advantage of his freedom, and that after the period of respite has elapsed, he takes up his happiness once more refreshed. That was how Hagauer, too, at first guilelessly accepted Agathe’s absence, for a while not even noticing how long his wife was staying away.

  What actually drew his attention to it was the same wall calendar, with the page to be torn off day after day, that had appeared in Agathe’s memory as an appalling symbol of life; it hung in the dining room as a spot that did not belong on the wall—persisting there as a New Year’s gift from a stationery store ever since Hagauer had brought it home from school, and because of its dreariness not only tolerated but maintained by Agathe. Now, it would have been entirely in Hagauer’s nature if after his wife’s departure he had taken over the task of tearing the sheets off this calendar, for it was contrary to his habits to let that part of the wall run wild, as it were. But on the other hand he was a man who knew at all times on what latitude of the week or month he was situated in the ocean of infinity; moreover, he already had a calendar in his office in school anyway; and finally, just as he was about to raise his hand to regulate the measurement of time in his home, he had felt a strange smiling reluctance, one of those impulses through which, as it later turned out, fate announces itself, but which at that moment he merely took for a tender, chivalrous sentiment that took him by surprise and made him pleased with himself: he decided that the page marking the day when Agathe had left the house should remain untouched, as a token of homage and a souvenir, until her return.