by Robert Musil
But when Fischel was on the defensive he adopted a suitably bearish stance, in this instance keeping up an impenetrable silence in the face of all allusions to the Tuzzi household, Arnheim, the Parallel Campaign, and his own failure. He tried to find out where and how long Arnheim was staying in town, and furtively hoped for an event that would at one blow expose the hollow pretense of it all and bring down his family’s high rating of those stocks with a crash.
52
SECTION CHIEF TUZZI FINDS A BLIND SPOT IN THE WORKINGS OF HIS MINISTRY
After he had decided to find out all about Arnheim, Section Chief Tuzzi soon made the satisfying discovery of a large blind spot in the workings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of the Imperial House, which were his special concern: it had not been designed to deal with persons like Arnheim. Other than memoirs, Tuzzi read no literary works but the Bible, Homer, and Rosegger, priding himself that this saved him from dissipating his mental forces. But that not a single man was to be found in the whole Foreign Ministry who had read a book of Arnheim’s he recognized as an error.
Section Chief Tuzzi had the right to summon the heads of other departments to his own office, but on the morning after that night disturbed by tears, he had gone himself to see the chief of the press department, impelled by a feeling that the occasion which led him to seek a discussion did not warrant full official status. The chief of the press department admired Section Chief Tuzzi for knowing so many personal details about Arnheim, admitted that he, too, had frequently heard the name mentioned, but promptly warded off any intimation that the man could possibly be found in any of his departmental files, since Arnheim had not, as far as he recalled, ever been the object of official consideration and since the processing of news material could not, of course, be extended to cover the public expressions of private individuals. Tuzzi conceded that this was as it should be, but pointed out that these days the borderline between the official and the private status of persons and events was not always clearly definable, which the chief of the press department found a most acute observation, whereupon the two section chiefs agreed that they had before them a most intriguing flaw in the system.
It was clearly a morning on which Europe was enjoying a little peace and quiet, because the two officials sent for the head clerk and instructed him to start a file headed Arnheim, Dr. Paul, though there was as yet nothing in it. After the head clerk came the chief file clerk and the clerk in charge of news clippings, both of whom were able to state on the spot, all aglow with efficiency, that no Arnheim was to be found in their files. Finally the press secretaries were called in, whose job it was to go through the newspapers every day and lay their clippings before the various chiefs. When asked about Arnheim they all made serious faces, and testified that he was indeed mentioned often and most favorably in the papers they read, but that they could not say what his writings were about because his activities—as they could immediately affirm—were not included within the sphere of their official concern with the news. Thus the flawless functioning of the Foreign Ministry’s apparatus was demonstrated whenever one touched a button, and all these officials left the room with the sense of having made the best show of their reliability.
“It’s exactly as I told you,” the chief of the press department said to Tuzzi with satisfaction. “Nobody knows a thing.”
The two section chiefs had listened to the reports with smiling dignity, sitting—as if embalmed forever by their surroundings, like flies in amber—in luxurious leather armchairs, on the deep-pile red carpet, framed by the tall windows draped in dark red in that white-and-gold room dating from the time of Maria Theresa, and acknowledged that the blind spot in the system, which they now had at least spotted, would be hard to cure.
“In this department,” its chief said with satisfaction, “we deal with every public utterance, but a borderline must be drawn somewhere around the term ‘public.’ I can guarantee that every ‘Hear, hear’ shouted by some deputy at one of this year’s regional council meetings can be located in our files within ten minutes, and every such interjection made in the last ten years, as far as it concerns foreign affairs, within half an hour at most. The same applies to every political newspaper article; my men do painstaking work. But those are tangible, so to speak responsible, utterances, in connection with well-defined conditions, powers, and concepts. However, if I have to decide, from a purely professional point of view, under which heading the clerk who compiles the excerpts or the catalog is to file some personal effusion by—let’s see, whom could we use as an example?”
Tuzzi helpfully gave him the name of one of the latest writers to frequent Diotima’s salon. The chief of the press department glanced up at him uneasily, as if he were hard of hearing.
“All right, him, let’s say—but where do we draw the line between what to note and what to pass over? We’ve even had political poems. Does this mean that every versifier—or perhaps only authors who write for our Burgtheater … ?”
Both laughed.
“How is one to deduce what these people mean, even if they were Schiller and Goethe? Of course there’s always a higher meaning in it, but for all practical purposes they contradict themselves with every second word they say.”
By this time the two men had become aware that they were running the risk of becoming involved in something “impossible,” a word with the added nuance of something socially ridiculous, to which diplomats are so keenly sensitive.
“Of course we can’t bring a whole staff of literary and drama critics into the ministry,” Tuzzi said with a smile, “but on the other hand, once we’ve become aware of it, there’s no denying that such people are not without influence on world opinion and consequently do affect politics.”
“It isn’t done in any Foreign Office in the world,” the press chief said helpfully.
“Agreed. But drop after drop will hollow out stone.” Tuzzi found that this proverb served nicely to express a certain danger. “Shouldn’t we try to set up a way of handling this?”
“I don’t know. I have qualms,” the other section chief said.
“So do I, of course!” Tuzzi replied. As the conversation neared its end he felt ill at ease, as if his tongue were coated, uncertain whether he had been talking nonsense or whether it would turn out after all to be another instance of that perspicacity for which he was celebrated. The press chief was equally undecided, and so they ended by assuring each other that they would have another talk on the subject later.
The press chief issued instructions to order Arnheim’s complete works for the ministry library, by way of concluding the matter, and Tuzzi went to a political department, where he requested a detailed report on the man Arnheim from the Austrian Embassy in Berlin. This was the only thing left for him to do at the moment, and until the report arrived his only source of information about Arnheim was his wife, a source he now felt strongly disinclined to use. He recalled Voltaire’s saying that people use words only to hide their thoughts and use thoughts only to justify the wrongs they have done. Certainly, that is what diplomacy had always been. But that a person spoke and wrote as much as Arnheim did, to hide his real intentions behind words, was something new; it made Tuzzi uneasy, and he would have to get to the bottom of it.
53
MOOSBRUGGER IS MOVED TO ANOTHER PRISON
The killer of a prostitute, Christian Moosbrugger, had been forgotten a few days after the newspapers stopped printing the reports of his trial, and the public had turned to other things for excitement. Only a circle of experts still took an interest in him. His lawyer had entered a plea to have the trial invalidated, demanded a new psychiatric examination, and taken other steps as well: the execution was indefinitely postponed and Moosbrugger moved to another prison.
The precautions with which this was done flattered him: loaded guns, many people, arms and legs in irons. They were paying attention to him, they were afraid of him, and Moosbrugger loved it. When he climbed into the prison van, he glanced around
for admiration and tried to catch the surprised gaze of the passersby. Cold wind, blowing down the street, played with his curly hair; the air drained him. Two seconds; then a guard shoved his behind into the van.
Moosbrugger was vain. He did not like to be pushed like that; he was afraid that the guards would punch him, shout or laugh at him. The fettered giant did not dare to look at any of his escort and slid to the front of the van of his own accord.
But he was not afraid of death. Life is full of things that must be endured, and that certainly hurt more than being hanged, and whether a man has a few years more or less to live really doesn’t matter. The passive pride of a man who has been locked up for long stretches would not let him fear his punishment; but in any case, he did not cling to life. What was there in life that he should love? Surely not the spring breeze, or the open road, or the sun? They only make a man tired, hot, and dusty. No one loves life who really knows it. “If I could say to someone,” Moosbrugger thought, “‘Yesterday I had some terrific roast pork at the corner restaurant!’ that might be something.” But one could do without even that. What would have pleased him was something that could satisfy his ambition, which had always come up against nothing but stupid insults.
An uneven jolting ran from the wheels through the bench into his body. Behind the bars in the door the cobblestones were running backward; heavy wagons were left behind; at times, men, women, or children stumbled diagonally across the bars; a distant cab was gaining on them, growing, coming closer, beginning to spray out life as an anvil throws off sparks; the horses’ heads seemed to be about to push through the door; then the clatter of hooves and the soft sound of rubber-tired wheels ran on past behind the wall of the van. Moosbrugger slowly turned his head back to stare again at the ceiling where it met the van’s side in front of him. The noises outside roared, blared, were stretched like a canvas over which now and then flitted the shadow of something happening. Moosbrugger took the ride as a change, without paying much attention to its meaning. Between two dark, inert stretches in prison a quarter of an hour’s opaque, white, foaming time was shooting by. This was how he had always experienced his freedom. Not really pretty. “That business about the last meal,” he thought, “the prison chaplain, the hangmen, the quarter hour before it’s all over, won’t be too different. It will bounce along on wheels too; I’ll be kept busy all the time, like now, trying to keep from sliding off this bench at every jolt, and I won’t be seeing or hearing much of anything with all those people hopping around me. It’s the best thing that can happen: finally I’ll get some peace.”
A man who has liberated himself from wanting to live feels immensely superior. Moosbrugger remembered the superintendent who had been his first interrogator at the police station. A real gent, who spoke in a low voice.
“Look here, Mr. Moosbrugger,” he had said, “I beseech you: grant me success!” And Moosbrugger had replied, “Well, if success means that much to you, let’s draw up a statement.”
The judge, later on, was skeptical, but the superintendent had confirmed it in court. “Even if you don’t care about relieving your conscience on your own account, please give me the personal satisfaction that you are doing it for my sake.” The superintendent had repeated this before the whole court, even the presiding judge had looked pleased, and Moosbrugger had risen to his feet:
“My deep respect to His Honor the superintendent for making this statement!” he had loudly proclaimed, then added, with a graceful bow: “Although the superintendent’s last words to me were ‘We will probably never see each other again,’ it is an honor and a privilege to see you, the superintendent, again today.”
A smile of self-approval transformed Moosbrugger’s face, and he forgot the guards sitting opposite him, flung to and fro like himself by the jolting van.
54
IN CONVERSATION WITH WALTER AND CLARISSE, ULRICH TURNS OUT TO BE REACTIONARY
Clarisse said to Ulrich: “Something must be done for Moosbrugger; this murderer is musical!”
Ulrich had finally, on a free afternoon, paid them a visit to make up for the one so fatefully prevented by his arrest.
Clarisse was clutching at his lapel; Walter stood beside her with a look on his face that was not quite sincere.
“What do you mean, musical?” Ulrich asked with a smile.
Clarisse looked merrily shamefaced. Unintentionally. As if she had to clap a tight comic grin on her face to hold back the embarrassment oozing from every pore. She let go of his lapel.
“Oh, nothing special,” she said. “You seem to have become an influential man!” It was not always easy to make her out.
Walter had already made a start, and then stopped again. Here, outside the city, there was still some snow on the ground; white fields and between them, like dark water, black earth. The sun washed over everything equitably. Clarisse wore an orange jacket and a blue wool cap. The three of them were out for a walk, and Ulrich, in the midst of nature’s desolate disarray, had to explain Arnheim’s writings to her. These dealt with algebraic series, benzol rings, the materialist as well as the universalist philosophy of history, bridge supports, the evolution of music, the essence of the automobile, Hata 606, the theory of relativity, Bohr’s atomic theory, autogeneous welding, the flora of the Himalayas, psychoanalysis, individual psychology, experimental psychology, physiological psychology, social psychology, and all the other achievements that prevent a time so greatly enriched by them from turning out good, wholesome, integral human beings. However, Arnheim dealt with all these subjects in his writing in the most soothing fashion, assuring his readers that whatever they did not understand represented only an excess of sterile intellect, while the truth was always simplicity itself, like human dignity and that instinct for transcendent realities within reach of everyone who lived simply and was in league with the stars.
“Plenty of people are saying this kind of thing nowadays,” Ulrich explained, “but Arnheim is the one whom people believe because they see him as a big, rich man who really knows whatever it is he is talking about, who has actually been to the Himalayas, owns automobiles, and can wear as many benzol rings as he likes.”
Clarisse, prompted by a vague notion of carnelian rings, wanted to know what benzol rings looked like.
“You’re a dear girl, Clarisse, all the same!” Ulrich said.
Walter came to her defense. “Thank heaven she doesn’t have to understand all that chemical gobbledygook.” But then he proceeded to defend the works of Arnheim, which he had read. He would not claim that Arnheim was the best one could imagine, but he was still the best the present age had produced; this was a new spirit! Scientifically sound, yet also capable of going beyond technical knowledge.
Thus their walk came to an end. The result for all of them was wet feet, an irritated brain—as though the thin, bare branches on the trees, sparkling in the winter sun, had turned to splinters stuck in the retina—a vulgar craving for hot coffee, and the feeling of human forlornness.
Steaming snow rose from their shoes; Clarisse enjoyed the mess they were making on the floor, and Walter kept his femininely sensuous lips pursed the whole time, because he was itching to start an argument. Ulrich told them about the Parallel Campaign. When Arnheim’s name cropped up again the argument began.
“I’ll tell you what I hold against him,” Ulrich persisted. “Scientific man is an entirely inescapable thing these days; we can’t not want to know! And at no time has the difference between the expert’s experience and that of the layman been as great as it is now. Everyone can see this in the ability of a masseur or a pianist. No one would send a horse to the races these days without special preparation. It is only on the problems of being human that everyone feels called upon to pronounce judgment, and there’s an ancient prejudice to the effect that one is born and dies a human being. But even if I know that five thousand years ago women wrote the same love letters, word for word, that they write today, I can’t read such letters any longer without wondering whe
ther it isn’t ever going to change!”
Clarisse seemed inclined to agree. Walter, however, smiled like a fakir preparing not to bat an eyelash while someone runs a hatpin through his cheeks.
“Meaning only, presumably, that until further notice you refuse to be a human being?” he broke in.
“More or less. It has an unpleasant feeling of dilettantism about it.”
“But I’ll grant you something quite different,” Ulrich went on after some thought. “The experts never finish anything. Not only are they not finished today, but they are incapable of conceiving an end to their activities. Even incapable, perhaps, of wishing for one. Can you imagine that man will still have a soul, for instance, once he has learned to understand it and control it biologically and psychologically? Yet this is precisely the condition we are aiming for! That’s the trouble. Knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion. At bottom, an impermissible mode of conduct: like dipsomania, sex mania, homicidal mania, the compulsion to know forms its own character that is off-balance. It is simply not so that the researcher pursues the truth; it pursues him. He suffers it. What is true is true, and a fact is real, without concerning itself about him: he’s the one who has a passion for it, a dipsomania for the factual, which marks his character, and he doesn’t give a damn whether his findings will lead to something human, perfect, or anything at all. Such a man is full of contradictions and misery, and yet he is a monster of energy!”
“And—?” Walter asked.