by Robert Musil
But today Ulrich was impervious to any suggestion of saving Moosbrugger. He knew Bonadea’s noble sentiments and knew how easily the flaring up of a single worthy impulse could turn into a raging fire consuming her whole body. He made it clear that he did not have the slightest intention of meddling in the Moosbrugger case.
Bonadea looked up at him with hurt, beautiful eyes in which the water rose above the ice like the borderline between winter and spring.
Ulrich had never entirely lost a certain gratitude for the childlike beauty of their first meeting, that night he lay senseless on the pavement with Bonadea crouching by his head, and the wavering, romantic vagueness of the world, of youth, of emotion, came trickling into his returning consciousness from this young woman’s eyes. So he tried to soften his offending refusal, to dissipate it in talk.
“Imagine yourself walking across a big park at night,” he suggested, “and two ruffians come at you. Would your first thought be to feel pity for them and that their brutality is society’s fault?”
“But I never walk through a park at night,” Bonadea promptly parried.
“But suppose a policeman came along: wouldn’t you ask him to arrest them?”
“I would ask him to protect me.”
“Which means that he would arrest them.”
“I don’t know what he would do with them. Anyway, Moosbrugger is not a ruffian.”
“All right, then, let’s assume he is working as a carpenter in your house. You’re alone with him in the place, and his eyes start to slither from side to side.”
Bonadea protested: “What an awful thing you’re making me do!”
“Of course,” Ulrich said, “but I’m only trying to show you how extremely unpleasant the kind of people are who lose their balance so easily. One can only indulge in an impartial attitude toward them when someone else takes the beating. In that case, I grant you, as the victims of society or fate they bring out our tenderest feelings. You must admit that no one can be blamed for his faults, as seen through his own eyes; from his point of view they are, at worst, mistakes or bad qualities in a whole person who is no less good because of them, and of course he’s perfectly right.”
Bonadea had to adjust her stocking and felt compelled as she did so to look up at Ulrich with her head slightly tilted back, so that—unguarded by her eye—a richly contrasting life of lacy frills, smooth stocking, tensed fingers, and the gentle pearly gleam of skin emerged around her knee.
Ulrich hastily lit a cigarette and went on:
“Man is not good, but he is always good; that’s a tremendous difference, don’t you see? We find a sophistry of self-love amusing, but we ought to conclude from it that a human being can really do no wrong; what is wrong can only be an effect of something he does. This insight could be the right starting point for a social morality.”
With a sigh, Bonadea smoothed her skirt back in place, straightened, and sought to calm herself with a sip of the pale golden fire.
“And now let me explain to you,” Ulrich went on with a smile, “why it is possible to have all sorts of feeling for Moosbrugger but not to do anything for him. Basically, all these cases are like the loose end of a thread—if you pull at it, the whole fabric of society starts to unravel. I can illustrate this, for a start, by some purely rational problems.”
Somehow or other, Bonadea lost a shoe. Ulrich bent down for it, and the foot with its warm toes came up to meet the shoe in his hand like a small child. “Don’t bother, don’t, I’ll do it myself,” Bonadea said, holding out her foot to him.
“There are, to begin with, the psychiatric-juridical questions,” Ulrich continued relentlessly, even as the whiff of diminished responsibility rose from her leg to his nostrils. “We know that medicine has already practically reached the point of being able to prevent most such crimes if only we were prepared to spend the necessary amounts of money. So now it’s only a social question.”
“Oh please, not that again!” Bonadea pleaded, now that he had said “social” for the second time. “When they get started on that at home, I leave the room; it bores me to death.”
“All right,” Ulrich conceded, “I meant to say that just as we already have the technology to make useful things out of corpses, sewage, scrap, and toxins, we almost have the psychological techniques too. But the world is taking its time in solving these questions. The government squanders money on every kind of foolishness but hasn’t a penny to spare for solving the most pressing moral problems. That’s in its nature, since the state is the stupidest and most malicious person there is.”
He spoke with conviction. But Bonadea tried to lead him back to the heart of the matter.
“Dearest,” she said longingly, “isn’t it the best thing for Moosbrugger that he’s not responsible?”
Ulrich fought her off: “It would probably be more important to execute several responsible people than to save one irresponsible person from execution!”
He was now pacing the floor in front of her. Bonadea found him revolutionary and inflaming. She managed to catch his hand, and laid it on her bosom.
“Fine,” he said. “I shall now explain to you the emotional questions.”
Bonadea opened his fingers and spread his hand over her breast. The accompanying glance would have melted a heart of stone. For the next few moments Ulrich felt as if he had two hearts in his breast, like the confusion of clocks ticking in a watchmaker’s shop. Mustering all his willpower, he restored order in his breast and said gently: “No, Bonadea.”
Bonadea was now on the brink of tears, and Ulrich spoke to her: “Isn’t it contradictory that you get yourself worked up about this one affair just because I happened to tell you about it, whereas you don’t even notice the millions of equally unjust things that happen every day?”
“What difference does that make?” Bonadea protested. “The point is, I do happen to know about this one, and I would be a bad person if I stayed calm!”
Ulrich said that one had to keep calm; absolutely, passionately calm, he added. He had repossessed his hand and sat down some distance from Bonadea. “Nowadays everything is done ‘meanwhile’ and ‘for the time being,’” he observed. “It can’t be helped. We are driven by the scrupulousness of our reason into an atrocious unscrupulousness of our hearts.” He poured another whiskey for himself, too, and put his feet up on the sofa. He was beginning to feel tired.
“Everyone starts out wanting to understand life as a whole,” he said, “but the more accurately one thinks about it, the more it narrows down. When he’s mature, a person knows more about one particular square millimeter than all but at most two dozen other people in the world; he knows what nonsense people talk who know less about it, but he doesn’t dare move because if he shifts even a micromillimeter from his spot he will be talking nonsense too.”
His weariness was now the same transparent gold as his drink on the table. I’ve been talking nonsense for the last half hour too, he thought. But this diminished state was comfortable enough. The only thing he feared was that it might occur to Bonadea to come and sit down next to him. There was only one way to forestall this: keep talking. He had propped up his head on his hands and lay stretched at full length like the effigies on the tombs in the Medici Chapel. He suddenly became aware of this, and as he assumed his pose he actually felt a certain grandeur flowing through his body, a hovering in their serenity, and he felt more powerful than he was. For the first time he thought he distantly understood these works of art, which he had previously only looked at as foreign objects. Instead of saying anything, he fell silent. Even Bonadea felt something. It was a “moment,” as one calls it, that defies characterization. Some dramatic exaltation united the two of them, and left them mute.
“What is left of me?” Ulrich thought bitterly. “Possibly someone who has courage and is not for sale, and likes to think that for the sake of his inner freedom he respects only a few external laws. But this inner freedom consists of being able to think whatever one likes;
it means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn’t need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by!” In this far from happy moment, when the curious little wave of feeling that had held him for an instant ebbed away again, he would have been ready to admit that he had nothing but an ability to see two sides to everything—that moral ambivalence that marked almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or perhaps their fate. His connections to the world had become pale, shadowy, and negative. What right did he have to treat Bonadea badly? It was always the same frustrating talk they had, over and over again; it arose from the inner acoustics of emptiness, where a shot resounds twice as loudly and echoes on and on. It burdened him that he could no longer speak to her except like this. For the special misery this caused them both, he came up with an almost witty, appealing name: Baroque of the Void. He sat up to say something nice to her.
“It just struck me,” he said to Bonadea, who had kept her seat and dignified position. “It’s a funny thing. A remarkable difference: a person able to be responsible for what he does can always do something different, but a person who isn’t never can.”
Bonadea responded with something quite profound: “Oh, Ulrich!” she said. That was the only interruption, and silence closed around them once more.
When Ulrich spoke in generalities in her presence, she did not like it at all. She felt quite rightly that despite her many lapses, she lived surrounded by people like herself, and she had a sound instinct for the unsociable, eccentric, and solipsistic way he had of treating her with ideas instead of feelings. Still, crime, love, and sadness had linked themselves in her mind, a highly dangerous mixture. Ulrich now seemed to her not nearly as intimidating, as much of a paragon, as he had at the beginning of their meeting; by way of compensation she now saw in him a boyish quality that aroused her idealism, the air of a child not daring to run past some obstacle in order to throw itself into its mother’s arms. She had felt for the longest time a free-floating, almost uncontrollable tenderness for him. But after Ulrich had checked her first hint of this, she forced herself with great effort to hold back. The memory of how she had lain undressed and powerless on his sofa on her previous visit still rankled, and she was resolved to sit, if she had to, on that chair in her hat and veil to the very end in order to teach him that he had before him a person who knew how to control herself as much as her rival, Diotima. Bonadea always missed the great idea that was supposed to go along with the great excitement she felt through the nearness of a lover. Unfortunately, this can, of course, be said of life itself, which contains a lot of excitement and little sense, but Bonadea did not know this, and she tried to express some great idea. Ulrich’s thoughts lacked the dignity she needed, to her way of thinking, and she was probably searching for something finer, more deeply felt. But refined hesitancy and vulgar attraction, attraction and a terrible dread of being attracted prematurely, all became part of the stimulus of the silence in which the suppressed actions twitched, and mingled, too, with the memory of the great peace that had so united her with her lover for a second. It was, in the end, like when rain hangs in the air but cannot fall; a numbness that spread over her whole skin and terrified her with the idea that she might lose her self-control without noticing it.
Suddenly a physical illusion sprang from all this: a flea. Bonadea could not tell whether it was reality or imagination. She felt a shudder in her brain, a dubious impression as if an idea had detached itself from the shadowy bondage of all the rest but was still only a fantasy—and at the same time she felt an undeniable, quite realistic shudder on her skin. She held her breath. When one hears something coming, pit-a-pat, up the stairs, knowing there is no one there but quite distinctly hearing pit-a-pat—that’s how it is. Bonadea realized in a flash that this was an involuntary continuation of the lost shoe. A desperate expedient for a lady. But just as she was trying to banish the spook, she felt a sharp sting. She gave a little shriek, her cheeks flushed a bright red, and she called upon Ulrich to help her look for it. A flea favors the same regions as a lover; her stocking was searched down to the shoe; her blouse had to be unbuttoned in front. Bonadea declared that she must have picked it up in the streetcar or from Ulrich. But it was not to be found, and had left no traces behind.
“I can’t imagine what it could have been!” Bonadea said.
Ulrich smiled with unexpected friendliness.
Bonadea burst into tears, like a little girl who has misbehaved.
64
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR VISITS DIOTIMA
General Stumm von Bordwehr had paid his first call on Diotima. He was the army officer sent by the War Ministry as their observer to the great inaugural meeting, where he made an impressive speech, which, however, could not prevent the War Ministry from being passed over—for obvious reasons—when the committees for the great peace campaign were set up, one for each ministry.
He was a not very imposing general, with his little paunch and the little toothbrush on his upper lip in place of a real mustache. His face was round and expressed something of the family man with no money beyond the funds for the statutory bond required when an officer wanted to marry. He said to Diotima that a soldier could expect to play only a modest role in the council chamber. Besides, it went without saying that for political reasons the Ministry of War could not be included in the roster of committees. Nevertheless, he dared maintain that the proposed campaign should have an effect abroad, and what had an influence abroad was the might of a people. He repeated the celebrated philosopher Treitschke’s observation that the state is the power to survive in the struggle of nations. Power displayed in peace kept war at bay, or at least shortened its cruelty. He went on like this for another quarter of an hour, slipping in classical quotations he fondly remembered from his school days; maintained that those years of humanistic studies had been the happiest of his life; tried to make Diotima feel that he admired her and was delighted with the way she had conducted the great conference; wanted only to repeat once again that, rightly understood, the building up of the armed forces that lagged far behind those of the other great powers could be the most impressive demonstration of peaceful intentions; and for the rest declared his confident expectation that a widespread popular concern for the country’s military problems was bound to arise of its own accord.
This amiable general gave Diotima the fright of her life. There were in those days in Kakania families whose houses were frequented socially by army officers because their daughters married army officers, and then there were families whose daughters did not marry army officers, either because there was no money for the mandatory security bond or on principle, so they did not receive army officers socially. Diotima’s family had belonged to the second sort for both reasons, with the consequence that this conscientiously beautiful woman had gone out into life with a concept of the military that was something like an image of Death decked out in motley.
She replied that there was so much that was great and good in the world that the choice was not easy. It was a great privilege to be allowed to give a great sign in the midst of the world’s materialistic bustle, but also a grave responsibility. And the demonstration was meant, after all, to arise spontaneously from the midst of the people themselves, for which reason she had to keep her own wishes a little in the background. She placed her words with care, as though stitching them together with threads in the national colors, and burned the mild incense of high bureaucratic phraseology upon her lips.
But when the General had left, the sublime woman suffered an inner breakdown. Had she been capable of so vulgar a sentiment as hatred she would have hated the pudgy little man with his waggling eyes and the gold buttons on his belly, but since this was impossible she felt vaguely insulted but could not say why. Despite the wintry cold she opened the windows and paced the room several times, her silks rustling. When she shut the windows again there were tears in her eyes. She was quite amazed. This was now the second time she was wee
ping without reason. She remembered the night when, in bed at her husband’s side, she had shed tears without being able to explain them. This time the purely nervous character of the process, unrelated to any tangible cause, was even more evident; this fat general caused tears to gush from her eyes like an onion, without any sensible feeling being involved. She had good cause to be worried; a shadowy fear told her that a wolf was prowling round her flocks and that it was high time to exorcise it by the power of the Idea. This is how it happened that after the General’s visit Diotima made up her mind to organize with the greatest speed the planned gathering of great minds who would help her define the proper content of the patriotic campaign.
65
FROM THE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARNHEIM AND DIOTIMA
It greatly eased Diotima’s heart that Arnheim had just returned from a trip and was at her disposal.
“Your cousin and I were talking about generals just a few days ago,” he instantly responded, with the air of a man alluding to a suspicious coincidence without wanting to be specific. Diotima received the impression that her contradictory cousin, with his unenthusiastic view of the great campaign, also favored the vague menaces emanating from the General.
“I wouldn’t like to expose this to ridicule in the presence of your cousin,” Arnheim went on, changing the subject, “but I would like to be able to make you feel something you would hardly come upon by yourself, far away as you are from such things: the connection between business and poetry. Of course, I mean business in the largest sense, the world’s business, such as I have been fated to conduct by the position to which I was born; it is related to poetry, it has irrational, even mystical aspects. I might even say that business is quite particularly endowed with those aspects. You see, money is an extraordinarily intolerant power.”
“There is probably a certain intolerance in everything people stake their lives on,” Diotima said hesitantly, her mind still on the unfinished first part of the conversation.