The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic

by Robert Musil

  “You know what Gerda’s like,” she said, “a beautiful and gifted girl but—”

  “A bit rebellious.” Ulrich finished it for her.

  “Yes, Heaven help us, always going to extremes.”

  “So she’s still a German Nationalist?”

  Clementine spoke of the parents’ feelings. “A mother’s errand of mercy” was what she somewhat pathetically called her visit, which had as its secondary aim to entice Ulrich back as a regular visitor to their family circle, now that he was known to have risen to such eminence in the Parallel Campaign. “I hate myself,” she went on, “for the way I encouraged Gerda’s friendship with these boys in recent years, against Leo’s will. I thought nothing of it; these youngsters are idealists in their way, and an open-minded person can let the occasional offensive word pass… . But Leo—you know how he is—is upset by anti-Semitism, whether it’s merely mystical or symbolic or not.”

  “And Gerda, in her free-spirited, Germanic, blond fashion, won’t recognize the problem?” Ulrich rounded it out.

  “She’s the same as I was at her age in this respect. Do you think, by the way, that Hans Sepp has any prospects?”

  “Is Gerda engaged to him?” Ulrich asked cautiously.

  “That boy has no means whatever of providing for her,” Clementine sighed. “How can you talk of an engagement? But when Leo ordered him out of the house Gerda ate so little for three weeks running that she turned to skin and bone.” All at once, she broke out angrily: “You know, it seems to me like hypnosis, like some sort of spiritual infection! That boy incessantly expounds his philosophy under our roof, and Gerda never notices the continual insult to her parents in it, even though she’s always been a good and affectionate child otherwise. But whenever I say anything, she answers: ‘You’re so old-fashioned, Mama.’ So I thought—you’re the only man who counts for something with her, and Leo thinks the world of you!—couldn’t you come over and try to open Gerda’s eyes to the callowness of Hans and his cronies?”

  For such a model of propriety as Clementine to resort to so aggressive a tactic could only mean that she was seriously worried. Whatever their conflicts, she was inclined to a certain solidarity with her husband in this situation. Ulrich raised his eyebrows in concern.

  “I’m afraid Gerda will call me old-fashioned too. These new young people pay no attention to us elders on such matters of principle.”

  “It occurred to me that the easiest way to distract Gerda might be your finding something for her to do in that patriotic campaign of yours everyone is talking about,” Clementine offered, and Ulrich hastened to promise her a visit, even while assuring her that the Parallel Campaign was far from being ready for such uses.

  When Gerda saw him coming through the door a few days afterward, two circular red spots appeared on her cheeks, but she energetically shook his hand. She was one of those charmingly purposeful young women of our time who would instantly become bus drivers if some higher purpose called for it.

  Ulrich had not been mistaken in the assumption that he would find her alone; it was the hour when Mama was out shopping and Papa was still at the office. Ulrich had hardly taken his first steps into the room when he was overcome with a sense of déjà vu, everything so reminded him of a particular day during their earlier times together. It had been a few weeks later in the year then, still spring but one of those piercingly hot days that sometimes precede the summer like burning embers, hard for the still unseasoned body to bear. Gerda’s face had looked haggard and thin. She was dressed in white and smelled white, like linen dried on meadow grass. The blinds were down in all the rooms, and the whole apartment was full of rebellious half-lights and arrows of heat whose points were broken off from piercing through the sack-gray barrier. Ulrich felt that Gerda’s body was made up entirely of the same freshly washed linen hangings as her dress. He felt this quite without emotion and could have calmly peeled layer after layer off her, without needing the least erotic stimulus to egg him on. He had the very same feeling again this time. Theirs seemed to be a perfectly natural but pointless intimacy, and they both feared it.

  “Why did it take you so long to come see us?” Gerda asked.

  Ulrich told her straight out that her parents would surely not wish them to be so close unless they intended to marry.

  “Oh, Mama,” Gerda said. “Mama’s absurd. So we’re not supposed to be friends if we don’t instantly think about that! But Papa wants you to come often; you’re said to be quite somebody in that big affair.”

  She came out with this quite openly, this foolishness of the old folk, secure in her assumption that she and Ulrich were naturally in league against it.

  “I’ll come,” Ulrich replied, “but now tell me, Gerda, where does that leave us?”

  The point was, they did not love each other. They had played a lot of tennis together, met at social functions, gone out together, taken an interest in each other, and thus unawares had crossed the borderline that separates an intimate friend whom we allow to see us in all our inward disorder from those for whom we cultivate our appearance. They had unexpectedly become as close as two people who have loved each other for a long time, who in fact almost no longer love each other, without actually going through love. They were always arguing, so it looked as if they did not care for each other, but it was both an obstacle and a bond between them. They knew that with all this it would only take one spark to start a big fire. Had there been less of a difference in their ages, or had Gerda been a married woman, then “opportunity would probably have created the thief,” and the theft might have led, at least afterward, to passion, since we talk ourselves into love as we talk ourselves into a rage, by making the proper gestures. But just because they knew all this, they did not do it. Gerda had remained a virgin, and furiously resented it.

  Instead of answering Ulrich’s question, she had busied herself about the room, when suddenly he stood beside her. That was reckless of him, because one can’t stand so close to a girl at such a moment and just start talking about something. They followed the path of least resistance, like a brook that, avoiding obstacles, flows down a meadow, and Ulrich put his arm around Gerda’s hip so that his fingertips reached the precipitate downward line of the inside elastic that follows from garter belt to stocking. He turned up Gerda’s face, with its confused and slightly sweaty look, and kissed her on the lips. Then they stood still, unable to let go or come together. His fingertips connected with the broad elastic of her garter belt and let it snap gently against her thigh a few times. Then he tore himself away and with a shrug asked her again:

  “Where do we go from here, Gerda?”

  Gerda fought down her excitement and said: “Is this how it has to be?”

  She rang for refreshments; she set the household in motion.

  “Tell me something about Hans,” Ulrich asked her gently, when they had sat down and had to begin the conversation again. Gerda, who had not quite regained her poise, did not answer at first, but after a while she said: “You’re so pleased with yourself, you’ll never understand younger people like us.”

  “Sticks and stones …,” Ulrich said evasively. “I think, Gerda, that I’m done with science now. Which means that I am making common cause with the younger generation. Is it enough to swear to you that knowledge is akin to greed? That it is a shabby form of thriftiness? A supercilious kind of spiritual capitalism? There is more feeling in me than you think. But I want to spare you the kind of talk that amounts to nothing but words.”

  “You must get to know Hans better,” Gerda replied weakly, then she erupted again: “Anyway, you’d never understand that it’s possible to fuse with others into a community, without any thought of yourself!”

  “Does Hans still come so often?” Ulrich asked warily. Gerda shrugged her shoulders.

  Her shrewd parents had refrained from forbidding Hans Sepp the house altogether; he was allowed to come a few days every month. In turn Hans Sepp, the student who was nothing and had as yet no p
rospect of becoming something, had to promise not to make Gerda do anything she shouldn’t, and to suspend his propagandizing for some mystical, Germanic action. In this way they hoped to rob him of the charm of forbidden fruit. And Hans Sepp in his chastity (only the sensual man wants to possess, but then sensuality is a Jewish-capitalistic trait) had calmly given his word as requested, without, however, taking it to mean that he would give up his frequent secret comings and goings, making incendiary speeches, hotly pressing Gerda’s hands or even kissing her, all of which still comes naturally to soulmates, but only that he would refrain from advocating sexual union without benefit of clergy or civic authority, which he had been advocating, but on a purely theoretical plane. He had pledged his word all the more readily as he did not feel that he and Gerda were spiritually mature enough as yet to turn his principles into action; setting up a barrier to the temptations of the baser instincts was quite in line with his way of thinking.

  But the two young people naturally suffered under these restraints imposed on them before they had found their own inner discipline. Gerda especially would not have put up with such interference from her parents, had it not been for her own uncertainties; this made her resentment all the greater. She did not really love her young friend all that much; it was more a matter of translating her opposition to her parents into an attachment to him. Had Gerda been born some years later than she was, her papa would have been one of the richest men in town, even if not too highly regarded as a result, and her mother would have admired him again, before Gerda could have been of an age to experience the bickerings of her progenitors as a conflict within herself. She would then probably have taken pride in being of “racially mixed” parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as if she had nothing at all to do with them. This solution, as good as it looked, had the disadvantage that she had never got around to bringing the worm that was gnawing at her inwardly out into the light of day. In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexistent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysterical ideas and everything in the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. Whatever Gerda knew of it had come to her from the outside, in the dark form of rumors, suggestion, and exaggeration. The paradox of her parents—who normally reacted strongly to anything talked about by many people—making so notable an exception in this case had made a deep impression early in her life, and since she attached no definite, objective meaning to this ghostly presence, she tended to connect with it everything disagreeable and peculiar in her home life, especially during her adolescence.

  One day she met the Christian-Germanic circle of young people to which Hans Sepp belonged, and suddenly felt she had found her true home. It would be hard to say what these young people actually believed in; they formed one of those innumerable undefined “free-spirited” little sects that have infested German youth ever since the breakdown of the humanistic ideal. They were not racial anti-Semites but opponents of “the Jewish mind,” by which they meant capitalism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism. Their basic doctrinal device was the “symbol”; as far as Ulrich could make out, and he had, after all, some understanding of such things, what they meant by “symbol” was the great images of grace, which made everything that is confused and dwarfed in life, as Hans Sepp put it, clear and great, images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead in streams of transcendence. Such symbols were the Isenheim Altar, the Egyptian pyramids, and Novalis; Beethoven and Stefan George were acceptable approximations. But they did not state, in so many words, what a symbol was: first, because a symbol cannot be expressed in so many words; second, because Aryans do not deal in dry formulas, which is why they achieved only approximations of symbols during the last century; and third, because some centuries only rarely produce the transcendent moment of grace in the transcendent human being.

  Gerda, who was no fool, secretly felt not a little distrust toward these overblown sentiments, but she also distrusted her distrust, in which she thought she detected the legacy of her parents’ rationalism. Behind her façade of independence she was anxiously at pains to disobey her parents, in dread that her bloodlines might hinder her from following Hans’s ideas. She felt deeply mutinous against the taboos girding the morals of her so-called good family and against the arrogant parental rights of intrusion that threatened to suffocate her personality, while Hans, who had “no family at all,” as her mother put it, suffered much less than she did; he had emerged from her circle of companions as Gerda’s “spiritual guide,” passionately harangued the girl, who was as old as he was, trying to transport her, with his tirades accompanied by kisses, into the “region of the Unconditional,” though in practice he was quite adept at coming to terms with the conditioned state of the Fischel household, as long as he was permitted to reject it “on principle,” which of course always led to rows with Papa Leo.

  “My dear Gerda,” Ulrich said after a while, “your friends torment you about your father—they really are the worst kind of blackmailers!”

  Gerda turned pale, then red. “You are no longer young yourself,” she replied. “You think differently from us.” She knew that she had stung Ulrich’s vanity, and added in a conciliatory tone: “I don’t expect much from love anyway. Maybe I am wasting my time with Hans, as you say; maybe I have to resign myself altogether to the idea that I’ll never love anyone enough to open every crevice of my soul to him: my thoughts and feelings, work and dreams; I don’t even think that would be so very awful.”

  “How wise beyond your years you sound, Gerda, when you talk like your friends,” Ulrich broke in.

  Gerda was annoyed. “When I talk with my friends,” she said, “our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we know that we live and speak as one with our people—do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others of our own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I’m sure you’ve never… In fact, you can’t even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been for a single person; you think like a beast of prey!”

  Why a beast of prey? Her words hung in midair, giving her away; she realized their senselessness and felt ashamed of her eyes, wide with fear, which were staring at Ulrich.

  “Let’s not go into that,” Ulrich said gently. “Let me tell you a story instead. Do you know”—he drew her closer with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags—” the sensational story of the capture of the moon? You know, of course, that long ago our earth had several moons. And there’s a very popular theory that such moons are not what we take them for, cosmic bodies that have cooled like the earth itself, but great globes of ice rushing through space that have come too close to the earth and are held fast by it. Our moon is said to be the last of them. Come and have a look at it!”

  Gerda had followed him to the window and looked for the pale moon in the sunny sky.

  “Doesn’t it look like a disk of ice?” Ulrich asked. “That’s no source of light. Have you ever wondered why the man in the moon always faces us the same way? Our last moon is no longer turning on its axis, that’s why; it’s already fixed in place! You see, once the moon has come into the earth’s power it doesn’t merely revolve around the earth but is drawn steadily closer. We don’t notice it because it takes thousands of years or even longer for the screw to tighten. But there’s no getting away from it, and there must have been thousands of years in the history of the earth during which the previous moons were drawn very close and went on racing in orbit with incredible speed. And just as our present moon pulls a tide from three to six feet high after it, an earlier one would have dragged in its wake whole mountain ranges of water and mud, tumbling all over the globe. We can hardly imagine the terror in which generation after generation must have lived on such a crazy earth fo
r thousands upon thousands of years.”

  “But were there human beings on earth already?” Gerda asked.

  “Certainly. In the end, such an ice moon cracks up, comes crashing down like giant hailstones, and the mountainous flood it has been dragging along in its orbit collapses and covers the whole globe with one vast tidal wave before it settles down again: That’s none other than the great biblical Flood, meaning a great universal inundation! How else could all the myths be in such agreement, if mankind hadn’t experienced it all? And since we have one moon left, such ages are bound to come once more. It’s a strange thought… .”

  Gerda gazed breathlessly out of the window and up at the moon; her hand was still resting in his, the moon was a pale, ugly stain on the sky, and it was precisely this unassuming presence that made this fantastic cosmic adventure—of which she somehow saw herself as the victim—look like an ordinary, everyday reality.