by Robert Musil
And then, without having been prompted by anything preceding, Agathe exclaimed: “Just imagine this applied to the whole thing, and you have Gottlieb Hagauer.” And she proceeded to mimic her husband like a schoolgirl: “‘You mean to say you really don’t know that Lamium album is the white dead nettle?’ ‘But how else can we make progress except through the same hard process of induction that has brought our human race step by step through thousands of years, by painful labor full of error, to our present level of understanding, as at the hand of a faithful guide?’ ‘Can’t you see, my dear Agathe, that thinking is also a moral obligation? To concentrate is a constant struggle against one’s indolence.’ ‘Mental discipline is that training of the mind by means of which a man becomes steadily more capable of working out a growing series of concepts rationally, always consistently questioning his own ideas, that is by means of flawless syllogisms categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive, or by induction, and finally of submitting the conclusions gained to verification for as long as is necessary to bring all the concepts into agreement!’ “
Ulrich marveled at his sister’s feat of memory. Agathe seemed to revel in the impeccable recitation of these pedantic dicta she had appropriated from God knew where, some book perhaps. She claimed that this was how Hagauer talked.
Ulrich did not believe it. “How could you remember such long, complicated sentences from only hearing them in conversation?”
“They stuck in my mind,” Agathe replied. “That’s how I am.”
“Do you have any idea,” Ulrich asked, astonished, “what a categorical syllogism is, or a verification?”
“Not the slightest!” Agathe admitted with a laugh. “Maybe he only read that somewhere himself. But that’s the way he talks. I learned it by heart as a series of meaningless words by listening to him. I think it was out of anger because he talks like that. You’re different from me; things lie inert in my mind because I don’t know what to do with them—so much for my good memory. Because I’m stupid, I have a terrific memory!” She acted as though this contained a sad truth she would have to shake off in order to go on in her exuberant vein: “It’s the same even when he’s playing tennis. ‘When, in learning to play tennis, I deliberately for the first time place my racket in a certain position in order to give a specific new direction to the ball, which up to that point had been following the precise course I intended, then I intervene in the flow of phenomena: I am experimenting!’ “
“Is he a good tennis player?”
“I beat him six-love.”
They laughed.
“Do you realize,” Ulrich said, “that with all the things you’re making Hagauer say, he’s actually quite right? It just sounds funny.”
“He may be right, for all I know,” Agathe replied. “I don’t understand any of it. But do you know that a boy in his class once translated a passage from Shakespeare quite literally, and the effect was touching, beginning with ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths,’ and without any feeling for what the boy had done, Hagauer simply crossed it out and replaced it, word for word, with the old Schlegel version!
“And I remember another instance, a passage from Pindar, I think: ‘The law of nature, King of all mortals and immortals, reigns supreme, approving extreme violence, with almighty hand,’ and Hagauer polished it: ‘The law of nature, that reigns over all mortals and immortals, rules with almighty hand, even approving violence.’
“And wasn’t it lovely,” she urged, “the way that little boy, whom he criticized, translated the words so literally it gave one the shivers, just the way he found them lying there like a collapsed heap of stones.” And she recited: “‘Cowards die so much before they die, The brave ones just die once. Among all the miracles, why should men fear death / Because it happens to everyone whenever it comes.’” With her hand high around the doorpost as though it were a tree trunk, she flung out the boy’s roughhewn version of Caesar’s lines with a splendid wildness, quite oblivious of the poor shriveled body lying there under her youthful gaze alight with pride.
Frowning, Ulrich stared at his sister. “The person who won’t try to ‘restore’ an old poem but leaves it in its decayed state, with half its meaning lost, is the same as the person who will never put a new marble nose on an old statue that has lost its own,” he thought. “One could call it a sense of style, but that’s not what it is. Nor is it the person whose imagination is so vivid that he doesn’t mind when something’s missing. It’s rather the person who cares nothing for perfection and accordingly doesn’t demand that his feelings be ‘whole’ either. She’s capable of kissing,” he concluded with a sudden twist, “without her body going all to pieces over it.”
At this moment it seemed to him that he need know nothing more of his sister than her passionate declamation to realize that she, too, was only ever “half integrated” with herself, that she, like himself, was a person of “piecemeal passions.” This even made him forget the other side of his nature, which yearned for moderation and control. He could now have told his sister with certainty that nothing she did ever fitted in with her surroundings, but that all was dependent on some highly problematic vaster world, a world that begins nowhere and has no limits. This would satisfactorily explain the contradictory impressions of their first evening together. But his habitual reserve was stronger, and so he waited, curious and even slightly skeptical, to see how she would get herself down from the high limb she had got herself out on. She was still standing, with her arm raised against the doorpost, and one instant too many could spoil the whole effect. He detested women who behaved as though they had been brought into the world by a painter or a director, or who do an artful fade-out after such a moment of high excitement as Agathe’s. “She could come down,” he thought, “from this peak of enthusiasm with the dim-witted look of a sleepwalker, like a medium coming out of a trance. She doesn’t have much choice, and it’s bound to be awkward.” But Agathe seemed to be aware of this herself, or possibly something in her brother’s eye had put her on guard. She leapt gaily from her high limb, landed on both feet, and stuck out her tongue at him.
But then she was grave and quiet again, and without saying a word went to fetch the medals. And so brother and sister set about acting in defiance of their father’s last will.
It was Agathe who did it. Ulrich felt shy about touching the defenseless old man lying there, but Agathe had a way of doing wrong that undercut any awareness of wrongdoing. Her movements of hand and eye were those of a woman tending a patient, and they had at times the spontaneous and appealing air of young animals who suddenly pause in their romping to make sure that their master is watching. The master took from her the decorations that had been removed and handed her the replicas. He was reminded of a thief whose heart is in his mouth. And if he had the impression that the stars and crosses shone more brightly in his sister’s hand than in his own, indeed as if they would turn into magical objects, it might really have been true in the greenish darkness in the room, filled with glimmerings of light reflected off the leaves of the big potted plants; or it might have been that he felt his sister’s will, hesitantly taking the lead and youthfully seizing his. But since no conscious motive was to be recognized in this, there again arose in these moments of unalloyed contact an almost dimensionless and therefore intangibly powerful sense of their joint existence.
Now Agathe stopped; it was done. Yet something or other still remained, and after thinking about it for a while she said with a smile: “How about each of us writing something nice on a piece of paper and putting it in his pocket?”
This time, Ulrich instantly knew what she meant, for they did not have many such shared memories, and he recalled how, at a certain age, they had loved sad verses and stories in which someone died and was forgotten by everyone. It might perhaps have been the loneliness of their childhood that had brought this about, and they often made up such stories between them, but even then Agathe had been inclined to act them out, while Ulrich took the lead only
in the more manly undertakings, which called for being bold and hard. And so it had been Agathe’s idea, one day, that they each should cut off a fingernail to bury in the garden, and she even slipped a small lock of her blond hair in with the parings. Ulrich proudly declared that in a hundred years someone might stumble across these relics and wonder who it might have been, since he was concerned with making an appearance in posterity; but for little Agathe the burial had been an end in itself. She had the feeling that she was hiding a part of herself, permanently removing it from the supervision of a world whose pedagogical demands always intimidated her even though she never thought very highly of them. And because that was when the cottage for the servants was being built at the bottom of the garden, they decided to do something special for it. They would write wonderful poems on two slips of paper, adding their names, to be bricked up in the walls. But when they began writing these poems that were supposed to be so splendid, they couldn’t think of anything to say, day after day, and the walls were already rising out of the foundations. Finally, when it was almost too late, Agathe copied a sentence out of her arithmetic book, and Ulrich wrote: “I am …” and added his name. Nevertheless, their hearts were pounding furiously when they sneaked up on the two bricklayers at work in the garden, and Agathe simply threw her piece of paper in the ditch where they were standing and ran off. But Ulrich, as the bigger and as a man even more frightened of being stopped and questioned by the astonished bricklayers, could move neither hand nor foot from excitement; so that Agathe, emboldened because nothing had happened to her, finally came back and took his slip from him. She then sauntered along with it innocently, inspected a brick at the end of a freshly laid row, lifted it, and slipped Ulrich’s name into the wall before anyone could turn her away. Ulrich himself had hesitantly followed her and felt at the moment she did it the vise in which in his fright he had been gripped turning into a wheel of sharp knives whirling so rapidly in his chest that it threw off sparks like a flaming Catherine wheel.
It was this incident to which Agathe was alluding now, and Ulrich gave no answer for the longest while, but smiled in a way that was meant to deter her, for repeating such a game with the dead man seemed taboo to him. But Agathe had already bent down, slid from her leg a wide silk garter that she wore to relieve the pull on her girdle, lifted the pall, and slipped it into her father’s pocket.
And Ulrich? He could hardly believe his eyes to see this childhood memory restored to life. He almost leapt forward to stop her, just because it was so completely out of order. But he caught in his sister’s eyes a flash of the dewy fresh innocence of early morning that is still untainted by any of the drab routines of the day, and it held him back.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he admonished her softly. He did not know whether she was trying to propitiate the deceased because he had been wronged, or doing him one last kindness because of all the wrong he had done himself. He could have asked, but the barbaric notion of sending the frosty dead man on his way with a garter still warm from his daughter’s thigh tightened his throat and muddled his brain.
129
THE OLD GENTLEMAN IS FINALLY LEFT IN PEACE
The short time left before the funeral was filled with any number of unaccustomed small chores and passed quickly; in the last half hour before the departure of the deceased, the number of callers in black whose coming had run through all the hours like a black thread finally became a black festival. The undertaker’s men had intensified their hammering and scraping—with the gravity of a surgeon to whom one has entrusted one’s life and from that moment on surrendered any right to interfere—and had laid, through the untouched normality in the rest of the house, a gangway of ceremonial feeling, which ran from the entrance past the stairs into the room that held the coffin. The flowers and potted plants, the black cloth and crêpe hangings, and the silver candelabra with trembling little golden tongues of flame, which received the visitors, knew their responsibility better than Ulrich and Agathe, who had to represent the family and were obliged to welcome all who had come to pay their last respects, though they hardly knew who any of them were and would have been lost without their father’s old servant, who unobtrusively prompted them whenever especially eminent guests appeared. All those who appeared glided up to them, glided past, and dropped anchor somewhere in the room, alone or in little groups, motionlessly observing the brother and sister, whose expressions grew stiff with solemn restraint, until at last the funeral director—the same man who had given Ulrich the printed forms to sign and in this last half hour had dashed up and down the steps at least twenty times—bounded up to Ulrich from the side and, with the studiously modulated self-importance of an adjutant reporting to his general on parade, told him that all was ready.
To conduct the funeral cortège ceremoniously through the town—the mourners would only later be seated in their carriages—Ulrich had to take the lead on foot, flanked on one side by His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s representative, the Governor of the province, who had come in person to honor the final sleep of a member of the Upper House, and on the other by an equally high-ranking gentleman, the senior member of three from the Upper House, followed by the two other noblemen of that delegation, then by the Rector and Senate of the University. Only after these, though ahead of the interminable stream of silk hats topping off public figures of slowly diminishing importance and dignity, came Agathe, hemmed in by women in black and personifying the point where, among the peaks of officialdom, the sanctioned private grief had its place. For the unregulated participation of those who had come “merely to show their sympathy” had its place only after those officially in attendance, and it is even possible that it may have consisted solely of the old serving couple trudging along by themselves behind the procession. Thus it was a procession composed mainly of men, and it was not Ulrich who walked at Agathe’s side but her husband, Professor Hagauer, whose apple-cheeked face with the bristly caterpillar mustache above the upper lip had been rendered unfamiliar to her by its curious dark-blue cast, produced by the thick black veil that allowed her to observe him unseen. As for Ulrich, who had been spending the many preceding hours with his sister, he could not help feeling that the ancient protocol of funeral precedence, dating back to the medieval beginnings of the University, had torn her from his side, and he missed her without daring to turn around to look for her. He tried to think of something funny to make her laugh when they met again, but his thoughts were distracted by the Governor, pacing along silently beside him with his lordly bearing and occasionally addressing a quiet word to Ulrich, who had to catch it, along with the many other attentions being shown him by all the Excellencies, Lordships, and Worships, for he was looked upon as Count Leinsdorf’s shadow, so that even the mistrust with which His Grace’s patriotic campaign was gradually coming to be regarded added to Ulrich’s prestige.
The curbs and the windows were filled with clusters of the curious, and even though he knew it would all be over in an hour, like a theater performance, he nevertheless experienced everything happening that day with a special vividness, and the universal concern with his personal fate weighed on his shoulders like a heavily braided cape. For the first time he felt the upright attitude of tradition. The involvement that ran like a wave ahead of the procession, among the chatting crowds that lined the pavements, who fell silent and then breathed freely again; the spell cast by the clergy; the thudding of clods of earth on wood that one knew was coming; the dammed-up silence of the procession—all this plucked at the spinal cord as if it were some primordial musical instrument, and Ulrich was amazed to sense within himself an indescribable resonance whose vibrations buoyed up his whole body as though he were actually being borne along by the waves of ceremony around him. And as he was feeling closer to the others on this day, he imagined how it would be if at this moment he were really striding forward in the original sense—half forgotten in the pomp it assumed in its present-day form—as the real heir of a great power. The thought banished
the sadness, and death was transmuted from a horrible private affair to a transition that was completed as a public ceremony. Gone was the gaping hole, stared at in dread, that every man whose presence one is accustomed to leaves behind in the first days after his disappearance, for his successor was already striding along in his place, the crowd breathing in homage to him, the funeral being at the same time a coming of age for him who now took up the sword and, for the first time without someone ahead of him, and alone, now walked toward his own end.
“I should have been the one,” Ulrich surprised himself by thinking, “to close my father’s eyes! Not for his sake, or my own, but…” He did not know how to complete the thought. That he had neither liked his father, nor his father him, seemed a petty overestimation of personal importance in the face of this order of things; in the face of death, anyway, personal concerns had the stale taste of meaninglessness, while everything that was of significance now seemed to emanate from the gigantic body of the cortège moving slowly through the streets lined with people, no matter how much idleness, curiosity, and mindless conformity were intermingled with it.
Still, the music played on, it was a light, clear, dazzling day, and Ulrich’s feelings wavered this way and that, like the canopy carried in procession above the Holy of Holies. Now and then he would see his own reflection in the glass panes of the hearse in front of him, his head with its hat, his shoulders, and from time to time he glimpsed on the floor of the hearse, beside the armorially resplendent coffin, little droppings of candle wax, never quite cleaned away from previous funerals, and he simply and without thinking felt sorry for his father, as one feels sorry for a dog run over in the street. Then his eyes grew moist, and when he gazed over all the blackness at the onlookers on the curb they looked like colorful sprinkled flowers, and the thought that it was he, Ulrich, who was seeing this, and not the man who had always lived here and who, moreover, loved ceremony so much more than he did, was so peculiar that it seemed downright impossible that his father should miss seeing himself leaving the world, which he had, on the whole, regarded as a good world. Deeply moved as he was, however, Ulrich could not help noticing that the director or undertaker who was leading this Catholic funeral procession to the cemetery and keeping it in good order was a tall, muscular Jew in his thirties: graced with a long blond mustache, carrying papers in his pocket like a courier, he dashed up and down, now straightening a horse’s harness, now whispering some instruction to the band. This reminded Ulrich further that his father’s body had not been in the house on the last day but had been brought back to it only just before the funeral, in accordance with the old gentleman’s testamentary last wish, inspired by the free spirit of humanistic inquiry, to put his body at the disposal of science; after which anatomical intervention it was only natural to assume that the old gentleman had been hurriedly sewn up again. Behind those shiny glass panes that reflected Ulrich’s image, then, at the center of this great, beautiful, solemn pageantry, was an untidily recobbled object. “With or without his decorations?” Ulrich wondered in dismay. He had forgotten about it and had no idea whether his father had been dressed again in the lab before the closed coffin was returned to the house. And what about Agathe’s garter? It could have been found—and he could imagine the jokes of the medical students. It was all extremely embarrassing, and so the protestations of the present again fragmented his feeling into myriad details, after it had for a moment almost rounded itself out into the smooth shell of a living dream. All he could feel now was the absurdity, the confused wavering nature of human order, and of himself.