by Robert Musil
“Now I’m all alone in the world,” he thought. “A mooring rope has snapped—up I go!” This echo of his first sensation on receiving the news of his father’s death now once more expressed his feelings as he walked on between the walls of people.
130
A LETTER FROM CLARISSE ARRIVES
Ulrich had not left his address with anyone, but Clarisse had it from Walter, who knew it as well as he knew his own childhood.
She wrote:
My darling—my duckling—my ling!
Do you know what a ling is? I can’t work it out. Could Walter be a weakling? [All the “lings” were heavily underlined.]
Do you think I was drunk when I came to you? I can’t get drunk. (Men get drunk before I do. An amazing fact.)
But I don’t know what I said to you; I can’t remember. I’m afraid you imagine I said things I never said. I never said them.
But this is supposed to be a letter—in a minute! But first: You know how dreams open up. You know how, when you’re dreaming, sometimes: you’ve been there before, you’ve talked with that person already, or—it’s like finding your memory again.
Being awake means knowing I’ve been awake.
(I have sleepmates.)
Do you still remember who Moosbrugger is? There’s something I have to tell you:
Suddenly, there was his name again.
Those three musical syllables.
But music is fakery. I mean, when it’s by itself. Music by itself is for aesthetes or something like that; no vitality. But music combined with vision, that makes the walls shake and the life of those to come rise up out of the grave of the present. Those three musical syllables, I didn’t just hear them, I saw them. They loomed up in my memory! Then suddenly you know: Where these appear, there’s something more. Why, I once wrote your Count a letter about Moosbrugger—how could I possibly have forgotten that! Now I hear-see a world in which the things stand still and the people move around, just as you’ve always known it, but in sound that’s visible! I don’t know how to describe it exactly, because only three syllables have shown up so far. Can you understand that? It may be too soon to talk about it.
I told Walter: “I must meet Moosbrugger!”
Walter asked: “Who’s Moosbrugger?”
I told him: “Ulo’s friend the murderer.”
We were reading the paper; it was morning, time for Walter to go to the office. Remember how we used to read the paper together, the three of us? (You have a poor memory, you won’t remember!) So I had just unfolded the part of the paper Walter had handed me, one arm left, one right: suddenly I feel hard wood, I’m nailed to the Cross. I ask Walter: “Wasn’t it only yesterday that there was something in the paper about a train wreck near Budweis?”
“Yes,” he says. “Why do you ask? A minor accident, one person killed, or two.”
After a while I say: “Because there’s been an accident in America too. Where’s Pennsylvania?”
He doesn’t know. “In America,” he says.
I say: “Those engineers never have a head-on collision on purpose!”
He looks at me. I could tell he didn’t understand. “Of course not,” he says.
I ask him when Siegmund’s coming. He’s not sure.
So there you are: of course the engineers don’t deliberately drive their locomotives into each other head-on; but why else do they do it? I’ll tell you why. That monstrous network of tracks, switches, and signals that covers the whole globe drains our conscience of all its power. Because if we had the strength to check ourselves just once more, to go over everything we had to do once more, we would do what was necessary every time and avoid the disaster. The disaster is that we halt before the next-to-last step!
Of course we can’t expect Walter to realize this at once. I think that I’m capable of achieving this immense power of conscience, and I had to shut my eyes so Walter wouldn’t see the lightning flash in them.
For all these reasons I regard it as my duty to get to know Moosbrugger.
You know my brother Siegmund is a doctor. He’ll help me.
I was waiting for him.
Last Sunday he came.
When he’s introduced to someone he says: “But I’m neither … nor musical.” That’s his sort of joke. Just because his name is Siegmund he doesn’t want to be thought to be either a Jew or musical. He was conceived in a Wagnerian ecstasy. You can’t get him to give a sensible answer to anything. All the time I was talking to him he only muttered some nonsense or other. He threw a rock at a bird, he bored holes in the snow with his stick. He wanted to shovel out a path too; he often comes to work in our garden, because, as he says, he doesn’t like staying home with his wife and children. Funny that you’ve never met him. “You two have the Fleurs du mal and a vegetable garden!” he says. I pulled his ears and punched him in the ribs, but it did no good whatsoever.
Then we went indoors to Walter, who of course was sitting at the piano, and Siegmund had his jacket under his arm and his hands were all dirty.
“Siegmund,” I said to him in front of Walter, “when do you understand a piece of music?”
He grinned and answered: “Absolutely never.”
“When you play it inside yourself.” I said. “When do you understand another human being? When you feel with him. Feel with him.” That’s a great mystery, Ulrich! You have to be like him: not by putting yourself into him but by taking him out into yourself! We redeem outward: that’s the strong way! We fall in with people’s actions, but we fill them out and rise above them.
Sorry to be writing so much about this. But the trains collide because our conscience doesn’t take that final step. Worlds don’t materialize unless we pull them. More of this another time. The man of genius is duty bound to attack! He has the mysterious power required. But Siegmund, the coward, looked at his watch and mentioned supper, because he had to go home. You know, Siegmund always tries to find the balance between the blasé attitude of the seasoned physician who has no very high opinion of the ability of his profession, and the blasé attitude of the contemporary person who has transcended the intellectual and already rediscovered the hygiene of the simple life and gardening. But Walter shouted: “Oh, for God’s sake, why are you two talking such nonsense? What do you want with this Moosbrugger anyway?” And that was a help.
Because then Siegmund said: “He’s neither insane nor a criminal, that’s true. But what if Clarisse has a notion that she can do something for him? I’m a doctor, and I have to let the hospital chaplain imagine the same sort of thing! Redeem him, she says! Well, why not let her at least see him?”
He brushed off his trousers, adopted an air of serenity, and washed his hands; we worked it all out over supper.
Now we’ve already been to see Dr. Friedenthal; he’s the deputy medical officer Siegmund knows. Siegmund said straight out that he’d take the responsibility for bringing me in under some sort of false pretenses, as a writer who would like to see the man.
But that was a mistake, because when it was put to him so openly, Dr. Friedenthal could only refuse. “Even if you were Selma Lagerlöf I’d be delighted to see you, of course, as I am in any case, but here we recognize only a scientific interest.”
It was rather fun to be called a writer. I looked him straight in the eye and said: “In this situation I count for more than Selma Lagerlöf, because I’m not doing it for ‘research.’”
He looked at me, and then he said: “The only thing I can suggest is for you to bring a letter of introduction from your embassy to the superintendent of the clinic.” He took me for a foreign writer, not realizing that I was Siegmund’s sister.
We finally agreed that I would not be coming to see Moosbrugger the psychiatric patient but Moosbrugger the prisoner. Siegmund got me a letter of introduction from a charitable organization and a permit from the District Court. Afterward Siegmund told me that Dr. Friedenthal regards psychiatry as a science that’s half art, and called him the ringmaster of a demons’
circus. I rather liked that.
What I liked best was that the clinic is housed in an old monastery. We had to wait in the corridor, and the lecture hall is in a chapel. It has huge Gothic windows, and I could see inside from across the courtyard. The patients are dressed in white, and they sit up on the dais with the professor. And the professor bends over their chairs in a friendly way. I thought: “Maybe they’ll bring Moosbrugger in now.” I felt like flying into the lecture hall through that tall window. You’ll say I can’t fly: jump through the window, then? But I’d never have jumped; that was not how I felt at all.
I hope you’ll be coming back soon. One can never express things. Least of all in a letter.
This was signed, heavily underlined, “Clarisse.”
131
A FAMILY OF TWO
Ulrich says: “When two men or women have to share a room for any length of time when traveling—in a sleeping car or a crowded hotel—they’re often apt to strike up an odd sort of friendship. Everyone has his own way of using mouthwash or bending over to take off his shoes or bending his leg when he gets into bed. Clothes and underwear are basically the same, yet they reveal to the eye innumerable little individual differences. At first—probably because of the hypertensive individualism of our current way of life—there’s a resistance like a faint revulsion that keeps the other person at arm’s length, guarding against any invasion into one’s own personality. Once that is overcome a communal life develops, which reveals its unusual origin like a scar. At this point many people behave more cheerfully than usual; most become more innocuous; many more talkative; almost all more friendly. The personality is changed; one might almost say that under the skin it has been exchanged for a less idiosyncratic one: the Me is displaced by the beginnings—clearly uneasy and perceived as a diminution, and yet irresistible—of a We.”
Agathe replies: “This revulsion from closeness affects women especially. I’ve never learned to feel at ease with women myself.”
“You’ll find it between a man and a woman too,” Ulrich says. “But there it’s covered up by the obligatory rituals of love, which immediately claim all attention. But more often than you might think, those involved wake suddenly from their trance and find—with amazement, irony, or panic, depending on their individual temperament—some totally alien being ensconced at their side; indeed, some people experience this even after many years. Then they can’t tell which is more natural: their bond with others or the self’s bruised recoil from that bond into the illusion of its uniqueness—both impulses are in our nature, after all. And they’re both entangled with the idea of the family. Life within the family is not a full life: Young people feel robbed, diminished, not fully at home with themselves within the circle of the family. Look at elderly, unmarried daughters: they’ve been sucked dry by the family, drained of their blood; they’ve become quite peculiar hybrids of the Me and the We.”
Clarisse’s letter came as a disturbance to Ulrich. The manic outbursts in it bother him much less than the steady and quasi-rational working out of some obviously demented scheme deep within her. He has told himself that after his return he will have to talk to Walter about it, and since then he has deliberately been speaking of other things.
Agathe, stretched out on the couch with one knee drawn up, eagerly picks up what he has just said: “You yourself are explaining, with what you’re saying, why I had to marry again!”
“And yet there is also something in the so-called sanctity of the family, in the entering into one another, serving one another, the selfless movement within a closed circle …,” Ulrich continues, taking no notice, and Agathe wonders at the way his words so often move away from her again just when they have been so close. “Usually this collective self is only a collective egotist, and then a strong family feeling is the most insufferable thing imaginable. Still, I can also imagine this unconditional leaping into the breach for one another, this fighting shoulder-to-shoulder and licking each other’s wounds, as an instinctual feeling of satisfaction rooted deep in the beginnings of the human race, and even marked in herd animals she hears him say, without being able to make much of it. Nor can she do more with his next statement: “This condition is subject to rapid degeneration, as it happens, like all ancient conditions whose origin has been lost,” and it is only when he ends by saying, “and would presumably have to require that the individuals involved be something quite special if the group they form is not to become some pointless caricature!” that she again feels comfortable with him and tries, as she looks at him, to keep her eyes from blinking so that he won’t meanwhile disappear, because it’s so amazing that he is sitting there saying things that vanish high into the air and then suddenly drop down again like a rubber ball caught in the branches of a tree.
Brother and sister had met in the late afternoon in the drawing room; many days had already passed since the funeral.
This long room was not only decorated in the Biedermeier taste, it was furnished with genuine pieces of the period. Between the windows hung tall rectangular mirrors in plain gilt frames, and the stiff, sober chairs were ranged along the walls, so that the empty floor seemed to have flooded the room with the darkened gleam of its parquet and filled a shallow basin, into which one hesitantly set foot. At the edge of this salon’s elegant barrenness—for the study where Ulrich had settled down on the first morning was set aside for him—about where in a quarried-out niche the tiled stove stood like a severe pillar, wearing a vase on its head (and also a lone candlestick, precisely in the middle of its front, on a shelf running around the stove at waist height), Agathe had created a very personal peninsula for herself. She had had a couch moved here, with a rug beside it, whose ancient reddish blue, in common with the couch’s Turkish pattern that repeated itself in infinite meaninglessness, constituted a voluptuous challenge to the subtle grays and sober, unassertive lineaments that were at home in this room by ancestral decree. She had further outraged that chaste and well-bred decree by rescuing a large-leaved man-sized plant complete with tub from the funeral decorations and installing it at the head of the couch, as a “grove,” on the other side from the tall, bright floor lamp that would enable her to read in comfort while lying down, and which, in that classicizing setting, had the effect of a searchlight or an antenna pole. This salon, with its coffered ceiling, pilasters, and slender glass cabinets, had not changed much in a hundred years, for it was seldom used and had never really been drawn into the lives of its more recent owners. In their forefathers’ day the walls now painted a pale gray might have been covered in fine fabrics, and the upholstery on the chairs had probably looked different too; but Agathe had known this salon as it now was since childhood, without even knowing whether it was her great-grandparents who had furnished it like this or strangers. She had grown up in this house, and the only association she had was the memory that she had always entered this room with the awe that is instilled into children about something they might easily damage or dirty.
But now she had laid aside the last symbol of the past, the mourning she had worn, and put on her lounging pajamas again, and was lying on the rebelliously intruding couch, where since early morning she had been reading all kinds of books, good and bad, whatever she could get her hands on, interrupting herself from time to time to eat or fall asleep; now that the day spent in this fashion was fading into evening, she gazed through the darkening room at the pale curtains that, already quite immersed in twilight, ballooned at the windows like sails, which made her feel that she was voyaging through that stiffly dainty room within the harsh corona of her lamp and had only just come to a halt. So her brother had found her, taking in her well-lit encampment at a glance, for he, too, remembered this salon and could even tell her that the original owner was supposed to have been a rich merchant whose fortunes declined, so that their great-grandfather, an imperial notary, had been in a position to acquire the attractive property at a price well within his means. Ulrich knew all sorts of other things as well about this ro
om, which he had looked over thoroughly; his sister was especially impressed to hear that in their grandparents’ day such formal décor had been seen as particularly natural. This was not easy for her to comprehend, since it looked to her like something spawned in a geometry class, and it took a while before she could begin to grasp the outlook of a time so over-saturated with the swirling aggressiveness of the Baroque that its own leaning toward symmetry and somewhat unbending forms was veiled by the tender illusion of being truer to nature in being pure, unadorned, and rational. But when she finally succeeded in grasping this shift of ideas, with the help of all the details Ulrich could supply, she was delighted to know so much about things that every experience in her life up until then had taught her to despise; and when her brother wanted to know what she was reading, she quickly rolled over on top of her supply of books, even though she defiantly said that she enjoyed trashy reading just as much as good.