by Robert Musil
Agathe had opened her eyes. After coming out of hiding at last, her glance contained something uncommonly hard to define, which Ulrich felt coursing sympathetically through his whole body. He suddenly started to talk again: “When I was younger I tried to see just that as a source of strength. And if one doesn’t have anything to pit against life? Fine, then life flees from man into his works! That’s more or less what I thought. And I suppose there’s something daunting about the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today’s world. At the very least there’s something in it of adolescence, which centuries can go through as well as teenagers, years of rapid, uneven growth. And like every young man I began by plunging into work, adventures, amusements; what difference did it make what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly? Do you remember that we once spoke of ‘the morality of achievement’? We’re born with that image, and orient ourselves by it. But the older one gets, the more clearly one finds out that this apparent exuberance, this independence and mobility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the partial drives—both your own against yourself and yours against the world—in short, everything that we ‘people of the present’ have regarded as a strength and a special distinction of our species, is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole as against its parts. Passion and willpower can do nothing about it. The moment you’re ready to go all out into the middle of something, you find yourself washed back to the periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences!”
Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to happen in his voice; when nothing changed and her brother’s words simply came to an end like a path turning off a road into a dead end, she said: “So your experience tells you that one can never really act with conviction and will never be able to. By conviction,” she explained, “I don’t mean whatever knowledge or moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling replete now where there’s emptiness, something one starts out from and returns to—” She broke off. “Oh, I don’t really know what I mean! I was hoping you’d explain it to me.”
“You mean just what we were talking about,” Ulrich answered gently. “And you’re also the only person I can talk to about these things. But there’d be no point in starting over just to add a few more seductive words. I’d have to say, rather, that being ‘at the inner core’ of things, in a state of unmarred ‘inwardness’—using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the meaning we just gave it—is apparently not a demand that can be satisfied by rational thinking.” He had leaned forward and was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes. “Human nature is probably averse to it,” he said in a low voice. “All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it! Perhaps it’s connected with the need for sibling love, an addition to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction toward a love unmixed with otherness and not-loving.” And after a pause he added: “You know how popular those babes-in-the-wood games are in bed: people who could murder their real siblings fool around as brother-and-sister babies under the same blanket.”
In the dim light his face twitched in self-mockery. But Agathe put her trust in his face and not in his confused words. She had seen faces quivering like this a moment before they plunged; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an immense distance. Tersely she answered: “Being brother and sister isn’t really enough, that’s all.”
“Well, we’ve already spoken of being twins,” Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.
“We’d have to be Siamese twins,” Agathe managed to say.
“Right, Siamese twins!” her brother echoed, gently disengaging her hand from his and carefully placing it on the coverlet. His words had a weightless sound, light and volatile, expanding in widening circles even after he had left the room.
Agathe smiled and gradually sank into a lonely sadness, whose darkness imperceptibly turned into that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile tiptoed into his study and stayed there, unable to work, for another two hours, until he, too, grew tired, learning for the first time what it was like to be cramped out of considerateness. He was amazed at how much he would have wanted to do during this time that would involve making noise and so had to be suppressed. This was new for him. And it almost irritated him a little, although he did his best to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be really physically attached to another person. He knew hardly anything about how such nervous systems worked in tandem, like two leaves on a single stalk, united not only through a single bloodstream but still more by the effect of their total interdependence. He assumed that every agitation in one soul would also be felt by the other, even though whatever evoked it was going on in a body that was not, in the main, one’s own. “An embrace, for instance—you are embraced by way of the other body,” he thought. “You may not even want it, but your other self floods you with an overwhelming wave of acceptance! What do you care who’s kissing your sister? But her excitement is something you must love jointly. Or suppose it’s you who are making love, and you have to find a way to ‘ensure’ her participation; you can’t just let her be flooded with senseless physiological processes …!” Ulrich felt a strong arousal and a great uneasiness at this idea; it was hard for him to draw the line between a new way of looking at something and a distortion of the ordinary way.
149
SPRING IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN
The praise Meingast bestowed on her and the new ideas she was getting from him had deeply impressed Clarisse.
Her mental unrest and excitability, which sometimes worried even her, had eased, but they did not give way this time, as they so often did, to dejection, frustration, and hopelessness; they were succeeded instead by an extraordinary taut lucidity and a transparent inner atmosphere. Once again she took stock of herself and arrived at a critical estimate. Without questioning it, and even with a certain satisfaction, she noted that she was not overly bright; she had not been educated enough. Ulrich, on the other hand, whenever she thought of him by comparison, was like a skater gliding to and fro at will on a surface of intellectual ice. There was no telling where it came from when he said something, or when he laughed, when he was irritable, when his eyes flashed, when he was there and with his broad shoulders preempting Walter’s space in the room. Even when he merely turned his head in curiosity, the sinews of his neck tautened like the rigging of a sailboat taking off with the wind into the blue. There was always more to him than she could grasp, which acted as a spur to her desire to fling herself on him bodily to catch hold of it. But the tumult in which this sometimes happened, so that once nothing in the world had mattered except that she wanted to bear Ulrich’s child, had now receded far into the distance, leaving behind not even that flotsam and jetsam that incomprehensibly keeps bobbing up in the memory after the tide of passion has ebbed. When she thought of her failure at Ulrich’s house, insofar as she ever still did, Clarisse felt cross, at most, but her self-confidence was hale and hearty thanks to the new ideas supplied by her philosophic guest, not to mention the sheer excitement of again seeing this old friend who had been transported into the sublime. Thus many days passed in all kinds of suspense while everyone in the little house, now bathed in spring sunshine, waited to see whether Ulrich would or would not bring the permit to visit Moosbrugger in his eerie domicile.
There was one idea in particular that seemed important to Clarisse in this connection: The Master had called the world “so thoroughly stripped of illusions” that people could no longer say about anything whether they ought to love it or hate it. Since then Clarisse felt that one was obliged to surrender oneself to an illusion if one received the grace of having one. For an illusion is a mercy. How was anyone at that time to know whether to turn right or left on leaving the house, unless he had a job, like Walter, which then cramped him, or, like herself, had a visit to pay to her parents
or brothers and sisters, who bored her! It’s different in an illusion! There life is arranged as efficiently as a modern kitchen: you sit in the middle and hardly need stir to set all the gadgets going. That had always been Clarisse’s sort of thing. Besides, she understood “illusion” to mean nothing other than what was called “the will,” only with added intensity. Up to now Clarisse had felt intimidated by being able to understand so little of what was going on in the world. But since Meingast’s return she saw this as a veritable advantage that freed her to love, hate, and act as she pleased. For according to the Master’s word mankind needed nothing so much as willpower, and when it came to wanting something with a will, Clarisse had always had that inner power! When Clarisse thought about it she was chilled with joy and hot with responsibility. Of course, what was meant by will here was not the grim effort it took to learn a piano piece or win an argument; it meant being powerfully steered by life itself, being deeply moved within oneself, being swept away with happiness!
Eventually she could not help telling Walter something about it. She informed him that her conscience was growing stronger day by day. But despite his admiration for Meingast, the suspected instigator of this deed, Walter answered angrily: “It’s probably lucky for us that Ulrich doesn’t seem able to get the permit!”
Clarisse’s lips merely quivered slightly, betraying sympathy for his ignorance and stubbornness.
“What is it you want from this criminal, anyway, who has nothing whatever to do with any of us?” Walter demanded manfully.
“It’ll come to me when I get there!” she said.
“I should think you ought to know it already,” Walter asserted.
His little wife smiled the way she always did when she was about to hurt him to the quick. But then she merely said: “I’m going to do something.”
“Clarisse!” Walter remonstrated firmly. “You may not do anything without my permission. I am your lawful husband and guardian.”
This tone was new to her. She turned away and took a few steps in confusion.
“Clarisse!” Walter called after her, getting up to follow her. “I intend to take steps to deal with the insanity that’s going around in this house!”
Now she realized that the healing power of her resolve was already manifesting itself, even in the strengthening of Walter’s character. She turned on her heel: “What steps?” she asked, and a flash of lightning from her narrowed eyes struck into the moist, wide-open brown of his.
“Now look,” he said to mollify her, backing away a little, in surprise at her demanding such a concrete response. “We’ve all got this in our system, this intellectual taste for the unhealthy, the problematic, for making our flesh creep; every thinking person has it; but—”
“But we let the philistines have their way!” Clarisse interrupted triumphantly. Now she advanced on him without taking her eyes off him; felt how a sense of her own healing power held him in its strong embrace and overpowered him. Her heart was filled with an odd and inexpressible joy.
“But we won’t make such a to-do over it,” Walter muttered sulkily, finishing his sentence. Behind him, at the hem of his jacket, he felt an obstacle; reaching backward, he identified it as the edge of one of those light, thin-legged little tables they had, which suddenly seemed spooky to him; he realized that if he kept backing away he would make it slide backward, which would be ludicrous. So he resisted the sudden desire to get far away from this struggle, to some dark-green meadow under blossoming fruit trees, among people whose healthy cheerfulness would wash his wounds clean. It was a quiet, stout wish, graced with women hanging on his words and paying their toll of grateful admiration. At the moment Clarisse came up close he actually felt rudely molested, in a nightmarish way. But to his surprise Clarisse did not say: “You’re a coward!” Instead, she said: “Walter? Why are we unhappy?”
At the sound of her appealing, clairvoyant voice he felt that happiness with any other woman could never take the place of his unhappiness with Clarisse. “We have to be!” he answered with an equally noble upsurge.
“No, we shouldn’t have to be,” she said obligingly. She let her head droop to one side, trying to find a way to convince him. It didn’t matter what it was: They stood there facing each other like a day without an evening, pouring out its fire hour after hour without lessening.
“You’ll have to admit,” she said finally, at once shyly and stubbornly, “that really great crimes come about not because somebody commits them but because we let them happen.”
Now Walter knew, of course, what was coming, and felt a shock of disappointment.
“Oh God!” he cried out impatiently. “I know as well as you do that far more people’s lives are ruined by indifference and by the ease with which most of us today can square our conscience than by the evil intentions of isolated individuals. And of course it’s admirable that you’re now going to say that this is why we must all quicken our conscience and carefully weigh in advance every step we take.”
Clarisse interrupted him by opening her mouth, but thought better of it and did not respond.
“Of course I think about poverty too, and hunger, and all the corruption that’s allowed to go on in this world, or mines caving in because the management economized on safety measures,” Walter went on in a deflated tone, “and I’ve agreed with you about it already.”
“But in that case two lovers mustn’t love each other either, as long as they’re not in a state of ‘pure happiness,’” Clarisse said. “And the world will never improve until there are such lovers!”
Walter struck his hands together. “Don’t you understand how unfair to life such great, dazzling, uncompromising demands are?” he exclaimed. “And it’s the same with this Moosbrugger, who keeps popping into your head like something on a turntable. Of course you’re right to claim that no stone should be left unturned as long as such miserable human creatures are simply killed off because society doesn’t know what to do with them. But of course it’s even more right that the healthy, normal conscience is justified in simply refusing to bother with such overrefined scruples. A healthy way of thinking is recognizable, in fact, by certain signs; one can’t prove it but has to have it in one’s blood.”
“In your blood,” Clarisse replied, “‘of course’ always means ‘of course not.’”
Nettled, Walter shook his head to show that he would not answer this. He Was fed up with always being the one to warn that a diet of one-sided ideas was unhealthy; in the long run, it was probably also making him unsure of himself.
But Clarisse read his thoughts with that nervous sensitivity that never failed to amaze him. With her head high, she jumped over all the intermediate stages and landed on his main point with the subdued but intense question: “Can you imagine Jesus as boss of a coal mine?” He could see in her face that by “Jesus” she really meant him, through one of those exaggerations in which love is indistinguishable from madness. He waved this off with a gesture at once indignant and discouraged. “Not so direct, Clarisse!” he pleaded. “Such things mustn’t be said so directly!”
“Yes, they must,” she answered. “It’s the only way! If we don’t have the strength to save him, we will never have the strength to save ourselves!”
“And what difference will it make if they do string him up?” Walter burst out. The brutality of it made him believe he felt the liberating taste of life itself on his tongue, gloriously blended with the taste of death and the doom of their entanglement with it that Clarisse was conjuring up with her hints.
Clarisse looked at him expectantly. But Walter said nothing more, either from relief after his outburst or from indecision. And like someone forced to play an unbeatable final trump card, she said: “I’ve had a sign!”
“But that’s just one of your fantasies!” Walter shouted at the ceiling, which represented heaven. But with those last airy words Clarisse had ended their tête-à-tête, giving him no chance to say anything more.
Yet he saw her only a s
hort while later talking eagerly with Meingast, who was rightly troubled by a feeling that they were being watched but was too nearsighted to be sure of it. Walter was not really participating in the gardening being done so zestfully by his visiting brother-in-law, Siegmund, who with rolled-up shirtsleeves was kneeling in a furrow doing something or other that Walter had insisted must be done in the spring if one wanted to be a human being and not a bookmark in the pages of a gardening book. Instead of gardening, Walter was sneaking glances at the pair talking in the far corner of the open kitchen garden.
Not that he suspected anything untoward in the corner he was observing. Still, his hands felt unnaturally cold in the spring air; his legs were cold too, what with the wet places on his trousers from occasionally kneeling to give Siegmund instructions. He took a high tone with his brother-in-law, the way weak, downtrodden people will whenever they get a chance to work off their frustrations on someone. He knew that Siegmund, who had taken it into his head to revere Walter, would not be easily shaken in his loyalty. But this did not prevent him from feeling a veritable after-sunset loneliness, a graveyard chill, as he watched Clarisse; she never cast a glance in his direction but was all eyes for Meingast, hanging on the Master’s words. Moreover, Walter actually took a certain pride in this. Ever since Meingast had come to stay in his house, he was just as proud of the chasms that suddenly opened up in it as he was anxious to cover them up again. From his standing height he had dispatched to the kneeling Siegmund the words: “Of course we all feel and are familiar with a certain hankering for the morbid and problematic!” He was no sneaking coward. In the short time since Clarisse had called him a philistine for saying the same thing to her, he had formulated a new phrase: “life’s petty dishonesty.”