by Robert Musil
In these circumstances they also did not have the right domestic help. The well-trained servant Ulrich had taken on temporarily when he moved in—an old man about to retire and only waiting for some technicality to be settled first—could not be expected to do more than the minimum Ulrich expected of him; the part of lady’s maid fell to Ulrich himself, since the room where a regular maid might be lodged was, like everything else, still in the realm of good intentions, and a few efforts in that direction had not brought good results. Instead, Ulrich was making great strides as a squire arming his lady knight to set forth on her social conquests. In addition, Agathe had done some shopping to supplement her wardrobe, and her acquisitions were strewn all over the house, which was nowhere equipped for the demands of a lady. She had acquired the habit of using the entire house as a dressing room, so that Ulrich willy-nilly took part in her new purchases. The doors between rooms were left open, his gymnastic apparatus served as clotheshorse and coatrack, and he would be called away from his desk for conferences like Cincinnatus from his plow. This interference with his latent but at least potential will to work was something he put up with not merely because he thought it would pass but because he enjoyed it; it was something new and made him feel young again. His sister’s vivacity, idle as it might appear to be, crackled in his loneliness like a small fire in a long-unused stove. Bright waves of charming gaiety, dark waves of warm trustfulness, filled the space in which he lived, taking from it the nature of a space in which he up till then had moved only at the dictates of his own will. But what was most amazing about this inexhaustible fountain of another presence was that the sum of the countless trifles of which it consisted added up to a non-sum that was of a quite different kind: his impatience with wasting his time, that unquenchable feeling that had never left him since he could remember, no matter what he had taken up that was supposed to be great and important, was to his astonishment totally gone, and for the first time he loved his day-to-day life without thinking.
He even overdid it a little, gasping in delight when Agathe, with the seriousness women feel in these matters, offered for his admiration the thousand charming things she had been buying. He acted as if the quaint workings of a woman’s nature—which, on the same level of intelligence, is more sensitive than the male and therefore more susceptible to the suggestion of dressing up to a point of crass self-display that is even further removed from the ideal of a cultivated humanity than the man’s nature—irresistibly compelled his participation. And perhaps it really was so. For the many small, tender, absurd notions he became involved with—tricking oneself out with glass beads, crimping the hair, the mindless arrangements of lace and embroidery, the ruthless seductive colors: charms so akin to the tinfoil stars at the fairgrounds that every intelligent woman sees right through them without in the least losing her taste for them—began to entangle him in the network of their glittering madness. For the moment one begins to take anything, no matter how foolish or tasteless, seriously and puts oneself on its level, it begins to reveal a rationale of its own, the intoxicating scent of its love for itself, its innate urge to play and to please. This was what happened to Ulrich when he helped equip Agathe with her new outfits. He fetched and carried, admired, appraised, was asked for advice, helped with trying on. He stood with Agathe in front of the mirror. Nowadays, when a woman’s appearance suggests that of a well-plucked fowl ready for the oven, it is hard to imagine her predecessor’s appearance in all its charm of endlessly titillated desire, which has meanwhile become ridiculous: the long skirt, to all appearances sewn to the floor by the dressmaker and yet miraculously in motion, enclosing other, secret gossamer skirts beneath it, pastel-shaded silk flower petals whose softly fluttering movements suddenly turned into even finer tissues of white, which were the first to touch the body itself with their soft foam. And if these clothes resembled waves in that they drew the eye seductively and yet repulsed it, they were also an ingenious contrivance of way stations and intermediate fortifications around expertly guarded marvels and, for all their unnaturalness, a cleverly curtained theater of the erotic, whose breathtaking darkness was lit only by the feeble light of the imagination. It was these quintessential preliminaries that Ulrich now saw removed daily, taken apart, as it were from the inside. Even though a woman’s secrets had long since lost their mystery for him, or just because he had always only rushed through them as anterooms or outer gardens, they had quite a different effect on him now that there was no gateway or goal for him. The tension that lies in all these things struck back. Ulrich could hardly have said what changes it wrought. He rightly regarded himself as a man of masculine temperament, and he could understand being attracted by seeing what he so often desired from its other side, for once, but at times it was almost uncanny, and he warded it off with a laugh.
“As if the walls of a girls’ boarding school had sprouted all around me in the night, completely locking me in!” he protested.
“Is that so terrible?” Agathe asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
Then he called her a flesh-eating plant and himself a miserable insect that had crawled into her shimmering calyx. “You’ve closed it around me,” he said, “and now I’m sitting surrounded by colors, perfume, and radiance, already a part of you in spite of myself, waiting for the males we’re going to attract!”
And it really was uncanny for him to witness the effect his sister had on men, considering his concern to “get her a husband.” He was not jealous—in what capacity could he have been?—and put her interests ahead of his, hoping that the right man would soon come along to release her from this interim phase in which leaving Hagauer had placed her; and yet, when he saw her surrounded by men paying her attentions, or when a man on the street, attracted by her beauty and ignoring her escort, gave her a bold stare, Ulrich did not know what to make of his feelings. Here too, natural male jealousy being forbidden him, he often felt somehow caught up in a world he had never entered before. He knew from experience all about the male mating dance as well as the female’s warier technique in love, and when he saw Agathe being treated to the one and responding with the other, it pained him; he felt as if he were watching the courtship of horses or mice, the sniffing and whinnying, the pouting and baring of teeth, with which strangers parade their self-regard and regard of the opposite sex; to Ulrich, observing this without empathy, it was nauseating, like some stupefaction welling up from within the body. And if he nevertheless tried to put himself in his sister’s place, prompted by some deep-seated emotional need, it sometimes would not have taken much afterward for him to feel, not just bewilderment at such tolerance, but the sort of shame a normal man feels when deviously approached by one who is not. When he let Agathe in on this, she laughed.
“There are also several women among our friends who take an interest in you,” she said.
What was going on here?
Ulrich said: “Basically it’s a protest against the world!” And then he said: “You know Walter: It’s been a long time since we’ve liked each other. But even when I’m annoyed with him and know that I irritate him too, I nevertheless often feel, at the mere sight of him, a certain warmth as if we understood each other perfectly, as in fact we don’t. Look, there’s so much in life we understand without agreeing with it; that’s why accepting someone from the beginning, before understanding him, is pure mindless magic, like water in spring running down all the hillsides to the valley!”
What he felt was: “That’s the way it is now!” And what he thought was: “Whenever I succeed in shedding all my selfish and egocentric feelings toward Agathe, and every single hateful feeling of indifference too, she draws all the qualities out of me the way the Magnetic Mountain draws the nails out of a ship! She leaves me morally dissolved into a primary atomic state, one in which I am neither myself nor her. Could this be bliss?”
But all he said was: “Watching you is so much fun!”
Agathe blushed deeply and said: “Why is that ‘fun’?
”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you’re self-conscious with me in the room,” Ulrich said. “But then you remember that, after all, I’m ‘only your brother.’ And at other times you don’t seem to mind at all when I catch you in circumstances that would be most interesting for a stranger, but then it suddenly occurs to you that I shouldn’t be looking at you, and you make me look the other way… .”
“And why is that fun?” Agathe asked.
“Maybe it’s a form of happiness to follow another person with one’s eyes for no reason at all,” Ulrich said. “It’s like a child’s love for its possessions, without the child’s intellectual helplessness… .”
“Maybe it’s fun for you to play at brother-and-sister only because you’ve had more than enough of playing at man-and-woman?”
“That too,” Ulrich said, watching her. “Love is basically a simple urge to come close, to grab at something that has been split into two poles, lady and gentleman, with incredible tensions, frustrations, spasms, and perversions arising in between. We’ve now had enough of this inflated ideology; it’s become nearly as ridiculous as a science of eating. I’m convinced most people would be glad if this connection between an epidermic itch and the entire personality could be revoked. And sooner or later there will be an era of simple sexual companionship in which boy and girl will stand in perfectly tuned incomprehension, staring at an old heap of broken springs that used to be Man and Woman.”
“But if I were to tell you that Hagauer and I were pioneers of that era you would hold it against me!” Agathe retorted, with a smile as astringent as good dry wine.
“I no longer hold things against people,” Ulrich said. He smiled. “A warrior unbuckled from his armor. For the first time since God knows when, he feels nature’s air instead of hammered iron on his skin and sees his body growing so lax and frail that the birds might carry him off,” he assured her.
And still smiling, simply forgetting to stop smiling, he contemplated his sister as she sat on the edge of a table, swinging one leg in its black silk stocking; aside from her chemise, she was wearing only short panties. But these were somehow fragmentary impressions, detached, solitary images, as it were. “She’s my friend, in the delightful guise of a woman,” Ulrich thought. “Though this is complicated by her really being a woman!”
And Agathe asked him: “Is there really no such thing as love?”
“Yes, there is,” Ulrich said. “But it’s the exception. You have to make distinctions. There is first of all a physical experience, to be classed with other irritations of the skin, a purely sensory indulgence without any requisite moral or emotional accessories. Second, emotions are usually involved, which become intensely associated with the physical experience, but in such a way that with slight variations they are the same for everyone; so that even the compulsory sameness of love’s climax belongs on the physical-mechanical level rather than on that of the soul. Finally, there is also the real spiritual experience of love, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other two. One can love God, one can love the world; perhaps one can only love God and the world. Anyway, it’s not necessary to love a person. But if one does, the physical element takes over the whole world, so that it turns everything upside down, as it were… .” Ulrich broke off.
Agathe had flushed a dark red. If Ulrich had deliberately chosen and ordered his words with the hypocritical intention of suggesting to Agathe’s imagination the physical act of love inevitably associated with them, he could not have succeeded better.
He looked around for a match, simply to undo the unintended effect of his speech by some diversion. “Anyway,” he said, “love, if that is love, is an exceptional case, and can’t serve as a model for everyday action.”
Agathe had reached for the corners of the tablecloth and wrapped them around her legs. “Wouldn’t strangers, who saw and heard us, talk about a perverse feeling?” she asked suddenly.
“Nonsense!” Ulrich maintained. “What each of us feels is the shadowy doubling of his own self in the other’s opposite nature. I’m a man, you’re a woman; it’s widely believed that every person bears within him the shadowy or repressed opposite inclination; at least each of us has this longing, unless he’s disgustingly self-satisfied. So my counterpart has come to light and slipped into you, and yours into me, and they feel marvelous in their exchanged bodies, simply because they don’t have much respect for their previous environment and the view from it!”
Agathe thought: “He’s gone into all that more deeply before. Why is he attenuating it now?”
What Ulrich was saying did, of course, fit quite well with the life they were leading as two companions who occasionally, when the company of others leaves them free, take time to marvel at the fact that they are man and woman but at the same time twins. Once two people find themselves in such an accord their relations with the world as individuals take on the charm of an invisible game of hide-and-seek, each switching bodies and costumes with the other, practicing their carefree two-in-one deception for an unsuspecting world behind two lands of masks. But this playful and overemphatic fun—as children sometimes make noise instead of being noisy—was not in keeping with the gravity that sometimes, from a great height, laid its shadow on the hearts of this brother and sister, making them fall unexpectedly silent. So it happened one evening, as they exchanged a few chance words more before going to bed, that Ulrich saw his sister in her long nightgown and tried to joke about it, saying: “A hundred years ago I would have cried out: ‘My angel!’ Too bad the term has become obsolete!” He fell silent, disconcerted by the thought: “Isn’t that the only word I should be using for her? Not friend, not wife! ‘Heavenly creature!’ was another term they used. Ridiculously high-flown, of course, but nevertheless better than not having the courage of one’s convictions.”
Agathe was thinking: “A man in pajamas doesn’t look like an angel!” But he did look fierce and broad-shouldered, and she suddenly felt ashamed of her wish that this strong face framed in tousled hair might cast its shadow over her eyes. In some physically innocent way she was sensually aroused; her blood was pulsing through her body in wild waves, spreading over her skin while leaving her drained and weak inside. Since she was not such a fanatical person as her brother, she simply felt what she felt. When she was tender, she was tender, not lit up with ideas or moral impulses, even though this was something she loved in him as much as she shrank from it.
Again and again, day after day, Ulrich summed it all up in the idea: Basically, it’s a protest against life! They walked arm in arm through the city: well matched in height, well matched in age, well matched in their attitude to things. Strolling along side by side, they could not see much of each other. Tall figures, pleasing to one another, they walked together for the sheer enjoyment of it, feeling at every step the breath of their contact in the midst of all the strangeness surrounding them. We belong together! This feeling, far from uncommon, made them happy, and half within it, half in resistance to it, Ulrich said: “It’s funny we should be so content to be brother and sister. The world in general regards it as a commonplace relationship, but we’re making something special of it!”
Perhaps he had hurt her feelings in saying this. He added: “But it’s what I’ve always wished for. When I was a boy I made up my mind to marry only a woman I’d have adopted as a child and brought up myself. I think plenty of men have such fantasies; they’re pretty banal, I suppose. But as an adult I actually once fell in love with such a child, though it was only for two or three hours!” And he went on to tell her about it:
“It happened on a streetcar. A little girl of about twelve got on, with her very young father or her older brother. The way she got on, sat down, and casually handed the fare to the conductor for both of them, she was every inch a lady, without a trace of childish affectation. It was the same when she talked to her companion, or quietly listened to him. She was extraordinarily beautiful: brunette, with full lips, strong eyebrows, a slightly t
urned-up nose; perhaps a dark-haired Polish girl, or a southern Slav. As I recall, the dress she was wearing suggested some national costume: long jacket, tight waist, laced bodice, and frills at the throat and wrists, all in its way as perfect as the little person herself. Perhaps she was Albanian. I was sitting too far away to be able to hear what she was saying. It struck me that the features of her grave little face were mature beyond her years, so that she seemed fully adult; yet it was not the face of a dwarfishly tiny woman, but unquestionably that of a child. On the other hand, it was not at all the immature stage of an adult’s face. It seems that a woman’s face may sometimes be complete at the age of twelve, formed even spiritually like a perfect first sketch from the hand of a master, so that everything added later to develop the picture only spoils its original greatness. One can fall passionately in love with such a phenomenon, mortally so, and really without any physical desire. I remember I glanced around nervously at the other passengers, because I felt as if I were falling apart. When she got off, I got off, too, but lost her in the crowded street,” he ended his little story.
After giving it a moment or two, Agathe asked with a smile: “And how does that fit in with the time for love being over, leaving only sex and companionship?”
“It doesn’t fit in at all!” Ulrich laughed.
His sister thought about it, and remarked with a noticeable harshness—it seemed to be an intentional repetition of the words he had used the evening of her arrival: “All men like to play at little-brother-and-little-sister. There must really be some stupid idea behind it. These little brothers and sisters call each other ‘father’ and ‘mother’ when they’re not quite sober.”
Ulrich was taken aback. It was not merely that Agathe was right, for gifted women are merciless observers of the men they love in their lives; but not being inclined to theorize, they make no use of their discoveries except when provoked. He felt somewhat affronted.