by Robert Musil
Robert Musil
The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2
Into the Millennium
From the Posthumous Papers
1961
PART III
INTO THE MILLENNIUM
(THE CRIMINALS)
1
THE FORGOTTEN SISTER
On his arrival in ——— toward evening of the same day, as Ulrich came out of the station he saw before him a wide, shallow square that opened into streets at both ends and jolted his memory almost painfully, as happens with a landscape one has seen often and then forgotten again.
“Believe me, income has dropped by twenty percent and prices have gone up twenty percent, that’s a total of forty percent!” “Believe me, a six-day bike race promotes international goodwill like nothing else!” These voices were still coming out of his ear: train voices. Then he distinctly heard someone saying: “Still, for me, there’s nothing to beat opera!” “Is that your hobby?” “It’s my passion.”
He tilted his head as though to shake water out of his ear. The train had been crowded, the journey long. Driblets of the general conversation around him that had seeped into him during the trip were oozing out again. Ulrich had waited for the joyfulness and bustle of arrival—which had poured into the quiet square from the station exit as from the mouth of a drainpipe—to subside to a trickle; now he was standing in the vacuum of silence left behind by such noise. But even as his hearing was still disturbed from the abrupt change, he was struck by an unaccustomed peace that met his eyes. Everything visible was more intensely so than usual, and when he looked across the square the crossbars of perfectly ordinary windows stood as black against the pale sheen of glass in the dimming light as if they were the crosses of Golgotha. And everything that moved seemed to detach itself from the calm of the street in a way that never happens in very large cities. Whether passing or standing still, things evidently had the space here in which to make their importance felt. He could see this with the curiosity of reacquaintance as he gazed out on the large provincial town where he had spent some brief, not very pleasant, parts of his life. It had, as he well knew, an air of someplace colonial, a place of exile: here a nucleus of ancient German burgher stock, transplanted centuries ago to Slavic soil, had withered away so that hardly anything was left, apart from a few churches and family names, to remind one of it; nor, except for a fine old palace that had been preserved, was there evidence of its having become, later on, the old seat of the Provincial Diet. But in the era of absolute rule this past had been overlaid by a vast apparatus of imperial administration, with its provincial headquarters, schools and universities, barracks, courthouses, prisons, bishop’s palace, assembly rooms, and theater, together with the people needed to run them and the merchants and artisans who came in their wake, until finally an industry of entrepreneurs moved in, filling the suburbs with their factories one after the other, with a greater influence on the fate of this piece of earth in the past few generations than anything else had had. This town had a past, and it even had a face, but die eyes did not go with the mouth, or the chin with the hair; over everything lay the traces of a hectic life that is inwardly empty. This could possibly, under special personal circumstances, foster great originality.
To sum it up in a phrase perhaps equally arguable, Ulrich had the sense of something “spiritually insubstantial in which one lost oneself so entirely as to awaken unbridled imaginings. In his pocket he carried his father’s eccentric telegram, which he knew by heart: “This is to inform you that I am deceased” was the old gentleman’s message for him—or was it to him? as indicated by the signature at the end: “Your father.” His Excellency the Privy Councillor never went in for levity at serious moments. The weird information of the message was consequently infernally logical, since he was himself notifying his son when, in expectation of his end, he wrote or dictated word for word the message that was to be dispatched the instant he had drawn his last breath; the facts could really not be more correctly stated, and yet this act by which the present tried to dominate a future it could not live to see emitted from the grave an uncanny whiff of an angrily decayed will!
This manifestation, which somehow reminded Ulrich of the meticulously undiscriminating taste of small towns, made him think with some misgiving of his sister, who had married in the provinces and whom he was about to meet, in the next few minutes. He had been wondering about her already on the train, for he did not know much about her. From time to time standard items of family news reached him through his father’s letters; for example: “Your sister Agathe is married,” adding some of the details, since at the time Ulrich had not been able to come home for the wedding. Only about a year later he received notice of the young husband’s death; then, three years or so after that, if he was not mistaken, word came that ‘Tour sister Agathe, I am glad to say, has decided to marry again.” At this second wedding, five years ago, Ulrich had been present and had seen his sister for a few days, but all he remembered was a ceaseless whirl, like a giant wheel of white cambric and lace. He also remembered the bridegroom, who made a poor impression on him. Agathe must have been twenty-two then, while he was twenty-seven, for he had just received his doctorate, so that his sister had to be twenty-seven now; but he had not seen her since that time, nor exchanged letters with her. He recalled only that his father had later written more than once: “It pains me to report that all does not seem to be going as well as it might in your sister’s marriage, although her husband is a capital fellow” and “The latest successes of your sister Agathe’s husband have been most gratifying”: Such, more or less, were his father’s comments in letters to which Ulrich had, regrettably, never paid any attention; but once, as he now remembered quite clearly, in connection with a disapproving comment on his sister’s childlessness, their father expressed the hope that she was nevertheless contented in her marriage, although it was not in her character ever to admit it.
“I wonder what she looks like now,” he thought.
It had been one of the old gentleman’s eccentricities to keep them conscientiously informed about each other after he had sent them away from home at a tender age, right after their mother’s death, to be educated in different schools. Ulrich, who got into scrapes, was often not allowed home for school holidays; so that since their childhood, when they had in fact been inseparable, he had hardly seen his sister again, with the exception of one longish visit when Agathe was ten.
In the circumstances, Ulrich had thought it only natural that they did not write. What would they have had to say to each other? At the time of Agathe’s first marriage he was, as he now remembered, a lieutenant in the army, and in the hospital recovering from a bullet wound received in a duel: Lord, what an ass he had been! In fact, he had made every kind of ass of himself. For he remembered now that the memory of the wounded lieutenant belonged someplace else. He had been about to qualify as an engineer and had something “important” to do that had kept him from the family ceremony. Later he learned that his sister had been very much in love with her first husband; he could not remember who had told him, but what does “very much in love” mean anyway? It’s what people say. She had married again, and Ulrich could not stand her second husband; that was the one thing he was sure of. He disliked him not only for the bad impression he made personally but also for that made by some of his books, which Ulrich had read, so that Ulrich’s subsequent forgetting of his sister might not have been quite unintentional. It was nothing to be proud of, but he had to admit that even during this last year, when he had thought of so many things, he had never given her a thought, not even when he had received the news of their father’s death. But he did ask the old manservant
who came to meet him at the station whether his brother-in-law had arrived yet, and was relieved to hear that Professor Hagauer was not expected until the day of the funeral. Even though it could be no more than two or three days till then, it seemed to him like a respite of indefinite duration, which he would spend alone with his sister as though they were the closest people in the world. There would have been no point in trying to see any logic in this; the thought of “my unknown sister” was evidently one of those roomy abstractions in which many feelings that are not quite at home anywhere could find a place.
Thus preoccupied, Ulrich had walked slowly into the town that opened up before him, at once strange and familiar. He had sent on his luggage, into which he had stuffed quite a number of books at the last minute, in a cab with the old servant, a part of his childhood memories, who had come to combine the functions of caretaker, butler, and clerk in a fashion that over the years made them hard to distinguish from one another. It was probably this self-effacing, taciturn man to whom Ulrich’s father had dictated his death notice, and Ulrich’s feet led him homeward in pleasurable wonder as his now alert senses curiously took in the fresh impressions that every growing city springs on someone who has not seen it for a long time. At a certain point, which they remembered before he did, Ulrich’s feet turned off the main street, and he soon found himself in a narrow lane formed by two garden walls. Diagonally across his path stood the house of barely two stories, the main building higher than the wings, with the old stable to one side and, still pressed against the garden wall, the little house where the servant and his wife lived; it looked as though for all his confidence in them the aged master had wished to keep them as far as possible from him while still embracing them within his walls. Ulrich had absently walked up to the locked garden gate and dropped the big ring-shaped knocker that hung there in lieu of a bell against the low door, black with age, before the servant came running up to correct his error. They had to go back around the wall to the main entrance, where the cab had drawn up, and it was only at this moment, seeing the shuttered facade of the house before him, that it occurred to Ulrich that his sister had not come to meet him at the station. The servant reported that Madame had a migraine and had retired after lunch, ordering them to wake her when the Herr Doktor arrived. Did his sister suffer from migraine often? Ulrich went on to ask, then instantly regretted his slip in drawing the old servant’s attention to family matters that were better passed over in silence.
“The young Madame gave orders for tea to be served in half an hour,” the well-trained old man replied, with a servant’s politely blank expression giving discreet assurance that he understood nothing beyond his duty.
Spontaneously Ulrich glanced up at the windows, supposing that Agathe might be standing there observing his arrival. He wondered whether she would be agreeable, becoming uneasily aware how awkward the visit would be if he happened not to like her. That she had neither come to meet his train nor met him at the house door was disntinctly in her favor, however, showing a certain rapport of feeling: rushing to meet him, after all, would have been as uncalled for as it would have been for him on arrival to rush to his father’s coffin. He left word for her that he would be down in half an hour, and went to his room to get himself in order. The room he was to stay in was in the mansard-roofed second story of the main house and had been his childhood room, now curiously supplemented by the addition of a few random pieces for an adult’s comfort. “It was probably the best they could do as long as the body is still in the house,” Ulrich thought, settling in among the ruins of his childhood a little awkwardly, yet also with a rather warm feeling that seemed to rise like mist from the floor. As he started to change it occurred to him to put on a pajama-like lounging suit he came across while unpacking. “She might at least have come down to say hello when I got here,” he thought, and there was a hint of rebuke in his casual choice of dress, even as he continued to feel that his sisters reason for acting as she did was likely to be a congenial one, so that he was also complimenting her by his unforced expression of ease.
The loose lounging suit of soft wool he put on was patterned in black and gray squares, almost a Pierrot costume, gathered at the waist, wrists, and ankles; he liked its comfort, which felt pleasant after that sleepless night and the long train journey, as he came down the stairs. But when he entered the room where his sister was waiting, he was amazed at his costume, for by some mysterious directive of chance he found his appearance echoed in that of a tall, blond Pierrot in a pattern of delicate gray and rust stripes and lozenges, who at first glance looked quite like himself.
“I had no idea we were twins!” Agathe said, her face lighting up with a smile.
2
CONFIDENCES
They did not greet each other with a kiss but merely stood amicably facing each other, then moved apart, and Ulrich was able to take a good look at his sister. They were of matching height. Agathe’s hair was fairer than his and had the same dry fragrance as her skin, the fragrance that was the only thing he liked about his own body. Instead of being all bosom she had small, firm breasts, and her limbs seemed to have the long, slender spindle shape that combines natural athletic ability and beauty.
“I hope you’re over your migraine,” Ulrich said. “It doesn’t show.”
“I never had migraine; it was just the simplest thing to say,” Agathe explained. “I couldn’t very well send you a long and complicated message through the servants. I was lazy, that’s all. I took a nap. In this house I’ve got into the habit of sleeping every chance I get. I’m basically lazy—out of desperation, I think. And when I heard you were coming I thought, ‘Let’s hope this is the last time I feel sleepy,’ and I gave myself up to a sort of sleep cure. I thought it over carefully and then, for the butler’s convenience, decided to call it migraine.”
“Don’t you go in for any sports?” Ulrich asked.
“Some tennis. But I detest sports.”
As she spoke, he studied her face again. It did not seem very like his own, but perhaps he was mistaken; maybe it was like the same face done in pastels and in a woodcut, the difference in the medium obscuring the congruence of line and plane. There was something in this face he found disturbing. After a while, he realized that he simply could not read its expression; what was missing was whatever it is that enables one to draw the usual inferences about the person. It was an expressive face, but nothing in it was emphasized, nothing combined in the way that normally suggests traits of character.
“How did you happen to dress like that?” Ulrich asked.
“No special reason. I thought it would be nice.”
“It’s very nice!” Ulrich laughed. “But positively a conjuring trick of chance! And Father’s death doesn’t seem to have greatly upset you either?”
Agathe rose slowly on her toes and then just as slowly sank back on her heels.
“Is your husband here yet?” her brother asked, just to say something.
“Professor Hagauer is coming for the funeral.” She seemed to relish the occasion to pronounce that name so formally and to dissociate herself from it as if it were some strange object.
Ulrich was at a loss how to respond. “Oh yes, so I was told,” he said.
Again they looked at each other, and then they went, as the proper next step, into the little room where the body lay.
The room had been kept artificially dark for a whole day; it was drenched in black. Flowers and lighted candles glowed and scented the air. The two Pierrots stood straight as they faced the dead man, as if watching him.
“I’ll never go back to Hagauer,” Agathe said, just to get it out. One could almost think she wanted the dead man to hear it too.
There he lay on his bier, as he had directed: in full evening dress, the pall drawn halfway down his chest to expose the stiff shirtfront with all his decorations, his hands folded without a crucifix. Small, hard-ridged brows, sunken cheeks and lips. Stitched into the horrible, eyeless corpse’s skin, which is sti
ll a part of the personality and yet already something apart: life’s traveling bag. In spite of himself, Ulrich felt shaken at his very core, deep beneath any feeling or thought; but nowhere else. If he had had to put it into words, he would only have been able to say that a tiresome, loveless relationship had come to an end. Just as a bad marriage debases the people who cannot get free of it, so does every burdensome bond meant to last forever when the mortal substance shrivels away from under it.
“I would have liked you to come sooner,” Agathe went on, “but Papa wouldn’t have it. He made all the arrangements for his death himself. I think he would have been embarrassed to die with you looking on. I’ve been living here for two weeks now; it’s been horrible.”
“Did he love you, at least?” Ulrich asked.
“Whatever he wanted done he told old Franz to take care of, and from then on he gave the impression of someone who has nothing to do and has no purpose in life. But every fifteen minutes or so he’d lift up his head to check whether I was still in the room. For the first few days, that is. Then it was only every half hour, then every hour, and during that frightful last day it happened only two or three times. And all that time he never said a word to me except when I asked him something.”
As she spoke, Ulrich was thinking: “She’s really hard. Even as a child she could be incredibly stubborn, in her quiet way. And yet she seems to be amenable enough….” And suddenly he thought of an avalanche. He had once almost lost his life in a forest that was being devastated by an avalanche. It had been no more than a soft cloud of powdery snow, and yet the irresistible force behind it gave it the impact of a toppling mountain.
“Was it you who sent me the telegram?” he asked.
“That was old Franz, of course. It was all settled beforehand. He wouldn’t let me take care of him, either. He certainly never loved me, and I don’t know why he sent for me. I felt miserable and shut myself up in my room as often as I could. It was during one of those times that he died.”