by Robert Musil
He scrutinized it for resemblances. Perhaps there were some. Perhaps it was all there: their race, their ties with the past, the impersonal element, the stream of heredity in which the individual is only a ripple, the limitations, disillusionments, the endless repetitiveness of the mind going around in circles, which he hated with every fiber of his deepest will to live.
In a sudden fit of discouragement he thought of packing up and leaving even before the funeral. If there really was something he could still achieve in life, what was he doing here?
But in the doorway he bumped into his sister, who had come looking for him.
4
OLD ACQUAINTANCE
For the first time Ulrich saw her dressed as a woman, and after his impression of her yesterday she seemed to be in disguise. Through the open door artificial light mingled with the tremulous gray of mid-morning, and this black apparition with blond hair seemed to be standing in an ethereal grotto through which radiant splendor flowed. Agathe’s hair was drawn back closer to her head, making her face look more feminine than it had yesterday. Her delicate womanly breasts were embedded in the black of the severe dress in that perfect balance between yielding and resistance characteristic of the feather-light hardness of a pearl; the slim long legs he had seen yesterday as so like his own were now curtained by a skirt. Now that her appearance as a whole was less like his own, he could see how alike their faces were. He felt as if it were his own self that had entered through a door and was coming to meet him, though it was a more beautiful self, with an aura in which he never saw himself. For the first time it flashed on him that his sister was a dreamlike repetition and variant of himself, but as the impression lasted only a moment he forgot it again.
Agathe had come to remind her brother of certain duties that were on the point of being delayed too long, for she had overslept. She held their father’s will in her hands and drew Ulrich’s attention to some dispositions in it that must be dealt with at once. Most urgent was a rather odd stipulation about the old man’s decorations, which was also known to the servant Franz. Agathe had zealously, if somewhat irreverently, underlined this point in the will in red pencil. The deceased had wanted to be buried with his decorations on his chest, and he had quite a few of them, but since it was not from vanity that he wanted this done he had added a long and ruminative justification of this wish. His daughter had read only the beginning, leaving it to her brother to explain the rest to her.
“Now, how shall I put it?” Ulrich said after he had read the passage. “Papa wants to be buried with all his decorations because he considers the individualistic theory of the state to be false! He favors the universalist view: It is only through the creative community of the state that the individual gains a purpose that transcends the merely personal, a sense of value and justice. Alone he is nothing, which is why the monarch personifies a spiritual symbol. In short, when a man dies he should wrap himself in his decorations as a dead sailor is wrapped in the flag when his body is consigned to the sea!”
“But didn’t I read somewhere that these medals have to be given back?”
“The heirs are obliged to return the medals to the Chamberlain’s Office. So Papa had duplicates made. Still, he seems to feel that the ones he bought are not quite the real thing, so he wants us to substitute them for the originals only when they close the coffin; that’s the trouble. Who knows, perhaps that’s his silent protest against the regulation, which he wouldn’t express any other way.”
“But by that time there’ll be hundreds of people here, and we’ll forget!” Agathe worried.
“We might just as well do it now.”
“There’s no time now. You’d better read the next part, what he writes about Professor Schwung. Professor Schwung may be here at any moment; I was expecting him all day yesterday.”
“Then let’s do it after Schwung leaves.”
“But it’s not very nice,” Agathe objected, “not to let him have his wish.”
“He’ll never know it.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Are you sure of that?”
“Oh?” Ulrich laughed. “Are you not quite sure, by any chance?”
“I’m not sure about anything,” Agathe answered.
“Even if it weren’t sure, he was never satisfied with us anyway.”
“That’s true,” Agathe said. “All right, let’s do it later. But tell me something,” she added. “Don’t you ever bother about what’s expected of you?”
Ulrich hesitated. “She has a good dressmaker,” he thought. “I needn’t have worried that she might be provincial!” But because these words somehow brought back all yesterday evening, he tried to think of an answer that would really be appropriate and helpful to her; but he could not find a way to put it that would not cause misunderstanding, so he ended up with involuntarily youthful brashness:
“It’s not only Father who’s dead; all the ceremonials around him are dead too. His will is dead. The people who turn up here are dead. I’m not trying to be nasty; God knows we probably ought to be grateful to all those who shore up the world we live in: but all that is the limestone of life, not its oceans!” He noticed a puzzled glance from his sister and realized how obscurely he was talking. “Society’s virtues are vices to the saint,” he ended with a laugh.
He put his hands on her shoulders, in a gesture that could have been construed as either patronizing or high-spirited but sprang only from embarrassment. Yet Agathe stepped back with a serious face and would not go along.
“Did you make that up yourself?” she asked.
“No; a man whom I love said it.”
She had the sullenness of a child forcing itself to think hard as she tried to sum up his responses in one statement: “So you would hardly call a man who is honest out of habit a good man? But a thief who steals for the first time, with his heart pounding, you’ll call a good man?”
These odd words took Ulrich aback, and he became more serious.
“I really don’t know,” he said abruptly. “In some situations I personally don’t very much care whether something is considered right or wrong, but I can’t give you any rules you could go by.”
Agathe slowly turned her questioning gaze away from him and picked up the will again. “We must get on with this; here’s another marked passage,” she admonished herself.
Before taking to his bed for the last time the old gentleman had written a number of letters, and his will contained explanations elucidating them and directions for sending them. The marked passage referred to Professor Schwung, one of his old colleagues, who after a lifelong friendship had so galled the last year of his life by opposing his view on the statute relating to diminished responsibility. Ulrich immediately recognized the familiar long-drawn-out arguments about illusion and will, the sharpness of law and the ambiguity of nature, which his father had summarized for him again before his death. Indeed, nothing seemed to have been so much on his mind in his final days as Schwung’s denunciation of the social school of thought, which his father had joined, as an emanation of Prussian influence. He had just begun to outline a pamphlet that was to have been titled “The State and the Law; or, Consistency and Denunciation,” when he felt his strength beginning to fail and saw with bitterness the enemy left in sole possession of the field. In solemn words such as are inspired only by the imminence of death and the struggle to preserve that sacred possession, one’s reputation, he enjoined his children not to let his work fall into oblivion, and most particularly charged his son to cultivate the influential connections he owed to his father’s tireless efforts, in order to crush totally all Professor Schwung’s hopes of realizing his aims.
Once one has expressed oneself in this fashion, then after one’s task is done, or at least the way is paved for its completion, it by no means precludes one’s feeling the urge to forgive a former friend such errors as have arisen from gross vanity. When a man is seriously ill and feels his mortal coil quietly uncoiling, he is inclined to forgive and ask
forgiveness; but when he feels better he takes it all back, because the healthy body is by nature implacable. The old gentleman must have experienced both these states of mind as his condition fluctuated during his last illness, and the one must have seemed as justified as the other. But such a situation is unbearable for a distinguished jurist, and so his logically trained mind had devised a means of leaving his last will unassailably valid, impervious to the influence of any last-minute emotional waverings: He wrote a letter of forgiveness but left it unsigned and undated, with instructions for Ulrich to date it at the hour of his father’s death, then sign it together with his sister Agathe as proxies, as can be done with an oral will when a dying man no longer has the strength to sign his name. Actually, he was, without wanting to admit it, an odd fish, this little old man who had always submitted to the hierarchies of existence and defended them as their most zealous servant while stifling within himself all sorts of rebellious impulses, for which, in his chosen course of life, he could never find an outlet. Ulrich was reminded of the death notice he had received, which had probably been dictated in the same frame of mind; he even almost recognized a certain kinship with himself in it, though not resentfully this time but with compassion, at least in the sense that he could see how the old man’s lifelong frustration at not being able to express his feelings must have led to his being infuriated to the point of hatred by this son who made life easy for himself by taking unpardonable liberties. For this is how the ways of sons always appear to father’s, and Ulrich felt a twinge of filial sympathy as he thought of all that was still unresolved inside himself. But he no longer had time to find some appropriate expression for all this that Agathe would also understand; he had just begun when a man swung with great energy into the twilit room. He strode in, hurled forward by his own energy right into the shimmer of the candlelight, before the derailed old servant could catch up to announce him. He lifted his arm in another wide sweep to shield his eyes with his hand, one step from the bier.
“My revered friend!” the visitor intoned sonorously. And the little old man lay with clenched jaws in the presence of his enemy Schwung.
“Ah, my dear young friends,” Professor Schwung continued: “Above us the majesty of the starry firmament, within us the majesty of the moral law!” With veiled eyes he gazed down upon his faculty colleague. “Within this breast now cold there lived the majesty of the moral law!” Only then did he turn around to shake hands with the brother and sister.
Ulrich took this first opportunity to acquit himself of his charge.
“You and my father were unfortunately at odds with each other lately, sir?” he opened cautiously.
For a moment the graybeard did not seem to catch his meaning.
“Differences of opinion, hardly worth mentioning!” he replied magnanimously, gazing earnestly at the deceased. But when Ulrich politely persisted, hinting that a last will was involved, the situation in the room suddenly became tense, the way it does in a low-down dive when everyone knows someone has just drawn a knife under the table and in a moment all hell will break loose. So even with his last gasp the old boy had managed to gall his colleague Schwung! Enmity of such long standing had of course long since ceased to be a feeling and become a habit; provided something or other did not happen to stir up the hostility afresh, it simply ceased to exist. There was only the accumulated experience of countless grating episodes in the past, which had coagulated into a contemptuous opinion each held of the other, an opinion as unaffected by the flux of emotion as any unbiased truth would be. Professor Schwung felt this just as his antagonist, now dead, had felt it. Forgiveness seemed to him quite childish and beside the point, for that one relenting impulse before the end—merely a feeling at that, not a professional admission of error—naturally counted for nothing against the experiences of years of controversy and, as Schwung saw it, could only serve, and rather brazenly, to put him in the wrong if he should take advantage of his victory. But this had nothing to do with Professor Schwung’s need to take leave of his dead friend. Good Lord, they had known each other back at the start of their academic careers, before either of them was married! Do you remember that evening in the Burggarten, how we drank to the setting sun and argued about Hegel? However many sunsets there may have been since then, that’s the one I always remember. And do you remember our first professional disagreement, which almost made enemies of us way back then? Those were the days! Now you are dead, and I’m still on my feet, I’m glad to say, even though I’m standing by your coffin.
Such are the feelings, as everyone knows, of elderly people faced with the death of their contemporaries. When we come into the sere and yellow leaf, poetry breaks out. Many people who have not turned a verse since their seventeenth year suddenly write a poem at seventy-seven, when drawing up their last will. Just as at the Last Judgment the dead shall be called forth one by one, even though they have long been at rest at the bottom of time together with their centuries, like the cargoes of foundered ships, so too, in the last will, things are summoned by name and have their personalities, worn away by use, restored to them: “The Bokhara rug with the cigar burn, in my study…” is the sort of thing one reads in such final dispositions, or “The umbrella with the rhinoceros-horn handle that I bought at Sunshine & Winters in May 1887…” Even the bundles of securities are named and invoked individually by number.
Nor is it chance that, as each object lights up again for the last time, the longing should arise to attach to it a moral, an admonition, a blessing, a principle, to cast one last spell on so many unreckoned things that rise up once more as one feels oneself sinking. And so, together with the poetry of testament-making time, philosophy too awakens; usually an ancient and dusty philosophy, understandably enough, hauled out from where it had been forgotten fifty years earlier. Ulrich suddenly realized that neither of these two old men could possibly have given way. “Let life take care of itself, as long as principles remain intact!” is an appropriate sentiment when a person knows that in a few months or years he will be outlived by those very principles. And it was plain to see how the two impulses were still contending with each other in the old academician: His romanticism, his youth, his poetic side, demanded a fine, sweeping gesture and a noble statement; his philosophy, on the other hand, insisted on keeping the law of reason untainted by sudden eruptions of feeling and sentimental lapses such as his dead opponent had placed on his path like a snare. For the last two days Schwung had been thinking: “Well, now he’s dead, and there’ll no longer be anything to interfere with the Schwungian view of diminished responsibility”; his feelings flowed in great waves toward his old friend, and he had worked out his scene of farewell like a carefully regulated plan of mobilization, waiting only for the signal to be put into operation. But a drop of vinegar had fallen into his scenario, with sobering effect. Schwung had begun on a great wave of sentiment, but now he felt like someone suddenly coming to his senses in the middle of a poem, and the last lines won’t come. And so they confronted each other, a white stubby beard and white beard stubble, each with jaws implacably clenched.
“What’s he going to do now?” Ulrich wondered, intent on the scene before him. But finally Hofrat Schwung’s happy certainty that Paragraph 318 of the Penal Code would now be formulated in accordance with his own proposals prevailed over his irritation, and freed from angry thoughts, he would most have liked to start singing “Should auld acquaintance be forgot…” so as to give vent to his now entirely benevolent and undivided feelings. But since this was out of the question, he turned to Ulrich and said: “Listen to me, my friend’s young son: It is the moral crisis that comes first; social decay is its consequence!” Then, turning to Agathe, he added: “It was the mark of greatness in your father that he was always ready to support an idealistic view struggling to prevail in the foundation of our laws.”
Then he seized one of Agathe’s hands and one of Ulrich’s, pressed them both, and exclaimed:
‘Tour father attached far too much imp
ortance to minor differences of opinion, which are sometimes unavoidable in long years of collaboration. I was always convinced that he did so in order not to expose his delicate sense of justice to the slightest reproach. Many eminent scholars will be coming tomorrow to take their leave of him, but none of them will be the man he was!”
And so the encounter ended on a conciliatory note. When he left, Schwung even assured Ulrich that he might count on his father’s friends in case he should still decide to take up an academic career.
Agathe had listened wide-eyed, contemplating the uncanny final form life gives to human beings. “It was like being in a forest of plaster trees!” she said to her brother afterward.
Ulrich smiled and said: “I’m feeling as sentimental as a dog in moonlight.”
5
THEY DO WRONG
“Do you remember,” Agathe asked him after a while, “how once when I was still very small, you were playing with some boys and fell into the water right up to your waist and tried to hide it? You sat at lunch, with your visible top half dry, but your bottom half made your teeth start chattering!”