by Robert Musil
The dream of being two people and one: in truth the effect of this fabrication was at many moments not unlike that of a dream that has stepped outside the boundaries of night, and now it was hovering in such a state of feeling between faith and denial, in which reason had nothing more to say. It was precisely the body’s unalterable constitution by which feeling was referred back to reality. These bodies, since they loved each other, displayed their existence before the inquiring gaze, for surprises and delights that renewed themselves like a peacock’s tail sweeping back and forth in currents of desire; but as soon as one’s glance no longer lingered on the hundred eyes of the spectacle that love offers to love, but attempted to penetrate into the thinking and feeling being behind it, these bodies transformed themselves into horrible prisons. One found oneself again separated from the other, as so often before, not knowing what to say, because for everything that desire still had to say or repeat a far too remote, protective, covering gesture was needed, for which there was no solid foundation.
And it was not long before the bodily motions, too, involuntarily grew slower and congealed. The rain beyond the windows was still filling the air with its twitching curtain of drops and the lullaby of sounds through whose monotony the sky-high desolation flowed downward. It seemed to Agathe that her body had been alone for centuries, and time flowed as if it were flowing with the water from the sky. The light in the room now was like that of a hollowed-out silver die. Blue, sweetish scarves of smoke from heedlessly burning cigarettes coiled around the two of them. She no longer knew whether she was tender and sensitive to the core of her being or impatient and out of sorts with her brother, whose stamina she admired. She sought out his eyes and found them hovering in this uncertain atmosphere like two dead moons. At the same instant something happened to her that seemed to come not from her will but from outside: the surging water beyond the windows suddenly became fleshy, like a fruit that has been sliced, and its swelling softness pressed between herself and Ulrich. Perhaps she was ashamed or even hated herself a little for it, but a completely sensual wantonness—and not at all only what one calls an unleashing of the senses but also, and far more, a voluntary and unconstrained draining of the senses away from the world—began to gain control over her; she was just able to anticipate it and even hide it from Ulrich by telling him with the speediest of all excuses that she had forgotten to take care of something, jumped up, and left the room.
42
UP JACOB’S LADDER INTO A STRANGER’S DWELLING
Hardly had that been done when she resolved to look up the odd man who had offered her his help, and immediately carried out her resolution. She wanted to confess to him that she no longer had any idea what to do with herself. She had no clear picture of him; a person one has seen through tears that dried up in his company will not easily appear to someone the way he actually is. So on the way, she thought about him. She thought she was thinking clearheadedly, but actually it was fantasy. She hastened through the streets, bearing before her eyes the light from her brothers room. It had not been a proper kind of light at all, she considered; she should rather say that all the objects in the room had suddenly lost their composure, or a kind of understanding that they must certainly have otherwise had. But if it were the case that it was only she herself who had lost her composure, or her understanding, it would not have been limited just to her, for there had also been awakened in the objects a liberation that was astir with miracles. “The next moment it would have peeled us out of our clothes like a silver knife, without our having moved a finger!” she thought.
She gradually let herself be calmed by the rain, whose harmless gray water bounced off her hat and down her coat, and her thoughts became more measured. This was perhaps helped, too, by the simple clothes she had hastily thrown on, for they directed her memory back to schoolgirl walks without an umbrella, and to guiltless states. As she walked she even thought unexpectedly of an innocent summer she had spent with a girlfriend and the friend’s parents on a small island in the north: there, between the harsh splendors of sea and sky, she had discovered a seabirds’ nesting place, a hollow filled with white, soft bird feathers. And now she knew: the man to whom she was being drawn reminded her of this nesting place. The idea cheered her. At that time, to be sure, in view of the strict sincerity that is part of youth’s need for experience, she would have hardly let it pass that at the thought of the softness and whiteness she would be abandoning herself to an unearthly shudder, as illogically, indeed as youthfully and immaturely, as she was now allowing to happen with such assiduity. This shudder was for Professor Lindner; but the unearthly was also for him.
The intimation, amounting to certainty, that everything that happened to her was connected as in a fairy tale with something hidden was familiar to her from all the agitated periods of her life; she sensed it as a nearness, felt it behind her, and was inclined to wait for the hour of the miracle, when she would have nothing to do but close her eyes and lean back. But Ulrich did not see any help in unearthly dreaminess, and his attention seemed claimed mostly by transforming, with infinite slowness, unearthly content into an earthly one. In this Agathe recognized the reason why she had now left him for the third time within twenty-four hours, fleeing in the confused expectation of something that she had to take into her keeping and allow to rest from the afflictions, or perhaps just from the impatience, of her passions. But then as soon as she calmed down she was herself again, standing by his side and seeing in what he was teaching her all the possibilities for healing; and even now this lasted for a while. But as the memory of what had “almost” happened at home—and yet not happened!—reasserted itself more vividly, she was again profoundly at a loss. First she wanted to convince herself that the infinite realm of the unimaginable would have come to their aid if they had stuck it out for another instant; then she reproached herself that she had not waited to see what Ulrich would do; finally, however, she dreamed that the truest thing would have been simply to yield to love and make room for a place for overtaxed nature to rest on the dizzying Jacob’s ladder they were climbing. But hardly had she made this concession than she thought of herself as one of those incompetent fairytale creatures who cannot restrain themselves, and in their womanly weakness prematurely break silence or some other oath, causing everything to collapse amid thunderclaps.
If her expectation now directed itself again toward the man who was to help her find counsel, he not only enjoyed the great advantage bestowed on order, certainty, kindly strictness, and composed behavior by an undisciplined and desperate mode of conduct, but this stranger also had the particular quality of speaking about God with certainty and without feeling, as if he visited God’s house daily and could announce that everything there that was mere passion and imagining was despised. So what might be awaiting her at Lindner’s? While she was asking herself this she set her feet more firmly on the ground as she walked, and breathed in the coldness of the rain so that she would become quite clearheaded; and then it started to seem highly probable to her that Ulrich, even though he judged Lindner one-sidedly, still judged him more correctly than she did, for before her conversations with Ulrich, when her impression of Lindner was still vivid, she herself had thought quite scornfully of this good man. She was amazed at her feet, which were taking her to him anyway, and she even took a bus going in the same direction so she would get there sooner.
Shaken about among people who were like rough, wet pieces of laundry, she found it hard to hold on to her inner fantasy completely, but with an exasperated expression on her face she persevered, and protected it from being torn to shreds. She wanted to bring it whole to Lindner. She even disparaged it. Her whole relation to God, if that name was to be applied to such adventurousness at all, was limited to a twilight that opened up before her every time life became too oppressive and repulsive or, which was new, too beautiful. Then she ran into it, seeking. That was all she could honestly say about it. And it had never led to anything, as she told herself with a si
gh. But she noticed that she was now really curious about how her unknown man would extricate himself from this affair that was being confided to him, so to speak, as God’s representative; for such a purpose, after all, some omniscience must have rubbed off on him from the great Inaccessible One, because she had meanwhile firmly resolved, squeezed between all kinds of people, on no account to deliver a complete confession to him right away. But as she got out she discovered in herself, remarkably enough, the deeply concealed conviction that this time it would be different from before, and that she had also made up her mind to bring this whole incomprehensible fantasy out of the twilight and into the light on her own. Perhaps she would have quickly extinguished this overblown expression again if it had entered her consciousness at all; but all that was present there was not a word, but merely a surprised feeling that whirled her blood around as if it were fire.
The man toward whom such passionate emotions and fantasies were en route was meanwhile sitting in the company of his son, Peter, at lunch, which he still ate, following a good rule of former times, at the actual hour of noon. There was no luxury in his surroundings, or, as it would be better to say in the German tongue, no excess[Oberfluss, literally, “overflow”]; for the German word reveals the sense that the alien word obscures. “Luxury” also has the meaning of the superfluous and dispensable that idle wealth might accumulate; “excess,” on the other hand, is not so much superfluous—to which extent it is synonymous with luxury—as it is overflowing, thus signifying a padding of existence that gently swells beyond its frame, or that surplus ease and magnanimity of European life which is lacking only for the extremely poor. Lindner discriminated between these two senses of luxury, and just as luxury in the first sense was absent from his home, it was present in the second. One already had this peculiar impression, although it could not be said where it came from, when the entry door opened and revealed the moderately large foyer. If one then looked around, none of the arrangements created to serve mankind through useful invention was lacking: an umbrella stand, soldered from sheet metal and painted with enamel, took care of umbrellas. A runner with a coarse weave removed from shoes the dirt that the mud brush might not have caught. Two clothes brushes hung in a pouch on the wall, and the stand for hanging up outer garments was not missing either. A bulb illuminated the space; even a mirror was present, and all these utensils were lovingly maintained and promptly replaced when they were damaged. But the lamp had the lowest wattage by which one could just barely make things out; the clothes stand had only three hooks; the mirror encompassed only four fifths of an adult face; and the thickness as well as the quality of the carpet was just great enough that one could feel the floor through it without sinking into softness: even if it was futile to describe the spirit of the place through such details, one only needed to enter to feel overcome by a peculiar general atmosphere that was not strict and not lax, not prosperous and not poor, not spiced and not bland, but just something like a positive produced by two negatives, which might best be expressed in the term “absence of prodigality.” This by no means excluded, upon one’s entering the inner rooms, a feeling for beauty, or indeed of coziness, which was everywhere in evidence. Choice prints hung framed on the walls; the window beside Lindners desk was adorned with a colorful showpiece of glass representing a knight who, with a prim gesture, was liberating a maiden from a dragon; and in the choice of several painted vases that held lovely paper flowers, in the provision of an ashtray by the nonsmoker, as well as in the many trifling details through which, as it were, a ray of sunshine falls into the serious circle of duty represented by the preservation and care of a household, Lindner had gladly allowed a liberal taste to prevail. Still, the twelve-edged severity of the room’s shape emerged everywhere as a reminder of the hardness of life, which one should not forget even in amenity; and wherever something stemming from earlier times that was undisciplined in a feminine way managed to break through this unity—a little cross-stitch table scarf, a pillow with roses, or the petticoat of a lampshade—the unity was strong enough to prevent the voluptuous element from being excessively obtrusive. Nevertheless, on this day, and not for the first time since the day before, Lindner appeared at mealtime nearly a quarter of an hour late. The table was set; the plates, three high at each place, looked at him with the frank glance of reproach; the little glass knife rests, from which knife, spoon, and fork stared like barrels from gun carriages, and the rolled-up napkins in their rings, were deployed like an army left in the lurch by its general. Lindner had hastily stuffed the mail, which he usually opened before the meal, in his pocket, and with a bad conscience hastened into the dining room, not knowing in his confusion what he was meeting with there—it might well have been something like mistrust, since at the same moment, from the other side, and just as hastily as he, his son, Peter, entered as if he had only been waiting for his father to come in.
43
THE DO-GOODER AND THE DO-NO-GOODER; BUT AGATHE TOO
Peter was a quite presentable fellow of about seventeen, in whom Lindners precipitous height had been infused and curtailed by a broadened body; he came up only as far as his father’s shoulders, but his head, which was like a large, squarish-round bowling ball, sat on a neck of taut flesh whose circumference would have served for one of Papa’s thighs. Peter had tarried on the soccer field instead of in school and had on the way home unfortunately got into conversation with a girl, from whom his manly beauty had wrung a half-promise to see him again: thus late, he had secretly slunk into the house and to the door of the dining room, uncertain to the last minute how he was going to excuse himself; but to his surprise he had heard no one in the room, had rushed in, and, just on the point of assuming the bored expression of long waiting, was extremely embarrassed when he collided with his father. His red face flushed with still redder spots, and he immediately let loose an enormous flood of words, casting sidelong glances at his father when he thought he wasn’t noticing, while looking him fearlessly in the eye when he felt his father’s eyes on him. This was calculated behavior, and often called upon: its purpose was to fulfill the mission of arousing the impression of a young man who was vacant and slack to the point of idiocy and who would be capable of anything with the one exception of hiding something. But if that wasn’t enough, Peter did not recoil from letting slip, apparently inadvertently, words disrespectful of his father or otherwise displeasing to him, which then had the effect of lightning rods attracting electricity and diverting it from dangerous paths. For Peter feared his father the way hell fears heaven, with the awe of stewing flesh upon which the spirit gazes down. He loved soccer, but even there he preferred to watch it with an expert expression and make portentous comments than to strain himself by playing. He wanted to become a pilot and achieve heroic feats someday; he did not, however, imagine this as a goal to be worked toward but as a personal disposition, like creatures whose natural attribute it is that they will one day be able to fly. Nor did it influence him that his lack of inclination for work was in contradiction to the teachings of school: this son of a well-known pedagogue was not in the least interested in being respected by his teachers; it was enough for him to be physically the strongest in his class, and if one of his fellow pupils seemed to him too clever, he was ready to restore the balance of the relationship by a punch in the nose or stomach. As we know, one can lead a respected existence this way; but his behavior had the one disadvantage that he could not use it at home against his father; indeed, that his father should find out as little about it as possible. For faced with this spiritual authority that had brought him up and held him in gentle embrace, Peter’s vehemence collapsed into wailing attempts at rebellion, which Lindner senior called the pitiable cries of the desires. Intimately exposed since childhood to the best principles, Peter had a hard time denying their truth to himself and was able to satisfy his honor and valor only with the cunning of an Indian in avoiding open verbal warfare. He too, of course, used lots of words in order to adapt to his opponent, but he
never descended to the need to speak the truth, which in his view was unmanly and garrulous.
So this time, too, his assurances and grimaces bubbled forth at once, but they met with no reaction from his master. Professor Lindner had hastily made the sign of the cross over the soup and begun to eat, silent and rushed. At times, his eye rested briefly and distractedly on the part in his son’s hair. On this day the part had been drawn through the thick, reddish-brown hair with comb, water, and a good deal of pomade, like a narrow-gauge railroad track through a reluctantly yielding forest thicket. Whenever Peter felt his father’s glance resting on it he lowered his head so as to cover with his chin the red, screamingly beautiful tie with which his tutor was not yet acquainted. For an instant later the eye could gently widen upon making such a discovery and the mouth follow it, and words would emerge about “subjection to the slogans of clowns and fops” or “social toadiness and servile vanity,” which offended Peter. But this time nothing happened, and it was only a while later, when the plates were being changed, that Lindner said kindly and vaguely—it was not even at all certain whether he was referring to the tie or whether his admonition was brought about by some unconsciously perceived sight—”People who still have to struggle a lot with their vanity should avoid anything striking in their outward appearance.”
Peter took advantage of his father’s unexpected absentmindedness of character to produce a story about a poor grade he was chivalrously supposed to have received because, tested after a fellow pupil, he had deliberately made himself look unprepared in order not to outshine his comrade by demonstrating the incredible demands that were simply beyond the grasp of weaker pupils.