by Robert Musil
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodigality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy assumes that one wishes to turn love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive affect of love from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that’s the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every movement finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
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But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more …
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To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this paradise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one’s wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the self wanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But if we are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me….
When Agathe next entered Lindner’s house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
—Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. —What’s the matter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father’s future wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret applause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside. She understood that so well. What could wisdom, faith, miracles, and principles mean to a young person who is still locked up in himself and not yet opened up by life to assimilate such things! She had a strange sympathy for him; for his being undisciplined and recalcitrant, for his being young, and apparently, too, simply for the badness of his way of thinking. She would gladly have been his playmate, at least here; these surroundings gave her this childish thought, but she sadly noticed that he usually treated her like an old woman.
—Peter! Peter! What’s the matter? he aped her. —He’ll tell you anyhow. You soul-sister of his!
Agathe laughed even more and caught him by the hand.
—Do you like that? Peter went after her unabashedly. —Do you like me to howl? How old are you anyway? Not so much older than I am, I should think: but he treats you the way he treats the sublime Plato! He had disengaged himself and examined her, looking for an advantage.
—What has he really done to you? Agathe asked.
—What’s he done? He’s punished me! I’m not at all ashamed in front of you, as you see. Soon he’s going to pull down my pants, and you’ll be allowed to hold me!
—Peter! For shame! Agathe warned innocently. —Did he really beat you?
—Did he? Peter? Maybe you’d like that?
—Shame on you, Peter!
—Not at all! Why don’t you call me Herr Peter? Anyway, what do you think: there! He stretched out his tensed leg and grasped his upper thigh, strengthened from playing soccer. —Have a look for yourself; I could murder him with one hand. He doesn’t have as much strength in both legs as I have in one arm. It’s not me, it’s you who ought to be ashamed, instead of prattling wisdom with him! Do you want to know what he’s done to me?
—No, Peter, you can’t talk to me that way.
—Why not?
—Because your father’s heart is in the right place. And because— But here Agathe could not find the right way to proceed; she was no good at preaching, although the youth was indeed in the wrong, and she suddenly had to laugh again. —So what did he do to you?
—He took away my allowance!
—Wait! Agathe asked. Without stopping to think, she fished out a banknote and handed it to Peter. She herself did not know why she did this; perhaps she thought the first thing to do was to get rid of Peter’s anger before she could have an effect on him, perhaps it only gave her pleasure to thwart Lindners pedagogy. And with the same suddenness she had addressed Peter with the familiar Du. Peter looked at her in astonishment. Behind his lovely misted eyes something quite new awoke. —The second thing he imposed on me—he continued, grinning cynically, without thanking her—is also broken: the school of silence! Do you know it? Man learns through silence to remove his speech from all inner and outer irritations and make it the handmaid of his innermost personal considerations!
—You surely said some improper things, said Agathe, falling back on the normal pronoun of address.
—This is how it was! “The first response of man to all interventions and attacks from without happens by means of the vocal cords,” he quoted his father. —That’s why he’s ruined today and my day off from school tomorrow with room arrest, observes total silence toward me, and has forbidden me to speak a single word with anybody in the house. The third thing—he mocked—is control of the instinct for food—
—But, Peter, you must now really tell me—Agathe interrupted him, amused—what did you do to set him off?
The conversation in which he was mocking his father through his future mother had put the youth in the best of spirits. —That’s not so simple, Agathe, he replied shamelessly. —There is, you ought to know, something that the old man fears the way the devil fears holy water: jokes. The tickling of jokes and humor, he says, comes from idle fantasy and malice. I always have to swallow them. That’s exemplary for one’s character. Because, if we look at the joke more closely—
—Enough! Agathe commanded. —What was your forbidden joke about?
—About you! said Peter, his eyes boring into hers in challenge. But at this moment he shrank back, because the doorbell rang, and both recognized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner. Before Agathe could make any reproaches, Peter pressed his fingernails with painful violence into her hand and stole out of the room.
There were also violent rebellions.
Agathe owned a piano. She was sitting at it in the twilight, playing. The uncertainty of her frame of mind played along with the notes. Ulrich came in. His voice sounded cold and mute as he greeted her. She interrupted her playing. When the words had died away, her fingers went
a few steps further through the boundless land of music.
—Stay where you are! ordered Ulrich, who had stepped back, drawing a pistol from his pocket. —Nothing’s going to happen to you. He spoke altogether differently, a stranger. Then he fired at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The first bullet cut through the dry, tender wood and howled across the strings. A second churned up leaping sounds. As shot followed shot, the keys began to hop. The jubilandy sharp reports of the pistol drove with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing uproar. When the magazine was empty, Ulrich let it drop to the carpet—he only noticed it when he futilely tried to get off two more shots. He gave the impression of a madman, pale, his hair hanging down over his forehead; a fit had seized him and carried him far away from himself. Doors slammed in the house, people were listening; slowly, in such impressions, reason again took possession of him.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive piano or flee the danger. She felt no fear, and although the beginning of her brothers outbreak could have seemed insane, this thought did not frighten her. She accepted it as a pleasant end. The strange cries of the wounded instrument aroused in her the idea that she would have to leave the earth in a swarm of fantastically fluttering birds.
Ulrich pulled himself together and asked if she was angry with him; Agathe denied it with radiant eyes. His face again assumed its usual expression. —I don’t know—he said—why I did it. I couldn’t resist the impulse.
Agathe reflectively tried out a few isolated strings that had survived.
—I feel like a fool…, Ulrich pleaded, and cautiously ran his hand through his sister’s hair, as if his fingers could find refuge from themselves there. Agathe withdrew them again by the wrist and pushed them away. —What came over you? she asked.
—I have no idea, Ulrich said, making an unconscious motion with his arms as if he wanted to brush off the embrace of something tenacious and lack it away.
Agathe said: If you wished to repeat that, it would turn into a quite ordinary target practice. Suddenly she stood up and laughed. —Now you’ll have to have the piano completely rebuilt. What won’t that all lead to: orders, explanations, bills…! For that reason alone something like this can’t happen again.
—I had to do it, Ulrich explained shyly. —I would just as gladly have shot at a mirror if you’d happened to be looking in it.
—And now you’re upset that one can’t do such a thing twice. But it was beautiful just as it was. She pushed her arm in his and drew close to him. —The rest of the time you’re never willing to do anything unless you know where it will lead!
On the same evening, Ulrich had to put in an appearance at a garden party. He could not very well beg off, although he would have done so had not his despair / depression impelled him to go. But he arrived late; it was near midnight. The greater part of the guests had already laid aside their masks. Among the trees of the old grounds torches flamed, rammed into the ground like burning spears or fastened with brackets to the trunks of trees. Gigantic tables had been set up, covered with white cloths. A flickering fire reddened the bark of the trees, the silently swaying canopy of leaves overhead, and the faces of countless people crowded together, which from a Utile distance seemed to consist only of such red and black spots. It seemed to have been the watchword among the ladies to appear in men’s costumes. Ulrich recognized a Frau Maya Sommer as a soldier from the army of Maria Theresa, the painter von Hartbach as a Tyrolean with bare knees, and Frau Clara Kahn, the wife of the famous physician, in a Beardsley costume. He also discovered that even among the younger women of the upper nobility, so far as he knew them by sight, many had chosen a mannish or boyish disguise; there were jockeys and elevator boys, half-mannish Dianas, female Hamlets, and corpulent Turks. The fashion of slacks for women, advocated just recently, seemed, although no one had followed it, to have had some effect upon the imagination nonetheless; for that time, in which women belonged to the world at most from ground level to halfway up their calves, but between there and the neck only to their husbands and lovers, to be seen like that at a party where one might expect to see members of the Imperial House was something unheard of, a revolution, even if only a revolution of caprice, and the precursor of the vulgar customs that the older and stouter ladies were already privileged to predict, while the others noticed nothing but exuberance. Ulrich thought he could excuse himself from greeting the old prince, around whom as master of the house a group of people was in constant attendance, while he barely knew him; he looked for [his valet] Tzi to ask him to do something, but when he could not find him anywhere assumed that the industrious man had already gone home, and sauntered away from the center of activity to the edge of a grove of trees, from which, over an enormous grass lawn, one could catch a glimpse of the castle. This magnificent old castle had had fastened to it long rows of electric lights like footlights, which shone from under cornices or ran up pillars and liquefied, as it were, the forms of the architecture from out of the shadows, as if the stern old master who had devised them was among the guests and a little tipsy beneath a blanched paper hat. Below, one could see the servants running in and out through the dark door openings, while above, the ugly reddish-gray night sky of the city arched forward like an umbrella into the other, pure dark night sky, which one glimpsed, with its stars, whenever one lifted one’s eyes. Ulrich did so, and was as if drunk from a combination of disgust and joy. As he let his glance fall, he perceived a nearby figure that had previously escaped his notice.
It was a tall woman in the costume of a Napoleonic colonel, and she was wearing a mask; by which Ulrich recognized immediately that it was Diotima. She acted as if she did not notice him, looking at the shining castle, sunk in thought. —Good evening, cousin! he addressed her. —Don’t try to deny it; I recognize you unmistakably because you’re the only person still wearing a mask.
—What do you mean? the mask asked.
—Very simple: You feel ashamed. Tell me why so many women showed up in trousers?
Diotima vehemently shrugged her shoulders. —The word went around beforehand. My God, I can understand it: the old ideas are already so worn out. But I really must confess to you that I’m annoyed; it was a tactless idea; you think you’ve stumbled into a theatrical fancy-dress ball.
—The whole thing is impossible, Ulrich said. —Such parties don’t work anymore because their time is past.
—Hmph! Diotima answered perfunctorily. She found the sight of the castle romantic.
—Would the Colonel command where one might find a better opinion? Ulrich asked, with a challenging look at Diotima’s body.
—Oh, my dear friend, don’t call me Colonel!
There was something new in her voice. Ulrich stepped close to her. She had taken off her mask. He noticed two tears that fell slowly from her eyes. This tall, weeping officer was totally ridiculous, but also very beautiful. He seized her hands and gently asked what the matter was. Diotima could not answer; a sob she was trying to suppress stirred the bright sheen of the white riding breeches that reached far up beneath her flung-back coat. They stood thus in the half-darkness of the light sinking into the lawns. —We can’t talk here, Ulrich whispered. —Come with me somewhere else. If you permit, I’ll take you to my house. Diotima tried to draw her hand away from his, but when this didn’t work she let it be. Ulrich felt by this gesture what he could hardly believe, that his hour with this woman had come. He grasped Diotima respectably around the waist and led her, supporting her tenderly, deeper into the shadows and then around to the exit. / A kiss right here?
Before they again emerged into the light, Diotima had of course dried her tears and mastered her excitement, at least outwardly. —You’ve never noticed, Ulrich—she said in a low voice—that I’ve loved you for a long time; like a brother. I don’t have anyone I can talk to. Since there were people nearby, Ulrich only murmured: —Come, we’ll t
alk. But in the taxi he did not say a word, and Diotima, anxiously holding her coat closed, moved away from him into the corner. She had made up her mind to confess her woes to him, and when Diotima resolved to do something it was done; although in her whole life she had never been with another man at night than Section Chief Tuzzi, she followed Ulrich because before she had run into him she had made up her mind to have a long talk with him if he was there, and felt/had a great, melancholy longing for such a talk. The excitement of carrying out this firm resolve had an unfortunate physical effect on her; it was literally true that her resolve lay in her stomach like some indigestible food, and when (in addition) the excitement suppressed all the juices that could dissolve it, Diotima felt cold sweat on her forehead and neck as if from nausea. She was diverted from herself only by the impression that arriving at Ulrich’s made on her; the small grounds, where the electric bulbs on the tree trunks formed an alley, seemed to her charming as they strolled through; the entry hall with the antlers and the small baroque staircase reminded her of hunting horns, packs of hounds, and horsemen, and— since nighttime reinforces such impressions and conceals their weaknesses—out of admiration for her cousin she could not understand why he had never showed off this house but had, as it always seemed, only made fun of it.