by Robert Musil
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe found a tiny pocket of sand up among the rocks beneath the edge of the plateau; when they stumbled onto it they had the feeling as if a creature that lived there had expected them and was looking at them: here no one knows anything about us anymore. They had been following a small, natural path; the coast curved away, they actually convinced themselves that the shining white hotel had disappeared. It was a long, narrow sunlit step of rock, with sand and bits and pieces of stone. They undressed. They felt the need to bend their knees and stretch their arms, naked, unprotected, small as children before the greatness of the sea and the solitude. They did not say this to each other, and were ashamed before each other, but hidden behind the motions of their clothing and of searching for a place to lie down, each tried it for himself.
They were both ashamed because it is so nudist-camp natural and health-conscious, but expected it necessarily had to lead to something else…
The silence nailed them to the cross.
They felt that soon they would not be able to stand it anymore, would have to shout, insane as birds.
This was why they were suddenly standing beside each other, with their arms around each other. Skin stuck to skin; timidly this small feeling penetrated the great desert like a tiny succulent flower growing all alone among the stones, and calmed them. They wove the circle of the horizon like a wreath around their hips, and looked at the sky. Stood as on a high balcony, interwoven with each other and with the unutterable like two lovers who, the next instant, will plunge into the emptiness. Plunged. And the emptiness supported them. The instant lasted; did not sink and did not rise. Agathe and Ulrich felt a happiness about which they did not know if it might be grief, and only the conviction inspiring them, that they had been chosen to experience the extraordinary, kept them from weeping.
7.
But they soon discovered…if they did not want to, they did not have to leave the hotel at all. A wide glass door led from their room to a small balcony overlooking the sea. Unobserved, they could stand in the doorway, their eyes directed at this never-answering expanse, their arms flung protectively around each other. Blue coolness, on which the living warmth of the day lay like fine gold dust even after midnight, penetrated from the ocean. While their souls were standing erect within them, their bodies found each other like animals seeking warmth. And then the miracle happened to these bodies. Ulrich was suddenly part of Agathe, or she of him.
Agathe looked up, frightened. She looked for Ulrich out there, but found him in the center of her heart. She did see his form leaning out in the night, wrapped in starlight, but it was not his form, only its shining, ephemeral husk; and she saw the stars and the shadows without understanding that they were far away. Her body was light and fleet, it seemed to her that she was floating in the air. A great, miraculous impetus had seized her heart, with such rapidity that she almost thought she felt the gentle jolt. At this moment brother and sister looked at each other confounded.
However much they had been preparing themselves for this every day for weeks, they feared that in this second they had lost their reason. But everything in them was clear. Not a vision. Rather an excessive clarity. And yet they still seemed to have lost and put aside not only their reason but all their capacities; no thoughts stirred in them, they could form no purpose, all words had receded far away, the will lifeless; everything that stirs in the individual was rolled up inertly, like leaves in a burning calm. But this deathlike impotence did not weigh them down; it was as if the lid of a sarcophagus had been roiled off them. Whatever was to be heard during the night sobbed without sound or measure, whatever they looked at was without form or mood and yet contained within itself the joyous delight of all forms and moods. It was really strangely simple: as their powers became circumscribed all boundaries had disappeared, and since they no longer felt any kind of distinctions, neither in themselves nor about objects, they had become one.
They gazed around cautiously. It was almost painful. They were quite confused, far away from themselves, set down in a distance in which they lost themselves. They saw without light and heard without sound. Their soul was as excessively stretched as a hand that loses all its power, their tongue was as if cut off. But this pain was as sweet as a strange, living clarity.
[?] It was like a pain grating on their sensibilities, and yet could be called more a sweetness than a pain, for there was no vexation in it but a peculiar, quite supranatural comfort.
And they further perceived that the circumscribing powers in them were not lost at all, but in reality inverted, and with them all boundaries had been inverted. They noticed that they had not become mute at all but were speaking, but they were not choosing words but were being chosen by words; no thought stirred in them, but the whole world was full of marvelous thoughts; they thought that they, and things as well, were no longer mutually displacing and repelling hermetic bodies, but opened and allied forms. Their glances, which in their whole lives had followed only the small patterns that objects and people form against the enormous background, had suddenly reversed, and the enormous background played with the patterns of life like an ocean with tiny matches.
Agathe lay half fainting against Ulrich’s chest. She felt at this moment embraced by her brother in such a distant, silent, and pure fashion that there was nothing at all like it. Their bodies did not move and were not altered, and yet a sensual happiness flowed through them, the like of which they had never experienced. It was not an idea and not imagined! Wherever they touched each other, whether on their hips, their hands, or a strand of hair, they interpenetrated one another.
They were both convinced at this moment that they were no longer subject to the distinctions of humankind. They had overcome the stage of desire, which expends its energy on an action and a brief intensification, and their fulfillment impinged on them not only in specific places but in all the places of their bodies, as fire does not become less when other fires kindle from it. They were submerged in this fire that fills up everything; swimming in it as in a sea of desire, and flying in it as in a heaven of rapture.
Agathe wept with happiness. Whenever they moved, the recollection that they were still two dropped like a grain of incense into the sweet fire of life and dissolved in it; these were perhaps the happiest moments, where they were not entirely one.
Originally also supposed to come here:…I’m in love and don’t know with whom…I’m neither faithful, nor unfaithful, what am I then.
For they felt, hovering more strongly over this hour than over others a breath of grief and transitoriness, something shadowy and unreal, a being robbed, a cruelty, a fearful tension of uncertain forces against the fear of being transformed once more. Finally, when they felt the condition fade, they separated wordlessly and in utter exhaustion.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe had separated without having made plans, and did not see each other the entire day; they could not do otherwise; the emotions of the night were still ebbing away and taking them with them; both felt the need to come to terms with themselves alone, without noticing that this entailed a contradiction of the experience that had overpowered them. Involuntarily they went off far across the countryside in opposite directions, stopped in places at different times, sought a resting place in view of the sea, and thought of each other.
It may be called strange that their love immediately involved the need for separation, but this love was so great that they mistrusted it and desired this test.
Can they still separate? How can it be done?
Now one can dream. Lie under a bush and the bees buzz; or stare into the weaving heat, the thin air. The senses doze off, and in the body memories shine forth agaip like the stars after sunset. The body is again touched and kissed, and the magic line of demarcation that otherwise still distinguishes the strongest memories from reality is transcended by these soft / dreaming memories. They push time and space aside like a curtain and unite the lovers not only in thought but physically, not with
their heavy bodies but with inwardly altered ones consisting entirely of tender mobility. But only when one thinks that during this union, which is more perfect and blissful than bodily union, one has no idea what the other person has just been doing, or what he will be doing the next moment, does the mystery attain its greatest depth. Ulrich assumed that Agathe had remained behind in the hotel. He saw her standing on the white square in front of the white building, speaking with the manager. It was false. Or perhaps she was standing with the young German professor who had arrived and introduced himself, or was talking with Luisina, the chambermaid with the lovely eyes, and laughing at her pert, funny answers. That Agathe was now able to laugh! It destroyed the Condition; a smile was just heavy enough to be borne by it…!! When Ulrich turned around, Agathe was suddenly really standing there. Really? She had come across the stones in a great arc; her dress was fluttering in the wind, she cast a dark shadow on the hot ground and was laughing at Ulrich. Blissfully real reality; it hurt as much as when eyes that have been staring into die distance must quickly adapt to nearness.
Agathe sat down beside him. A lizard sat nearby; it silently darted out its tongue, a small, scurrying flame of life, beside their conversation. Ulrich had noticed it some time before. Agathe hadn’t. But when Agathe, who was afraid of small animals, caught sight of it, she was frightened and, laughing in embarrassment, scared the little creature away with a stone. And to gather courage she ran after it, clapping her hands and chasing the little beast.
Ulrich, who had been staring at the small creature as at a flickering magic mirror, said to himself: That we were now so different is as sad as that we were born at the same time but will die at different times. With his eyes and ears he followed this strange body, Agathe. But then he suddenly fell deeply once again into and was at the bottom of the experience out of which Agathe had startled him.
He was not able to pin it down clearly, but in this flickering brightness above the stones in which everything was transformed, happiness into grief, and also grief into happiness, the painful moment abruptly took on die secret lust of the hermaphrodite who, separated into two independent beings, finds itself again, whose secret no one who touches it suspects. Yet how glorious it is—Agathe’s brother thought—that she is different from me, that she can do things I can’t even guess at, which yet also belong to me through our secret empathy. Dreams occurred to him, which he otherwise never recalled but which must have often preoccupied him. Sometimes in a dream he had met the sister of a beloved, although she did not have a sister, and this strange familiar person radiated all the happiness of possession and all the happiness of desire. Or he heard a soft voice speaking. Or saw only the fluttering of a skirt, which most definitely belonged to a stranger, but this stranger was most definitely his beloved. As if a disembodied, completely free attachment was only playing with these people. All at once Ulrich was startled, and thought he saw in the great brightness that the secret of love was precisely this, that lovers are not one.
That belongs to the principles of profane love! Thus really already a game against itself.
“How wonderful it is, Agathe,” Ulrich said, “that you can do things I can’t guess at.”
“Yes,” she answered, “the whole world is full of such things. As I was walking across this plateau I felt that I could now walk in every direction.”
“But why did you come to me?”
Agathe was silent.
“It is so beautiful to be different from the way one was born,” Ulrich continued. “But I was afraid of just that.” He told her the dreams that he had remembered, and she knew them too.
“But why are you afraid?” Agathe asked.
“Because it occurred to me that if it is the sense of these dreams—and it might well be that they signify the final memory of it—that our desires aim not at making one person out of two but, on the contrary, at escaping from our prison, our oneness, to become two in a union, but preferably twelve, a thousand, incredibly many, rather, to slip out of ourselves as in a dream, to drink life brewed to the boiling point, to be carried out of ourselves or whatever, for I can’t express it very well; then the world contains as much lust as strangeness, as much tenderness as activity, and is not an opium haze but rather an intoxication of the blood, an orgasm of battle, and the only mistake we could make would be to forget the (lustful contact of) lust of strangeness and imagine doing all sorts of things by dividing up the hurricane of love into scanty creeks flowing back and forth between two people—”
He had jumped up.
“But how would one have to be?” Agathe asked pensively and simply. It pained him that she could immediately appropriate his half-loved and half-cursed idea. “One would have to be able to give,” she went on, “without taking away. To be such that love does not become less when it’s divided. Then that would be possible too.
Not to treat love as a treasure”—she laughed—”the way it’s already laid down in language!”
Ulrich was picking up head-sized stones and flinging them from the cliff into the sea, which squirted up a tiny spray; he had not exercised his muscles for a long time.
“But…?” Agathe said. “Isn’t what you’re saying simply what one reads fairly often, drinking the world in great drafts of desire? To want to be a thousandfold, because once isn’t enough?” She was parodying it a little because she suddenly realized that she did not like it.
“No!” Ulrich shouted back. “It’s never what others say!” He flung the large stone he was holding in his hand so angrily to the ground that the loose limestone exploded. “We forgot ourselves,” he said gently, grasping Agathe under the arm and pulling her away. “It would still have to be a sister and a brother, even if they’re divided into a thousand pieces. —Anyway, it’s just an idea.”
***
Meanwhile days came when only the surface stirred. On the sparkling damp stones in the sea. A silent being: a fish, flowerlike in the water. Agathe romped after it from stone to stone until it dived under, darting into the darkness like an arrow, and disappeared. Well? Ulrich thought. Agathe was standing out on the rocks, he on the shore; a melody of eventfulness broke off, and a new one must carry on: How will she turn around, how smile back to the shore? Beautifully. like all perfection. With total charm in her motion is how Agathe did it; the insights of the orchestra of her beauty, though it seemed to be making music without a conductor, were always delightful.
And yet all perfected beauty—an animal, a painting, a woman—is nothing more than the final piece in a circle; an arc is completed, one sees it but would like to know the circle. If it is one of life’s familiar circles, for instance that of a great man, then a noble horse or a beautiful woman is like the clasp in a belt, which closes it and for a moment seems to contain the entire phenomenon; in the same way one can be smitten with a lovely farm horse, because in him as in a focusing mirror the entire heavy-footed beauty of the field and its people is repeated. But if there is nothing behind it? Nothing more than is behind the rays of the sun dancing on the stones? If this infinitude of water and sky is pitilessly open? Then one might almost believe that beauty is something that secretly negates, something incomplete and incompletable, a happiness without purpose, without sense. But what if it lacks everything? Then beauty is a torture, something to laugh and cry over, a tickling to make one roll around in the sand, with Apollo’s arrow in one’s side.
Hatred of beauty. Sense of urgent sexual desire: to destroy beauty.
The brightness of such days was like smoke, which the clarity of the nights wiped away.
Agathe had somewhat less imagination than Ulrich. Because she had not thought as much as he had her emotions were not as volatile as his, but burned like a flame rising straight out of the particular ground on which she happened to be standing. The daring nature of their flight, the conscience made somewhat anxious by the fear of discovery, and finally this hiding place in a flower basket between the porous limestone wall, sea, and sky, at times gave her a high-
spirited and childlike cheerfulness. She then treated even their strange experience as an adventure: a forbidden space within herself over whose enclosure one spies, or into which one forces one’s way, with beating heart, burning neck, and heavy soles weighed down with clods of damp earth from the path one has hurriedly followed in secret.
In this way very indirect suggestion of repeated coitus.
***
She sometimes had a playful way of allowing herself to be touched, with opened-even-when-closed eyes; of reappearing; a tenderness that was not to be stilled. He secretly observed her, saw this play of love with the body, which has the captivation of a smile and the oppressive quality of a force of nature, for the first time, or was moved by it for the first time. Or there were hours when she did not look at him, was cold, almost angry with him; because she was too agitated; like someone in a boat not daring to move, so it was in her body—afterward, every time. Because the connection does not function. Or after-reactions; at first a blocking and then, for no apparent reason, an after-flood. It was thrilling and charming to let oneself be cradled by these inspirations; they shortened the hours but they forced an optic of nearness and minute observation. Ulrich resisted this. It was a leftover piece of earth drifting in the liquid fire and clouding it; a temptation to explanations such as that Agathe had never learned the proper connection between love and sex. As with most people, the entire power of the sexual had first come together with a spark of inclination at the time she had married Hagauer, who was not yet abhorrent to her. Instead of stumbling into a storm with someone almost only in the company of accompanied by someone almost as impersonal as the elements, and only then noticing as a still nameless surprise that this person’s legs are not clothed like one’s own and that one’s soul is beckoning one to change one’s hiding place…