by Robert Musil
“He hunts them?” Clarisse asked in a choked voice.
“Yes; you could almost say he’s a hunter in love with his prey.”
Clarisse froze; she did not know what was happening to her. Friedenthal had conducted her back along a somewhat different route, and as he was speaking opened the door of a ward they had to traverse, which seemed to contain the most glorious thing she had ever seen. It was a large hall, and she thought she was looking into a living flower bed. They were crossing the ward for hysterical women. These women were standing around singly and in small clusters, and lying in beds. They all appeared to be wearing snow-white clothes and to have loosened and flowing inky-black hair. Clarisse couldn’t take in a single detail; the totality resembled something unutterably beautiful and dramatically agitated. “Sisters!” Clarisse felt softly but powerfully in that moment when attention streamed in irregular pulses toward her and Friedenthal; she had the feeling of being able to fly higher with a swarm of wondrous lovebirds than all the excitements of life and art allow. Her companion made only slow forward progress with her, for all sorts of humble enamored souls approached him from every side, or wandered in his path with a strength of erotic gentleness such as Clarisse had never before experienced. Friedenthal directed placating or severe words to them, and with soft movements pushed them away; and meanwhile other women lay in their beds in their white jackets, having spread out their hair darkly over the pillows, women whose bellies and legs under their thin blankets performed the drama of love. Sinning figures. Paired with a partner who remained invisible but was palpably present, against whom they pushed their arms with exaggerated resistance, who exaggeratedly stimulated the swelling of their breasts, from whose mouths they withdrew with superhuman effort and toward whom their bellies vaulted with superhuman effort, while in the midst of this obscene play their eyes shone innocently with the enchanting inert beauty of large, dark flowers.
Clarisse was still deeply confused by this flower bed of love and suffering, by its morbid and yet intoxicating aroma, by its aura, by the gliding-through and not-being-allowed-to-stop, when she was sitting in Friedenthal’s office being observed by him with an unflagging smile. Collecting herself and returning from her almost spatially deep distraction, she clung to something she managed to get out in a raw, almost mechanical voice: “Declare him not accountable for his actions!”
Friedenthal looked at her with astonishment. “My dear lady,” he asked in a joking tone, “of what concern is that to you?”
Clarisse recoiled because she could not think of an answer. But since nothing occurred to her, she said simply and suddenly: “Because he can’t help it!”
Dr. Friedenthal now scrutinized her more closely. “What makes you so sure of that?”
Clarisse energetically withstood his glance and answered haughtily, as if she was not certain whether to condescend to giving him such a response: “But he’s here only because he’s standing in for someone else!” Annoyed, she shrugged her shoulders, jumped up, and looked out the window. When after a short while she perceived that this did not have any effect, she turned around again and came down a peg. “You can’t understand me: he reminds me of someone!” she observed, half attenuating the truth. She did not want to say too much and held back.
“But that’s not a scientific reason,” Friedenthal drawled.
“I thought you’d do it if I asked you to,” she now said simply.
“You’re too casual about that.” The doctor was reproachful. He leaned back in his armchair like Faust and went on with a glance at his studio: “Have you at all considered whether you are doing the man a favor by wanting him committed instead of punished? It’s no fun living within these walls.” He shook his head disconsolately.
His visitor replied clearly: “First the executioner must leave him alone!’?
“Look,” Friedenthal said. “In my opinion, Moosbrugger is probably an epileptic. But he also shows symptoms of paraphrenia systematica and perhaps of dementia paranoides. He just happens to be in every respect a borderline case. His attacks, in which excruciatingly terrifying delusions and sensory disorientation certainly do play a role, can last minutes or weeks, but they often pass over imperceptibly into complete mental clarity, just as they are also capable of arising with no fixed boundaries from this same clarity, and besides, even in the paroxysmal stage consciousness never quite disappears but is only diminished in varying degrees. So something probably could be done for him, but the case is by no means one in which it would be necessary for a doctor to exclude his responsibility as a physician!”
“So you’ll do something for him?” Clarisse urged.
Friedenthal smiled. “I don’t know yet.”
“You have to!”
“You’re strange,” Friedenthal drawled. “But… one could weaken.”
“You don’t have the slightest doubt that the man is sick!” the young woman asserted emphatically.
“Of course not. But it’s not my job to judge that,” the doctor defended himself. “You’ve already heard: I am to judge whether his free will was excluded during the deed, whether his consciousness was present during the deed, whether he had any insight into his wrongdoing: nothing but metaphysical questions, which put this way have no meaning for me as a physician, but in which I do have to show some consideration for the judge!”
In her excitement Clarisse strode up and down the room like a man.
‘Then you oughtn’t to let yourself be used like that!” she exclaimed harshly. “If you can’t prevail against the judge, it has to be attempted some other way!”
Friedenthal tried another tack to dissuade his visitor from her annoying ideas. “Have you ever really tried to picture to yourself what a horrible raging beast this momentarily calm half-sick man can be?” he asked.
“What’s that to us now?” Clarisse retorted, cutting off his effort. “When confronted with a case of pneumonia, you don’t ask whether you can help a good person go on living! Your only task now is to prevent yourself from becoming accessory to a murder!”
Friedenthal sadly threw up his hands. “You’re crazy!” he said rudely and dejectedly.
“One has to have the courage to be crazy if the world is to be set right again! From time to time there have to be people who refuse to go along with the lies!” Clarisse asserted.
He took this to be a witty joke, which in the rush he had not quite understood. From the start this little person had made an impression on him, especially since, dazzled by General von Stumm, he overestimated her social position; and in any case, many young people these days give a rather confused impression. He found her to be something special, and felt himself restlessly stirred by her spontaneous eagerness as if by something relentlessly, even nobly, radiant. To be sure, he perhaps ought to have seen this radiance as diamond-like, for it also had something of the quality of an overheated stove: something distinctly unpleasant that made one hot and icy. He unobtrusively assessed his visitor: stigmata of a heightened nervousness were doubtless to be perceived in her. But who today did not have such stigmata! Friedenthal’s response was no different from the usual one—for when there are hazy notions of what is really meaningful, what is confused always has the same chance to excel that the con artist has in a hazily defined society—and although he was a pretty good observer, he had always managed to regain his composure no matter what Clarisse said. In the last analysis, one can always regard any person as a small-scale swatch of mental illness; that’s the job of theory, how one looks at a person at one time psychologically and at another chemically; and since after Clarisse’s last words a chasm of silence yawned, Friedenthal again sought “contact” and at the same time sought once more to divert her from her insistent demands. “Did you really like the women we saw?” he asked.
“Oh, enormously!” Clarisse exclaimed. She stood quietly before him, and the hardness was suddenly gone from her face. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she added softly. “That ward is like a monstrous magni
fying glass held over a woman’s triumph and suffering!”
Friedenthal smiled with satisfaction. “Well, so now you see,” he said. “Now you’ll have to concede that the attraction that illness exercises is not alien to me either. But I must observe limits, I have to keep things in their places. Then I wanted to ask you whether you have ever considered that love, too, is a disturbance of the mind. There is hardly anyone who does not conceal something in his most private and proper love life that he reveals only to his guilty partner, some craziness or weakness: why not simply call it perversity and madness? In public you have to take measures against it, but in your inner life you can’t always arm yourself against such things with the same rigor. And psychiatrists—psychiatry is ultimately an art too—will celebrate their greatest success when they have a certain sympathy and rapport with the medium in which they are working.” He had seized his visitor’s hand, and Clarisse ceded to him its outermost fingertips, which she felt lying between his fingers as softly and helplessly as if they had fallen from her like the petals a flower drops. Suddenly she was completely a woman, full of that tender capriciousness in the face of a man’s beseeching, and what she had experienced in the morning was forgotten. A soundless sigh parted her lips. It seemed to her that she had never felt this way, or not for the longest time, and evidently at this moment something from the magic of his realm rubbed off on Friedenthal, whom she by no means especially liked. But she pulled herself together and asked sternly: ‘What have you made up your mind to do?”
“I have to make my rounds now,” the doctor replied, “but I would like to see you again. But not here. Can’t we meet somewhere else?”
“Perhaps,” Clarisse responded. “When you have carried out my request!”
Her lips narrowed, the blood drained from her skin, and this made her cheeks look like two small leather balls; there was too much pressure in her eyes. Friedenthal suddenly felt exploited. It is extraordinary, but when a person sees another as merely a means to an end, it is much easier for him to take on that impenetrable look of someone who is mentally ill, the more natural it seems to him that consideration ought to be shown him. “Every hour here we see souls suffer, but we have to stay within our bounds,” he countered. He became circumspect.
Clarisse said: “Good, you don’t want to. Let me make you another proposition.” She stood before him, small, legs apart, hands behind her back, and looked at him with a bashfully sarcastic, urgent smile: “I’ll join the clinic as a nurse!”
The doctor stood up and asked her to talk it over with her brother, who would make clear to her how many necessary prerequisites for such a position she was lacking. As he spoke, the sarcasm that was squeezed into her eyes drained out of them and they filled with tears. “Then I want,” she said, almost voiceless from excitement, “to be accepted as a patient! I have a mission!” Because she was afraid of spoiling her chances if she looked directly at the doctor, she looked to one side and up a little, and perhaps her eyes even wandered around. A shudder heated her skin, which swelled up red. Now she looked lovely and in need of tenderness, but it was too late; irritation at her importunity had sobered the doctor and made him reserved. He did not even ask her any more questions, for it seemed politic not to know too much about her out of consideration for the General and Ulrich, who had brought her here, and also in view of the almost forbidden favors he had granted her. And it was only out of old medical habit that from this point on his speech became still gentler and more emphatic as he expressed to Clarisse his regret that there was no way he could meet her second request, and he advised her to confide this wish to her brother too. He even informed her that before that happened he could not allow her to continue her visits to the clinic, much as this would be a loss to him personally.
Clarisse offered no real resistance to what he said. She had already imputed worse to Friedenthal. “He’s an impeccable medical bureaucrat,” she told herself. That eased her departure: she casually extended her hand to the physician, and her eyes laughed cunningly. She was not at all depressed, and even as she went down the steps was thinking about other possibilities.
LATE 1920s
FISCHEL / GERDA HANS SEPP ULRICH
It was Ulrich’s bad conscience that drove him to Gerda; since the melancholy scene between them, he had not heard anything from her and did not know how she had come to terms with herself. To his surprise, he found Papa Leo at the Fischels’ house; Mama Clementine had gone out with Gerda. Leo Fischel would not let Ulrich go; he had rushed out to the hall himself when he recognized his voice. Ulrich had the impression of changes. Director Fischel seemed to have changed his tailor; his income must have increased and his convictions diminished. Then too, he had usually stayed later at the bank; he had never worked at home after the air there had become so irksome. But today he seemed to have been sitting at his desk, although this “roaring loom of time” had not been used for years; a packet of letters lay on the baize cloth, and the chrome-plated telephone, otherwise used only by the ladies, was standing askew, as if it had just been in use. After Ulrich had sat down, Fischel turned toward him in his desk chair and polished his pince-nez with a handkerchief that he drew from his breast pocket, although earlier he would certainly have objected to such a foppish action, saying that it had been sufficient for a Goethe, a Schiller, and a Beethoven to carry their handkerchiefs in their trouser pocket—whether that was the case or not.
—It’s been a long time, said Director Fischel.
—Yes, Ulrich said.
—Did you inherit a great deal? Fischel asked.
—Oh, Ulrich said. —Enough.
—Yes, there are problems.
—But you look splendid. You somehow seem to have got younger.
—Oh, thanks; professionally there have never been any problems. But look— He pointed in a melancholy way to a pile of letters that lay on the desk. You do know Hans Sepp?
—Of course. You took me into your confidence—
—Right! Fischel said.
—Are those love letters?
The telephone rang. Fischel put on his pince-nez, which he had taken off to listen, extracted a paper with notes from his coat, and said: — Buy! Then the inaudible voice at the other end spoke to him for quite a while. From time to time Fischel looked over his spectacles at Ulrich, and once he even said: —Excuse me! Then he said into the instrument: —No, thank you, I don’t like the second business! Talk about it? Yes, of course we can talk about it again—and with a short, satisfied pause for reflection, he hung up.
—You see, Fischel said. —That was someone in Amsterdam; much too expensive! Three weeks ago the thing wasn’t worth half as much, and in three weeks it won’t be worth half what it costs now. But in between there’s a deal to be made. A great risk!
—But you didn’t want to, Ulrich said.
—Oh, that’s not really settled. But a great risk…! But still, let me tell you, that’s building in marble, stone on stone! Can you build on the mind, the love, the ideals of a person? He was thinking of his wife and of Gerda. How different it had been at the beginning! The telephone rang again, but this time it was a wrong number.
—You used to put more worth on solid moral values than on a solid purse, Ulrich said. —How often you held it against me that I couldn’t follow you in that!
—Oh—he responded—ideals are like air that changes, you don’t know how, with closed windows! Twenty-five years ago, who had any notion of anti-Semitism? No, then there were the great perspectives of Humanity! You’re too young. But I still managed to hear some of the great parliamentary debates. The last ones! The only thing that’s dependable is what you can say with numbers. Believe me, the world would be a lot more reasonable if it were simply left to the free play of supply and demand, instead of being equipped with armored ships, bayonets, diplomats who know nothing about economics, and so-called national ideals.
Ulrich interrupted with the objection that it was precisely heavy industry and the banks whose dem
ands were urging peoples on to armament.
— Well, shouldn’t they? Fischel replied. —If the world is the way it is, and runs around in fool’s outfits in broad daylight, they shouldn’t take account of that? When the military just happens to be convenient for customs dealings, or against strikers? Money, you know, has its own rationale, and it’s not to be trifled with. By the way, apropos, have you heard anything new about Arnheim’s ore deposits? Again the phone rang; but with his hand on the instrument, Fischel waited for Ulrich’s answer. The conversation was brief, and Fischel did not lose the thread of their conversation; since Ulrich knew nothing new about Arnheim, he repeated that money had its own rationale. —Pay attention, he added. —If I were to offer Hans Sepp five hundred marks to move to one of the universities of his revered-above-all Germania (Germany), he would reject them indignantly. If I offered him a thousand, ditto. But if I were to offer him ten thousand—though I never in my life would, even if I had so much money! It almost seemed as if Fischel, horrified at such an idea, had lost the connection, but he was only reflecting, and went on: —One just can’t do that, because money has its own rationale. For a man who spends insane amounts, the money won’t stick; it will fly from him, make him a spendthrift. That the ten thousand marks refuse to be offered to Hans Sepp proves that this Hans Sepp is not real, is of no value, but an awful, swindling scourge with which God is chastising me.
Again Fischel was interrupted. This time by longer communications. That he was conducting such transactions at home instead of at the office struck Ulrich. Fischel gave three orders to buy and one to sell. In between he had time to think about his wife. —If I were to offer her money so she would divorce me—he asked himself—would Clementine do it? An inner certainty answered: No. Leo Fischel mentally doubled the amount. Ridiculous! said the inner voice. Fischel quadrupled. No, on principle, occurred to him. Then in one swoop he breathlessly increased the sum beyond any human resistance or capability, and angrily stopped. He speedily had to switch his mind to smaller fortunes, which literally shrank in his mind the way the pupils narrow with a sudden change of light; but he did not forget his affairs for an instant, and made no mistakes.