by Robert Musil
***
Gerda had come back. After Hans’s death she had, for the moment, nothing to live for. But if Fischel had expected to find his daughter crushed, he was mistaken. A young lady who obviously had far-reaching plans walked in, wearing the insignia of a Red Cross nurse.
—I’m going to go as a nurse, Papa, Gerda said.
—Not right away, not right away, my child! General Director Fischel answered submissively. —We have to wait and see. No one has any idea what this is going to turn into—
—What should it turn into! I’ve already seen the young men at the mobilization stations. They’re singing. Their wives and fiancées are with them. No one knows how he is going to come back. But if you walk through the city and look in people’s eyes, including the people who aren’t going to the front yet, it’s like a big wedding.
Fischel, concerned, looked at his daughter over his glasses. —I would wish another kind of wedding for you, may God preserve us. A Dutch firm has offered me a shipful of margarine, available at the port of Rotterdam—do you know what that means? Five crowns difference per ton since yesterday! If I don’t telegraph right away, tomorrow it will probably be seven crowns. That means prices are going up. If they come back from the campaign with both eyes, the young men will need them both to look out for their money!
—Well—Gerda said—people are talking about increases, but there have always been increases at the beginning. Mama is quite wild too.
—Oh? Fischel asked. —Have you already talked with Mama? What’s she up to?
—At the moment, she’s in the kitchen—Gerda motioned with her head toward the wall, behind which a hall led to the kitchen—and laying in canned goods like mad. Before that, she cashed in her change, like everyone else. And she fired the kitchen maid; since the manservant has to go in the army anyway, she wants to really cut down on the servants.
Fischel nodded with satisfaction. —She’s in favor of the war. She hopes the brutality will cease and people will be purified. But she is also a clever woman and is being prudent. Fischel said this a little mockingly and a little tenderly.
—Oh, Papa. Gerda flared up. —If I had wanted to be the way you are, I would have married a knight in shining armor. You keep misunderstanding me. I’m not letting myself be left by the wayside because my first romantic experience wasn’t a good one! You’ll manage to get me into a field hospital. When the patients come in from the front they should find real, up-to-date people as nurses, not praying nuns! You have no idea how much love and emotion of a sort we’ve never experienced before are (to be seen) in the streets today! We’ve been living like animals, brought down one day by death; it’s different now! It’s tremendous, I tell you: everyone is a brother; even death isn’t an enemy; a person loves his own death for the sake of others; today, for the first time, we understand life!
Fischel had been staring at his daughter with pride and concern. Gerda had got even thinner. Sharp, spinsterish lines cut up her face into an eye segment, a nose-mouth part, and a chin-and-neck section, all of which, whenever Gerda was trying to say something, pulled like horses dragging a load that was too heavy: now one part, now another, never all together, giving the face an overstrained and deeply moving quality. —Now she has a new craze—Fischel thought—and will manage once again not to lead a settled life! In his mind he ran down a list of a dozen men who, now that Hans Sepp was fortunately dead, could be regarded as qualified suitors; but in view of the damned uncertainty that had broken out, there was no predicting what was going to happen to any of them tomorrow. Gerda’s blond hair seemed to have become shaggier; she had been neglecting her appearance, but this made her hair look more like Fischel’s, and it had lost the presumptuous soft, dark-blond smoothness characteristic of her mother’s family. Memories of a brave, unkempt fox terrier and of himself, who had fought his way up and at the moment was standing again before something as yet unseen by man, over which he would go on climbing, mingled in his heart with the brave stupidity of his daughter into a warm togetherness. Leo Fischel straightened up in his chair and laid his hand on the desktop with emphasis. —My child!—he said—I have a strange feeling when I hear you talk this way, while people are shouting hurrah and prices are rising. You say I don’t have any idea, but I do, except that I can’t say myself what it is. Don’t believe that I’m not caught up in this too. Sit down, my child!
Gerda did not want to, she was too impatient; but Fischel repeated his wish more strongly, and she obeyed, sitting hesitantly on the extreme edge of an armchair. —This is the first day you’re back; listen to me! Fischel said. —You say I understand nothing about love and killing and such things; that may be. But if nothing happens to you in the hospital, which God forbid, you ought to understand me a little before we part again. I was seven years old when we had the war with Prussia. Then too, for two weeks, all the bells pealed and in the synagogue we prayed to God to annihilate the Prussians, who today are our allies. What do you say to that? What should anyone say to that?
Gerda did not want to answer. She had the prejudice that what was going on now belonged to the enthusiastic young, not the cautious old. And only reluctantly, because her father was looking at her so penetratingly, did she murmur some sort of response. —Over the course of time, people simply learn to understand each other better—was what her answer about the Prussians amounted to. But Leo Fischel snatched up her words spiritedly: —No! People dont learn to understand each other better in the course of time; it’s just the opposite, I tell you! When you get to know a person and you like him, it may be that you think you understand him; but after you’ve been around him for twenty-five years you don’t understand a word he says! You think, let’s say, that he ought to be grateful to you; but no, just at that moment he curses you. Always when you think he has to say yes, he’ll say no; and when you think no, he thinks yes. So he can be warm or cold, hard or soft, as it suits him; and do you believe that for your sake he’ll be the way you want him to be? It suited your mother as little as it suits this armchair to be a horse, because you’re already impatient and want to be off!
Gerda smiled weakly at her father. Since she had come back and seen the new situation, he had made a strong impression on her; she could not help herself. And he loved her, there was no doubting that, and it comforted her.
—But what are we going to do with the things that won’t let us understand them? Fischel asked prophetically. —We measure them, we weigh them, we analyze them mentally, and we direct all our keenness to finding in them something that remains constant, something by which we could get hold of them, on which we can rely and which we can count. Those are the laws of nature, my child, and where we have discovered them we can mass-produce things and buy and sell to our heart’s content. And now I ask you, how can people relate to one another when they don’t understand one another? I tell you, there’s only one way! Only when you stimulate or inhibit his desire can you get a person exactly where you want him. Whoever wants to build solidly must make use of force and basic desires. Then a person suddenly becomes unambiguous, predictable, dependable, and your experience with him is repeated everywhere in the same fashion. You can’t rely on goodness. You can rely on bad qualities. God is wonderful, my child; he has given us our bad qualities so that we can achieve some semblance of order.
—But in that case the order of the world would be nothing but baseness jumping through hoops! Gerda flared up.
—You’re clever! Perhaps so. But who can know? At any rate, I don’t point a bayonet at a person’s chest to have him do what he thinks is right. Are you following the newspapers? I’m still getting foreign papers, although it’s beginning to be difficult. Here and abroad they’re saying the same things. Get the screws on them. Tighten the screws on them. Cold-bloodedly continue the tight-screw policy. Don’t hesitate to apply the “strong method” of breaking windows. That’s the way they’re talking here, and abroad it’s not much different. I believe they’ve already introduced martial law, and i
f we should get into the war zone we’ll be threatened with the gallows. That’s the strong method. I can understand that it makes an impression on you. It’s clean, precise, and abhors chatter. It qualifies the nation for great things by treating each individual person who is part of it like a dog! Leo Fischel smiled.
Gerda shook her tousled head decisively, but in a slow, friendly way.
—You must be clear about this, Fischel added. —When the industrialists’ association supplied a bourgeois workers’ opposition party with an election fund, or when my former bank made money available for something, they weren’t doing anything different. And a deal only comes about at all if I either force another person to meet me halfway, because otherwise it will hurt him, or if I give him the impression that there’s a good deal to be made; then I mostly outsmart him, and that’s also a form of my power over him. But how delicate and adaptable this power is! It’s creative and flexible. Money gives measure to a man. It’s ordered selfishness. It’s the most splendid organization of selfishness, a creative super-organization, constructed on a real notion of bearish speculation!
Gerda had been listening to her father, but her own thoughts buzzed in her mind. She answered: —Papa, I didn’t understand everything, but you’re surely right. Of course, you’re looking at things as a rationalist, and for me it’s precisely the irrational (what goes beyond all calculation) in what’s going on now that’s fascinating!
—What does irrational mean? General Director Fischel protested. —By that you mean illogical and incalculable and wild, the way one sometimes is in dreams? To that I can only say that buying and selling is like war; you have to calculate and you can calculate, but even there what is decisive in the last analysis is will, courage, the individual, or, as you call it, the irrational. No, my child—he concluded—money is selfishness brought into relation with enterprise and efficiency. All of you are trying another way to regulate selfishness. It’s not new, I acknowledge it, it’s related. But wait and see how it works! For centuries capitalism has been a proven way of organizing human powers according to the ability to make money; where its influence is suppressed, you will find that arbitrariness, backroom deals, kowtowing for advantage, and adventurism will spring up. As far as I’m concerned, you can do away with money if you like, but you won’t abolish the superior power of whoever is holding the advantages in his hand. Except that you’ll put someone who doesn’t know what to do with them in the place of someone who did! For you’re mistaken if you believe that money is the cause of our selfishness; it’s the consequence.
—But I don’t believe that at all, Papa, Gerda said modesdy. —I’m only telling you that’s what’s going on now—
—And furthermore—Fischel interrupted her—it’s the most reasonable consequence!
—What’s going on now—Gerda went on with her sentence—rises above reason. The way a poem or love rises above the commerce of the world.
—You’re a deep girl! Fischel embraced her and released her. He liked Gerda’s youthful ardor. —My fortune! he called her mentally, and followed her with a tender glance. A discussion with a person one loves and understands is bracing. He had not philosophized this way for a long time; it was a remarkable period. In conversation with this child Fischel had achieved some clarity about himself. He wanted to buy. Not a ship; at least five ships. He summoned his secretary. —We can’t do this ourselves—he told him—it wouldn’t look good, but let’s do it through an intermediary. But for Leo Fischel this was not the main thing. The main thing was that he had gained a feeling of connection with events and yet a feeling of isolation, too. In spite of the ups and downs going on around him, he had created order within himself.
1936
TO THE COMPLEX: LEO FLSCHEL-GERDA-HANS SEPP
Note: Development of a Man of Action (Leo Fischel)
Title: Return to an abandoned world Leo Fischel as messenger from the world Encounter with a messenger from an abandoned world / News from a lost world
Walking through the train, Ulrich saw a familiar face, stopped, and realized that it was Leo Fischel, who was sitting in a compartment by himself, leafing through a stack of flimsy papers he held in his hand. With his pince-nez far down on his nose, and his reddish-blond muttonchop sideburns, he looked like an English lord of the 1860s. Ulrich was so in need of contact with everyday life that he greeted his old acquaintance, whom he had not seen for months, almost joyfully.
Fischel asked him where he was coming from.
“From the south,” Ulrich responded vaguely.
“We haven’t seen you for quite a while,” Fischel said with concern. “You’ve been having trouble, haven’t you?”
“How so?”
“I just mean in general. In your position with the campaign, I’m thinking.”
“I never had a connection with the campaign that could be called a position,” Ulrich objected with some heat.
“You just disappeared one day,” Fischel said. “Nobody knew where you were. That led me to think that you were having problems.”
“Except for that error, you’re very well informed: how come?” Ulrich laughed.
“I was looking for you like a needle in a haystack. Hard times, bad stories, my friend,” Fischel replied with a sigh. “The General didn’t know where you were, your cousin didn’t know where you were, and you weren’t having your mail forwarded, I was told. Did you get a letter from Gerda?”
“Get it? No. Perhaps I’ll find it waiting for me at home. Has something happened to Gerda?”
Director Fischel did not answer; the conductor was passing by, and he motioned him in to give him some telegrams, requesting that he send them off at the next stop.
Ulrich now first noticed that Fischel was traveling first class, which he would not have expected of him.
“Since when are you seeing my cousin and the General?” he asked.
Fischel looked at him reflectively. Obviously he did not understand the question right away. “Oh,” he then said, “I think you hadn’t even left yet. Your cousin consulted me on a matter of business, and through her I met the General, whom I wanted at that time to request something of on account of Hans Sepp. You know, don’t you, that Hans shot and killed himself?”
Ulrich gave an involuntary start.
“It even got into some of the newspapers,” Fischel confirmed. “He was called up for his military service and a few weeks later shot himself.”
“But why?”
“God knows! Frankly speaking, he could just as well have done it sooner. He could always have shot himself. He was a fool. But in the final analysis, I liked him. You won’t believe it, but I even liked his anti-Semitism and his diatribes against bank directors.”
“Was there anything between him and Gerda?”
“Bitter quarrels,” Fischel confirmed. “But it wasn’t that alone. Listen: I’ve missed you. I searched for you. When I’m talking with you I have the feeling I’m talking not with a reasonable person but with a philosopher. Whatever you say—please permit an old friend to say this—is never to the point, never has hands and feet, but it has head and heart! So what do you say about Hans Sepp’s having shot himself?”
“Is that why you were searching for me?”
“No, not because of that. On account of business and the General and Arnheim, who are friends of yours. The man before you is no longer with Lloyd’s Bank but has gone into business for himself. It’s a handful, let me tell you! I’ve had a lot of trouble, but now, thank goodness, things are going splendidly—”
“If I’m not mistaken, what you call trouble is losing your job?”
“Yes; thank goodness I lost my job at Lloyd’s; otherwise today I would still be a head clerk with the title of Director and would remain one until I was put out to pasture. When I was forced to give that up, my wife began divorce proceedings against me—”