The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  Ulrich found it touching somehow. He did not brush her off but stopped and let her repeat her offer, as though he had not understood. Here he had unexpectedly found a friend who, for a slight charge, would put herself entirely at his disposal, ready to do her best to please him and avoid anything to put him off. If he showed himself willing, she would slip her arm in his with a gentle trustfulness and faint hesitation, as when old friends meet again for the first time after a separation not of their own making. If he promised to double or treble her usual price, and put the money on the table beforehand, so that she need not think about it but could abandon herself to that carefree, obliging state of mind that goes with having made a good deal, it would be shown that pure indifference has the merit of all pure feeling, which is without personal presumption and functions minus the needless confusion caused by interference from private emotions. Such thoughts went through his mind, half seriously, half flippantly, and he could not bring himself altogether to disappoint the little person, who was waiting for him to strike a deal; he even realized that he wanted her to like him, but clumsily enough, instead of simply exchanging a few words with her in the language of her profession, he fumbled in his pocket, slipped approximately the amount she would have asked into her hand, and walked on. For the space of a moment he had briefly pressed her hand—which had oddly resisted, in her surprise—firmly in his, with a single friendly word. But as he left this willing volunteer behind, he knew that she would rejoin her colleagues, who were whispering nearby in the dark, show them the money, and finally think of some gibe at him to give vent to feelings she could not understand.

  The encounter lived on in his mind for a while as though it had been a tender idyll of a minute’s duration. He did not romanticize the poverty of his fleeting friend or her debasement, but when he imagined how she would have turned up her eyes and given the fake little moan she had learned to deliver at the right moment, he couldn’t help feeling without knowing why that there was something touching about this deeply vulgar, hopelessly inept private performance for an agreed price; perhaps because it was a burlesque version of the human comedy itself. Even while he was still speaking to the girl he had thought fleetingly of Moosbrugger, the pathological comedian, the pursuer and nemesis of prostitutes, who had been out walking on that other, unlucky night just as Ulrich was this evening. When the housefronts on that street had stopped swaying like stage scenery for a moment, Moosbrugger had bumped into the unknown creature who had awaited him by the bridge the night of the murder. What a shock of recognition it must have been, going through him from head to toe: for an instant, Ulrich thought he could feel it himself. Something was lifting him off the ground like a wave; he lost his balance but didn’t need it, the movement itself carried him along. His heart contracted, but his imaginings became confused and overran all bounds, until they dissolved in an almost enervating voluptuousness. He made an effort to calm down. He had apparently been living so long without some central purpose that he was actually envying a psychopath his obsessions and his faith in the part he was playing! But Moosbrugger was fascinating, after all, not just to himself but to everyone else as well. Ulrich heard Arnheim’s voice asking him: “Would you set him free?” and his own answer: “No! Probably not.” Never ever, he now said to himself, and yet he had the hallucinatory image of an act in which the movement of reaching out in some extreme state of excitement and that of being moved by it fused into an ineffable communion, in which desire was indistinguishable from compulsion, meaning from necessity, and the most intense activity from blissful receptiveness. He fleetingly recalled the opinion that such luckless creatures as Moosbrugger were the embodiments of repressed instincts common to all, of all the murders and rapes committed in fantasies. Let those who believed this make their own peace with Moosbrugger, let them justify him to reestablish their own morality, after they had satisfied their dark urges through him! Ulrich’s conflict was different; he repressed nothing and could not help seeing that the image of a murderer was no stranger to him than any other of the world’s pictures; what they all had in common with his own old images of himself: part crystallization of meaning, part resurgence of the nonsense beneath. A rampant metaphor of order, that was what Moosbrugger meant for him. And suddenly Ulrich said: “All of that—” and made a gesture as though thrusting something aside with the back of his hand. He had not merely thought it, he had said it out loud, and reacted to hearing himself speak by pressing his lips together and finishing his statement in silence: “All of that has to be settled, once and for all!” Never mind what “all of that” was in detail; it was everything he had been preoccupied with, tormented by, sometimes even delighted with, ever since he had taken his “sabbatical”—everything that had tied him up in knots, like a dreamer for whom all things are possible except getting up and moving about; all that had led him from one impossible thing to another, from the very beginning until these last minutes of his homeward walk. Ulrich felt that he would now at long last have to either live like everybody else, for some attainable goal, or come to grips with one of his impossible possibilities. He had reached his own neighborhood, and he quickened his pace through the last street with a peculiar sense of hovering on some threshold. The feeling lent him wings, it moved him to take action, but as it was unspecific, again he was left with only an incomparable sense of freedom.

  This might have passed off like so much else, but when he turned the corner into his own street he thought he saw all the windows of his house lit up, and shortly afterward, when he reached his garden gate, he could have no doubt about it. His old servant had asked for permission to spend the night with relatives somewhere; Ulrich had not been home since the episode with Gerda, when it was still daylight, and the gardener couple, who lived on the ground floor, never entered his rooms; yet there were lights on everywhere—intruders must be in the house, burglars he was about to take by surprise. Ulrich was so bewildered, and so disinclined to shake off the spell he was under, that he walked straight up to the house without hesitation. He had no idea what to expect. He saw shadows on the windows that seemed to indicate there was only one person moving about inside, but there could be more, and he wondered whether he might be walking into a bullet as he entered—or should he be prepared to shoot first? In a different state of mind Ulrich would probably have gone looking for a policeman or at least investigated the situation before deciding what to do, but he wanted this adventure to himself, and did not even reach for the pistol he sometimes carried since the night he had been knocked down by the hoodlums. He wanted. . . he didn’t know what he wanted; he was willing to see what happened!

  But when he pushed open the front door and entered the house, the burglar he had been looking forward to with such mixed feelings was only Clarisse.

  123

  THE TURNING POINT

  Ulrich’s recklessness might from the beginning have been motivated in part by an underlying faith in some harmless explanation for everything, that shying away from believing the worst that always leads one into danger; nevertheless, when his old servant unexpectedly came up to him in the hall, he almost knocked him down. Fortunately, he stopped himself in time, and was told that a telegram had come, which Clarisse had signed for and was now holding for him upstairs. The young lady had arrived about an hour ago, just as he, the old man, had been about to leave, and she would not let herself be turned away, so that he had preferred to stay in and give up his night out this once, for if he might be permitted to say so, the young lady seemed to be rather upset.

  Ulrich thanked him and went up to his rooms, where he found Clarisse lying on the couch, on her side with her legs drawn up. Her straight, slim figure, her boyish haircut, and the charming oval of her face resting on one hand as she looked at him when he opened the door all made a most seductive picture. He told her that he had taken her for a burglar.

  Clarisse’s eyes flashed like rapid bursts of machine-gun fire. “Maybe I am a burglar!” she said. “That old fox your servant di
d his best to make me leave. I sent him off to bed, but I know he’s been lurking out of sight downstairs somewhere. Your house is lovely!” She held out the telegram to him without getting up. “I was curious to see what you’re like when you come home to be by yourself,” she went on. “Walter’s gone to a concert. He won’t be back till after midnight. But I didn’t tell him I was coming to see you.”

  Ulrich ripped open the telegram and read it while only half listening to Clarisse’s words. He turned suddenly pale and read the startling message over again, unable to take it in. Although he had failed to answer several letters from his father asking him about the progress of the Parallel Campaign and the problem of “diminished responsibility,” a longish interval had passed, without his noticing it, since any further reminders had come—and now this telegram, obviously drafted in advance with meticulous care by his father himself, informed him punctiliously, and in a funereal tone that did not quite succeed in repressing all reproach, of his own death. There had been little enough affection between them; in fact, the thought of his father had almost always been rather disturbing to Ulrich, and yet, as he now read the quaintly sinister text over again, he was thinking: “Now I am all alone in the world.” He did not mean it literally, nor would that have made any sense, considering how things had been between them; what he meant was that he felt, with some amazement, that he was floating free, as though some mooring rope had snapped, or that his state of alienation from a world to which his father had been the last link had now become complete and final.

  “My father’s dead,” he said to Clarisse, holding up the telegram with a touch of unintended solemnity.

  “Oh!” Clarisse said. “Congratulations!” And after a slight, thoughtful pause she added: “I suppose you’re going to be very rich now?” and looked around with interest.

  “I don’t believe he was more than moderately well off,” Ulrich replied distantly. “I’ve been living here quite beyond his means.”

  Clarisse acknowledged the rebuke with a tiny smile, a sort of little curtsy of a smile; many of her expressive movements were as abrupt and disproportionate in a small space as the theatrical bow of a boy who must demonstrate before company how well he has been brought up. She was left alone for a few moments while Ulrich excused himself to go and make preparations for the trip he would have to take. When she had left Walter after their violent scene she had not gone far; outside the door to their apartment there was a seldom-used staircase leading up to the attic, and there she had sat, wrapped in a shawl, until she heard him leave the house. It made her think of the lofts in theaters for the stage machinery, where ropes run on pulleys, and there she sat while Walter made his exit down the stairs. She imagined that actresses might sit on the rafters above the stage between calls, wrapped in shawls, watching the stage from above, enjoying a full view of everything that was going on, just as she was now. It fitted in with a favorite notion of hers, that life was a dramatic role to be played. There was no need to understand one’s part rationally, she thought; after all, what did anyone know about it, even those who might know more than she did? It was a matter of having the right instinct for life, like a storm bird. One simply spread out one’s arms—and for her that included words, tears, kisses—like wings and took off! This fantasy offered some compensation to her for being no longer able to believe in Walter’s future. She looked down the steep staircase Walter had just descended, spread her arms, and kept them raised in that position as long as she could; perhaps she could help him in that way! A steep ascent and a steep descent are strong complementary opposites and belong together, she thought. “Joyful world aslant” was what she named her wingspread arms and her gaze down the stairwell. She changed her mind about sneaking out to watch the demonstrators in town; what did she care about the common herd; the fantastic drama of the elect had begun!

  And so Clarisse had gone to see Ulrich. On the way a sly smile would sometimes appear on her face, whenever it occurred to her that Walter thought her crazy each time she let slip any sign of her greater insight into what was going on between them. It tickled her vanity to know that he was afraid of having a child by her even while he impatiently longed for it. “Crazy” to her meant being something like summer lightning, or enjoying so extraordinary a degree of health that it frightened people; it was a quality her marriage had brought out in her, step by step, as her feelings of superiority and control grew. She did realize, all the same, that there were times when other people did not know what to make of her, and when Ulrich reappeared she felt she ought to say something to him that would be in keeping with an event that cut so deeply into his life. She leapt up from the couch, paced through the room and the adjoining rooms, and then said: “Well, my sincere condolences, old fellow!”

  Ulrich looked at her in astonishment, although he recognized the tone she fell into when she was nervous. Sometimes she’s so hopelessly conventional, he thought; it’s like coming upon a page from another book bound in with what one is reading. She had not bothered to watch her words with the appropriate expression but had flung them at him sideways, over her shoulder, which heightened the effect of hearing, not a false note exactly, but the wrong words to the tune, giving the uncanny impression that she herself consisted of many such misplaced texts.

  When she received no answer from Ulrich, she stopped in front of him and said: “I have to talk with you!”

  “May I offer you some refreshment?” Ulrich said.

  Clarisse only fluttered her hand at shoulder height to signal no. She pulled her thoughts together and said: “Walter is dead set on having a child. Can you understand that?” She seemed to be waiting for an answer. But what could Ulrich have said to that?

  “But I don’t want to!” she cried out violently.

  “Well, no need to fly into a rage,” Ulrich said. “If you don’t want to, it can’t happen.”

  “But it’s destroying him!”

  “People who are always expecting to die generally live a long time! You and I will be shriveled ancients while Walter will still have his boyish face under his white mane as Director of his Archives.”

  Clarisse turned pensively on her heel and walked away from Ulrich; at a distance, she wheeled to face him again and “fixed him” with her eye.

  “Have you ever seen an umbrella with its shaft removed? Walter falls apart when I turn away from him. I’m his shaft and he’s . . .” She was about to say “my umbrella” but thought of something much better: “my shield,” she said. “He sees himself as my protector. And the first thing that means is giving me a big belly. Next will be the lectures on breast-feeding the infant because that is nature’s way, and then he’ll want to bring up the child in his own image. You know him well enough to know all that. All he wants is to have the rights to everything and a terrific excuse for making bourgeois conformists out of both of us. But if I go on saying no, as I have been, he’ll be done for. I mean simply everything to him!”

  Ulrich smiled incredulously at this sweeping claim.

  “He wants to kill you,” Clarisse added quickly.

  “What? I thought that was your suggestion to him.”

  “I want the child from you!” Clarisse said.

  Ulrich whistled through his teeth in surprise.

  She smiled like an adolescent who has misbehaved with deliberate provocation.

  “I wouldn’t do something so underhanded to such an old friend,” Ulrich said slowly. “It goes against my grain.”

  “Oh? So you’re a man of high scruple, are you?” Clarisse seemed to attach some special significance of her own to this that Ulrich didn’t understand. She gave it some thought and then returned to the attack: “But if you are my lover, he’s got you where he wants you.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s obvious; I just don’t know quite how to put it. You’ll be forced to treat him with consideration. We’ll both be feeling sorry for him. You can’t just go ahead and cheat on him, of course, so you’ll have to try to m
ake it up to him somehow. And so on and so forth. And most important of all, you’ll be driving him to bring out the best that’s in him. You know perfectly well that we are stuck inside ourselves like statues in a block of stone. We have to sculpt our way out! We have to force each other to do it.”

  “Maybe so,” Ulrich said, “but aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? What makes you think any of this will happen?”

  Clarisse was smiling again. “Perhaps I am ahead of myself,” she said. She sidled up to him and slipped her arm confidingly under his, which hung limply at his side and made no room for hers. “Don’t you find me attractive? Don’t you like me?” she asked. And when he did not answer, she went on: “But you do find me attractive, I know it; I’ve seen it often enough, the way you look at me, when you come to see us. Do you remember if I’ve ever told you that you’re the Devil? That’s how I feel. Try to understand, I’m not calling you a poor devil: that’s the kind who wants to do evil because he doesn’t know any better. You are a great devil: you know what’s good and you do the opposite of what you’d like to do! You know the life we lead is abominable, and so you say mockingly that we must go on with it. And you say, full of your high scruples, ‘I won’t cheat on a friend,’ but you only say that because you’ve thought a hundred times, ‘I’d like to have Clarisse.’ But just because you’re a devil you have something of a god inside you, Ulo! A great god. The kind who lies to try to keep from being recognized. You do want me. . . .”