The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  She had gripped both his arms now, standing before him with her face lifted up to his, her body curving back like a plant responding to a touch on its petals. In a moment her face will be drenched with that look, like the last time, Ulrich thought apprehensively. But nothing of the kind happened; her face remained beautiful. Instead of her usual tight smile there was an open one, which showed a little of her teeth between the rosy flesh of her lips, as though about to bite. Her mouth took on the shape of a double Cupid’s bow, a line echoed in the curve of her eyebrows and again in the translucent cloud of her hair.

  “For a long time now you’ve been wanting to pick me up with those teeth in that lying mouth of yours and carry me off, if only you could stand to let me see you as you really are,” Clarisse had continued. Ulrich gently freed himself from her grip. She dropped down on the couch as if he had put her there, and pulled him down after her.

  “You really shouldn’t let your imagination run away with you like this,” Ulrich said in reproof.

  Clarisse had let go of him. She closed her eyes and supported her head with both hands, her elbows resting on her knees; now that her second attack had been repelled, she decided to resort to icy logic.

  “Don’t be so literal-minded,” she said. “When I speak of the Devil, or of God, it’s only a figure of speech. But when I’m alone at home, or walking in the neighborhood, I often think: If I turn to the left, God will come; if I turn to the right, the Devil. Or when I’m about to pick something up with my hand, I have the same feeling about using the right or the left hand. When I tell Walter about it he puts his hands in his pockets, in real panic. He’s happy to see a flower in bloom, or even a snail, but don’t you think the life we lead is terribly sad? No God comes, or the Devil either. I’ve been waiting for years now, but what is there to wait for? Nothing. That’s all there is, unless art can work a miracle and change everything.”

  At this moment there was something so gentle and sad about her that Ulrich gave way to an impulse to touch her soft hair with his hand. “You may be right in the details, Clarisse,” he said. “But I can never follow your leaps from one point to another, or see how it all hangs together.”

  “It’s quite simple,” she said, still in the same posture as before. “As time went on, an idea came to me. Listen!” She straightened up and was suddenly quite vivacious again. “Didn’t you once say yourself that the way we live is full of cracks through which we can see the impossible state of affairs underneath, as it were? You needn’t say anything, I’ve known about it for a long time. We all want to have our lives in order, but nobody has! I play the piano or paint a picture, but it’s like putting up a screen to hide a hole in the wall. You and Walter also have ideas, and I don’t understand much of that, but that doesn’t work either, and you said yourself that we avoid looking at the hole out of habit or laziness, or else we let ourselves be distracted from it by bad things. Well, there’s a simple answer: That’s the hole we have to escape through! And I know how! There are days when I can slip out of myself. Then it’s like finding yourself—how shall I put it?—right in the center of things as if peeled out of a shell, and the things have had their dirty rind peeled off too. Or else one feels connected by the air with everything there is, like a Siamese twin. It’s an incredible, marvelous feeling; everything turns into music and color and rhythm, and I’m no longer the citizen Clarisse, as I was baptized, but perhaps a shining splinter pressing into some immense unfathomable happiness. But you know all about that. That’s what you meant when you said that there’s something impossible about reality, and that one’s experiences should not be turned inward, as something personal and real, but must be turned outward, like a song or a painting, and so on and so forth. Oh, I could recite it all exactly the way you said it.” Her “so on and so forth” recurred like some wild refrain as Clarisse’s torrent of words flowed on, regularly interspersed with her assertion “You can do it, but you won’t, and I don’t know why you won’t, but I’m going to shake you up!”

  Ulrich had let her go on talking, only shaking his head from time to time when she attributed to him something too unlikely, but he could not bring himself to argue with her and left his hand resting on her hair, where his fingertips could almost sense the confused pulsation of the thoughts inside her skull. He had never yet seen Clarisse in such a state of sensual excitement and was amazed to see that even in her slim, hard young body there was room for all the loosening and soft expansion of a woman’s glowing passion; this sudden, always surprising opening up of a woman one has known only as inaccessibly shut away in herself did not fail to have its effect on him. Although they defied all reason, her words did not repel him, for as they came close to touching him in the quick and then again angled off into absurdity, their constant rapid movement, like a buzzing or humming, drowned out the quality of the tone, beautiful or ugly, in the intensity of the vibrations. Listening to her seemed to help him make up his mind, like some wild music, and it was only when she seemed to have lost her way in the maze of her own words and could not find her way out that he shook her head a little with his outspread hand, as though to call her back and set her straight.

  But the opposite of what he intended happened, for Clarisse suddenly made a physical assault on him. She flung an arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his so quickly that it took him completely by surprise and he had no time to resist, as she pulled her legs up under her body and slid over to him so that she ended up kneeling in his lap, and he could feel the little hard ball of one breast pressing against his shoulder. He caught barely anything of what she was saying; she stammered something about her power of redemption, his cowardice, and his being a “barbarian,” which was why she wanted to conceive the redeemer of the world from him and not from Walter. Actually, her words were no more than a raving murmur at his ear, a hasty muttering under her breath more concerned with itself than with communication, a rippling stream of sound in which he could only catch a word here and there, such as “Moosbrugger” or “Devil’s Eye.” In self-defense he had grabbed his little assailant by her upper arms and pushed her back on the couch, so that she was now struggling against him with her legs, pushing her hair into his face and trying to get her arms around his neck again.

  “I’ll kill you if you don’t give in,” she said loud and clear. Like a boy fighting in affection mixed with anger, who won’t be put off, she struggled on in mounting excitement. The effort of restraining her left him with only a faint sense of the current of desire streaming through her body; even so, Ulrich had been strongly affected by it at the moment of putting his arm firmly around her and pressing her down. It was as if her body had penetrated his senses. He had after all known her for such a long time, and had often indulged in a bit of horseplay with her, but he had never been in such close, head-to-toe contact with this little creature, so familiar and yet so strange, its heart wildly bouncing, and when Clarisse’s movements quieted down in the grip of his hands, and the relaxation of her muscles was reflected tenderly in the glow of her eyes, what he did not want to happen almost happened. But at this instant he thought of Gerda, as though it were only now that he was facing the challenge to come to terms with himself.

  “I don’t want to, Clarisse,” he said, and let her go. “I need to be by myself now, and I have things to do before I leave.”

  When Clarisse grasped his refusal, it was as though with a jolt her head had shifted gears. She saw Ulrich standing a few steps away, his face contorted with embarrassment, saw him saying things she did not seem to take in, but as she watched the movement of his lips she felt a growing revulsion. Then she noticed that her skirt was above her knees, and jumped up off the couch. Before she understood what had happened, she was on her feet, shaking her hair and her clothes into place, as if she had been lying on the grass, and said:

  “Of course you have to pack now; I won’t keep you any longer.” She was smiling again, her normal vaguely scoffing smile that was forced through a narrow slit, and
wished him a good trip. “By the time you’re back we’ll probably have Meingast staying with us. He wrote to say he was coming, and that’s actually what I came to tell you,” she added casually.

  Ulrich hesitantly held her hand. She was rubbing his playfully with a finger. She would have given anything to know what in the world she had been saying to him; she must have said all sorts of things, because she had been so worked up that now she had forgotten it all! She did have a general idea of what had happened, and she didn’t mind, for her feelings told her that she had been brave or ready to sacrifice herself, and Ulrich timid. She wanted only to part as good friends and not to leave him in any doubt about that. “Better not tell Walter about this visit, and keep what we were talking about between ourselves for the time being,” she said lightly. She gave him her hand once more at the garden gate and declined his offer to accompany her beyond it.

  When Ulrich went back into the house he was preoccupied. He had to write some letters to let Count Leinsdorf and Diotima know he was leaving and had to attend to various other details, because he foresaw that taking over his inheritance might keep him away for some time. He stuffed various personal articles and a few books into the traveling cases already packed by his servant, whom he had sent off to bed, but when he had finished he no longer felt like going to bed himself. He was both exhausted and overstimulated after his eventful day, yet instead of canceling each other out, these two states of feeling only heightened each other so that, tired as he was, he felt unable to sleep.

  Not really thinking, but following the oscillations of his memories, Ulrich began by acknowledging that he could no longer doubt his impression, at various times, that Clarisse was not merely an unusual person but probably already mentally unbalanced—and yet, during her attack just now, or whatever one might call it, she had said things that were too close for comfort to much that he had occasionally said himself. This should have started him really thinking hard, but it only brought the unwelcome reminder, in his half-drowsy state, that he still had much to do. Almost half of the year he had taken off to think was gone, without his having settled any of his problems. It flashed through his mind that Gerda had urged him to write a book about it. But he wanted to live without splitting himself into a real and a shadow self. He remembered speaking to Section Chief Tuzzi about writing. He saw himself and Tuzzi standing in Diotima’s drawing room, and there was something theatrical, something stagy, about the scene. He remembered saying casually that he would probably have to either write a book or kill himself. But the thought of death, thinking it over at close range, so to speak, did not in the least correspond to his present state of mind either; when he explored it a little and toyed with the notion of killing himself before morning instead of taking the train, it struck him as an improper conjunction at the moment he had received the news of his father’s death! Half asleep as he was, the figures of his imagination raced through his mind; he saw himself peering down the dark barrel of a gun, where he saw a shadowy nothing, the darkness veiling the depths beyond, and mused on the rare coincidence that the same image of a loaded gun had been his favorite metaphor in his youth, when his will was all charged up, waiting to take aim and let fly at some unknown target. His mind was flooded with images such as the pistol and standing with Tuzzi. The look of a meadow in the early morning. A winding river valley filled with dense evening mists, as seen from a moving train. The place at the far end of Europe where he had parted from the woman he loved—he had forgotten what she looked like, but the image of the unpaved village streets and the thatched cottages was as fresh as yesterday. The hair under the arm of another loved woman, all that was left of her. Snatches of forgotten melodies. A characteristic movement. The fragrance of flower beds, unnoticed at the time because of the charged words being forced out by the profound emotion of two souls, and coming back to him now when the words and the people were long forgotten. He saw a man on various paths, almost painful to look at, left over like a row of puppets that had had their springs broken long ago. One would think that such images are the most transient things in the world, but there are moments when all one’s life splits up into such images, solitary relics along the road of life, as though the road led only away from them and back to them again, as though a man’s fate were obeying not his ideas and his will but these mysterious, half-meaningless pictures.

  But while he was moved almost to tears by the pointlessness, the uselessness, of all the efforts he had ever taken pride in, his sleepless, exhausted state gave rise to a feeling, or perhaps one should say that a marvelous feeling diffused itself around him. The lights Clarisse had turned on in all the rooms while she was alone were still on, and an excess of light flowed back and forth between the walls and the objects, filling the space between with an almost living presence. It was probably the tenderness inherent in any painless state of exhaustion that changed his total sense of his body; this ever-present though unheeded physical self-awareness, vaguely enough defined in any case, now passed over into a more yielding and expansive state. It was a loosening up as though a tourniquet were coming undone, and since neither the walls nor the objects underwent any real change and no god entered the rooms of this unbeliever, and since Ulrich himself by no means allowed his clear judgment to become clouded (unless his fatigue deceived him into thinking so), it could only be the relationship between himself and his surroundings that was undergoing such a change. The transformation was not objective; it was a subjective expanse of feeling, deep as groundwater, on which the senses and the intelligence, those pillars of objective perception, normally supported themselves but on which they now were gently separating or merging—the distinction lost its meaning almost as soon as he made it.

  “It’s a change in attitude; as I change, everything else involved changes too,” Ulrich thought, sure that he had himself well under observation. But one could also say that his solitude—a condition that was present within him as well as around him, binding both his worlds—it could be said, and he felt it himself, that this solitude was growing greater or denser all the time. It flowed through the walls, flooded the city, then, without actually expanding, inundated the world. “What world?” he thought. “There is none!” The notion no longer seemed to have any meaning. But Ulrich’s good judgment was still sufficiently in charge to make him recoil at once from such an exaggeration; he stopped hunting for more words and moved instead toward a state of full wakefulness. After a few seconds he gave a start. Day was breaking, its gray pallor mingling with the swiftly withering brightness of the artificial light.

  Ulrich jumped to his feet and stretched. Something remained in his body that he could not shake off. He passed a finger over his eyelids, but something remained of that gentleness, that fusion of his vision and the things it beheld. And suddenly he recognized in a way hard to describe a sort of draining away of his strength, as though he had lost any power to go on denying that he was again standing exactly where he had stood years before. He shook his head, smiling. “An attack of ‘the major’s wife,’” he called it mockingly. There was no real danger of that, his rational mind told him, since there was no one with whom he could have repeated that old foolishness. He opened a window. The air outside was neutral, ordinary everyday morning air in which the first sounds of the city’s life were striking up. He let its coolness rinse his temples, as the civilized European’s distaste for sentimentality began to fill him with its hard clarity and he made up his mind to deal with the situation, if necessary, with the utmost precision. And yet, standing for a long time at the window, staring out into the morning without thinking of anything, he still had a sense of all the feelings that were slipping gleamingly away.

  His servant’s sudden entrance, with the solemn expression of the early riser, to wake him up, took Ulrich by surprise. He took a bath, rapidly did a few vigorous exercises, and left for the railroad station.

  PART III

  INTO THE MILLENNIUM (THE CRIMINALS)

  124

  THE FOR
GOTTEN SISTER

  On his arrival in ________ toward evening of the same day, as Ulrich came out of the station he saw before him a wide, shallow square that opened into streets at both ends and jolted his memory almost painfully, as happens with a landscape one has seen often and then forgotten again.

  “Believe me, income has dropped by twenty percent and prices have gone up twenty percent, that’s a total of forty percent!” “Believe me, a six-day bike race promotes international goodwill like nothing else!” These voices were still coming out of his ear: train voices. Then he distinctly heard someone saying: “Still, for me, there’s nothing to beat opera!” “Is that your hobby?” “It’s my passion.”

  He tilted his head as though to shake water out of his ear. The train had been crowded, the journey long. Driblets of the general conversation around him that had seeped into him during the trip were oozing out again. Ulrich had waited for the joyfulness and bustle of arrival—which had poured into the quiet square from the station exit as from the mouth of a drainpipe—to subside to a trickle; now he was standing in the vacuum of silence left behind by such noise. But even as his hearing was still disturbed from the abrupt change, he was struck by an unaccustomed peace that met his eyes. Everything visible was more intensely so than usual, and when he looked across the square the crossbars of perfectly ordinary windows stood as black against the pale sheen of glass in the dimming light as if they were the crosses of Golgotha. And everything that moved seemed to detach itself from the calm of the street in a way that never happens in very large cities. Whether passing or standing still, things evidently had the space here in which to make their importance felt. He could see this with the curiosity of reacquaintance as he gazed out on the large provincial town where he had spent some brief, not very pleasant, parts of his life. It had, as he well knew, an air of someplace colonial, a place of exile: here a nucleus of ancient German burgher stock, transplanted centuries ago to Slavic soil, had withered away so that hardly anything was left, apart from a few churches and family names, to remind one of it; nor, except for a fine old palace that had been preserved, was there evidence of its having become, later on, the old seat of the Provincial Diet. But in the era of absolute rule this past had been overlaid by a vast apparatus of imperial administration, with its provincial headquarters, schools and universities, barracks, courthouses, prisons, bishop’s palace, assembly rooms, and theater, together with the people needed to run them and the merchants and artisans who came in their wake, until finally an industry of entrepreneurs moved in, filling the suburbs with their factories one after the other, with a greater influence on the fate of this piece of earth in the past few generations than anything else had had. This town had a past, and it even had a face, but the eyes did not go with the mouth, or the chin with the hair; over everything lay the traces of a hectic life that is inwardly empty. This could possibly, under special personal circumstances, foster great originality.