by Robert Musil
So thinking, he forgot, without quite knowing how, the Bonadea who was there; resting his head on his arm, he had pensively turned his back to Bonadea and was gazing through the walls at distant things, when his total silence moved her to open her eyes. All unaware, he was at this moment remembering how he had once on a journey got off a train before reaching his destination; a translucent day that had mysteriously, seductively, swept the veils from the landscape had lured him away from the station for a walk, only to desert him at nightfall, when he found himself without his luggage in a hamlet hours away. Indeed, he seemed to recall that he had always had the quality of staying out for unpredictable lengths of time and never returning by the same road; and this suddenly brought back a far distant memory, from a period in his childhood that he normally could not recall, which cast a light on his life. Through a tiny chink in time he seemed to feel again the mysterious yearning by which a child is drawn toward some object it sees, to touch it or even put it in its mouth, at which point the magic comes to a stop as in a blind alley. Just as briefly, he regarded it as possible that the longing of adults, which drives them toward any distance merely to transform it into nearness, is no better or worse—the same sort of longing that dominated him, a compulsion, to judge by a certain aimlessness that was merely masked by curiosity; and finally, this basic image changed to a third, emerging as this hasty and disappointing episode with Bona-dea, which neither of them had wanted to turn out as it had. Lying side by side in bed seemed utterly childish to him. “But what does its opposite mean, that motionless, hushed love at a great distance, as incorporeal as an early autumn day?” he wondered. “Probably only another version of child’s play,” he thought skeptically, and remembered the colorful animal prints he had loved more rapturously as a child than he had loved his mistress today.
Bonadea at this point had seen just about enough of his back to gauge her unhappiness, and she spoke up: “It was your fault!”
Ulrich turned to her with a smile and said spontaneously: “My sister is coming here in a few days to stay with me—did I tell you? We’ll hardly be able to see each other then.”
“For how long?” Bonadea asked.
“To stay,” Ulrich answered, smiling again.
“Well?” Bonadea said. “What difference will it make? Unless you’re trying to tell me that your sister won’t let you have a lover?”
“That’s just what I am trying to tell you,” Ulrich said.
Bonadea laughed. “Here I came to see you today in all innocence, and you never even let me finish my story!” she complained.
“I seem to have been designed as a machine for the relentless devaluation of life! I want to be different for once,” Ulrich retorted. This was quite beyond her, but it made her remember defiantly that she loved Ulrich. All at once she stopped being the helpless victim of her nerves and found a convincing naturalness; she said, simply: “You’ve started an affair with her!”
Ulrich warned her not to say such things; a little more grimly than he had meant to. “I intend for a long time to love no woman otherwise than if she were my sister,” he said, and stopped. The length of his silence impressed Bonadea with a greater sense of his determination than was perhaps justified by his words.
“You’re really perverse!” she cried in a tone of prophetic warning, and leapt out of bed in order to hurry back to Diotima’s academy of love, whose unsuspecting portals stood wide open to receive its repentant and refreshed disciple.
147
AGATHE ACTUALLY ARRIVES
That evening there was a telegram, and the next afternoon Agathe arrived.
Ulrich’s sister brought only a few suitcases, in accordance with her plan to leave everything behind—not that the quantity of her luggage was wholly in keeping with the precept “Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes.” When he heard about the precept, Ulrich laughed; there were even two hatboxes that had escaped the fire.
Agathe’s forehead showed the charming furrow denoting hurt feelings and futile brooding over them.
Whether it was fair of Ulrich to find fault with the imperfect expression of a grand and sweeping emotion was left undetermined, for Agathe did not raise the question. The cheerful fuss and upheaval that of necessity attended her arrival made an uproar in her ears and eyes like a dance swaying around a brass band. She was in fine spirits but faintly disappointed, although she had not been expecting anything in particular and had even made a point during her journey of not forming any expectations. It was only that when she remembered that she had stayed up all the previous night she was suddenly overcome with fatigue. She didn’t mind when Ulrich had to tell her, after a while, that her telegram had come too late for him to postpone an appointment he had for the afternoon. He promised to be back in an hour, and settled his sister on the sofa in his study with such elaborate care that they both had to laugh.
When Agathe woke up, the hour was long gone, and Ulrich was not there. The room was sunk in deep twilight and was so alien that she felt suddenly dismayed at finding herself in the midst of the new life to which she had been looking forward. As far as she could make out, the walls were lined with books just as her father’s had been, and the tables covered with papers. Curiosity led her to open a door and enter the adjacent room: here she found clothes closets, shoe boxes, the punching bag, barbells, and parallel bars. Beyond these were more books, the bathroom with its eau de cologne, bath salts, brushes, and combs, her brother’s bedroom, and the hall, with its hunting trophies. Her passage was marked by lights flashing on and off, but as chance would have it, Ulrich noticed none of this, even though he was home by now. He had put off waking her to let her rest a while longer, and now he ran into her on the landing as he was coming up from the little-used basement kitchen. He had gone there to look around for a snack to bring her; since he had not planned ahead, there was no one to wait on them that day. It was only when they stood side by side that Agathe’s random impressions began to coalesce into a perception that left her so disconcerted and disheartened that she felt it would be best to bolt as soon as she could. There was something so impersonal, so indifferent about the spirit in which things had been thrown together here that it frightened her.
Ulrich noticed this and apologized, explaining the situation light-heartedly. He told her how he had come to acquire his house and gave its history in detail, beginning with the antlers he had come to own without ever going hunting and ending with the punching bag, which he set bobbing for her benefit. Agathe looked at everything again with disquieting seriousness, and even turned her head for another look whenever they left a room. Ulrich tried to make this examination entertaining, but as it went on he began to feel embarrassed about his house. It turned out—something habit had made him overlook—that he had used only the few rooms he needed, leaving the rest dangling from them like a neglected decoration. When they sat down together after this survey Agathe asked: “But why did you do it, if you don’t like it?”
Her brother provided her with tea and every refreshment he could find in the house, and insisted on giving a hospitable welcome, belated though it was, so that their second reunion should not be inferior to the first in material comforts. Dashing back and forth on these errands, he confessed: “I’ve done everything so carelessly and wrong that the place doesn’t have anything at all to do with me.”
“But it’s all really very attractive,” Agathe now consoled him.
Ulrich responded that it would probably have been even worse if he had done it differently. “I can’t stand houses with interiors tailored to express one’s personality,” he declared. “It would make me feel that I had ordered myself from an interior decorator too.”
And Agathe said: “I shy away from that kind of house also.”
“Even so, it can’t be left the way it is,” Ulrich rectified. He was sitting at the table with her, and the very fact that they would now be having their meals together raised a number of problems. The realization that all sorts of t
hings would have to be changed took him by surprise; it would take a quite unprecedented effort on his part, and he reacted to this at first with the zeal of a beginner.
“A person living alone,” he said, when his sister seemed considerately willing to leave everything as it was, “can afford to have a weakness; it will merge with his other qualities and hardly be noticeable. But when two people share a weakness it becomes twice as conspicuous in comparison with the qualities they don’t share, and approaches a public confession.”
Agathe could not see it.
“In other words, as brother and sister there are things that each of us could indulge in on our own but we cannot do together; that’s exactly why we have come together.”
This appealed to Agathe. Still, his negative formulation, that they had come together in order not to do something, left something to be desired, and after a while she asked, returning to the way his furnishings had been assembled by the best firms: “I’m afraid I still don’t understand. Why did you let the place be done like this if you didn’t think it was right?”
Ulrich met her cheerful gaze and let his eyes rest on her face, which, above the slightly crumpled traveling dress she was still wearing, now looked smooth as silver and so amazingly present that it felt equally near and far from him; or perhaps the closeness and the remoteness in his presence canceled each other out, just as, out of the infinity of sky, the moon suddenly appears behind the neighboring roof.
“Why did I do it?” he answered, smiling. “I forget now. Probably because I could just as well have done it some other way. I felt no responsibility. I’d be less sure of myself if I were to tell you that the irresponsible way in which we’re conducting ourselves now may well be the first step toward a new responsibility.”
“How so?”
“Oh, in all sorts of ways. You know: the life of an individual person may be only a slight variant of the most probable average value in the series, and so on.”
All Agathe took in of this was what made sense to her. She said: “Which comes to: ‘Quite nice’ and ‘Very nice indeed.’ Soon one stops realizing what a revolting life one is leading. But sometimes it gives one the creeps, like waking up to find oneself on a slab in the mortuary!”
“What was your place like?” Ulrich asked.
“Middle-class respectable, à la Hagauer. ‘Quite nice.’ Just as counterfeit as yours!”
Ulrich had meanwhile found a pencil and was sketching the plan of his house on the tablecloth, reallotting the rooms. That was easy, and so quickly done that Agathe’s housewifely gesture of protecting the tablecloth came too late and ended uselessly with her hand resting on his. Problems arose again only over the principles of how the place should be furnished.
“We happen to have a house,” Ulrich argued, “and we do have to make some changes to accommodate the two of us. But by and large it’s an outdated and idle question these days. ‘Setting up house’ is putting up a façade with nothing behind it: social and personal relations are no longer solid enough for homes; no one takes any real pleasure now in keeping up a show of durability and permanence. In the old days people did that, to show who they were by the number of rooms and servants and guests they had. Today almost everyone feels that only a formless life corresponds to the variety of purposes and possibilities life is filled with, and young people either prefer stark simplicity, which is like a bare stage, or else they dream of wardrobe trunks and bobsled championships, tennis cups and luxury hotels along great highways, with golf course scenery and music on tap in every room.”
He spoke in a light conversational tone, as if playing host to a stranger, but was actually talking himself up to the surface because he was self-conscious about their being together in a situation that combined finality with a new beginning.
After she had let him have his say, his sister asked:
“Are you suggesting that we ought to live in a hotel?”
“Not at all!” Ulrich hastened to assure her. “Except now and then when traveling.”
“And for the rest of the time, should we build ourselves a bower on an island or a log cabin in the mountains?”
“We’ll be settling in here, of course,” Ulrich answered, more seriously than the nature of their conversation warranted. There was a brief lull in the exchange. He had stood up and was pacing up and down the room. Agathe pretended to be picking at a thread on the hem of her dress, bending her head below the line on which their eyes had been meeting. Suddenly Ulrich stopped and said, with some effort in his voice but going straight to the point:
“My dear Agathe, there’s a whole circle of questions here, which has a large circumference and no center, and all these questions are: ‘How should I live?’”
Agathe had risen, too, but still did not look at him. She shrugged her shoulders.
“We’ll have to try!” she said. Her face was flushed from bending over, but when she lifted her head, her eyes were alight with high spirits, the flush only lingering on her cheek like a passing cloud. “If we’re going to stay together,” she declared, “you’ll have to start by helping me unpack and put my things away and change, because I haven’t seen a maid anywhere!”
His bad conscience traveled into his arms and legs and made them galvanically mobile, under Agathe’s direction and with her help, to make up for his negligence. He cleared out closets like a hunter disemboweling an animal, abandoning his bedroom to Agathe, swearing to her that it was hers and that he would find a sofa somewhere. Eagerly he moved to and fro all objects of daily use that had hitherto lived in their places like flowers in a flower bed, waiting to be picked one at a time by a selecting hand. Suits were piled up on chairs; on the glass shelves in the bathroom, cosmetics were carefully separated into men’s and women’s departments. By the time order had more or less been transformed into disorder, only Ulrich’s gleaming leather slippers remained, abandoned on the floor like an offended lapdog evicted from its basket: a pitiful symbol of disrupted comfort in all its pleasant triviality. But there was no time to take this to heart, for Agathe’s suitcases were next, and however few there seemed to be, they were inexhaustibly crammed with exquisitely folded things that spread open as they were lifted out, blossoming in the air just like the hundreds of roses a magician pulls from his hat. These things had to be hung up or laid down, shaken out and put in piles, and because Ulrich was helping, it proceeded with slip-ups and laughter.
But in the midst of all this activity, he could only think, incessantly, that for his whole life, and up to a few hours ago, he had lived alone. And now Agathe was here. This little sentence, “Agathe is here now,” repeated itself in waves, like the astonishment of a boy who has received a new plaything; there was something mind-numbing about it and, on the other hand, a quite overwhelming sense of presence too, all of which expressed itself again and again in the words: Agathe is here now.
“So she’s tall and slender?” Ulrich thought as he watched her covertly. But she wasn’t at all; she was shorter than he, and had broad, athletic shoulders. “Is she attractive?” he mused. That was hard to say too. Her proud nose, for instance, was slightly tilted up from one side; there was far more potent charm in this than attractiveness. “Could she be a beauty?” Ulrich wondered in a rather strange way, for he was not quite at ease with this question even though, leaving aside all convention, Agathe was a stranger to him. There is, after all, no such thing as a natural inhibition against looking at a blood relation with sexual interest; it is only a matter of custom, or to be explained by the detours of morality or eugenics. Also, the circumstance that they had not grown up together had prevented the sterilized brother-sister relationship that is prevalent in European families. Even so, their origin and their feeling toward each other were enough to take the edge off even the harmless question of how beautiful she might be, a missing excitement Ulrich now noticed with distinct surprise. To find something beautiful surely means, first of all, to find it: whether it is a landscape or a lover, there it is, looking
at the pleased finder, and it seems to have been waiting for him alone. And so, delighted that she was now his and ready to be discovered by him, he was hugely pleased with his sister. But he still thought: “One can’t regard one’s own sister as truly beautiful; at most one can be pleased by the admiration she evokes in others.” But then he was hearing her voice for minutes at a time, where no voice had been before, and what was her voice like? Waves of scent accompanied the movement of her clothing, and what was this scent like? Her movements were now knee, now delicate finger, now rebelliousness of a curl. All one could say about it was: it was there. It was there where before there had been nothing. The difference in intensity between the most vivid moment of thinking about the sister he had left behind and the emptiest present moment was still so great and distinct a pleasure that it was like a shady spot filling up with the warmth of the sun and the scent of wild herbs unfurling.