Agathe, The Forgotten Sister E-Book

Robert Musil

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 665

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Agathe:The Forgotten Sister, by Robert Musil, is a profound and introspective extension of his unfinished magnum opus The Man Without Qualities. Centered on the complex and ambiguous relationship between Ulrich, the protagonist, and his sister Agathe, the narrative delves into philosophical questions of identity, morality, and the limits of rational understanding. Through their intense emotional and intellectual connection, Musil explores the boundaries between love, incest, and metaphysical yearning, challenging conventional notions of familial and individual bonds. Though fragmentary, the work is admired for its lyrical prose and psychological depth, reflecting Musil's preoccupation with the collapse of traditional values in early 20th-century Europe. The characters' quest for meaning amid spiritual emptiness mirrors the broader disorientation of modernity, blending philosophical reflection with moments of human vulnerability and existential doubt. The significance of Agathe, or The Forgotten Sister lies in its philosophical ambition and its willingness to confront taboo and complexity in human relationships. As a continuation of Musil's literary and intellectual exploration, it offers readers a window into the unfinished yet enduring legacy of one of modernism's most enigmatic writers.

Leseprobe

Robert Musil

AGATHE: THE FORGOTTEN SISTEN

Original Title:

“Agathe; oder, die vergessene Schwester"

Contents

INTRODUCTION

AGATHE: THE FORGOTTEN SISTER

INTRODUCTION

Robert Musil

1880 – 1942

Robert Musil was an Austrian writer and philosopher, best known for his unfinished modernist masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Born in Klagenfurt, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Musil is celebrated for his intellectually dense and psychologically profound works, which explore the complexities of identity, morality, and the disintegration of traditional values in modern society. Despite being underappreciated during his lifetime, Musil’s literary output has come to be regarded as central to 20th-century European literature.

Early Life and Education

Robert Musil was born into a cultivated, upper-middle-class family. His father was a respected engineer and professor, which exposed Musil to academic and scientific thought from a young age. Musil initially studied engineering at the Technical University in Brno and later shifted to philosophy and psychology at the University of Berlin. His academic rigor and exposure to both the sciences and the humanities deeply shaped his analytical approach to literature and life. Though trained as an engineer, Musil found his true vocation in writing.

Career and Contributions

Musil’s early works, such as Young Törless (1906), already demonstrated a keen psychological insight and critique of authoritarian structures, depicting a young student’s moral awakening in a military boarding school. The novel anticipated themes that would dominate his later work: the crisis of rationality and the moral ambiguity of modern existence.

His magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), published in parts beginning in 1930, is an ambitious and unfinished novel that blends narrative with essayistic reflection. Set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I, the novel follows Ulrich, a detached intellectual, as he navigates a decaying society teetering on the edge of collapse. Musil uses Ulrich’s experiences to examine the fragmentation of values and the paradoxes of modern consciousness. The work stands as one of the most formidable achievements of modernist literature, akin to the writings of James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

Impact and Legacy

Musil’s intellectual and literary depth earned him admiration from critics and fellow writers, though his books reached a limited audience during his lifetime. His writing, marked by philosophical inquiry and psychological acuity, has influenced thinkers and authors such as Thomas Mann, Elias Canetti, and Milan Kundera.

Musil’s legacy lies in his unflinching exploration of a world in transition—where old certainties have eroded and modern rationalism fails to provide new moral foundations. His work is emblematic of the existential unease of the early 20th century, offering readers not just stories, but frameworks for understanding the complexity of modern life.

Robert Musil died in relative obscurity in 1942, in Geneva, Switzerland, where he had been living in exile following the rise of Nazism. His death went largely unnoticed, and his major work remained unfinished. However, in the decades following World War II, Musil’s reputation grew steadily, thanks to scholarly attention and the posthumous publication of his notes and fragments.

Today, Musil is regarded as a key figure of European modernism. His insistence on intellectual honesty, psychological depth, and stylistic precision continues to resonate. Though The Man Without Qualities remains incomplete, its penetrating insights into the human condition and critique of modernity ensure Musil’s enduring place among the literary giants of the 20th century.

About the work

Agathe:The Forgotten Sister, by Robert Musil, is a profound and introspective extension of his unfinished magnum opus The Man Without Qualities. Centered on the complex and ambiguous relationship between Ulrich, the protagonist, and his sister Agathe, the narrative delves into philosophical questions of identity, morality, and the limits of rational understanding. Through their intense emotional and intellectual connection, Musil explores the boundaries between love, incest, and metaphysical yearning, challenging conventional notions of familial and individual bonds.

Though fragmentary, the work is admired for its lyrical prose and psychological depth, reflecting Musil’s preoccupation with the collapse of traditional values in early 20th-century Europe. The characters' quest for meaning amid spiritual emptiness mirrors the broader disorientation of modernity, blending philosophical reflection with moments of human vulnerability and existential doubt.

The significance of Agathe, or The Forgotten Sister lies in its philosophical ambition and its willingness to confront taboo and complexity in human relationships. As a continuation of Musil’s literary and intellectual exploration, it offers readers a window into the unfinished yet enduring legacy of one of modernism’s most enigmatic writers.

AGATHE: THE FORGOTTEN SISTER

1. THE FORGOTTEN SISTER

When ulrich arrived in  ——  toward evening of the same day and came out of the train station, a wide, shallow square lay before him that spilled out into streets at both ends and exerted an almost painful effect on his memory, as happens with a landscape one has seen many times and forgotten again.

“I assure you, incomes are down by twenty percent and life is twenty percent more expensive: that amounts to forty percent!” “And I can assure you, a six-day bicycle race creates bonds of friendship between nations!” These voices were coming out of his ear; coupé voices.* Then he heard someone say, very distinctly: “Nevertheless, opera means more to me than anything!” “I suppose it’s a sport for you.” “No, it’s a passion!” He tilted his head as if to shake water out of his ear: the train had been crowded, the journey long. Drops of the general conversation that had seeped into him during the trip were now draining away. Ulrich had waited for the cheerfulness and bustle of arrival to pour out into the stillness of the square through the station gate, as if through the mouth of a duct, until its flow was reduced to small trickles; now he stood in the suction chamber of silence that follows upon noise. And along with the auditory disquiet induced by the sudden shift, he noticed an unfamiliar calm before his eyes. Everything visible was more pronounced than usual, and as he looked across the square, the cross-shaped frames of perfectly ordinary windows stood as black against the pale sheen of glass in the evening light as if they were the crosses of Golgotha. And all things in motion detached themselves from the stillness of the street in a way that does not happen in very large cities. Whether drifting or stagnant, everything here evidently had room to enlarge its importance. He detected this with some curiosity of reacquaintance as he regarded the large provincial town where he had spent some brief but not very pleasant parts of his life. It had, as he very well knew, a quality of rootless dislocation, like a colonial outpost. An ancient core of German burgher stock, transplanted centuries ago to Slavic soil, had worn away so thoroughly that, aside from a few churches and family names, hardly anything was left to remind one of them. Nor was there any evidence, except for a handsome palace that had survived, of the town’s having become the old seat of the provincial diet later on. But in the era of absolute government, this past had been covered over by a sprawling vice-regency, with its district headquarters, schools and universities, barracks, courthouses, prisons, episcopal residence, assembly rooms, and theater, along with their attendant staffs and the merchants and craftsmen they attracted, until eventually an industry of immigrant entrepreneurs filled the suburbs with one factory after another, exerting a stronger influence on the fate of this piece of earth in recent generations than anything else had. This town had a history, and it also had a face, but the eyes did not go with the mouth or the chin with the hair, and over everything lay the traces of a life roiled by much change and motion, but inwardly empty. It could be that under special personal circumstances this might favor some great departures from the ordinary.

To sum it up in a phrase that is no less imperfect: Ulrich felt a “spiritual vacuity” in which one could lose oneself so completely as to awaken an inclination toward unbridled fancies. He had in his pocket his father’s peculiar telegram, which was imprinted on his memory. “Take note herewith of my recent demise” was the message conveyed to him on the old man’s behalf — or was it not, rather, a direct communication? For such it appeared to be, given the signature underneath: “Your father.” His Excellency the High Privy Councilor was not given to levity at serious moments. The eccentric construction of the message, therefore, was devilishly logical, for it was he himself who was notifying his son when, in expectation of his end, he wrote or dictated those words, thereby declaring the resulting document valid as of the instant after he had drawn his last breath; indeed there was probably no way to state the facts more correctly, and yet this operation, in which the present sought to dominate a future it would no longer be able to experience, exuded an eerie sepulchral whiff of ragefully moldering willpower.

This mode of behavior, which Ulrich for some reason associated with the almost meticulously off-balance taste of small towns, made him think, not without some misgiving, of his sister, who had married in the provinces and whom he was supposed to meet in a few minutes. His thoughts had already turned to her during the trip, for he knew little about her. From time to time obligatory announcements of family events had reached him through his father’s letters; for example, “Your sister, Agathe, has married,” followed by additional information, as Ulrich had not been able to come home for the wedding. Then, about a year later, he had received notice of the young husband’s death; and three years after that, if he was not mistaken, word came that “Your sister, Agathe, I am pleased to say, has decided to marry again.” At this second wedding, five years ago, Ulrich had been present and had seen his sister for several days; but all he remembered was a ceaselessly whirling giant Ferris wheel of white lace, tulle, and linen. And he remembered the groom, whom he hadn’t liked. Agathe must have been twenty-two years old then, and he twenty-seven, for he had just received his doctorate; therefore she must be twenty-seven now. But he had not seen her since that time, nor had he exchanged letters with her. He only remembered that later his father had often written: “Lamentably, all does not seem to be going as well in your sister’s marriage as it might, though her husband is an upstanding man.” Or, once, “Your sister’s husband’s latest successes have given me much pleasure.” Such, more or less, were his father’s remarks, to which, regrettably, Ulrich had never paid any attention; but once, as he now remembered quite clearly, there had been, in connection with a disapproving comment on his sister’s childlessness, an expression of hope that she was nevertheless contented in her marriage, even though her character would not allow her to admit it. “I wonder what she looks like now,” he thought. It had been one of the peculiarities of the old gentleman, who showed such solicitude in keeping them informed about each other, that he had sent them away from home at a tender age, right after their mother’s death, to be educated in separate schools. Ulrich, who tended to misbehave, was often not allowed to go home on holidays, so that since their childhood, when they had loved each other very much, he had hardly seen his sister again, with the exception of one long visit when she was ten.

It seemed natural to Ulrich that under these circumstances they hadn’t exchanged letters. What would they have had to say to each other? At the time of Agathe’s first marriage, he was, as he now remembered, a lieutenant and confined to a hospital with a bullet wound he had received in a duel. God, what an ass he had been! In fact, strictly speaking, several asses at once! For he realized now that the memory of the dueling lieutenant didn’t belong there; he had been on the verge of becoming an engineer and had something “important” to do that kept him from the family celebration. Later he learned that his sister had loved her husband very much: he no longer remembered who had told him that, but what does “loved him very much” really mean? It’s a manner of speaking. She had married again, and Ulrich could not stand the second husband; that was the one thing he was sure of! He disliked him not only for the personal impression he had of him but for some books by him which he had read, and it was certainly possible that his subsequent forgetting of his sister may have been not entirely unintentional. It was not good of him to have done that; but he had to admit that even during the past year, when he had thought of so many things, he hadn’t remembered her once, not even when he learned of his father’s death. However, at the train station he had asked the old manservant who picked him up whether his brother-in-law had arrived yet, and was happy to hear that Professor Hagauer was not expected until the funeral. And though it would be no more than two or three days till then, it seemed to Ulrich a limitless retreat, which he would now spend with his sister as though they were the most intimate confidants in the world. It would have been useless to ask himself why he felt as he did. Probably the thought of the “unknown sister” was one of those roomy abstractions in which many feelings that are not quite at home anywhere find a place.

And while he was occupied with such questions, Ulrich had slowly walked into the town, which opened up before him, at once strange and familiar. He had arranged for a car to follow behind him with his luggage, to which he had added quite a number of books at the last minute, and with the old servant, who, already belonging to his childhood memories, had come to combine the functions of caretaker, butler, and beadle in a manner that over the years had brought imprecision to their inner boundaries. Probably it was this humble, taciturn man to whom Ulrich’s father had dictated the telegram announcing his death, and Ulrich’s feet led him homeward in a kind of pleasant wonderment, as his now alert senses took in with curiosity the fresh impressions with which every growing city surprises a visitor who has not seen it in a long time. At a certain point, which they remembered before he did, Ulrich’s feet departed with him from the main street, and after a short time he found himself in a narrow lane formed by two garden walls. Diagonally across from him stood the house, barely three stories high, the central part of it taller than the wings, the old stable off to the side, and, still pressed against the garden wall, the little house where the butler lived with his wife; it looked as if, for all his dependence on them, the aged master had pushed them as far away from himself as he could while at the same time enclosing them within his walls. Absorbed in his thoughts, Ulrich had arrived at the closed entrance to the garden, raised the big ring-shaped knocker that hung there in place of a bell, and let it drop against the low, age-blackened door, before his attendant came running and corrected his error. They had to walk back around the wall to the front entrance, where the car had stopped, and only then, at the moment when he saw the shuttered facade of the house before him, did Ulrich take note of the fact that his sister had not come to meet him at the station. The butler informed him that Madam had complained of a migraine and retired after lunch, giving instructions to wake her when he, the Herr Doktor, arrived. Did his sister have migraines often, Ulrich went on to ask, and immediately regretted his awkwardness, which revealed his estrangement to the aged confidant of his father’s household and touched on family relations it was better to pass over in silence. “Madam gave orders for tea to be served in half an hour,” the old man replied with the politely blank face of a well-trained servant, giving discreet assurance that he understood nothing that went beyond his duty.

Inadvertently Ulrich glanced up at the windows, supposing that Agathe might be standing there observing his arrival. He wondered if he would find her agreeable, and realized with discomfort that his stay would be quite unpleasant if he did not like her. That she neither came to the train nor to the door of the house, however, seemed to him a confidence-inspiring sign, and it showed a certain kinship of feeling, for strictly speaking it would have been as unwarranted for her to rush to meet him as it would be for him to dash to his father’s coffin immediately upon arrival. He sent word that he would be ready in half an hour, and went to get himself in order. The room that had been prepared for him was in the garret-like third floor of the main building and had been his room when he was a child; it was now curiously supplemented by several pieces of furniture brought together haphazardly to serve the convenience of an adult. “There’s probably no way of arranging it differently as long as the body is still in the house,” Ulrich thought, settling in among the ruins of his childhood, which was not easy, but there was also a vaguely pleasant feeling that rose like mist from this floor. He decided to change his clothes, and as he began to do so it occurred to him to put on a pajama-like leisure suit he had come across while unpacking. “She should have at least come down to say hello when I got here!” he thought, and there was a touch of rebuke in the carelessness with which he chose this garment, even though he continued to feel that his sister must have a reason for acting as she did and that he could like her for it, which in turn lent his change of clothes something of the courtesy that lies in the unforced expression of ease with another person.

It was a wide, soft, woolen pajama, almost a kind of Pierrot costume, checkered black and gray and gathered at the waist, wrists, and ankles; he liked it for its comfort, a quality that felt pleasant as he came down the stairs after the sleepless night and the long journey. But when he entered the room where his sister was waiting for him, he was more than a little surprised by his outfit, for by a secret directive of chance he found himself face-to-face with a tall, blond Pierrot swathed in delicate gray-and-rust stripes and diamonds, who at first glance looked quite like himself.

“I didn’t know we were twins!” Agathe said, her face lighting up with amusement.

2. TRUST

They did not greet each other with a kiss but merely stood facing each other amicably, then shifted positions, and Ulrich was able to look at his sister more closely. They were of matching height. Agathe’s hair was lighter than his, but was of the same fragrant dryness as Ulrich’s skin, the only feature he loved about his own body. Her chest did not lose itself in breasts, but was slim and sturdy, and her limbs seemed to have the long, slender spindle shape that combines natural fitness with beauty.

“I hope your migraine is gone,” Ulrich said. “There’s no sign of it that I can see.”

“I had no migraine at all, it was just simpler to say that,” Agathe explained. “I couldn’t very well send you a more intricate message through the butler: I was just lazy. I took a nap. I’ve got into the habit here of sleeping whenever I have a free minute. I’m lazy in general: out of desperation, I think. And when I heard you were coming, I said to myself: Let’s hope this will be the last time I’ll be sleepy, and then I indulged myself in a kind of sleep cure by taking one more nap. After careful consideration, for the butler’s purposes, I called the whole thing a migraine.”

“You don’t go in for sports?”

“Some tennis. But I detest sports.”

As she spoke, Ulrich regarded her face again. He didn’t find it very similar to his own; but maybe he was mistaken, there could be a resemblance like that between a pastel and a woodcut, where the difference of medium could distract the viewer from noticing an accordance of lines and planes. There was something about this face that unsettled him. After a while he realized what it was: he couldn’t make out its expression. It lacked whatever it is that allows one to draw the usual conclusions about a person. It was not an empty face by any means, but nothing in it was emphasized or summed up as a readable character trait.

“How come you dressed the same way?” Ulrich asked.

“I didn’t give it much thought,” she said. “I thought it would be nice.”

“It’s very nice!” Ulrich said, laughing. “But it’s quite a conjuring trick on the part of chance. And Father’s death doesn’t seem to have greatly upset you either.”

Agathe rose slowly on her toes and then just as slowly sank to her heels.

“Is your husband here too?” her brother asked, just to say something.

“Professor Hagauer won’t be coming until the funeral.” She seemed to relish the opportunity to pronounce the name so formally and place it at a distance from herself as something alien.

Ulrich did not know how to respond. “Yes, so I’ve heard,” he said.

They looked at each other again, and then, as moral custom suggests one ought, they went into the little room where the body lay.

This room had been kept artificially dark for the whole day; it was drenched in black. Within it, flowers and lighted candles glowed and exuded odors. The two Pierrots stood tall and erect before the dead man and seemed to be watching him.

“I’m not going back to Hagauer!” Agathe said, just to have it said. One could almost think the dead man was supposed to hear it too.

There he lay on his pedestal, in accordance with his own instructions: in full evening dress, the shroud drawn halfway up to his chest, the stiff shirt showing above it, hands folded without a crucifix, decorations affixed. Small, hard orbital arches, sunken cheeks and lips. Sewn inside a corpse’s ghastly, eyeless skin, which is still a part of the entity and yet already extraneous; life’s traveling bag. Ulrich felt shaken at the root of existence, where there is neither feeling nor thought; but nowhere else. If he had had to put it into words, he would only have been able to say that a tiresome relationship without love had come to an end. Just as a bad marriage corrupts people who cannot get free of it, so does every onerous bond reckoned to last through eternity when the mortal substance shrivels away beneath it.

“I would have liked you to come sooner,” Agathe continued, “but Papa would not allow it. He made all the arrangements for his death himself. I think he would have been embarrassed to die with you looking on. I’ve been living here for two weeks now. It was dreadful.”

“Did he love you at least?” Ulrich asked.

“Everything he wanted done he told his old servant to take care of, and from then on he gave the impression of a person who has nothing to do and has lost his reason for living. But every fifteen minutes or so he would lift his head to see if I was in the room. That was during the first few days. Afterward it was only every half hour, then every hour, and on that horrible last day it only happened two or three times. And all those days he never said a word to me, even when I asked him a question.”

As she was telling him this, Ulrich thought: “She’s actually hard. Even as a child she could be tremendously stubborn, in a quiet way. And yet she looks soft.” And suddenly he remembered the day he nearly lost his life in a forest that was being torn to shreds by an avalanche. A soft cloud of powdery snow, seized by an irresistible power, had become hard as a falling mountain.

“Was it you who sent me the telegram?” he asked.

“That was old Franz, of course! All that was already in place. He wouldn’t let me care for him, either. I’m certain he never loved me, and I don’t know why he had me come here. I felt bad and locked myself in my room as often as I could. And during one of those times he died.”

“He probably did it to prove you had done something wrong,” he said bitterly. “Come!” And he drew her toward the door. “But what if he wanted you to stroke his forehead, or kneel next to his bed — if only because he had always read that this is the proper way to take leave of one’s father — and couldn’t bring himself to ask you?”

“Maybe so,” Agathe said.

They had stopped again and looked at him.

“It’s just horrible, everything about it!” Agathe said.

“Yes!” Ulrich said. “And one knows so little.”

As they were leaving the room, Agathe stopped again and said to Ulrich: “I’m imposing on you with something that of course is of no concern to you: but it was during Father’s illness that I decided not to go back to my husband under any circumstances!”

Her brother could not help smiling at her obstinacy. Agathe had a vertical furrow between her eyebrows and was speaking vehemently; she seemed to fear that he would not take her side. She reminded him of a frightened cat who out of sheer terror launches a frontal attack.

“Does he consent?” Ulrich asked.

“He doesn’t know yet,” Agathe said. “But he won’t consent.”

The brother looked questioningly at his sister. But she vigorously shook her head. “Oh no, it’s not what you think. There’s no third person involved!”

With this, their conversation was finished for the time being. Agathe apologized for not having considered that Ulrich must be hungry and tired, and led him into a room where tea had been served; finding that something was missing from the tray, she went to fetch it herself. Ulrich used the opportunity to recall her husband as clearly as he could, in order to understand her better. He was a man of medium height with a rigidly straight back, pudgy legs in crudely tailored trousers, rather thick lips under a bristly moustache, and a fondness for large-patterned ties, evidently to show that he was no ordinary schoolmaster but a modern pedagogue willing to move with the times. Ulrich felt his old misgivings against Agathe’s choice revive; but remembering the open candor that shone from Gottlieb Hagauer’s eyes and forehead, it was inconceivable that this man would harbor some secret vice. “He’s simply a model of enlightened, hardworking goodwill, a man doing his laudable best to advance the human race in his field without meddling in matters outside his domain,” Ulrich decided, and then, remembering Hagauer’s writing, he descended into thoughts that were not entirely pleasant.

Such people can already be spotted in their school years. They are not conscientious (as is usually said of them, confusing the effect with the cause) so much as methodical and practical in their studies. They lay out every task beforehand the way one must lay out the clothes one will wear the next morning, piece by piece, down to the collar studs and cuff links, if one wants to dress quickly and without fumbling. There is no train of thought they cannot firmly affix to their minds with those five or six buttons they have at the ready, and there is no denying that the results speak for themselves and stand up to scrutiny. In this way they advance to the head of the class without being felt to be morally unpleasant by their classmates, while people like Ulrich, whose nature tempts them to now slightly exceed and then just as slightly fall short of what is required, are left behind in a way that treads as slowly and softly as fate itself, even if they are far more gifted. He noticed that secretly he was in awe of these shining examples, for their intellectual precision made his own romantic enthusiasm for exactness look a little dubious. “They don’t have a trace of soul,” he thought, “and are thoroughly good-natured. After their sixteenth year, when young people get inflamed over spiritual questions, they seem to fall behind a little and are not really able to understand new ideas and feelings, but here too they work with their ten buttons, and there comes a day when they can demonstrate that they understood everything all along, ‘of course without going to untenable extremes,’ and in the end it is they who in effect usher these ideas into public life, which for others have become vestiges of their faded youth or the kind of hyperbole one indulges in solitude.” And so, by the time Agathe came back into the room, Ulrich, though he still could not imagine what might have happened to her, felt that a battle with her husband, even without just cause, was something that would possess an utterly contemptible inclination to give him pleasure.

Agathe apparently regarded it as futile to explain her decision rationally. Her marriage was in all external respects in perfect order, as was to be expected from a man of Hagauer’s character. No quarrels, almost no differences of opinion, not least because Agathe, as she told Ulrich, never confided her opinion to him on any subject. Of course no excesses, neither drinking nor gambling. Not even bachelor habits. Fair distribution of income. Well-ordered household. Quiet routine of social occasions with others and unsocial ones à deux. “So if you simply leave him for no reason at all,” Ulrich said, “you will be found at fault in the divorce; provided he sues.”

“Let him sue!” Agathe exclaimed.

“Maybe it would be good to grant him a small financial advantage if he agrees to an amicable settlement?”

“All I took with me,” she replied, “was what I would need for a three-week trip, and a few childish things and mementos from my time before Hagauer. He can keep all the rest, I don’t want it. But he won’t get anything more out of me in the future!”

Again she had spoken with surprising vehemence. One possible explanation was that Agathe wanted to avenge herself for having granted this man unfair advantages in the past. Ulrich’s pugnacity, competitive spirit, and gift for strategic ingenuity were now aroused, though he felt some misgivings as well; for it was like the effect of a stimulant that agitates the external emotions while the inner ones remain untouched. He changed the course of the conversation, hesitantly seeking a wider perspective: “I’ve read some of his writing and have heard about him too,” he said. “As far as I know, he’s considered a rising man in the field of education.”

“Yes, he is that,” Agathe said.

“Judging by what I know of his work, he’s not only well versed in every branch of pedagogy but also took a stand early on for reform in higher education. I remember reading a book of his where there was talk of the irreplaceable value of history and the humanities for a moral education on the one hand and of the equally irreplaceable value of science and mathematics as intellectual disciplines on the other, and thirdly, of the irreplaceable value of harnessing the élan vital through sports and military drill to prepare mind and body for action.”

“That may be,” Agathe said, “but have you noticed the way he quotes?”

“The way he quotes? Wait a minute: I vaguely remember noticing something. He uses a lot of quotations. He quotes the old masters. He — of course he quotes the moderns as well, and now I know what it is: he quotes in a way that is positively revolutionary for a schoolmaster — he doesn’t just quote the eminent scholars but also the aeronautics engineers, politicians, and artists of the day . . . But that’s pretty much what I already said, isn’t it . . .” he concluded with the sheepish feeling of a memory that has gone off the track and runs up against a buffer.

“The way he quotes,” Agathe picked up the thread, “is to go as far as Richard Strauss in discussing music, or as far as Picasso in painting; but he’ll never, not even as an example of something that’s wrong, bring up a name that hasn’t become a fixture in the newspapers at least by attracting their disapproval!”

That was indeed the case. That was what Ulrich had been searching for in his memory. He looked up. He was pleased by the taste and acuity that were revealed in Agathe’s reply. “So that’s how he became a leader in the course of time, by being one of the first who followed that course in its wake,” he added, laughing. “All who come after him see him ahead of them! But do you like our leading figures?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t quote.”

“Still, let’s be humble,” Ulrich said. “Your husband’s name stands for a program that many people regard as the best there is. His work represents a small piece of solid progress. His rise in the world won’t be long in coming. Sooner or later he’ll hold a university chair, even though for years he had to eke out a living as a schoolteacher; and I, you see, who had opportunities laid out before me on a straight path, am now in a position where I probably wouldn’t even get a lectureship. That’s something!”

Agathe was disappointed, which was probably why her face assumed the porcelain-smooth and impassive expression of a lady as she amiably replied: “I don’t know, perhaps you need to show consideration for Hagauer?”

“When is he expected?” Ulrich asked.

“Not before the funeral. He has no time to spare. But under no conditions is he to stay in this house. I won’t allow it!”

“As you wish!” Ulrich said with unexpected resolution. “I will pick him up and drop him off at a hotel. And if you want, I will say to him: ‘Your room is reserved for you here!’”

Agathe was surprised, and suddenly delighted. “That will annoy him tremendously, because it costs money, and I’m sure he expects to stay here!” Her expression had instantly regained a wild and mischievous look, like that of a child contemplating a prank.

“What are the arrangements, by the way?” her brother asked. “Does this house belong to you, to me, or to both of us? Is there a will?”

“Papa left me a big package that’s supposed to contain everything we need to know.” They went to the study, which was behind the room where the body lay.

Again they glided through candlelight and floral scent, past the horizon of those two eyes that could no longer see. For a second, in the flickering semidarkness, Agathe was no more than a shimmering mist of gold, gray, and rose. They took the package containing the will back to their tea table, where they then forgot to open it.

For as they sat down, Agathe confided to her brother that to all intents and purposes she had been living apart from her husband, though under the same roof. She didn’t say for how long it had been that way.

This made a bad impression on Ulrich at first. Often married women, when they think of a man as a possible lover, will tell him this kind of story; and although his sister had made her disclosure with embarrassment, and yet willfully, in an awkward and transparent effort to initiate something or other, it bothered him that she hadn’t thought of a more original line; he considered the whole thing an exaggeration. “Frankly,” he said, “I never understood how you could live with a man like that.”

Agathe replied that their father had wanted it, and what could she have done about it?

“But you were a widow then, not a child!”

“That’s exactly why. I had returned to Papa; everybody was saying I was too young to live alone, because even though I was a widow, I was just nineteen years old; and then I just couldn’t stand it here.”

“But why didn’t you find yourself another man? Or study something and start an independent life that way?” Ulrich asked, unrelenting.

Agathe just shook her head. She paused briefly before answering: “I already told you, I’m lazy.”

Ulrich felt this was no answer. “So you had a special reason for marrying Hagauer!?”

“Yes.”

“You were in love with someone you couldn’t have?”

Agathe hesitated. “I loved my deceased husband.”

Ulrich regretted that he had used the word “love” so tritely, as though he regarded the importance of the institution it refers to as inviolable. “One wants to give comfort,” he thought, “and just that is already like doling out charity.” Nevertheless he felt tempted to continue talking in the same vein. “And then you realized what had befallen you and you started to make trouble for Hagauer,” he said.

“Yes,” Agathe said. “But not right away — quite late,” she added. “Very late, in fact.”

At this point they got into a little argument.

These confessions were visibly costing Agathe an effort, though she offered them of her own volition and evidently, as was natural at her age, considered the negotiation of sexual life to be an important topic for everyone. She seemed prepared from the start to take the chance of not being understood, sought his trust, and was firmly and not without candor and passion intent on securing her brother’s allegiance. But Ulrich, though morally still in a mood of largesse, was not able as yet to meet her halfway. For all his strength of spirit, he was not always free from the prejudices his mind rejected, having too often allowed his life to go one way and his mind another. And because he had too often exploited and abused his influence over women with a hunter’s delight in trapping and observing his quarry, he had almost always encountered the corresponding image of woman as game that collapses under the man’s love-spear, and his memory was deeply imprinted with the raptures of humiliation to which a woman in love subjects herself, while the man is far from experiencing any comparable surrender. This conception of masculine power and feminine weakness is still quite common today, even though new ideas have evolved with the successive waves of youth, and the naturalness with which Agathe talked about her dependence on Hagauer pained her brother. It seemed to Ulrich that his sister had suffered a degradation without being fully aware of it, by submitting herself to the influence of a man he disliked and persisting in that condition for years. He did not say this, but Agathe must have read something like it in his face, for she suddenly said: “I couldn’t very well run away from him right away, once I had married him; that would have been a little overwrought!”

Ulrich — always the Ulrich in the state of older brother and somewhat obtuse dispenser of edifying counsel — jolted upright and cried out: “Would it really be overwrought to suffer revulsion and immediately draw all the necessary conclusions?!” He tried to soften his words by following them with a smile and looking at his sister in as friendly a way as possible.

Agathe was also looking at him; her face was wide open from the effort of trying to read his features. “Surely a healthy person won’t be so piqued by an awkward situation?!” she persisted. “What does it matter, after all?”

This had the effect of causing Ulrich to pull himself together, with the resolve to no longer entrust his thoughts to a partial self. He was now once more the man of functional understanding. “You are right,” he said, “what do processes as such really matter! What matters is the system of ideas through which we regard them, and the personal system these form a part of.”

“How do you mean that?” Agathe asked distrustfully.

Ulrich apologized for putting it so abstractly, but while he searched for a more accessible analogy, his brotherly jealousy returned and influenced his choice of terms: “Suppose a woman we care about has been raped,” he said. “Within the framework of a heroic system of ideas we would have to expect revenge or suicide; in a cynical-pragmatic framework, we would expect her to shake it off like a hen; and what would actually happen today would probably be a combination of the two; but this inner incertitude is more loathsome than anything.”

But Agathe did not accept this way of putting it either. “Does it really seem so awful to you?”

“I don’t know. It seemed to me that it must be humiliating to live with a person one does not love. But now — as you will!”

“Is it worse than when a woman who wants to marry less than three months after her divorce is compelled by the State to be examined by an officially appointed gynecologist to see whether she’s pregnant or not, because of the laws of inheritance? I’ve read that that happens!” Agathe’s forehead seemed to bulge with protective anger, and the little vertical furrow between her eyebrows had appeared again. “And every one of them gets over it if she has to!” she said contemptuously.

“I don’t disagree with you,” Ulrich replied. “All events, once they actually happen, pass like rain and sunshine. You’re probably much more sensible than I am in considering these things in a natural way; but a man’s nature is not natural, it impinges on nature and alters it and is therefore sometimes overwrought.” His smile was a plea for friendship, and his eyes saw how young she was. The skin on her face scarcely creased when she was agitated, but was further tautened and smoothed by the inner tension, like a glove on a clenched fist.

“I never thought about this in such general terms,” she now said. “But after listening to you, it seems to me again that the life I’ve been leading has put me terribly in the wrong.”

“It’s only because you’ve already volunteered so much without coming to the point,” her brother said, playfully settling the debt implied by their mutual confessions of fault. “How can I hit the mark if you won’t tell me anything about the man for whose sake you’re finally leaving Hagauer?”

Agathe looked at him like a child or a student who feels misjudged by her teacher. “Does it have to be a man?! Can’t it happen by itself? Have I done something wrong by leaving him without a lover? I suppose I would be lying to you if I claimed that I had never had a lover; I don’t want to be so absurd; but I don’t have a lover now and I would resent it if you thought I couldn’t leave Hagauer unless I had one!”

Her brother had no choice but to assure her that passionate women sometimes leave their husbands without having a lover, and that this was the more dignified course.  — The tea for which they had met had been converted into an informal early supper, at Ulrich’s request. He was very tired and wanted to go to bed early in order to get a good night’s sleep, for the next day promised all sorts of business and unrest. Now, as they smoked their last cigarettes before parting, he didn’t know what to make of his sister. There was nothing either emancipated or bohemian about her, even though she was sitting there in the wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, it seemed to him now; as she gestured and moved in conversation, the light, masculine garment, which was semitransparent, like water, suggested the delicate form underneath, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, her lovely hair was gathered up in decidedly feminine style. But the center of this amphibious impression was still her face, which possessed the charm of a woman to a high degree and yet had something missing or held in reserve whose nature he could not make out.

And that he knew so little about her and was sitting with her so intimately, and yet not at all as he would with a woman to whom he would be a man, this was something very pleasant, in the lassitude to which he was now beginning to surrender.

“A big change since yesterday!” he thought.

He was grateful for that and tried to think of some affectionate brotherly thing to say to her upon parting, but since he lacked any experience with this, nothing occurred to him. So he just put an arm around her and kissed her.

3. DAYBREAK IN A HOUSE OF MOURNING

It was still early when Ulrich woke from dreamless sleep as smoothly as a fish leaping from water. All traces of the previous day’s fatigue were gone. He set out in search of breakfast and walked through the house. The mourning rituals were not quite in motion yet; there was merely an aura of sorrow hovering in all the rooms, reminding him of shops that open their shutters at dawn when the street is still empty of people. Then he took the scientific papers he had been working on from his suitcase and went to his father’s study. The room, now with its stove lit, looked more human than it had on the previous evening. Even though a pedantic mind had designed it with an obsessive view to weighing this on the one hand against that on the other, all the way to the plaster busts lined up in parallel rows on top of the bookshelves, still, the many small, personal things that had been left behind — pencils, monocle, thermometer, an open book, boxes of pen nibs, and the like — gave it the touching vacancy of a lifelong abode that had been abandoned by its tenant just a moment ago. Ulrich sat in the midst of it — not far from the window, actually, yet near the room’s center of gravity, the desk — and felt a peculiar listlessness. Portraits of his forebears hung on the walls, and some of the furniture dated from their time; the man who had lived here had formed the egg of his life from the shells of theirs; now he was dead, and his furnishings still stood there as clean-cut as if they had been carved out of space with a file, but already the order of things was about to crumble away to adapt itself to his successor, and one felt the longevity of these inanimate objects almost imperceptibly burgeoning with renewed life behind their rigid air of mourning.

In this mood Ulrich spread out his work, which he had interrupted weeks and months ago, and his gaze immediately settled on the equations of hydrodynamics where he had gotten bogged down. He darkly remembered having thought of Clarisse when he had used the three basic states of water as an example to show a new mathematical possibility; and Clarisse had then diverted him from it.* But there is a kind of remembering that recalls not so much the word as the atmosphere in which it was spoken, and so Ulrich suddenly thought: “Carbon...” and then had the impression, as if out of nowhere, that it would help him if he could just instantaneously know in how many states carbon occurred; but he couldn’t remember, and instead he thought: “Man occurs in two states, male and female.” He dwelled on this thought for quite a while, seemingly stunned with amazement, as if it were God knows how great a discovery that man lives in two different permanent states. But concealed beneath this momentary stopping of his mind, something different was taking place. For one can be hard, selfish, driven, pushed outward in bas-relief, as it were, and suddenly feel oneself to be not only the same Ulrich So-and-so but also the opposite, recessed and inverted, a selflessly happy creature in an ineffably tender and somehow also selfless state of all surrounding things. And he asked himself: “How long has it been since I last felt this?” To his surprise, it was little more than twenty-four hours. The silence that surrounded him was refreshing, and the state he was reminded of did not seem as uncommon as it usually did. “After all, we’re organisms,” he thought, reassured, “who have to prevail against one another in an unfriendly world with all the vigor and desire we have at our disposal. But each of us, together with all his enemies and victims, is also a particle and child of this world, and perhaps not as separate from the rest or as independent as he imagines.” Given that premise, it seemed to him not at all incomprehensible that from time to time an intimation of unity and love arises from the world, almost a certainty that the palpable urgencies of life under ordinary circumstances keep us from seeing more than half of the pattern in which all beings are interwoven. There was nothing in this that had to be offensive to a person whose feelings were imbued with the precision of a mathematical-scientific worldview: Ulrich was even reminded of the work of a psychologist with whom he was personally acquainted that dealt with two large opposing groups of concepts, one based on the sense of being encompassed by the contents of experience, the other on the encompassing of these contents by the subject. It proposed that such a state of “being within something” and “looking at something from outside,” a “concave” and a “convex” way of feeling, a “spatial” and a “figural” awareness, an “insight” orientation and an “outlook” orientation, occurred in so many other opposite pairs of experience and their corresponding linguistic tropes that it was justifiable to assume a primeval doubleness of human consciousness behind it. It was not the kind of study that is rigorously based on factual research, but was of the imaginative kind that roams slightly in advance of established knowledge and that originates in an impetus that lies outside the scope of everyday scientific activity; but it was built on solid foundations and its deductions were persuasive, edging towards a unity of feeling that was hidden behind primordial mists, and whose myriad scattered fragments, Ulrich now assumed, had produced the present-day mentality that is vaguely organized around contrasting male and female modes of experience and is mysteriously shadowed by ancient dreams.

Here Ulrich sought to secure his footing — literally the way one uses ropes and crampons for a descent down a dangerous rock face — and began a further deliberation.

“The most ancient philosophies, which are almost incomprehensibly obscure to us, often speak of a feminine and a masculine ‘principle,’” he thought.

“The goddesses that existed side by side with the gods in primeval religions are in truth no longer accessible to our sensibility. For us a relationship with these superhumanly powerful women would be masochistic!

“But nature,” he thought, “gives men nipples and women a male sex organ, which does not necessarily mean that our forebears were hermaphrodites. Nor, then, are they likely to have been psychically androgynous. In which case the double possibility of a giving and a taking vision must once have been received from without, as a two-faced aspect of nature, and somehow all that is much older than the difference between the sexes, who later adapted these modes to complement their psychological wardrobe.”

Such was the direction his thoughts took, but subsequently it happened that he remembered a detail from his childhood, and he was distracted by it, because — and this had not happened for a long time — he was finding pleasure in remembering. It must be said in advance that his father had in earlier days been a horseman and had also owned riding horses, to which the empty stable by the garden wall that Ulrich had seen on his arrival still bore witness. Probably that was the only aristocratic fancy his father had arrogated to himself out of admiration for his feudal friends’ way of life, but Ulrich had been a little boy at the time, and the infinity, or at any rate the vastness, that a horse’s tall, muscular body possessed for an admiring child reestablished itself to his senses as an eerie fairytale landscape, a mountain covered with fields of hair through which the ripples of the skin ran like waves of wind. It was, he realized, one of those memories whose splendor comes from the child’s powerlessness to fulfill his wishes; but these words are not adequate to the magnitude of that splendor, which was virtually supernatural, or to the no less miraculous splendor that little Ulrich touched shortly afterward with his fingertips in a quest for the earlier one. For at that time posters announcing a circus had been put up in the town, showing not only horses but also lions and tigers, as well as magnificent large dogs that lived in friendship with the wild beasts, and he had spent a long time staring at these posters before he finally succeeded in getting hold of one of those brightly colored sheets and cutting out the animals, which he now stiffened with little wooden supports so they could stand up. But what happened then can only be compared to drinking that never quenches one’s thirst, no matter how long one goes on drinking; for it knew no bounds, nor, as it went on for weeks, did it yield any progress, and was a constant pull drawing him out of himself and into those adored creatures, which now, with the unutterable happiness of a lonely child, he believed he possessed whenever he looked at them, while just as strongly he felt that some ultimate thing was missing, a lack that nothing could fill, which was precisely what gave his longing the immense radiance that suffused his whole body. But then, along with this peculiarly boundless memory, another, slightly later experience emerged from the oblivion of those young days and despite its childishness took possession of the big adult body that was sitting there, dreaming with open eyes. It was the memory of a little girl who had only two qualities: that she had to belong to him and that as a result he got into fights with other boys. And of these two, only the fights were real, for the little girl did not exist. What a strange time that was, setting out like a knight-errant in search of some unknown boy, preferably bigger than himself, preferably on a lonely road that was capable of harboring a mystery, there to leap at the throat of his surprised enemy and, with some luck, wrestle him to the ground. He had received quite a few beatings for this and won great victories, too, but no matter how it turned out, he felt cheated of satisfaction. Nor would his feelings consider the obvious possibility that the little girls he actually knew were the same kind of creatures as the one he went into battle for, because like all boys his age he became rigid and awkward in the presence of girls; until one day something happened that was an exception to the rule. And now Ulrich remembered it as clearly as if he were looking at the image in the circle of a telescope trained across the years on an evening when Agathe was dressed up for a children’s party. She was wearing a velvet dress, and her hair flowed over it like waves of lighter velvet, so that suddenly, in much the same way he had yearned for the animals in the posters, he felt an unspeakable longing to be a girl. At that time he knew so little about men and women that he did not regard it as entirely impossible, but he knew enough not to try to enforce the fulfillment of his wishes, as children often will; rather it was a combination of the two, an ambiguous state which if he were to describe it now was as if he were groping in the dark for a door, meeting with a blood-warm or warmly sweet resistance, pressing against it again and again as it tenderly yielded to his urge to push through without actually ever giving way. Maybe it also resembled a harmless kind of vampire passion that sucks the object of its longing into itself, except this little man did not want to draw that little woman into himself but wanted to be entirely in her place; and this happened with that dazzling tenderness that accompanies only the earliest intimations of sex.

Ulrich stood up and stretched his arms, marveling at his reverie. No more than ten steps away, on the other side of the wall, lay his father’s body, and only now did he notice that, around them both, the house, which had been dead and desolate, was bustling with people, who seemed to have suddenly risen from the earth. Old women were laying carpets and lighting new candles, there was hammering on the staircase, flowers were delivered, floors were being waxed, and now it appeared that he too was about to be drawn into this bustle, for visitors were announced who were up and about at this hour because there was something they wanted to have or to know, and from that time on the flow of people was unending. The university needed information about the funeral, a peddler came and shyly asked for clothing, a local antiquarian-book dealer announced himself with profuse apologies to present an offer, on behalf of a German firm, for a rare legal tome that was presumed to be in the deceased’s library, a chaplain asked to speak with Ulrich regarding some point that was not clear in the parish registry, a man from the insurance company came with a lengthy contestation, someone was looking for a cheap piano, a real estate agent left his card in the eventuality that the family might wish to sell the house, a retired government clerk offered to address envelopes, and so the coming, going, asking, and wanting went on without cease in these favorable early morning hours, each caller making matter-of-fact reference to the death in the family and staking his claim to existence, in speech and in writing, at the front door, where the old servant turned away as many as he could, and upstairs, where Ulrich nonetheless had to receive everyone who slipped through. He had never imagined how many people politely wait for the death of others and how many hearts are quickened the moment one’s own heart stops. He was somewhat astonished, and saw: A beetle lies in the forest, and other beetles, ants, birds, and swaying butterflies gather around.