Agathe Read online

  Agathe detested female emancipation just as much as she despised the female need to raise a brood for which a male must supply the nest. She liked to think back on the time when she had first felt her breasts stretching the fabric of her dress and had borne her burning lips through the cooling air of the streets. But the evolved erotic fuss and bustle that emerges from the protective veils of girlhood like a round knee from pink tulle had aroused her scorn throughout her life. When she asked herself what she was actually convinced of, the answer she received was a feeling that she was destined to experience something extraordinary and different; and this had been the case already back then, when she knew almost nothing about the world and did not believe the little that she had been taught. And it had always seemed to her a mysterious kind of activity, corresponding to this impression, to let everything happen to her as it would, if necessary, without immediately overestimating its importance.

  Agathe looked at Ulrich, who was sitting gravely and stiffly at her side, swaying with the movements of the car; she remembered how hard put he had been to comprehend, on their first evening together, that she had not run away from her husband on her wedding night even though she did not like him. She had felt tremendous respect for her big brother while awaiting his arrival, but now she smiled, secretly recalling the impression Hagauer’s thick lips had made on her in those first months whenever they rounded amorously beneath the bristles of his moustache: his entire face would be drawn in thick-skinned folds toward the corners of his mouth, and she would feel, as if filled to satiety: “Oh, what an ugly man this is!” She had also endured his mild pedagogic vanity and goodness as merely physical nausea, more outer than inner. After the first surprise was over, she had occasionally been unfaithful to him: “If one wants to call it that,” she thought, “when, to an inexperienced young thing whose sensuality is dormant, the advances of a man who is not her husband come like a thunderous knocking at the door!” She had shown little talent for infidelity: Lovers, once she had come to know them, struck her as no more compelling than husbands, and it seemed to her that she could just as well take seriously the ceremonial masks of an African tribe as the romantic masquerades of European men. Not that she had never lost her head: but with the first attempts at repeating the magic, the spell was gone. The enacted fantasy world and theatricality of love left her untransported. These stage directions for the soul, elaborated by men for the most part, all amounting to the notion that life, being hard, should now and then contain an hour of weakness—with one or another variation on the theme of weakening: the enthrallment, the languishing, the being taken, the giving of oneself, the succumbing, the losing of one’s senses, and so forth—struck her as cheaply melodramatic and overdone, since she had at no time ever felt herself to be other than weak in a world so superbly constructed by the strength of men.

  The philosophy Agathe acquired in this way was simply that of the female human being who refuses to be taken in and cannot help noticing what the male human being is trying to put over on her. In fact, it was not a philosophy at all, but only a defiantly hidden disappointment, still mingled with a cautious readiness for some unknown resolution, a readiness that perhaps increased in the same measure as the outward defiance abated. Since Agathe was well read, but by her nature not inclined to engage in theories, she often had occasion, when she compared her own experiences with the ideals of books and the theater, to wonder why her seducers had never held her spellbound like game caught in a trap, which would have accorded with the Don Juan–like self-image a man of that time would have adopted if, with a woman’s consent, he stumbled into an affair; nor had life with her husband assumed the form of a Strindbergian battle of the sexes in which the captive woman, by the rules of this secondary mode, uses her powers of cunning and weakness to torment her despotic and inept lord and master to death. In point of fact her relations with Hagauer, in contrast to her deeper feelings about him, had always remained quite good. On the first evening Ulrich had used big words like “terror,” “shock,” and “rape” that were completely off the mark. “I very much regret not being able to serve up an angel in my stead,” Agathe thought, bristling again at the memory, for in fact everything in her marriage had taken a very natural course. Her father had supported the man’s proposal with sensible reasons, she herself had decided to marry again: fine, one does it, one has to put up with whatever is involved; it’s neither particularly beautiful nor excessively unpleasant. Even now she was still sorry to be consciously hurting Hagauer, though she absolutely wanted to do just that! She had not entered the marriage with a hope for love; she had thought it would all work out somehow. He was a good man, after all.

  Though perhaps it was rather that he was one of those people who always do good; the goodness is not in themselves, Agathe thought. Apparently goodness disappears from people to the degree that it turns into goodwill or good deeds! How had Ulrich put it? A stream that turns factory wheels loses its gradient. Yes, he had said that too, but it wasn’t what she was looking for. Now she had it: “It seems that it’s really only those people who don’t do much good who are able to preserve all their goodness”! But the moment she had the sentence, plausibly the way Ulrich must have said it, it struck her as completely nonsensical. It couldn’t be taken out of the forgotten context of their conversation. She tried shifting the position of the words and exchanging them for similar ones; but then it became clear that the first version was the right one, for the others were as if spoken into the wind and there was nothing left of them. So Ulrich had said it that way, but: “How can one call people good who behave badly?” she thought. “This really is nonsense!” And she knew: that statement, at the moment when Ulrich pronounced it, though it signified no more then than it did now, had been wonderful! “Wonderful” was not the word for it: she had almost felt sick with joy when she heard that sentence! Such statements explained her whole life. This one, for instance, had been uttered during their last long talk, after the funeral and after Professor Hagauer had left; and suddenly she had realized how carelessly she had always acted, including the time when she had simply thought it would “work out somehow” with Hagauer because he was “a good person”! Ulrich often said things that for a moment would fill her entirely with joy or misery, even though it wasn’t possible to “keep” those moments. When was it, for example, that he had said that in some circumstances he might love a thief but never a person who was honest from habit? She couldn’t remember at the moment, but the marvelous thing was that she very soon realized it was not he who had said it but herself. As a matter of fact, much of what he said she had already thought: just not with words, for with only herself to rely on, as she had been until now, she would never have made such definite assertions! Agathe, who up to now had been feeling very content among the jolts and bumps of the car as it drove along cobbled suburban streets, wrapping them both in a net of mechanical vibrations that rendered them speechless, had also used her husband’s name in the midst of her thoughts with the same placid contentment and merely as a term of reference to a certain time and its contents; but now, slowly and for no particular reason, an infinite horror went through her: Hagauer had actually been there with her in the flesh! The fair-minded way in which she had been thinking of him disappeared, and her throat tightened with bitterness.

  He had arrived on the morning of the funeral, had asked, with loving urgency, if despite his lateness he could still see his father-in-law, had gone to the autopsy lab, had delayed the closing of the coffin, had, in a tactful, sincere, restrained way been deeply moved. After the funeral Agathe had feigned exhaustion, and Ulrich had been obliged to dine out with his brother-in-law. As he told her afterward, Hagauer’s constant company had made him as frantic as a tight collar, and for that reason alone he had done everything to dispose of him as soon as possible. Hagauer had planned to go to the capital for a conference of educators, to spend another day there calling on people at the ministry and doing some sightseeing, and had as an attentive husba
nd scheduled two days prior to this to spend with his wife and look after her inheritance; but Ulrich, in accordance with the agreement he had made with his sister, had invented a story that made it seem impossible for Hagauer to be put up at the house and informed him that a room was reserved for him at the best hotel in town. As expected, Hagauer had wavered; the hotel would be inconvenient and expensive, and it would be only proper for him to pay for himself; on the other hand, perhaps two days could be devoted to his calls and sightseeing in the capital, and if one traveled by night, one could save the cost of an overnight stay. And so Hagauer, pretending regret, had said he found it very difficult to take advantage of Ulrich’s thoughtful provisions, and finally revealed his resolve, which could hardly be modified now, to depart that same evening. Thus all that was left to discuss was the question of the inheritance, and now, remembering that moment, Agathe smiled again, for at her request Ulrich had told her husband that the will was not to be opened for a few days yet. Agathe would be there, after all, he was told, to look after his interests, and he would also receive a proper legal notification; and as for furniture, mementos, and the like, Ulrich, as a bachelor, would make no claim he was not prepared to subordinate to his sister’s wishes. Finally he had asked Hagauer whether he would agree in case they decided to sell the house, which was of no use to anyone, of course without committing himself, as none of them had seen the will yet, and Hagauer had replied, without committing himself of course, that he could think of no reason to object for the moment, but that he must reserve the right to determine his position if it came to an actual transaction. All this Agathe had suggested to her brother, and he had passed it on, because he thought nothing of it and because he wanted to get rid of Hagauer. But suddenly Agathe felt miserable again, for after they had managed this so adroitly, her husband had come to her room, together with her brother, to say goodbye to her. Agathe had behaved as unfriendly as she could and said there was absolutely no way of telling when she would return home. Knowing him as she did, she immediately saw that he was unprepared for this and that he resented the way his decision to leave right away was now making him look like the unloving husband; and he was suddenly offended in retrospect by the suggestion that he stay at a hotel, and by the cool reception he had found at the house, but since he was a man who lived according to plan, he said nothing, decided to present his wife with the facts later on, and kissed her, after taking his hat, politely on the lips. And this kiss, which Ulrich had seen, now seemed to demolish Agathe. “How is it possible,” she asked herself in dismay, “that I stayed with this man for so long? But then, haven’t I put up with things my whole life without resisting?!” She reproached herself passionately: “If I were worth anything at all, it could never have gone this far.”

  Agathe averted her face from Ulrich, whom she had been watching, and looked out of the window. Low suburban buildings, icy street, heavily muffled people—images of an ugly bleakness rolled past, reproaching her for the desert waste of a life into which she felt she had drifted as a result of her negligence. She was now no longer sitting up straight but had let herself slide down into the cab’s upholstery, with its musty smell of old age, in order more comfortably to see out of the window, and remained in this ungraceful position, in which the jolts of the car rudely clutched and shook her belly. This body of hers, tossed about like a rag, gave her an uncanny feeling, for it was the only thing she owned. Sometimes, waking up in her boarding school in the half-darkness of morning, she had felt herself drifting into the future inside her body as if in the shell of a small boat. Now she was about twice the age she had been then, and the same half-darkness pervaded the car. But she still could not imagine her life and had no idea what it should be like. Men were a complement and a completion of one’s own body but did not fill it with meaning; one took them as one was taken by them. Her body told her that in just a few years it would begin to lose its beauty: which meant losing the feelings that, coming as they did directly out of its self-certainty, were only to a small degree expressible in words and thoughts. Then everything would be over without anything having been there. It occurred to her that Ulrich had spoken in a similar way about the futility of his gymnastics, and while she forced her face to remain averted from him, still looking out of the window, she resolved to ask him about it.

  9

  FURTHER COURSE OF THE EXCURSION TO THE SWEDISH RAMPART. THE MORALITY OF THE NEXT STEP

  The siblings had left the cab by the last, low, and already quite rural looking houses on the edge of the town and set off, walking steadily uphill, along a wide, furrowed country road with frozen wheel tracks that crumbled beneath their feet. Soon their shoes were coated with the dismal gray of this parquet for peasants and cart drivers, in sharp contrast with their elegant city clothes, and though it was not cold, a fierce wind blowing down on them from above made their cheeks burn, and the glazed brittleness of their lips made it hard to talk.

  The memory of Hagauer urged Agathe to explain herself to her brother. She was convinced that this failed marriage must be incomprehensible to him in every way, even by the simplest social standards; yet, though the words inside her were already prepared, she could not make up her mind to overcome the resistance of the steep incline, the cold, and the air beating against her face. Ulrich was striding ahead, in a broad track left by some object dragged behind a cart, which they were using as a path; she saw his broad, lean shoulders and hesitated. She had always imagined him hard, unyielding, and something of an adventurer, perhaps only because of the disapproving remarks she had heard from her father and occasionally also from Hagauer, and the thought of this brother, estranged and escaped from the family, had made her ashamed of her own acquiescence in life. “He was right not to bother about me!” she thought, and her dismay at having so often put up with unwanted situations repeated itself. But in truth she had in her the same tempestuous, contradictory passion that had made her proclaim those wild lines of poetry standing between the doorposts of the room where her father’s dead body lay. Pressing on to catch up with Ulrich, she fell short of breath, and suddenly that serviceable road rang with questions such as it had probably never heard before, and the wind was torn by words that had not yet resounded in any wind among these hills.

  “You remember—” she exclaimed, and gave several well-known examples from literature: “You didn’t tell me if you would pardon a thief—but these murderers you would find good?!”

  “Of course!” Ulrich shouted back. “Well—no, wait: Those may just be people with a good disposition, people of value. They won’t lose that, even as criminals. But they don’t continue being good!”

  “But why do you love them even after their crime?! Surely not because of their former good inclinations, but because you still like them!”

  “It’s always like that,” Ulrich said. “It’s the person who gives character to the act, and not the other way around! We distinguish between good and evil, but within ourselves we know they are inseparable!”

  Agathe’s wind-flushed cheeks burned an even deeper red, because the passion of her questions, which was at once explicit and concealed in her words, had been able to find its examples only in books. The abuse of “cultural matters” is so pervasive that it was possible to feel that they are out of place where trees stand and the wind blows, as if human culture were not the sum of all natural formations! But she had fought with herself bravely, had linked her arm in her brother’s, and now replied, close to his ear, so that she no longer needed to shout, her face trembling with a strange, high-spirited glee: “That must be why we exterminate evil people but serve them a hearty breakfast first!”