Agathe Read online

  Ulrich, sensing some of the fervor at his side, leaned down to speak in his sister’s ear, albeit loudly enough: “Everyone readily assumes that he himself couldn’t do anything evil, because after all he’s a good person!”

  With these words they had reached the top, where the road no longer climbed but cut through a widespread, treeless plateau. The wind had suddenly abated, and it was no longer cold, but in the pleasant stillness the conversation fell silent and could not immediately be resumed.

  “What made you think of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal in the middle of that wind?” Ulrich asked after a while. “If someone had been watching us, he’d have thought we were crazy.”

  Agathe laughed. “He wouldn’t have understood us any more than the cries of the birds! . . . By the way, you talked to me about Moosbrugger just the other day.”*

  They walked on with long strides.

  After a while Agathe said: “But I don’t like him!”

  “I’d almost forgotten about him myself,” Ulrich answered.

  After they had again walked on in silence, Agathe stopped. “Tell me,” she said, “You’ve done many irresponsible things, haven’t you? For example, I remember you were in the hospital for a bullet wound once. I’m sure you don’t think everything out beforehand . . . ?”

  “The questions you’re asking today!” Ulrich exclaimed. “What do you expect me to say to that?”

  “Don’t you ever regret what you’ve done?” Agathe asked quickly. “I have the impression you never regret anything. You once said something like that yourself.”

  “Good God in heaven,” Ulrich answered, walking on again, “there’s a plus in every minus. Maybe I did say something like that, but there’s no need to take it all that literally.”

  “A plus in every minus?”

  “Something good in everything bad. Or at least in much of what is bad. Usually in a human minus variant there is an unrecognized plus variant: that’s probably what I wanted to say. And when you regret something, just that may give you the strength to do something better than you could have done otherwise. The crucial thing is never what one does but always what one does afterward.”

  “And when you’ve killed someone, what can you do afterward?”

  Ulrich shrugged. He felt like answering, just to follow the thought to its logical conclusion: “Conceivably that could enable me to write a poem that gives thousands of people their inner life, or to make a great invention.” But he stopped himself. “That would never happen!” he realized. “Only a lunatic could persuade himself of such a thing. Or an eighteen-year-old aesthete. Such ideas, God knows why, contradict the laws of nature. By the way—” he corrected himself, “it was like that for prehistoric man; he killed because human sacrifice was a great religious poem!”

  He did not say any of those thoughts aloud, but Agathe continued: “This may be a silly objection, but the first time I heard you say it doesn’t matter what step one takes, what matters is always the next step, what I imagined was this: If a person could fly inwardly, fly morally, so to speak, always moving at great speed from one improvement to the next, he wouldn’t know any remorse! I envied you tremendously for that!”

  “That is absurd,” Ulrich said emphatically. “I said that a misstep doesn’t matter, what matters is the next step. But what is it that matters after the next step? Obviously the step after that. And after the nth step, the nth-plus-one step? Such a person would have to live without an end or a decision, in fact without any reality at all. And yet, what matters is always only the next step. The fact is, we have no method for dealing adequately with this inexorable sequence. Dear Agathe,” he concluded abruptly, “sometimes I regret my whole life!”

  “But that’s just what you can’t do!” his sister said.

  “Why absolutely not? Why precisely not that?!”

  “I,” Agathe replied, “have never done anything and therefore always had time to regret the few things I did undertake. I am convinced you have no experience of this: a state where there’s so little light. The shadows come, and what was has power over me. It’s present in the smallest details, and I can’t forget anything and don’t understand anything. It’s not a pleasant state...”

  She said this without emotion, very humbly. Ulrich had in fact never known this backward-streaming movement of life, since his own life had always been set on expansion, and it merely reminded him that his sister had at times sounded noticeably unhappy about herself. But he failed to ask her about it, for they had meanwhile reached a hilltop that he had chosen as their destination and were coming near its far edge. It was a mighty elevation associated by legend with a Swedish siege in the Thirty Years’ War because it looked like a fortification, even though it was much too big for that, a green bulwark of nature, without bush or tree, that fell away as a high bright wall of rock on the side overlooking the town. A deep-set, empty world of hills surrounded this promontory; no village, no house was to be seen, only the shadows of clouds and gray pastures. Once again Ulrich felt the spell of this place, which he remembered from his youth; the town still lay far below in the distance, anxiously huddled around a few churches that looked like hens with their chicks, so that one suddenly felt like bounding into their midst with a single leap and wreaking havoc among them, or sweeping them up in the grip of a giant hand. “It must have felt glorious to those Swedish adventurers, coming to a place like this after riding along for weeks and then, from the saddle, catching sight of their quarry for the first time!” he said, after explaining to his sister the significance of the place. “It’s only at such moments that the weight of life is ever really lifted from us—the burden of our secret grievance that we all have to die, that everything is so brief and probably so futile!”

  “What moments do you mean?” Agathe asked.

  Ulrich did not know how to answer. He did not want to answer at all. He remembered that as a young man he had always felt the need in this place to clench his teeth and keep silent. At last he replied: “Those moments of risk and tumult when events run away with us: the meaningless moments, basically!” As he said this, he felt his head perched on his neck like a hollow nut, with old phrases inside it like “the grim reaper” or “My trust in nothing now is placed!” and with them the faded fortissimo of the years when the boundary between the expectations of life and life itself has not yet been established. He thought: “What experiences have I had since then that were unequivocal and happy? None.”

  Agathe responded: “I’ve always acted without meaning, that only makes for unhappiness.”

  She had walked very close to the edge of the cliff; her ears were deaf to her brother’s words, she did not understand them and saw before her a somber, barren landscape whose sadness corresponded to her own. When she turned around, she said: “It’s a place to kill oneself,” and smiled; “the emptiness in my head would dissolve with infinite tenderness into the emptiness of this view.” She took a few steps back to Ulrich. “All my life,” she continued, “I’ve been reproached for having no ambition, for not loving anything, not respecting anything, in short for lacking the will to live. Papa used to scold me for it, Hagauer faulted me for it: So now do tell me, for God’s sake, tell me finally when, at what moments, does anything in life seem necessary?”

  “When one turns over in bed,” Ulrich gruffly declared.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Excuse the mundane example,” he said, “but it’s true: You’re uncomfortable; you keep thinking of changing your position; you form one resolution after the other; and suddenly you’ve turned over! It’s really more accurate to say you’ve been turned over. Whether you act on the spur of passion or after long reflection, it’s always the same pattern.” He did not look at her as he said this; he was answering himself. He still felt: “Here I stood and wanted something that was never satisfied.”

  Agathe smiled again, but the smile that passed over her lips resembled a movement of pain. She returned to where she had stood earlier and stared s
ilently into the unknowable distance. Her fur coat formed a dark silhouette against the sky, and her slender figure formed a striking contrast to the wide stillness of the landscape and the cloud shadows flitting across it. Watching her, Ulrich had an indescribably intense feeling of being in the presence of an event. He was almost ashamed to be standing there in the company of a woman instead of next to a saddled horse. And although he was well aware that the cause of this lay in the tranquil pictorial effect emanating from his sister at that moment, he had the impression that something was happening, not in himself but somewhere in the world, and that he was missing it. He told himself he was being ridiculous. And yet there had been something accurate in his thoughtlessly uttered assertion that he regretted his whole life. Sometimes he longed to be embroiled in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were senseless or criminal, as long as they were decisive. Definitive, not vitiated by the constant provisional quality that events have when people remain superior to their experience. “In other words, ending in themselves, and valid for no other reason,” Ulrich reflected, now searching intently for another way to say it, and inadvertently this train of thought no longer wandered off to imagined events but settled on the sight that Agathe herself, mirroring nothing but herself, offered at these moments. Thus brother and sister stood for quite a while, apart and solitary, in a hesitance filled with contradictions that did not permit either of them to introduce a change. But perhaps the strangest thing was that on this occasion nothing was further from Ulrich’s thoughts than that something had already happened, since, on Agathe’s behalf and out of a wish to get rid of his unsuspecting brother-in-law, he had palmed off on him the lie that there was a sealed will that was only to be opened after several days, and assured him, equally against his better knowledge, that Agathe would look after his interests, actions Hagauer would later characterize as “aiding and abetting.”

  Somehow they managed to leave the place where each had stood steeped in private reverie, and walked on together without having spoken their minds. The wind had picked up again, and because Agathe seemed tired, Ulrich suggested they pay a visit to a shepherd’s cottage he knew of nearby. They soon found it, a stone cabin. They had to stoop as they entered the door, and the shepherd’s wife stared at them with defensive embarrassment. In the Germano-Slavic dialect that was spoken in that region and that he still dimly recalled, Ulrich asked if they might warm themselves and eat their provisions in the shelter of the house, and bolstered this request so voluntarily with an offer of money that the involuntary hostess broke out into a horrified lamentation that in her repulsive poverty she was unable to offer “such beautiful guests” better hospitality. She wiped off the greasy table by the window, lit some brushwood in the stove, and put a pot with goat’s milk over the flame. Agathe, however, had immediately squeezed past the table to the window without paying attention to the troubles that were being taken, as if it were a matter of course that one would find shelter somewhere, and a matter of indifference where. She looked out through the foggy little square of four panes onto the inland side of the Rampart, an area that, lacking the expansive view offered by the cliff, reminded one more of the feeling of a swimmer surrounded by cresting green waves. Though the day was not yet declining toward evening, it had passed its zenith and begun to lose its light. Agathe suddenly asked: “Why don’t you ever talk to me seriously?”

  What better answer could Ulrich have given than to glance up at her briefly with a look that was supposed to represent innocence and surprise? He was occupied with spreading out ham, sausage, and eggs on a sheet of paper between himself and his sister.

  But Agathe continued: “When one accidentally bumps into your body, it hurts and there’s a shock at the enormous difference. But when I want to ask you something important, you dissolve into thin air!” She did not touch the food Ulrich pushed towards her; indeed, in her aversion to concluding the day with a rural banquet she had raised herself up so straight she was not even touching the table. And now something happened that was almost a repetition of their climb up the country road. Ulrich shoved aside the mugs of goat’s milk that had just been brought to the table from the stove and were emitting an odor that was very disagreeable to an uninitiated sense of smell; and the slight nausea it caused had the sobering, clarifying effect one sometimes gets from a sudden bitterness. “I have always spoken seriously to you,” he retorted. “I can’t help it if you don’t like what I say, because what you dislike in my responses is the morality of our time.” At that moment it became evident to him that he wanted to explain to his sister, as completely as he possibly could, everything she would have to know in order to understand herself, and to some extent her brother as well. And with the resolution of a man who regards any interruption as superfluous, he set out on a lengthy speech.

  “The morality of our time, no matter what else may be said about it, is the morality of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are good so long as the fifth one is followed by a time of blessings and beneficence. Success can make anything be forgotten. When you reach the point where you fund elections and buy paintings, you have also acquired the indulgence of the State. There are unwritten rules: If someone gives money to the Church, to charities, and to political parties, it need not be more than a tenth of what he would have to spend if he came up with the idea of proving his goodwill by patronizing the arts. Also, some limits are still imposed on success: one cannot yet achieve every end by every means: some principles of Crown, Aristocracy, and Society still exert a certain retarding influence on the “parvenu.” The State, on the other hand, avows, with respect to its own suprapersonal person, the most naked commitment to the principle that one may rob, murder, and cheat so long as the result is power, civilization, and glory. Of course I am not saying that all this is acknowledged in theory as well; on the contrary, theoretically it is all quite murky. But what I just told you sums up the most ordinary facts. Moral reasoning is, in this context, just one more means to an end, a weapon one uses in pretty much the same way as a lie. That is what the world made by men looks like, and I would want to be a woman if only—women did not love men!

  “What is considered good nowadays is anything that gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere: but this conviction is precisely what you called the “flying man without remorse,” and what I said is a problem that can’t be solved because we lack a method. As a scientifically educated person, I feel in every situation that my knowledge is incomplete and a guideline at best, and that maybe tomorrow I will already possess new experience that will allow me to think differently than today; on the other hand, even a person wholly in the grip of emotion, a “man in ascent,” as you imagined him, will experience every one of his acts as a step that is raising him up to the next one. So there is something in our minds and in our souls, a “morality of the next step,” but is this merely the morality of the five bankruptcies, does the entrepreneurial morality of our time reach that far into the interior life, or is this seeming correspondence an illusion, or is the careerist’s morality a miscarriage—grotesquely disfigured and born before its time—of more profound possibilities? At the moment I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer!”

  The short breathing space Ulrich admitted into his exposition was entirely rhetorical, for he intended to develop his views still further. But Agathe, who so far had been listening with the alert impassivity that was sometimes characteristic of her, gave the conversation an unplanned direction with the simple remark that this answer was of no interest to her, because all she wanted to know was Ulrich’s position, and she was incapable of taking in all the different possible ways of thinking. “But if you should demand of me that I accomplish something in any way whatsoever, I would rather not have any morality at all,” she added.

  “Thank God!” Ulrich exclaimed. “It gives me pleasure every time I look at your youth, beauty, and strength and then hear you say that you have no energy! Our era is dripping with vigor and drive as it is. It’
s had its fill of ideas, all it wants is action. This mania for action comes from having nothing to do. I mean inwardly. But even outwardly everyone spends his whole life just repeating one and the same act: getting ahead in the occupation he started out with. I think this brings us back to the question you asked me earlier, when we were outside. It’s so easy to summon the drive for action and so difficult to find a meaning in it! Hardly anyone understands this nowadays. That’s why men of action look like competitors in a bowling alley who know how to knock over ten wooden things with the gestures of a Napoleon. It wouldn’t even surprise me if they ended up flying at each other’s throats, overwhelmed by the incomprehensible fact that all their actions are insufficient!...” He had begun in a lively manner but then became pensive and even fell silent for a while. At last he just looked up with a smile and contented himself with saying: “You say that if I expect you to make a moral effort, you will disappoint me. I say that if you expect me to give you moral advice, I will disappoint you. It seems to me that we ought not to have any specific requirements of each other; I mean all of us: Truly, instead of demanding deeds of one another, we ought to lay the foundations for them; that is my feeling!”

  “But how should one do that?!” Agathe said. She was aware that Ulrich had deviated from the big general discourse he had begun and had arrived at more personal considerations, but even these were too general for her taste. She had, as we know, a prejudice against general analyses and regarded any mental effort that extended beyond her own skin, so to speak, as rather pointless; she was certain of this with regard to exertions that might be required of herself, and assumed it was probably true of the generalizing statements of others as well. Still, she understood Ulrich quite well. She noticed that her brother, as he sat there with his head lowered, softly arguing against the spirit of action, was unconsciously carving lines and notches into the tabletop with the blade of his pocketknife, and that all the sinews of his hand were taut. The thoughtless but almost passionate activity of this hand, and that he had said so frankly that she was young and beautiful, was a purposeless duet above the orchestra of the other words; nor did she give it any significance other than that she was sitting here and watching.