Agathe Read online

  He was distracted only by the lingering gaze of another woman, who resembled the first one though she was neither brash nor fleshy, but well-bred and delicate like a pastel stroke, which nonetheless impresses itself in a fraction of a second: He looked up and in a state of utter inner exhaustion beheld a very beautiful lady in whom he recognized Bonadea.*

  The glorious day had lured her out onto the street. Ulrich looked at his watch: he had been strolling for just a quarter of an hour, and no more than forty-five minutes had passed since he had left Count Leinsdorf’s palace. Bonadea said: “I’m not free today.” Ulrich thought: “How long, by this measure, is a whole day, a year, or even a resolution for a lifetime!” It was beyond calculation.

  *Bonadea is Ulrich’s on-again, off-again mistress, who is obsessed with Ulrich and by whom Ulrich is bored.

  16

  AGATHE IS REALLY HERE

  That evening a telegram arrived, and the next afternoon, Agathe.

  Ulrich’s sister came with only a few suitcases, just the way she had envisioned leaving everything behind. Not that the quantity of her bags was wholly in keeping with the injunction: Throw everything you have into the fire, including your shoes. When Ulrich heard of this resolution, he laughed: there were even two hatboxes that had escaped the fire.

  Agathe’s forehead assumed its charming expression of piqued dignity and futile rumination over the offense.

  Whether Ulrich was right in finding fault with the incomplete expression of a vast and transporting emotion remained uncertain, for Agathe did not raise this question; the unavoidable gaiety and disorder aroused by her arrival whirled in her eyes and ears like the swaying undulations of dancers around a brass band: she was very cheerful and felt slightly disappointed, even though she had not expected anything definite and had even deliberately abstained from all expectations during her trip. It was only when she remembered the previous night, when she had not had any sleep, that she suddenly became very tired. She didn’t mind that Ulrich had to confess after a while that when he received the news of her arrival, it had been too late to postpone an appointment he had for that afternoon; he promised to be back in an hour and, with an elaborate fussiness that made them both laugh, prepared a bed for his sister on the divan in his study.

  When Agathe woke up, the hour was long over, and Ulrich was nowhere to be seen. The room was sunk in deep dusk light and was so unfamiliar that the thought of now being in the midst of the new life she had been looking forward to frightened her. As far as she could make out, the walls were lined with books just as her father’s had been, and the tables were covered with papers. She curiously opened a door and entered the adjacent room: there she encountered wardrobes, a shoe tree, a boxing ball, barbells, a Swedish ladder. She walked on and found more books. She came to the bathroom, with its cologne, aromatic essences, brushes, and combs, then to her brother’s bed, to the hall with its hunting decor. Her path was marked by the flaring up and dying down of gaslight, but as chance would have it, Ulrich noticed nothing of this, even though he was already in the house; he had put off waking her in order to let her have a longer rest, and now he ran into her on the landing as he came up from the rarely used basement kitchen. He had gone there in search of refreshment for her, since on this day of unforeseen demands the house lacked even the most basic help. Now that they were standing side by side, Agathe felt the jumble of impressions she had received coalesce into an unease and despondency that made her feel it would be best to run away as soon as possible. There was something about the indifference and haphazardness with which things had been heaped together in this house that alarmed her.

  Ulrich noticed this and apologized, offering some facetious explanations. He told her how he had come to acquire his house and recounted its history in detail, beginning with the antlers, which he owned without having ever gone hunting, and ending with the boxing ball, which he set dancing for Agathe’s benefit. Agathe looked at everything again with disquieting seriousness and even turned her head when they left a room, as if to confirm her impression. Ulrich tried to be amused by this examination, but as it went on he began to feel embarrassed about his house. Something that was usually concealed by habit now became apparent: he occupied only the most necessary rooms, so that the other rooms hung off them like disheveled finery. When they were sitting down together after the tour of the house, Agathe asked: “But why did you do it, if you don’t like it?”

  Her brother provided her with tea and everything the house had to offer, and insisted on giving her a hospitable welcome, belated though it was, so that this second reunion should not be inferior to the first with respect to creaturely comfort. Hurrying back and forth, he assured her: “I did it all haphazardly, incorrectly, and in such a way that the place has nothing to do with me.”

  “But it really looks very nice,” Agathe now consoled him.

  Ulrich remarked that if he had done it differently, it would probably have been even worse. “I can’t stand homes that are custom-made to match their owner’s personality,” he declared. “It would make me feel as if I had ordered myself from an interior decorator!”

  And Agathe said, “Homes like that scare me too.”

  “Even so, it can’t stay like this,” Ulrich corrected himself. He was sitting with her at the table now, and the mere fact that from now on they would always be having their meals together raised a number of questions. The realization that all sorts of things would have to be different took him by surprise; he felt that he was required to exert himself in an utterly unfamiliar way, and at first he had the zeal of a beginner. “A person alone,” he said, countering his sister’s indulgent readiness to leave everything as it was, “can have a weakness: it will blend in with his other qualities and disappear among them. But when two share a weakness, its weight doubles in comparison with the qualities they don’t have in common and comes to look like a deliberate avowal.”

  Agathe could not see that.

  “In other words, as brother and sister we can’t do some things that each of us have felt free to do on our own; which is precisely why we have come together.”

  That appealed to Agathe. Still, his negative way of putting it, that they were together only in order not to do something, felt incomplete to her, and after a while, returning to the subject of his furnishings and how they had been sent piecemeal by a number of elegant firms, she asked: “I still don’t quite get it. Why did you furnish your house like this if you didn’t think it was right?”

  Ulrich received her cheerful gaze and let his eyes rest on her face, which, above the slightly wrinkled dress she had traveled in, suddenly appeared smooth as silver and so wondrously present that it could just as well be close or far away; or rather, far and near canceled each other out in this presence, just as the moon in its depthless sky will suddenly appear behind a neighbor’s roof. “Why I did it?” he replied with a smile. “I don’t remember. Probably because it could just as well have been done differently. I felt no responsibility. I would be on less certain ground if I were to tell you that the irresponsibility with which we lead our lives today could be a step toward a new sense of responsibility.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, in many ways. As you know: An individual life may be no more than a slight divergence from the most probable average value in a series. And so on.”

  Agathe had heard only what made sense to her. She said: “What this adds up to is ‘quite nice’ and ‘very nice.’ Pretty soon one no longer has any sense of how abominably one is living. But it can get gruesome sometimes, sort of like waking up on a slab in a morgue!”

  “So what was your home like?” Ulrich asked.

  “Philistine. Hagauerish. ‘Quite nice.’ Just as fake as yours.”

  Ulrich meanwhile had picked up a pencil and was sketching the floor plan of the house on the tablecloth and reassigning the rooms. That was easy and so quickly done that Agathe’s housewifely gesture in defense of the tablecloth came too late and aimlessly ended with h
er hand settling on his. The difficulties arose again only when it came to the principles by which the house was to be furnished. “We happen to have a house,” Ulrich argued, “and need to rearrange things for the two of us, but by and large it’s an outdated and idle question. ‘Setting up house’ is setting up a facade with nothing behind it. Social conditions and personal relations are no longer solid enough for houses. Putting on an appearance of permanence and continuity no longer gives anyone genuine pleasure. People used to do this, showing who they were by the number of their rooms, servants, and guests. Now almost everyone feels that a formless life is the only form that is in keeping with the diverse purposes and possibilities life is filled with, and young people either love bare simplicity, which is like a theater without props, or else they dream of wardrobe trunks and bobsled championships, of tennis cups and a luxury hotel by a highway jammed with cars and golf-course scenery and music in the rooms that can be turned on and off like running water.” He was making conversation, as if entertaining a stranger; but actually he was talking himself up to the surface, because the combination of finality and dawning in their being together made him uneasy.

  But after she had let him finish, his sister asked: “So are you suggesting that we live in a hotel?”

  “Definitely not!” Ulrich hastened to assure her. “Except maybe now and then while traveling.”

  “And for the rest of the time we’ll build ourselves an arbor on an island or a log cabin in the mountains?”

  “We’ll settle in here, of course,” Ulrich replied, more seriously than this conversation warranted. They fell silent for a little while. He had stood up and was walking back and forth in the room. Agathe pretended to be fixing something on the hem of her dress, bending her head below the line on which their eyes had been meeting. Suddenly Ulrich stopped and said with a voice that came out with difficulty but was forthright and sincere: “Dear Agathe, there exists a circle of questions with a large circumference and no center: and all of these questions mean ‘How shall I live?’”

  Agathe had also risen, but still did not look at him. She shrugged. “One has to try it!” she said. A rush of blood had risen to her brow; but when she raised her head, her eyes were bright with exuberant high spirits, and the blush lingered briefly only on her cheeks like a passing cloud. “If we’re going to stay together,” she declared, “you will have to help me unpack, put my things away, and change, because I haven’t seen a maid anywhere!”

  Now her brother’s bad conscience galvanized his arms and legs to make good, under Agathe’s direction and with her assistance, for his inattentiveness. He cleared out closets like a hunter disemboweling an animal and abandoned his bedroom with a pledge that it was now Agathe’s and that he would find himself a couch somewhere. Eagerly he carried back and forth the objects of daily use that had hitherto lived in their places as quietly as flowers in a flowerbed, awaiting the selecting hand as the only variation in their destiny. Suits piled up on chairs; on the glass shelves in the bathroom, all implements of personal hygiene were carefully partitioned into a gentleman’s and a lady’s department; by the time order had been more or less turned into disorder, only Ulrich’s shiny leather slippers still stood deserted on the floor, looking like an offended lapdog evicted from its basket, by the very pleasantness and triviality of their nature a perfect emblem of disturbed comfort. But there was no time to be touched by this, for Agathe’s suitcases were next, and however few of them there had seemed to be, the abundance of delicately folded things that spread out as they emerged from their confines, blossoming in the air much like the hundred roses a magician pulls from his hat, was all but inexhaustible. These garments had to be hung up and laid down, shaken out and neatly stacked, and since Ulrich assisted in this task as well, it was accompanied by accidents and laughter.

  But actually, amidst all these activities, Ulrich could think of only one thing, constantly, over and over: that all his life and still a few hours ago he had been alone. And now Agathe was here. This little sentence: “Agathe is here now,” repeated itself in waves, like the astonishment of a little boy who has just been given a present; something about it had an inhibiting effect on the mind, but on the other hand also an utterly incomprehensible fullness of presence, and all in all it kept coming back to that little statement: “Agathe is here now.” “So she’s tall and slender?” Ulrich thought, observing her secretly. But that didn’t describe her at all: she was shorter than he was, and she was broad-shouldered. “Is she attractive?” he wondered. You couldn’t say that either: her proud nose, for example, was slightly turned upward when viewed from one side, which exerted a far more potent charm than mere attractiveness. “Is she actually beautiful?” Ulrich asked himself in an oddly whimsical way. For the question was not an easy one for him, even though as a woman, if one left convention aside, Agathe was a stranger to him. After all, there is no such thing as an inner prohibition against looking at a blood relation with sexual desire; that is mere custom, or it can be explained along the detours of morality and social hygiene; besides, the fact that Ulrich and Agathe had not grown up together had prevented them from developing the sterilized brother-sister feeling that prevails in the European family: nevertheless, convention alone initially sufficed to rob the feelings they had for each other, even the harmless feeling in the mere thought of her beauty, of an ultimate keenness whose absence Ulrich sensed at that moment by his own distinct surprise. To find something beautiful probably means, first of all, to find it: whether it is a landscape or a woman, there it lies, gazing back on the charmed finder and appearing to have been waiting solely and exclusively for him; and so, with this delight in the fact that she now belonged to him and wanted to be discovered by him, he felt immensely fond of his sister, but still he thought: “One can’t find one’s own sister truly beautiful; at the most, one can be flattered that others fancy her.” But then, where in the past there had been silence, he heard her voice for minutes at a time, and what was her voice like? Waves of fragrance accompanied the movement of her clothes, and what was this scent like? Her motions were now a knee, now a delicate finger, now an unruly lock of hair. The only thing one could say about it was that it was there. It was there where before there had been nothing. The difference in sheer intensity between the most vivid moment of thinking about the sister he had left behind and the emptiest present moments was still as great and as distinctly pleasant as when a shaded spot is filled with the scent of wild herbs opening to the light and warmth of the sun.

  Agathe was aware that her brother was watching her, but she did not let him know that. During lulls in their talk, when she felt his gaze follow her movements, in the pauses between one remark and the response to it, which were not so much a suspension as a glide through silence, like a car coasting over a deep and treacherous spot with its motor turned off, she too enjoyed the hyperimmediacy and calm intensity of their reunion. And when all the unpacking and putting away was done and Agathe was alone in the bath, an adventure ensued that threatened to burst like a wolf into this gentle pasture for the eyes, for she had undressed down to her underwear in a room where Ulrich now, smoking cigarettes, kept watch over her belongings. With the water swirling around her, she wondered what she should do. There was no maid, so ringing or calling out was not going to be of much help. Apparently her only recourse was to wrap herself in Ulrich’s bathrobe, which was hanging on the wall, knock on the door, and send him out of the room. But Agathe cheerfully doubted whether, in view of the grave familiarity that, if not already full-fledged, had just been born between them, it was permissible for her to conduct herself like a young lady and beg Ulrich to withdraw, so she decided not to acknowledge any equivocal femininity and to appear before him as the natural friend and companion he must see in her even in scanty clothing.

  But when she resolutely entered the room, they both felt an unexpected stirring of the heart. Both tried not to be embarrassed. For a moment they were unable to divest themselves of the inconsequence that al
lows near nudity at the beach but in a room turns the hem of a chemise or panties into the secret path of romantic fantasy. Ulrich smiled awkwardly as Agathe, with the light of the antechamber behind her, stood in the open door looking like a silver statue lightly veiled in a smokelike shroud of batiste; whereupon, with a voice that was much too emphatically casual, she asked for her stockings and dress, which turned out to be in the next room. Ulrich showed her the way, and to his secret delight she strode off a little too boyishly, savoring the difference with a kind of defiance, as women tend to do when they don’t feel themselves protected by their skirts. A little later there was a new development when Agathe found herself half-sheathed in her dress and half-caught in it and had to call Ulrich for help. As he was fiddling with the hooks and fastenings at the back of it, she felt, without sisterly jealousy, but rather with a sense of convenience, that he was quite adept at finding his way around women’s clothes, and she herself moved nimbly when the nature of the procedure required her to do so.

  Bent close over the supple, tender, and yet firm skin of her shoulders, intently given over to the unaccustomed task, which raised a flush on his brow, Ulrich was courted by a feeling that could not be quite put into words, unless one were to say that his body was equally assailed by a sense of having a woman and not having a woman very close to him; but one could just as well have said that though he was doubtlessly standing in his own shoes, he nevertheless felt drawn out of himself and over to her as if he had been given a second, far more beautiful body for his own.