Agathe Read online

  “So you don’t really believe in it”? Agathe asked.

  To this Ulrich gave no answer. But after a while he said: “Translated into the disastrous idiom of our time, one could call this value, which is in such terrifyingly scarce supply for everyone today, the percentage share of a person in his experiences and actions. In dreams it seems to be a hundred percent, in waking life it doesn’t even amount to half of one percent! This is something you noticed immediately in my home today; but my relationships with the people you will meet are no different. Once—and really, if I’m not mistaken, I ought to add that it happened in conversation with a woman where it was very apropos—I called it the “acoustics of the void.” If a pin drops in an empty room, the resulting noise has something disproportionate, even exorbitant, about it; but it’s the same when there’s emptiness between people. Then one no longer knows: Are we screaming, or is there a deathly silence? Because everything that’s unaligned or off-kilter acquires the magnetic power of an enormous temptation as soon as it turns out that one has nothing to counteract it with. Don’t you agree? But I’m sorry,” he interrupted himself, “you must be tired, and I’m not letting you rest. It seems, I’m afraid, there are some things in my surroundings and in my social life that won’t be to your liking.”

  Agathe had opened her eyes. After being hidden so long, her gaze expressed something extremely hard to define, though sympathy was a part of it, which Ulrich now felt spreading over his whole body. Suddenly he began to talk again: “When I was younger, I tried to regard just that as a sign of strength. So one hasn’t got anything with which to oppose life? Fine, then life will run away from man and into his works! That’s more or less how I thought. And there’s no denying the colossal power that resides in the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today’s world. At the very least there’s a kind of adolescent rowdiness in it. Surely centuries go through growing pains? And like every young man I started by throwing myself into work, adventure, and amusement; it seemed all the same to me what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly. Do you remember we once talked about the ‘morality of achievement’? That’s the inborn image in us by which we orient ourselves. But the older one gets, the more clearly one learns that this apparent exorbitance, this independence and mobility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the partial drives—sovereignty of your own parts and drives against yourself, as well as your own sovereignty against the world—in short, that everything we, as ‘people of today,’ have regarded as a strength and a distinction of our species is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole with respect to its parts. Passion and willpower can do nothing against this. The moment you want to be entirely at the center of anything, you find yourself flushed back to the periphery: that’s the experience in all experiences today!”

  Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to happen in his voice; when that did not occur and her brother’s talk simply stopped like a path that has branched off from a road and come to a dead end, she said: “So according to your experience one can never really act with conviction, and will never be able to do so. What I mean by conviction,” she corrected herself, “is not some kind of science, or the moral dressage we were put through, but feeling completely present within oneself, and feeling one’s presence in everything else as well; where something that is now empty is fulfilled and complete. I mean something one starts out from and to which one returns. Oh, I myself don’t know what I mean,” she broke off vehemently. “I was hoping that you would explain it to me!”

  “You mean exactly what we have been talking about,” Ulrich gently replied. “And you’re the only person with whom I can talk about it like this. But there wouldn’t be any point in my starting over again just in order to add a few enticing words. I should say, rather, that finding oneself in the absolute middle of life, in a state of unimpaired ‘inwardness’—if one doesn’t understand the word in a sentimental sense, but with the meaning we just gave it—is probably not a demand that can be made in a rational state of mind.” He had leaned forward, touched her arm, and looked into her eyes for a long time. “It may be contrary to human nature,” he said softly. “But the reality is that we are painfully in need of it! Because this must be where the desire to be like brothers and sisters comes from, which is a complement to ordinary love, in the imaginary direction of a love without any elements of exclusion and not-love.” And after a while he added: “You know how popular the brother and sister theme is in bed; people who could murder their real siblings put on silly charades of being naughty little brothers and sisters conspiring under a blanket.”

  In the half darkness his face quivered in self-mockery. But Agathe’s trust was in this face and not in the confusion of the words. She had seen faces twitching like this a moment before they swooped down; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an infinitely long distance.

  Her answer was curt: “Being brother and sister just isn’t enough!”

  “Well, we’ve already made it ‘twin brother and sister,’” Ulrich retorted, now soundlessly rising, for he had the impression that fatigue had at last overcome her.

  “We ought to be Siamese twins,” Agathe added.

  “Agreed, then, Siamese twins!” her brother repeated, carefully detaching her hand from his and laying it on the quilt, and his words sounded buoyant, their weightlessness still expanding after he had left the room.

  Agathe smiled. Gradually she descended into a lonely sorrow whose darkness, imperceptible to her weariness, soon blended with that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile tiptoed into his study and there, for two hours during which he was unable to work, until he too grew tired, he made his first acquaintance with the experience of being cramped by consideration for another person. He marveled at the number of things he would have liked to do during that time and that had to be suppressed on account of the noise they would make. This was new to him. And it almost irritated him a little, although he did his utmost to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be physically conjoined with another person. He had little information about how two such nervous systems function together, like two leaves on a single stalk, connected not only through their blood but even more through the effect of their complete interdependence. He assumed that every excitement in one psyche would also be felt by the other, while the process that evoked it took place in a body that was not, in the main, one’s own. “An embrace, for instance: you’re embraced in the other,” he thought. “You may not even consent to it, but your other self floods you with an overwhelming wave of consent! What business is it of yours who kisses your sister? But her arousal, you can’t help loving it together with her! Or it’s you who are making love, and now you must somehow involve her in it, you can’t just flood her with senseless physiological processes. . . !?” Ulrich felt a strong appeal and a great discomfort in this train of thought; it was difficult to draw an accurate distinction between new points of view and a distortion of the ordinary ones.

  18

  TOO MUCH GAIETY

  Agathe proved naturally adept at making use of the advantages social life offered her, and her brother was pleased with her assured bearing in a circle of extremely arrogant individuals. The years she had spent as the wife of a secondary-school teacher in the provinces seemed to have fallen off her without leaving a trace. For the time being, however, Ulrich summed it all up with a shrug, saying: “The high nobility find it amusing that we should be called the Siamese Twins: they’ve always been more interested in menageries than, for example, in art.”

  Tacitly they agreed to treat everything that happened as a mere interlude. There was a great deal that needed to be changed or re­arranged in their household, which had been clear to them on the very first day, but they did nothing about it, because they shied away from resuming a discussion whose limits could not be foreseen. Ulrich, who had given up his bedroom to Agathe, had settled himself in the dressing room, with the bathroom between the
m, and had subsequently ceded most of his closet space to her. An offer of sympathy on this account he rejected with a reference to Saint Lawrence and his grill; but it never seriously occurred to Agathe that she might have disrupted her brother’s bachelor existence, because he assured her that he was very happy and because she had only a very vague conception of the degrees of happiness he might have enjoyed previously. She now liked this house, with its unbourgeois layout, the useless extravagance of reception rooms and anterooms around the few usable and now overfilled rooms; it had about it something of the elaborate civility of a bygone age that is defenseless against the self-indulgent boorishness of the present, but sometimes the silent objection of the elegant rooms against the invading disorder was sad, too, like torn and tangled strings on the beautifully carved hull of an ancient instrument. Agathe saw then that her brother had not really chosen this secluded house without feeling or interest, even though he wanted to give that impression, and from its old walls came a language of passion that was neither quite mute nor quite audible. But neither she nor Ulrich admitted to anything more than that they rather enjoyed disarray. They lived with a certain amount of inconvenience, ordered food from a hotel, and derived from all this the somewhat excessive high spirits that can ensue at a picnic where one eats less well on the green earth than one would at the table.

  Nor could adequate domestic service be found under these circumstances. The experienced servant whom Ulrich had taken in when he moved into the house had been hired for a brief period only, as he was an old man who was ready to retire and was only waiting for some matter to be settled first; not much could be expected of him, and Ulrich gave him as little to do as possible. The role of chamber­maid fell to Ulrich himself, for the room where a decent maid might have been put up was, like everything else, still at the planning stage, and a few attempts to get over this state of affairs had not led to good results. Thus Ulrich was making great progress as a squire arming his lady knight to set forth on her social conquests. In addition, Agathe had begun to shop for new clothes to supplement her wardrobe. And as the house was nowhere equipped for the needs of a lady, she had developed the habit of using the entirety of it as a dressing room, so that Ulrich, whether he wished to or not, took part in her new acquisitions. The doors between the rooms stood open, his gymnastics equipment served as clotheshorses and hangers, and at times of decision he would be called away from his desk like Cincinnatus from his plow.* This thwarting of his will to work (which, though in abeyance, was still ready to be called upon) was something he put up with not only because he assumed it would pass but also because it brought him a pleasure that was new to him and was having a rejuvenating effect. His sister’s seemingly idle vivacity crackled in his solitude like a small fire in a long-unused stove. Bright waves of charming gaiety, dark waves of human trust, filled the rooms in which he lived, which as a result lost their nature of a space in which their sole inhabitant moved at the dictates of his own will. But what astonished him above all in this inexhaustible presence that was not his own was that the uncountable trifles of which it consisted added up to something incalculable and utterly different in kind: his impatience with anything that wasted his time, this unquenchable feeling that had been with him all his life, no matter what he had seized on that was considered to be great and important, had to his amazement completely disappeared, and for the first time he was loving his daily life without thinking at all.

  He even gasped, a little too obligingly, when Agathe, with the earnestness women bring to such matters, offered for his admiration the thousand dainty things that she had bought. There is a droll oddity in the nature of the human female that renders her, though equal in intelligence, more sensitive than the male and precisely for that reason more receptive to the idea of resorting to the brutal ploys of self-adornment, by which she deviates even further from rationally ordered humanity than he does in his masculine way. Ulrich acted as if this trait irresistibly compelled his sympathetic engagement. And perhaps that was really the case. For the many small, endearingly silly inspirations he was presented with: wreathing oneself in glass beads, crimping one’s hair with a curling iron, enlisting the inane patterns of lace and embroidery, applying seductive colors with a determination that is nothing short of ruthless—these baits so akin to the aluminum stars one can win at a fairground shooting gallery that every intelligent woman sees through them without in the slightest losing her taste for them—began to enmesh him in the threads of their gleaming lunacy. For the moment one takes anything, no matter how foolish or lacking in taste, seriously on an equal footing, it begins to display its own harmonious order, the intoxicating scent of its amour propre, its innate urge to play and to please. This was what happened to Ulrich in the course of the operations that were required of him as he assisted Agathe with her regalia. He fetched and carried, admired, appraised, was asked for advice, helped with trial fittings. He stood with Agathe in front of the mirror. Nowadays, when a woman’s appearance resembles that of a well-plucked chicken that offers no inconvenience, it is difficult to imagine her earlier appearance in all its allure to a long-deferred appetite, a charm that has in the meantime fallen prey to ridicule: the long skirt, seemingly stitched to the floor by the tailor and yet miraculously ambulant, enclosed a second layer of other, secret light skirts beneath it, pastel-colored silken petals whose gently swaying movement then suddenly gave way to white, even softer tissues, and it was only the delicate foam of those ultimate garments that finally touched the body; and if this attire resembled waves in that it wed an undertow of enticement with a firm rebuff to the eye, it was also an ingenious system of way stations and fortifications ranged around expertly defended wonders and with all its unnaturalness an artfully curtained theater of love, whose breathtaking darkness was lightened only by the dim lamp of the imagination. Ulrich was now seeing this epitome of preliminaries dismantled daily, deconstructed, as it were, from the inside. And though a woman’s secrets had long since ceased to be a mystery to him, or perhaps rather because he had always only hurried through them like vestibules or front yards, they took on a completely different importance now that there was no gateway for him and no goal. The tension that lay in all these things rebounded. Ulrich would have been hard put to say what changes it wrought in him. He rightly regarded himself as a man of masculine temperament, and it seemed reasonable to him that such a man might be tempted to see what he has so often desired from its own side, but at times it became almost eerie and he would rebel against it with a laugh.

  “As though the walls of a girl’s boarding school had risen up around me overnight, completely shutting me in!” he protested.

  “Is that so terrible?” Agathe asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ulrich replied.

  Then he called her a carnivorous plant and himself a poor insect that had crawled into her luminous calyx. “You’ve closed it around me,” he said, “and now that, against my nature, I’ve become part of you, I’m sitting here surrounded by colors, perfume, and radiance, waiting for the males we’re going to attract!”

  And the effect on him—given his concern to “find her a husband”—of witnessing the effect Agathe had on men was indeed rather strange. He was not jealous—in what capacity could he have been that?—and subordinated his own welfare to hers. What he wished for her was that a man worthy of her would soon free her from the state of transition her separation from Hagauer had placed her in: and nevertheless, when he saw her standing at the center of a group of men vying for her attention, or when on the street a man, attracted by her beauty and heedless of her escort, looked her in the eye, he did not know what to make of his feelings. Here too, since the simple way out—male jealousy—was forbidden to him, he often felt enclosed in a world he had never entered before. From his own experience he knew as much about male posturing as he did about women’s more guarded procedures in love, and when he saw Agathe exposed to the one and engaged in the other, he suffered; he felt as if he were attending the courtsh
ip of horses or of mice; the snorting and neighing, the pursing and spreading of lips with which strangers display their smugness and deference to each other filled him, observing it as he did without sympathy, with a faint disgust, like a dense anesthetic torpor spreading up from the depths of his body. And if nevertheless, in accordance with a deep emotional need, he put himself in his sister’s place, he was afterward not far from feeling, along with bewilderment at such acquiescence, the shame that a normal man feels when ap­proached under false pretenses by a man who is not. When he confessed this to Agathe, she laughed. “Well, there happen to be some women in our circle who are very interested in you,” was her answer.

  What was going on here?

  Ulrich said: “Basically it’s a protest against the world!”

  And Ulrich said further: “You know my friend Walter: it’s been a long time since we liked each other; but even though he irritates me and I know that I get on his nerves as well, often at the mere sight of him I feel affection toward him, as if he and I were in perfect accord, which in fact we are not. Look, in life one understands so much without having come to an understanding with it; that’s why being in agreement with another person from the outset, before one has understood him, is as fabulously, beautifully senseless as when water streams into a valley from all sides in the spring!”

  And he felt: “It’s that way now!” And he thought: “As soon as I manage to no longer have any self-centered, egotistic thoughts toward Agathe or even a single ugly feeling of indifference, she draws all qualities out of me the way the Magnetic Mountain draws the nails out of a ship! Morally, I am dissolved into a state like that of the primal atom, where I am neither myself nor her! Could it be that beatitude is like this?!”