Agathe Read online

  “Please just pay attention,” Agathe requested. “Am I the economically or intellectually active, up-to-date woman? No. Am I the woman in love? I’m not that either. Am I the good, harmonizing, simplifying, nest-building helpmeet and mother? That least of all. So what is left then? What am I in the world for? The social circles we move in, I might as well tell you, basically mean nothing to me. And I almost think I could do without the music, literature, and art that educated people find so enchanting. Hagauer, for example, can’t do without them; he needs them, if only for his quotations and allusions. He at least always has at his fingertips the pleasure and orderliness of a collection. So is he not right when he reproaches me with not accomplishing anything, with denying myself ‘the wealth of the beautiful and the moral,’ and when he tells me the most I can still hope for is sympathy and tolerance from Professor Hagauer?!”

  Ulrich handed her back the letter and replied calmly: “Let’s face it: You really are socially feebleminded!” He was smiling, but there was in his tone a hint of residual irritation from having looked into this intimate letter.

  But Agathe did not appreciate her brother’s answer. It made her feel worse. Shyly, she mocked him in turn: “Why then, if that is the case, did you insist, without telling me anything, that I get divorced and lose my only protector?”

  “Oh,” Ulrich said evasively, “probably because it’s so beautifully easy to adopt a firm manly tone with another man. I banged my fist on the table, he banged his fist on the table; and of course then I had to bang twice as hard: I think that’s why I did it.”

  Up to now, though her depression prevented her from realizing it, Agathe had been very glad, indeed wildly elated, that her brother had secretly done the opposite of what he had professed to be doing during the time of their playfully flirtatious brother-and-sister game; for offending Hagauer could only have one purpose: to set up a barrier behind her that would make it impossible for her to return. But now, even here in this place of hidden joy, there was only a hollow sense of loss, and Agathe fell silent.

  “We must not overlook,” Ulrich continued, “how well Hagauer manages in his own way to misunderstand you with, I’m tempted to say, point-blank accuracy. Watch out, he may yet, in his own fashion, without hiring a detective, merely by starting to think about the weaknesses in your relationship with the human race, ferret out what you did with Father’s will. How are we going to defend you then?”

  And so, for the first time since they had been together again, the damnably blessed prank Agathe had played on Hagauer became a subject of their conversation. She vehemently shrugged her shoulders and made a vague gesture of defense.

  “Hagauer is in the right, of course,” Ulrich offered, gently and emphatically, for her consideration.

  “He is not in the right!” she replied with emotion.

  “He is partly right,” Ulrich compromised. “In a situation as dangerous as this we must start out with a completely clear and honest view of what has happened and where we stand. What you did could land us both in jail.”

  Agathe’s eyes widened in alarm. She basically knew this already, but it had never before been stated as a matter of fact.

  Ulrich responded with a sympathetic gesture. “That’s not the worst of it,” he continued. “But how do we protect what you’ve done, and also the way in which you did it, from the reproach that—” He searched for an adequate expression and found none: “So let’s just say it’s a little bit like what Hagauer says; that it tends towards the shadow side, nervous disorders, defects born of a deficit? Hagauer represents the voice of the world, even if it does sound ridiculous in his mouth.”

  “Now comes the cigarette case,” Agathe said with a small voice.

  “That’s right, here it comes,” Ulrich said insistently. “There’s something I have to tell you that has been bothering me for a long time.”

  Agathe tried to stop him. “Isn’t it better if we undo the whole thing?!” she asked. “Maybe I should talk with him on amicable terms and somehow offer him an apology?”

  “It’s too late for that. Now he could use it as a tool to force you to go back to him,” Ulrich declared.

  Agathe was silent.

  Ulrich returned to his example of the wealthy man who steals a cigarette case in a hotel. He had developed a theory according to which there could only be three grounds for such a theft: poverty, profession, or, if neither applies, some psychological defect. “Once when we spoke about this you objected that one could do it out of conviction,” he added.

  “I said one could simply do it!” Agathe interjected.

  “Well, yes: on principle!”

  “No, not on principle!”

  “That’s just it!” Ulrich said. “If one does such a thing, there has to be at least some conviction involved! I can’t get over this! One doesn’t ‘simply’ do anything, there has to be a reason for it, a ground, either an external one or an internal one. The two may not be easy to tell apart, but let’s not philosophize about this; I’m just saying: If one considers something that is completely gratuitous to be right, or if, say, some decision springs out of the void for no reason at all, one comes under suspicion of being pathological or defective.”

  That was of course far more, and much worse, than what Ulrich had meant to say; but it coincided with the direction of his misgivings.

  “Is that all you have to say to me about it?” Agathe quietly asked.

  “No, it isn’t,” Ulrich answered grimly: “If one has no reason, one must find one!”

  Neither of them was in any doubt as to where they must look. But Ulrich was after something else, and after a brief span of silence he continued thoughtfully: “The moment you venture away from harmony with everyone else, you will for all eternity cease to know what is good and what is evil. So if you want to be good, you must be convinced that the world is good. And this neither of us are. We live in a time when morality is either disintegrating or going through convulsions. But for the sake of a world that may yet come, one must keep oneself pure!”

  “Do you believe this has any influence on whether that world comes or not?” Agathe demurred.

  “No, unfortunately I don’t believe that. At the most, the way I believe it is like this: If even the people who see this don’t act rightly, it will certainly not come, and the decay is unstoppable!”

  “What’s in it for you if in five hundred years everything will be different, or not?”

  Ulrich hesitated. “I do my duty, you see? Maybe like a soldier.”

  Probably because on that unhappy morning Agathe was in need of a different and more affectionate consolation than Ulrich was giving her, she replied: “So in the end, you’re no different from your general?!”*

  Ulrich was silent.

  Agathe was not inclined to stop. “But you’re not even sure it’s your duty,” she continued. “You do it because that’s the way you are and because you enjoy it. And that’s all I did!”

  Suddenly she lost her self-control. Something in all this was very sad. All at once there were tears in her eyes, and a violent sob constricted her throat. In order to hide this from her brother, she threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against his shoulder. Ulrich could feel her weeping and the trembling of her back. An annoying embarrassment came over him: he felt himself turning cold. No matter how many tender and happy feelings he believed he had for his sister, at this moment, which should have touched him, these feelings were not there; his sensibility was distraught and immobilized. He stroked Agathe and whispered some words of consolation, but did so against strong resistance. And because he felt no reciprocal intellectual excitement in her, the contact of their two bodies seemed to him like that of two bundles of straw. He put an end to it by leading Agathe to a chair and sitting down in another chair at some distance from her. As he did that, he responded to what she had said: “You’re not enjoying the business with the will at all! And you never will, because it was a disorderly thing to do!”

&n
bsp; “Order?” Agathe exclaimed through her tears. “Duty?!”

  She was quite beside herself because Ulrich had behaved so coldly. But she was already smiling again. She realized that she would have to deal with herself unassisted. She felt the smile she had managed to produce hovering outside her, far from her icy lips. Ulrich, on the other hand, was now free of embarrassment; he was even pleased that he had not felt the usual physical responsiveness; it was clear to him that this too must be different between them. But he did not have time to think about it, for he saw that Agathe had been grievously affected, and so he began to talk. “Don’t be hurt by the words I used,” he begged her, “and don’t hold them against me! I’m probably wrong to choose words like “order” and “duty”; that really does sound like a sermon. But why,” he said, changing course, “why the devil are sermons contemptible? Shouldn’t they be our greatest joy?!”

  Agathe had no desire to answer this at all.

  Ulrich abandoned his question.

  “Please don’t think I’m trying to set myself up as being on the side of the angels!” he pleaded. “I did not mean to suggest that I never do anything bad. I just don’t like having to do it in secret. I love the bandits of morality, not the thieves. So I want to make a moral bandit out of you,” he joked, “and I won’t allow you to offend out of weakness.”

  “For me, there’s no point of honor in this!” his sister said from behind her smile, which was very far removed from her now.

  “It’s really terribly funny that there are times like ours where all the young people are so in love with the bad!” he interjected with a laugh, in order to move the conversation to a less personal plane. “The current passion for the morally gruesome is of course a weakness, probably due to a surfeit of the good among middle-class people; they’ve had enough of it. I too used to think one should say no to everything. Everyone who’s between twenty-five and forty-five today thought this way; but of course that was just a kind of fashion; I could imagine a reversal happening soon, and with it a younger generation that pins morality instead of immorality to its lapel. Then the oldest fools, who have never in their life felt the excitement of morality and merely spouted moral platitudes here and there, will suddenly be the precursors and pioneers of a new character!”

  Ulrich had stood up and was walking restlessly back and forth. “Maybe we could say it like this,” he suggested. “The good is almost a commonplace by its very nature, whereas evil is still a critique! The immoral attains its divine right as a drastic critique of the moral! It shows us that life has other possibilities. It gives the lie to hypocrisy. We are grateful for this; in exchange we show it some forbearance! The fact that there are forgers of wills who are unquestionably charming should prove that something is amiss with the sanctity of private property. Maybe no proof is needed; but that’s where the task begins: because for every kind of crime we must conceive of the possibility of pardoned criminals, even for infanticide and whatever other horrors there may be—”

  He had been trying to catch his sister’s eye, without success, despite his teasing reference to the will. Now she made an inadvertent gesture of resistance. She was no theoretician, she could only find her own crime excusable; basically his comparison felt like a new affront.

  Ulrich laughed. “It looks like a silly game, but it means something that we can juggle like this,” he assured her. “It proves there’s something wrong with the way we evaluate our actions. And something really is skewed there. In a society of will-forgers, you would doubtless be in favor of the sanctity of the law; but in a society of the righteous these things get blurred and turned inside out. I’d even say that if Hagauer were a scoundrel, you would be fervently righteous: it’s truly calamitous that even he is a decent fellow! This is how we all get pushed and pulled!”

  He waited for an answer, which did not come; so he shrugged and repeated: “We’re looking for a reason that would justify what you did. We have established that respectable people are only too happy to involve themselves in crime, of course only in their imagination. We might add that criminals, to judge by what they themselves say, would all like to be regarded as respectable people. So a definition virtually proffers itself: Crimes are the coming together, in the bodies and minds of sinners, of what other people discharge in small irregularities. Which is to say, in fantasies and in thousands of everyday acts and attitudes of nastiness and spite. One could also say: Crimes are in the air and are merely seeking the path of least resistance that leads them to certain people. One could even say that, while they are the acts of individuals who are incapable of any morality, in the main they are the concentrated expression of some universally human misconduct in the distinction between good and evil. That is what filled us from our early youth with the critical spirit our contemporaries have never got beyond!”

  “But what are good and evil, exactly?” Agathe tossed out the question without Ulrich’s noticing how he was tormenting her with his impartiality.

  “How would I know?” he answered with a laugh. “I’m noticing only now for the first time that I loathe evil. I really didn’t know how much until today. Oh, Agathe, you have no idea what it’s like,” he lamented pensively; “Science, for example! For a mathematician, to put it very simply, minus five is no worse than plus five. A research scientist mustn’t loathe anything and will under certain circumstances feel more pleasurable excitement over a beautiful cancer than a beautiful woman. A man of knowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will not be revealed until the end of days. Science is amoral. This whole glorious business of penetrating into the unknown has weaned us off the habit of being personally concerned with our conscience. In fact, it doesn’t even give us the satisfaction of taking such concern entirely seriously. And art? Doesn’t it amount to a continual creation of images that don’t correspond to the image of life itself? I’m not talking about bogus idealism or the painting of voluptuous nudes at a time when everyone goes around covered all the way up to their nose,” he said, joking again. “But think of a real work of art: Have you never had the feeling that something about it reminds you of the scorched smell that rises from a knife you’re whetting on a grindstone—a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-storm smell, divinely uncanny!?”

  This was the only point at which Agathe interrupted him of her own volition. “Didn’t you use to write poems yourself?” she asked him.

  “You still remember that? When did I confess that to you?” Ulrich asked. “Yes; well, we all write poems at some stage. I was still doing it even when I was a mathematician,” he admitted. “But the older I got, the worse they became; and I don’t believe it was due to lack of talent so much as a growing distaste for the disorder and roving romanticism of this emotional digression—”

  His sister shook her head almost imperceptibly, but Ulrich noticed it. “Yes, really!” he insisted. “A poem should not be any more of an exceptional event than an act of kindness is! But, if I may ask this, what becomes of the elation the moment after? You love poetry, I know: but what I want to say is that it’s not enough to just have the scent of fire in one’s nostrils until it fades away. This fragmentary behavior is exactly equivalent to a morality that exhausts itself in half-baked criticism.” And suddenly returning to the main subject, he replied to his sister: “If my response to this Hagauer business were what you expect it to be today, then I should be skeptical, casual, and ironic. Then the doubtlessly very virtuous children that you or I may yet have would truthfully say of us that we belonged to a time of middle-class security that entertained no worries, except maybe useless ones. And yet we’ve gone to such great pains with our conviction!”

  Ulrich probably wanted to say a great deal more; he was actually only preparing the plan of action he had in mind for his sister, and it would have been good if he had let her know that. For suddenly she stood up and on a vague pretext made herself ready to go outside.

  “So it remains the case that I’m a moral imbecile?” she asked in a forced a
ttempt to make a joke of it. “I can’t keep up with everything you’re saying to refute that!”

  “We’re both moral imbeciles!” Ulrich assured her politely. “Both of us!” And he was somewhat annoyed by the haste with which his sister left him without telling him when she would come back.

  *Agathe is referring to Ulrich’s loquacious friend General Stumm von Bordwehr, a member of the Parallel Campaign who occasionally visits Ulrich to apprise him of the most recent goings-on there.

  21

  AGATHE WANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A GENTLEMAN

  Actually she had rushed off because she did not want once again to present her brother with the sight of tears she could scarcely restrain. She was as sad as a person who has lost everything. Why, she did not know. It had started while Ulrich was talking. Why, she did not know either. He should have done something other than talk. What, she did not know. He was right, of course, not to take seriously the “silly coincidence” of her agitation with the arrival of the letter, and to keep on talking in the way he always did. But Agathe had to run away.

  At first she felt only a need to run. She ran headlong away from the house. Where the layout of the streets forced her to change course, she hurried on in that direction. She was fleeing; in the same way that animals and humans flee from a disaster. Why, she did not ask herself. Not until she got tired did she realize what she intended to do: Never to go back!

  She wanted to walk until evening. Further from home with every step. She assumed that by the time she was stopped by the barrier of evening, her decision would be made. It was the decision to kill herself. It was not exactly the decision to kill herself but the expectation that the decision would be final by evening. A desperate seething and whirling in her head was behind this expectation. She did not even have anything to kill herself with. Her little poison capsule was in a drawer somewhere or in a suitcase. The only thing that was final about her death was the yearning never to have to go back again. She wanted to walk out of life. Of that wish, the walking was already there. With every step, already, she was leaving her life.