The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic Read online

  “What do you mean, ‘And—?’”

  “Surely you’re not suggesting that we can leave it at that?”

  “I would like to leave it at that,” Ulrich said calmly. “Our conception of our environment, and also of ourselves, changes every day. We live in a time of passage. It may go on like this until the end of the planet if we don’t learn to tackle our deepest problems better than we have so far. Even so, when one is placed in the dark, one should not begin to sing out of fear, like a child. And it is mere singing in the dark to act as though we knew how we are supposed to conduct ourselves down here; you can shout your head off, it’s still nothing but terror. All I know for sure is: we’re galloping! We’re still a long way from our goals, they’re not getting any closer, we can’t even see them, we’re likely to go on taking wrong turns, and we’ll have to change horses; but one day—the day after tomorrow, or two thousand years from now—the horizon will begin to flow and come roaring toward us!”

  Dusk had fallen. “No one can see my face now,” Ulrich thought. “I don’t even know myself whether I’m lying.” He spoke as one does when making an uncertain snap judgment about the results of decades of certainty. It occurred to him that this youthful dream he had just unfurled for Walter had long since turned hollow. He didn’t want to go on talking.

  “Meaning,” Walter said sharply, “that we should give up trying to make any sense of life?”

  Ulrich asked him why he needed to make sense of it. It seemed to be doing nicely without that, it seemed to him.

  Clarisse giggled. She didn’t mean to mock Walter; Ulrich’s question had struck her as funny.

  Walter turned on the light, as he saw no reason why Ulrich should exploit the advantage, with Clarisse, of being the dark man. An irritating glare enveloped the three of them.

  Ulrich stubbornly expanded on his point: “What one needs in life is merely the conviction that one’s business is doing better than one’s neighbor’s. Your pictures, my mathematics, somebody else’s wife and children—everything that can assure a person that he is in no way unusual but that in this way of being in no way unusual he will not so easily find his equal!”

  Walter had not yet sat down again. He was full of unrest. Triumph. “Do you realize what you’re talking about?” he shouted. “Muddling through! You’re simply an Austrian, and you’re expounding the Austrian national philosophy of muddling through!”

  “That may not be as bad as you think,” Ulrich replied. “A passionate longing for keenness and precision, or beauty, may very well bring one to prefer muddling through to all those exertions in the modern spirit. I congratulate you on having discovered Austria’s world mission.”

  Walter wanted to make some retort. But it turned out that the unrest that had kept him on his feet was not only a sense of triumph but—how to put it?—also the need to leave the room. He hesitated between the two impulses, but they were irreconcilable, and his gaze slid away from Ulrich’s eyes toward the door.

  When they were alone, Clarisse said: “This murderer is musical. I mean …” She paused, then went on mysteriously: “I can’t explain it, but you must do something for him.”

  “But what can I do?”

  “Set him free.”

  “You must be dreaming.”

  “You can’t mean all those things you say to Walter?” Clarisse asked, and her eyes seemed to be urging him to an answer whose content he could not guess.

  “I don’t know what you want,” he said.

  Clarisse kept her eyes stubbornly on his lips; then she came back to her point: “You ought to do what I said, anyway; you would be transformed.”

  Ulrich observed her, trying to understand. He must have missed something—an analogy, or some “as if” that might have given a meaning to what she was saying. It sounded strange to hear her speaking so naturally without making sense, as though referring to some commonplace experience she had had.

  But Walter was back. “I’m prepared to admit—” he began. The interruption had taken the edge off the argument.

  He perched on his piano stool again and noticed with satisfaction some soil clinging to his shoes. “Why is there no dirt on Ulrich’s shoes?” he thought. “It’s the last hope of salvation for European man.”

  But Ulrich was looking above Walter’s shoes at his legs, sheathed in black cotton, with their unlovely shape of the soft legs of young girls.

  “A man today who still aspires to integrity deserves a lot of credit,” Walter said.

  “There’s no such thing anymore,” Ulrich countered. “You only have to look in a newspaper. It’s filled with an immeasurable opacity. So many things are being talked about, it would surpass the intellectual capacity of a Leibniz. But we don’t even notice; we have changed. There’s no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general culture-medium.”

  “Quite so,” Walter shot back. “There is in fact no complete education anymore, in Goethe’s sense. Which is why today every idea has its opposite. Every action and its opposite are accompanied by the subtlest arguments, which can be defended or attacked with equal ease. How on earth can you champion such a state of affairs?”

  Ulrich shrugged.

  “One has to withdraw completely,” Walter said softly.

  “Or just go along,” his friend replied. “Perhaps we’re on our way to the termite state, or some other un-Christian division of labor.” Ulrich thought privately that it would be just as easy to agree as to argue. Contempt showed as clearly through the politeness as a tidbit in aspic. He knew that Walter would again be annoyed with what he had just said, but he was beginning to long for a conversation with someone with whom he could agree completely, for once. There had been a time when he and Walter had had such conversations: the words are drawn from the breast by some mysterious power, and not one word misses its mark. But when one talks with antipathy the words rise like fog from an icy plain. He looked at Walter without resentment, certain that Walter also felt that the further this conversation went the more it was deforming his inner convictions, but that he was blaming Ulrich for it. “Everything we think is either sympathy or antipathy!” Ulrich thought. At this moment he was so vividly struck by the truth of this that he felt it as a physical pressure, like the bodily contact of people swaying in unison when they are jammed together. He looked around for Clarisse.

  But Clarisse seemed to have stopped listening some time ago; at some point she had picked up the newspaper that had lain in front of her on the table and had begun asking herself why she found this so pleasurable. She felt herself looking at the boundless opacity Ulrich had spoken of before, with the paper between her hands. Her arms unfolded the darkness and opened out. Her arms formed two crossbeams with the trunk of her body, with the newspaper hanging between them. That was the pleasure, but the words to describe it were nowhere within her. She knew only that she was looking at the paper without reading it, and that it seemed to her there must be some savage mystery inside Ulrich, a power akin to her own, though she could not pin it down. Her lips had opened as if she were about to smile, but it was unconscious, a loosening of a still-frozen tension.

  Walter continued in a low voice: “You’re right when you say there’s nothing serious, rational, or even intelligible left; but why can’t you see that it is precisely this growing rationality, infecting everything like a disease, that is to blame? Everyone’s brain is seized with this craving to become more and more rational, to rationalize and compartmentalize life more than ever, but unable to imagine what’s to become of us when we know everything and have it all analyzed, classified, mechanized, standardized. It can’t go on like this.”

  “Well,” Ulrich said with composure, “when the monks were in charge, a Christian had to be a believer, even though the only heaven he could conceive of, with its clouds and harps, was rather boring; and now we are confronted with the Heaven of Reason, which reminds us of our school days with its rulers, hard benches, and horrible c
halk figures.”

  “I have the feeling there will be a reaction of an unbridled excess of fantasy,” Walter added thoughtfully. There was a hint of cowardice and cunning in this remark. He was thinking of Clarisse’s mysterious irrationality, and as he spoke of reason threatening to drive the irrational to excess he was thinking of Ulrich. The two others did not catch on, which made him feel, in triumph and pain, that they did not understand him. He would have loved to ask Ulrich not to set foot in this house so long as he stayed in town, if only he could have done so without provoking Clarisse to mutiny.

  The two men watched Clarisse in silence.

  Clarisse suddenly noticed that they were no longer arguing, rubbed her eyes, and blinked amiably at Ulrich and Walter, who sat in the rays of yellow light against the dusky blue of the windowpanes like exhibits in a glass case.

  55

  SOLIMAN AND ARNHEIM

  Meanwhile Christian Moosbrugger, the murderer of the young woman, had acquired yet another female admirer. The question of his guilt or his affliction had captured her heart a few weeks before as vividly as it had those of many others, and she had her own view of the case, which diverged somewhat from that of the court. The name “Christian Moosbrugger” appealed to her, evoking a tall, lonely man sitting by a mill overgrown with moss, listening to the roar of the water. She firmly believed that the accusations against him would be cleared up in some entirely unexpected way. As she sat in the kitchen or the dining room with her needlework, a Moosbrugger who had somehow shaken off his chains would appear beside her—and wild fantasies spun themselves out. It was far from impossible that Christian, had he only met Rachel in time, would have given up his career as a killer of girls and revealed himself as a robber chieftain with an immense future.

  The poor man in his prison never dreamed of the heart that was beating for him as it bent over the mending of Diotima’s underwear. It was no great distance from the apartment of Section Chief Tuzzi to the court building. From one roof to the other an eagle would have needed only a few wingbeats, but for the modern soul, which playfully spans oceans and continents, nothing is as impossible as finding its way to souls who live just around the corner.

  And so the magnetic currents had dissipated again, and for some time Rachel had loved the Parallel Campaign instead of Moosbrugger. Even if things were not going as well as they might inside the reception rooms, a great deal was going on in the antechambers. Rachel, who had always managed to read the newspapers that passed from her employer’s quarters to the kitchen, no longer had the time, since she was standing from dawn to dusk as a small guard post in front of the Parallel Campaign. She loved Diotima, Section Chief Tuzzi, His Grace Count Leinsdorf, the nabob, and, once she had noticed that he was beginning to play a role in the household, even Ulrich, as a dog loves his master’s friends with a single love, though excitingly varied by their different smells. But Rachel was intelligent. In Ulrich’s case, for instance, she was well aware that he was always somewhat at variance with the others, and her imagination started trying to think up some special, unexplained part he must play in the Parallel Campaign. He always looked at her in a friendly fashion, and little Rachel noticed that he kept on looking at her most particularly when he thought she was not aware of it. She felt sure that he wanted something from her; well, she had nothing against it; her little white pelt twitched with expectation, and a tiny golden dart would shoot at him out of her fine black eyes from time to time. Ulrich, without being able to figure it out, sensed the sparks flying from this little person as she flitted around the furniture and the stately visitors, and it offered him some distraction.

  He owed his place in Rachel’s attention not least to certain secret talks in the antechamber, which tended to undermine Arnheim’s dominant position. That dazzling figure was quite unaware that he had a third enemy, besides Ulrich and Tuzzi, in the person of his little page Soliman. This small black fellow was the glittering buckle on the magic belt with which the Parallel Campaign had engirdled Rachel. A funny little creature, who had followed his master from magic climes to the street where Rachel worked, he was simply appropriated by her as that part of the fairy tale intended for her, in accordance with the social law that made the nabob the sun who belonged to Diotima, while Soliman, an enchanting colorful fragment of stained glass sparkling in that sun, was Rachel’s booty. The boy, however, saw things somewhat differently. Although physically small he was sixteen going on seventeen, a creature full of romantic notions, malice, and personal pretension. Arnheim had plucked him out of a traveling dance troupe in southern Italy and taken him into his household. The strangely restless little fellow with the mournful monkey’s eyes had touched his heart, and the rich man decided to open higher vistas to him. It was a longing for a close, faithful companionship, such as not infrequently overcame the solitary man—a weakness he usually hid behind increased activity. And so Arnheim treated Soliman, until his fourteenth year, on more or less those same terms of equality as rich families once casually brought up their wet nurse’s offspring side by side with their own, letting them share the games and fun, until the moment when it appears that the same milk is of a lower grade when it is a mother’s milk compared with that of a wet nurse. Soliman used to crouch day and night at his master’s desk or at his feet, behind his back or on his knees, during Arnheim’s long hours of conversation with famous visitors. He had read Scott, Shakespeare, and Dumas when Scott, Shakespeare, and Dumas had happened to be lying around on the tables, and had learned to spell from the Handbook on the Humanities. He ate his master’s sweets, and when no one was looking soon took to smoking his cigarettes as well. A private tutor came and gave him—though somewhat erratically, because of all the traveling they did—an elementary education. It was all terribly boring to Soliman, who loved nothing more than serving as a valet, which he was also allowed to do, and which was serious, grownup work, satisfying his need for action. But one day—not so long ago either—his master had called him in and told him, in a friendly way, that he had not quite fulfilled the hopes set on him. Now he was no longer a child, and Arnheim, his master, was responsible for seeing that Soliman, the little servant, turned into a decent citizen; which is why he had decided to treat him henceforth as exactly what he would have to be, so that he could learn to get used to it. Many successful men, Arnheim added, had begun as bootblacks and dishwashers; this beginning had indeed been the source of their strength, because the most important thing in life was to do whatever one does with all one’s heart.

  That hour, when he was promoted from the undefined status of a pet kept in luxury to that of a servant with free board and lodging and a small wage, ravaged Soliman’s heart to a degree of which Arnheim had no notion at all. Arnheim’s statements had gone clear over Soliman’s head, but Soliman’s feelings made him guess what they meant, and he had hated his master ever since the change had been imposed on him. Not that he stopped helping himself to books, sweets, and cigarettes, but while he had formerly taken merely what gave him pleasure, he now deliberately stole from Arnheim, with so insatiable a vengefulness that he sometimes simply broke things, or hid them, or threw them away—things Arnheim obscurely thought he remembered, puzzled that they never turned up again. While Soliman was revenging himself like a goblin, he pulled himself together remarkably in carrying out his duties and presenting a pleasing appearance. He continued to be a sensation with all the cooks, housemaids, hotel staff, and female visitors; was spoiled by their glances and smiles, gaped at by jeering ragamuffins on the street; and generally felt like a fascinating and important personage, even when oppressed. His master, too, occasionally favored him with a pleased or complacent glance, or with a kind, wise word. Everyone praised Soliman as a handy, obliging boy, and if it happened that such praise came just after he had got something especially awful on his conscience he grinned obsequiously, enjoying his triumph as if he had swallowed a searingly cold lump of ice.

  Rachel had won this boy’s trust the moment she told him that w
hat was going on in the house might be preparations for war; ever since, she had been subjected by him to the most scandalous revelations about her idol, Arnheim. Despite Soliman’s blasé airs, his imagination was like a pincushion bristling with swords and daggers, and the tales he poured into Rachel’s ear about Arnheim were full of thundering horses’ hooves and swaying torches and rope ladders. He revealed that his name was not really Soliman, rattling off a long exotic name with such speed that she could never catch it. He later imparted the secret that he was the son of an African prince, kidnapped as a baby from his father, whose warriors, cattle, slaves, and jewels numbered in the thousands. Arnheim had bought him only in order to sell him back to his father for a staggering sum, but Soliman was going to run away, and would have done it sooner were his father not so far away.

  Rachel was not fooled by these stories, but she believed them because nothing connected with the Parallel Campaign could be incredible enough. She would also have liked to forbid Soliman such talk about Arnheim, but had to stop short of regarding his presumption with horrified mistrust because his assurance that his master was not to be trusted promised, for all her doubts, a tremendous imminent, thrilling complication for the Parallel Campaign.

  Such were the storm clouds behind which the tall man brooding by the moss-grown millrace disappeared, and a pallid light gathered in the wrinkled grimaces of Soliman’s little monkey face.

  56

  THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEES SEETHE WITH ACTIVITY. CLARISSE WRITES TO HIS GRACE PROPOSING A NIETZSCHE YEAR

  At about this time Ulrich had to report to His Grace two or three times a week. A high-ceilinged, shapely room, delightful in its very proportions, had been set aside for him. At the window stood a large Maria Theresa desk. On the wall hung a dark picture, mutely glowing with patches of red, blue, and yellow, of some horsemen or other driving their lances into the bellies of other, fallen horsemen. On the opposite wall hung the portrait of a solitary lady whose vulnerable body was carefully armored in a gold-embroidered, wasp-waisted corset. There seemed no reason why she had been banished all by herself to this wall, as she was obviously a Leinsdorf; her young, powdered face resembled the Liege-Count’s as closely as a footprint in dry snow matches one in wet loam. Ulrich, incidentally, had little opportunity to study Count Leinsdorf’s face. Since the last meeting, the Parallel Campaign had received such a boost that His Grace never found leisure to devote to the great ideas anymore but had to spend his time reading correspondence, receiving people, discussions, and expeditions. He had already had a consultation with the Prime Minister, a talk with the Archbishop, a conference at the Chamberlain’s office, and had more than once sounded out a number of the high aristocracy and the ennobled commoners in the Upper House. Ulrich had not been invited to these discussions and gathered only that all sides expected strong political resistance from the opposition, so they all declared they would be able to support the Parallel Campaign the more vigorously the less their names were linked with it, and for the time being only sent observers to represent them at the committee meetings.