Agathe Page 33

  The morning had brought a rainy day and confined the siblings to their house. The leaves of the trees gleamed drearily outside the windows like wet linoleum; the pavement behind the gaps in the foliage was as shiny as a rubber boot. One’s eyes were almost loath to touch the wet view. Agathe regretted her remark and no longer knew why she had made it. She sighed and began again: “Today the world reminds me of the rooms we had as children.” She was referring to the bare upper rooms in their father’s house and the bemused reunion with them they had both celebrated. Perhaps that comparison was far-fetched; but she added: “It’s a person’s first sadness, surrounded by his toys, that comes back again and again!”

  Unwittingly, after the recent period of sustained good weather, expectations had been directed toward another beautiful day, and this filled the mind with thwarted desire and impatient melancholy. Now Ulrich looked out of the window as well. Behind the gray, streaming wall of water, will-o’-the-wisps of outings never taken, fenceless meadows and an infinite world, danced and beckoned; and perhaps, too, a spectral wish to be alone some day and free again to move in any direction, the sweet pain of which is the story of the Passion and also already the Resurrection of love. He turned to his sister with something of this still in the expression of his face and body, and asked her almost fiercely: “I suppose I’m not one of those people who can respond empathically to others?”

  “No, you really aren’t!” she replied, and smiled at him.

  “But precisely what such people imagine,” he continued, for it was only now that he understood how seriously her words had been meant, “that one can suffer together, is as impossible for them as it is for anyone else. What they have, at best, is the skill nurses have at guessing what someone in need likes to hear.”

  “In that case they must know what would help him,” Agathe objected.

  “Not at all!” Ulrich asserted more stubbornly. “Probably the only comfort they give is by talking: someone who talks a lot discharges another person’s grief drop by drop, the way rain discharges the electricity in a cloud. This is the well-known alleviation of sorrow by talking!”

  Agathe was silent.

  “Maybe people like your new friend,” Ulrich now said ingenuously, “work the way some cough remedies do: they don’t get rid of a sore throat, but they soothe its irritation, and then it often heals by itself!”

  In any other situation he could have expected his sister’s consent, but Agathe, who since yesterday had been strangely disposed because of her sudden weakness for a man whose worth Ulrich doubted, smiled implacably and toyed with her fingers. Ulrich jumped up and said urgently: “But I know him, even if it’s just a passing acquaintance: I’ve heard him lecture a few times!”

  “You even called him a vapid fool,” Agathe interjected.

  “And why not?” Ulrich defended it. “People like him know less than anyone how to empathize with another person. They don’t even know what it means. They simply don’t feel the difficulty, the enormously questionable nature of this aspiration!”

  Now Agathe asked with almost passionate insistence: “Why do you think it’s a questionable aspiration?”

  Ulrich was silent. He even lit a cigarette to confirm that he was not going to answer; after all, they had talked about it enough the night before! Agathe knew this too. She did not want to provoke any new explanations. These explanations were as enchanting and as devastating as gazing into the sky and seeing cities of marble in gray, pink, and yellow clouds. She thought: “How lovely it would be if all he said was: ‘I want to love you as myself, and I can love you better that way than I can love any other woman, because you are my sister!’” And because he did not want to say that, she took a small pair of scissors and carefully cut off a thread that was sticking out somewhere, as if for the time being this were the single thing in the whole world that deserved her full attention. Ulrich watched with the same attention. She was at that moment more seductively present to all his senses than ever, and some of what she was hiding he was able to guess, though not everything. For meanwhile she had had time to come to this resolution: If Ulrich could forget that she herself was laughing at the stranger who presumed he could help her, he didn’t deserve to be reminded of it now. And besides, she had a hopeful presentiment about Lindner. She did not know him. But that he had offered to help her selflessly and with conviction must have inspired trust in her, for a joyous tonality of the heart, hard trumpet blasts of will, confidence, and pride, beneficently opposed to her own state, seemed to be sending their refreshing music from behind all the comedy of that encounter. “No matter how great difficulties may be, they amount to nothing if one meets them with an earnest will!” she thought, and was suddenly seized by remorse, so that she now broke the silence more or less the way one breaks off a flower so that two heads can bend over it, and added a second question to her first: “Do you still remember that you always said ‘love thy neighbor’ is as different from an obligation as a cloudburst of bliss is from a drop of satisfaction?”

  She was astonished by the vehemence with which Ulrich answered her: “I’m not unaware of the irony of my situation. Since yesterday, and probably always, I have done nothing but rouse an army of reasons why this love of one’s neighbor is not a joy, but a hugely sublime, all but impossible undertaking! So nothing could be more understandable than your seeking protection from this with a man who hasn’t a clue about any of this, and in your position I would do the same.”

  “But it’s not true at all that I’m doing that!” Agathe retorted curtly.

  Ulrich could not help casting a glance at her that expressed as much gratitude as mistrust. “It’s hardly worth talking about,” he assured her. “I didn’t really want to bring it up.” He hesitated a moment and went on: “But look, given that one must love another person as one loves oneself, no matter how much one loves him it remains a deception and a self-deception, because one simply cannot feel with him how his head hurts, or his finger. It is absolutely unbearable that one cannot really share the experience of a person one loves, and it’s something utterly simple. This is how the world is arranged. We wear our animal skin with the hair inside and cannot shed it. And this terror in the midst of tenderness, this nightmare of perpetually thwarted communion—this is something the properly good, the ‘well and good’ people never experience. Their so-called empathy is actually a substitute to spare them the sense of a lack!”

  Agathe forgot that she had just said something that resembled and did not resemble a lie. She saw shining through the disillusionment in Ulrich’s words the vision of a sharing in each other next to which the usual proofs of love, goodness, and sympathy lost their meaning; and she understood that this was why he spoke of the world more than of himself, for if it was to be more than idle dreaming one would have to dislodge oneself along with reality like a door from its hinges. At this moment she was far away from the man with the sparse beard and timid severity who wanted to do her good. But she couldn’t say it. She just looked at Ulrich, then looked away without speaking. Then she distracted herself with something, then they looked at each other again. After the shortest time the silence gave the impression of having lasted for hours.

  The dream of being two people and one—: in truth the effect of this fable was at some moments not unlike that of a dream that has stepped outside the boundaries of night, and now again she found herself suspended between belief and denial, in a state of feeling in which reason had nothing more to say. It was only the body’s constitution, impervious to all influence, that relegated feeling back to reality. These bodies, loving each other as they did, displayed their existence before the searching gaze with surprises and delights that renewed themselves like a peacock’s fan poised amid the streams of desire; but as soon as the gaze no longer dwelt on the hundred eyes of the spectacle that love offers to love but sought to penetrate into the thinking and feeling person behind it, the bodies turned into cruel dungeons. Each found itself facing the other again, as so often be
fore, not knowing what to say, because for everything that longing might have still wanted to say or repeat, a far too steep overarching gesture was needed, as if leaning across an abyss, for which there was no solid foundation.

  And it was not long before the bodily motions, too, inadvertently slowed down and froze. Outside the windows, the rain was still filling the air with its pulsing curtain of drops and the lulling, hypnotic sounds through whose monotony the sky-high desolation flowed downward. It seemed to Agathe that her body had been alone for centuries; and time flowed as if it were flowing with the water from the sky. The light in the room now resembled a hollowed-out silver cube. Blue smoke from cigarettes carelessly left burning twined around her and Ulrich like sweet-scented scarves. She no longer knew whether she was tender and vulnerable to the core of her being or impatient and sore at her brother, whose perseverance she admired. She sought his eyes and found them glaring like two moons afloat in this precarious atmosphere. And at that moment something happened to her—it did not seem to come from her will but from outside—: the surging water beyond the windows suddenly became like the flesh of a sliced fruit and was pressing its swelling softness between herself and Ulrich. Perhaps she was ashamed or even hated herself a little for it, but an utterly sensual exuberance—and not at all merely what is called sensual abandon but also, indeed much rather, a voluntary and free disengagement of the senses from the world—began to take possession of her; she was just barely able to anticipate it and even hide it from Ulrich by suddenly leaping from the couch, telling him with the speediest of excuses that she had forgotten to take care of something, and leaving the room.

  26

  UP JACOB’S LADDER TO A STRANGER’S HOME

  As soon as that was done she decided to look up the strange man who had offered her his help, and immediately proceeded to carry out her resolution. She wanted to confess to him that she no longer knew what do with herself. She had no clear picture of him; a person one has seen through tears that dried in his company is not likely to appear the way he really is. So, on her way, she thought about him. She believed she was being clearheaded; but actually her thinking was still imbued with imagination. She hurried through the streets, bearing before her eyes the light from her brother’s room. But it hadn’t been real light at all, she thought; it was more as if all the things in the room had suddenly lost their composure, or some kind of sanity they must ordinarily possess. But if in fact she alone had lost her composure, or her sanity, then that too would not have been limited to herself, because something had been set free in the things, a liberation that was stirring with miracles. “One moment more, and it would have peeled us out of our clothes like a silver knife, without our having moved a finger!” she thought.

  But gradually she felt herself calming to the sound of the harmless, gray water pattering on her hat and coat, and her thoughts became more measured. Perhaps the simple clothes she had hastily thrown on helped as well, for they directed her memory back to schoolgirl walks without an umbrella and to guiltless states of mind. She recalled an innocent summer she had spent with a friend and her parents on a small island in the north: there, between the hard splendors of sea and sky, they had discovered a nesting place of seabirds, a hollow filled with white, soft feathers. And now she knew it: The man she was drawn to reminded her of this nesting site. The idea pleased her. Back then she would hardly have permitted herself, given the rigorous sincerity that is part of youth’s need for experience, to abandon herself, as she was now deliberately doing, with such illogical, indeed juvenile, willfulness, to an unearthly dread at the thought of that softness and whiteness. This dread was related to Professor Lindner; but the unearthliness was related to him also.

  The almost certain intuition that everything that happened to her was magically connected with something hidden was familiar to her from all the agitated periods of her life; she sensed it as something close by, somewhere behind her, and was inclined to wait for the hour of the miracle, when she would have nothing to do but close her eyes and lean back. Ulrich saw nothing helpful in supernatural reveries; his attention seemed mostly occupied with transforming, with infinite slowness, all unearthly content into an earthly one. Agathe realized that this was the reason why she had now left him for the third time in twenty-four hours, fleeing in obscure expectation of something that would take her into its care and allow her to rest from the afflic­tions, or perhaps just from the impatience, of her passions. But then as soon as she had calmed down, she would be herself again and back at his side, seeing in what he was teaching her the very possibility of salvation; and now, too, this lasted for a while. But when the memory of what had “almost” happened at home—and yet not happened!—obtruded more vividly, she was again profoundly at a loss. First she wanted to convince herself that the infinite realm of the unimaginable would have come to their aid if they had held out for another instant; then she reproached herself for not waiting to see what Ulrich would do; but in the end she dreamed that the right thing to do would have been simply to give in to love and grant overtaxed nature respite on a rung of the dizzying Jacob’s ladder they were climbing. But no sooner had she admitted this than she appeared to herself like one of those incompetent fairy-tale creatures who cannot contain themselves and in their womanly weakness prematurely break silence or some other oath, causing everything to collapse amid thunderclaps.

  If her expectation now turned again to the man who was to help her find counsel, he not only possessed the great advantages bestowed on orderliness, certainty, kindly strictness, and self-possession by an ill-mannered, desperate display; but this stranger also had the special distinction of speaking about God with serene certainty, as if he were a daily guest in His house and in a position to intimate that there, everything that was mere passion and vanity was despised. So what might be awaiting her at Lindner’s? While she was asking herself this question, she pressed her feet more firmly on the ground as she walked and drew the coldness of the rain-drenched air into her lungs to make her mind completely sober; and then it began to seem highly probable to her that Ulrich, even though he was judging Lindner one-sidedly, nonetheless judged him more accurately than she did, since before her conversations with Ulrich, when her impression of Lindner was still fresh, her own thoughts about the good man had been quite mocking. She was amazed by her feet, which were taking her to him anyway, and she even took a horse-drawn bus to get there faster.

  Shaken about among people who were like rough, wet pieces of laundry, she found it hard to keep her web of reveries intact, for she wanted to bring it to Lindner. But she managed to protect it from tearing and withstood the ride with a determined face. She even belittled it, reducing its size, as it were. Her entire relation to God, if this name should even be applied to such adventurousness, was limited to a kind of twilight that opened up when her life became too oppressive and repulsive or, and this was new, too beautiful. Into that space she would then run, searching. That was all she could honestly say about it. And nothing had ever come of it. This she told herself between bounces and jolts. And then she noticed that she was now really curious to find out how her unknown acquaintance would extricate himself from this business that was being entrusted to him as God’s deputy, so to speak—a vocation for which, surely, some degree of omniscience must have been granted him by the great Ina­ccessible One. For she in the meantime, squeezed between all kinds of people, had firmly resolved under no condition to deliver a full confession to him right away. But when she got out, she discovered within herself, remarkably enough, the deeply hidden conviction that this time it would be different from before and that she was determined to bring the Unfathomable out of the twilight and into the light, and to do so on her own if needs be. Perhaps she would have quickly extinguished this hyperbolic word if it had entered her consciousness at all; but what was there in place of a word was merely a surprised feeling that whirled her blood upward as if it were fire.

  The man toward whom such passionate feelings and fantas
ies were en route was meanwhile sitting in the company of his son, Peter, at his midday meal, which he still ate, following a good rule of former times, at the actual hour of noon. There was no luxury in his surroundings, or, as it is better to say in German, no Überfluss; for the native word reveals the sense that the adopted foreign word—Luxus—obscures. Both words have the meaning of the superfluous and dispensable that idle wealth might accumulate; but Überfluss additionally means an overflowing, and thus signifies a padding of existence that slightly swells beyond its frame, or that surplus ease and liberality of European life of which only the very poor are deprived. Lindner distinguished between these two concepts of luxury, and just as luxury in the first sense was absent from his home, it was present in the second. One already received this peculiar impression, though one could not tell where it came from, when the front door opened and revealed the moderately large foyer. If one looked around, none of the furnishings created to serve mankind with a useful invention were lacking: an umbrella rack, soldered from sheet metal and painted with enamel, took care of one’s umbrella. A coarsely woven runner rug removed from shoes the dirt that had not already been left on the doormat. Two clothes brushes were tucked into a pouch on the wall, and a rack for hanging outer garments was also provided. An electric bulb lit the room; there was even a mirror; and all these implements were maintained with the utmost care and promptly replaced when they suffered damage. But the bulb had the lowest wattage, by which one can just barely make things out; the clothes rack had only three hooks; the mirror encompassed only four-fifths of an adult face; and the carpet was just thick enough and its quality just good enough to enable one to feel the floor through it and not sink into softness. It may very well be futile, by the way, to attempt to describe the spirit of a place through such details, but one needed only to enter that house to feel wafting toward one the peculiar presence of something alive and intangible that was not strict and not lax, not affluent and not poor, not flavored and not tasteless, but simply a positive result of two negations such as might best be described as “lack of waste.” However, this by no means precluded a feeling for beauty, indeed even a sense of pleasure, from making themselves felt as one entered the inner rooms. Sumptuous prints hung framed on the walls, the window next to Lindner’s desk was adorned with a colorful showpiece of glass representing a knight who, with a prim gesture, was liberating a maiden from a dragon, and in the choice of several painted vases that held beautiful paper flowers, in the acquisition of an ashtray by the nonsmoker, as well as in the many small details through which, as it were, a ray of sunlight falls into the grave circle of duty represented by the upkeep and care of a household, Lindner had gladly permitted an unbuttoned taste to prevail. And yet, the twelve-edged severity of the room’s shape permeated everything just enough to remind one of the hardness of life, which should not be forgotten even in comfort; and even where a touch of feminine indiscipline stemming from earlier times—a cross-stitched doily, a pillow with roses, or the petticoat of a lampshade—interrupted this unity, the containing whole was strong enough to prevent the voluptuous element from overstepping its bounds.