Agathe Page 36

  By now his victim’s resistance had completely transformed the philosopher of life dwelling in his high watchtower into a poet of chastisement and its arousing secondary effects. He was intoxicated by a feeling he had not experienced before, born of an intimate connection between the moral censure with which he was goading his visitor and the excitation of all his manhood, an emotion that one might symbolically characterize, as he himself now accepted, as lustful.

  But the “arrogant conqueress,” who was supposed to be ultimately driven to despair by the empty vanity of her worldly beauty, responded matter-of-factly to his threats of the rod by quietly asking: “By whom am I being punished? Are you thinking of God?”

  And that could not be said aloud! Lindner suddenly lost his courage. Beads of sweat stood among the hairs on his head. It was impossible to utter the name of God in such a context. His gaze, thrust out like a two-pronged fork, slowly withdrew from Agathe. Agathe felt it. “So he can’t do it either!” she thought. She felt a mad desire to keep on tugging at this man until she heard from his mouth what he did not want to disclose to her. But it was enough for now; the conversation had reached its outermost limit. Agathe understood that it had only been a passionate subterfuge, transparent in its very fervor, to avoid having to say the essential thing. Besides, Lindner, too, now knew that everything he had propounded, indeed everything that had excited and upset him, even his own exaggerations, only came from his fear of all exaggeration, of which the most profligate kind, in his view, was the attempt to encroach, with the meddling instruments of sensation and feeling, upon that which must remain shrouded in sublime language, and that this hyperbolic young woman was obviously driving him in that direction. He now called it, silently in his own mind, “a violation of the decency of faith.” For during these moments, the blood flowed back down from Lindner’s head and resumed its ordinary course; he awoke like a person who finds himself standing naked far from his front door, and remembered that he must not send Agathe away without consolation and instruction. Taking a deep breath, he stood back from her, stroked his beard, and said reproachfully: “You have an unquiet and illusion-prone mind.”

  “And you have a peculiar idea of gallantry!” Agathe coolly replied, for she had no wish to go on any longer.

  Lindner found it necessary to say something more to recover his dignity: “You should learn in the school of reality to rein in your subjectivity with unsparing rigor, for a person who cannot do this will soon be dragged to the ground by fantasies and illusions. . . !” He paused, for the strange woman was still eliciting unwelcome emphases from his voice. “Woe to him who departs from morality, it is from reality he is departing!” he quietly added.

  Agathe shrugged. “I will attend the school of reality! I hope to see you at our place the next time!” she suggested.

  “To that I must respond: Never!” Lindner protested forcefully and now perfectly down-to-earth. “Your brother and I have divergent views on life that make it preferable for us not to engage socially,” he added as an excuse.

  “In that case I will come to you,” Agathe calmly replied.

  “No!” Lindner repeated, but curiously enough, he blocked her path in an almost menacing fashion, for she had got up to leave. “That must not happen! You must not put me in the ambiguous position toward my colleague Hagauer of receiving visits from you without his knowledge!”

  “Are you always as impassioned as you are today?” Agathe asked sarcastically, thereby forcing him to make way for her. She now, at the end, felt vapid, yet also fortified. The fear Lindner had betrayed had moved her toward actions that were foreign to her true condition; but while her brother’s demands often discouraged her, this man gave her back her freedom to act at will from an inner impulse, and it comforted her to confuse him.

  “Did I perhaps compromise myself a little?” Lindner asked himself after she had gone. He stiffened his shoulders and marched back and forth in the room several times. Finally he resolved to allow continued contact with her and summed up his considerable unease with the soldierly words: “One must be prepared to meet every discomfiture with valor!”

  • • •

  When Agathe got up to leave, Peter had quickly slipped away from the keyhole, where with considerable astonishment he had been eavesdropping on what his father was up to with the “big goose.”

  *In Greek mythology, Niobe was excessively proud of her beauty and that of her fourteen children. The gods punished her by destroying her children, after which she turned into a stone monument of never-ending sorrow.

  †The German word Wissenschaft, here unavoidably translated as “science,” refers also more generally to the pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship.

  29

  BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF WONDROUS EXPERIENCES

  Soon after this visit, there was a recurrence of the “Impossible,” which was already hovering almost physically around Ulrich and Agathe, and it truly happened without anything happening at all.

  They were changing to go out for the evening. There was no one in the house to help Agathe except Ulrich; they were late in starting and had therefore been in the greatest hurry for a quarter of an hour, when a short pause occurred. Almost all the ornaments of war a woman puts on for such occasions were distributed, piece by piece, on the armrests and surfaces of the room, and Agathe was bending over her foot, with all the attentiveness that pulling on a thin silk stocking demands. Ulrich was standing at her back. He saw her head, her neck, her shoulder, and this nearly naked back; her body was leaning a little to the side over the raised knee, and the tension of the process rounded three slender folds that sped merrily through the clear skin on her neck like three arrows: the lovely corporeality of this picture, sprung from the momentarily spreading stillness, seemed to have lost its frame and passed so suddenly and directly into Ulrich’s body as to set him into motion, so that, not quite as unconsciously as a flag being unfurled by the wind but not with conscious deliberation either, he crept closer on tiptoe, and, taking the bent-over figure by surprise, with gentle ferocity bit into one of those three arrows, simultaneously wrapping an arm around his sister. Then Ulrich’s teeth just as carefully released his overpowered captive; his right hand had gripped her knee, and while with his left arm he pressed her body to his, he pulled her aloft with him on upward-leaping sinews. Agathe cried out in fright.

  So far, everything had happened in as playful and joking a manner as much that had happened before, and even though it was tinged with the colors of love, it was only with the essentially shy intention of hiding love’s more dangerous uncommon nature beneath the garb of such lighthearted familiarity. But thanks to one of those accidents that are beyond anyone’s control, when Agathe got over her fright and felt herself not so much flying through the air as rather resting in it, suddenly released from all gravity and in its stead steered by the gentle force of the gradually decelerating motion, she seemed to herself marvelously comforted, indeed transported beyond all earthly unrest; with a movement that changed her body’s equilibrium and that she would never have been able to repeat, she now shed even the last silken thread of constraint, turned in falling to her brother, continuing, as it were, to rise as she fell, and lay, sinking down, as a cloud of happiness in his arms. Ulrich carried her, pressing her body gently to himself, through the darkening room to the window and set her on her feet beside him in the mellow light of the evening, which streamed over her face like tears. Despite the strength all this required, and despite the force Ulrich had imposed on his sister, what they were doing seemed to them curiously remote from strength and force; one could, again, compare it with the wondrous ardor of a picture that to the hand that takes hold of it from outside is nothing more than a silly painted surface. Thus they had nothing in mind beyond the physical process that completely pervaded their consciousness, and yet alongside its nature as a harmless, initially even rather coarse, joke that set every muscle in motion, it also possessed a second nature that with great tenderne
ss paralyzed their limbs and at the same time enchanted them with an indescribable sensitivity. Questioningly, they wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders. The fraternal build of their bodies conveyed itself to them, as if they were rising up from a single root. They looked into each other’s eyes with a curiosity as if they were seeing such things for the first time. And although they would not have been able to articulate what had actually happened, because their participation in it had been too compelling, they believed they knew that just a moment ago they had unexpectedly found themselves for an instant in the midst of that shared condition at whose border they had for so long been hesitating, which they had described to each other so often and yet had only gazed into from outside.

  Of course if they considered it soberly, and surreptitiously they both did, it amounted to little more than a charming accident and should have dissolved into nothing at the next moment or at least with the return of some activity; and yet this did not happen. On the contrary, they left the window, turned on the light, returned to their preparations, but gave them up after a short time; and without their needing to confer with each other, Ulrich went to the telephone and informed the hosts of the party that they were not coming. He was already wearing his evening suit, but Agathe’s dress was still hanging unfastened from her shoulders, and she was only now attempting to impart some civilized order to her hair. The mechanical resonance of his voice in the telephone and the connection to the world that had been established had not sobered Ulrich in the least; he sat down across from his sister, who paused in what she was doing, and when their eyes met, nothing was more certain than that the decision had been made and all prohibitions would now be a matter of indifference to them. Nevertheless, things turned out differently. Their mutual understanding announced itself to them with every breath; it was an agreement, endured in defiance, to release themselves at last from the discontent of longing, and it was an agreement endured with such aching sweetness that the images anticipating the fulfillment of that longing nearly tore themselves loose from them to unite them already in imagination, as a storm whips up a veil of foam ahead of the waves: but a still greater power bade them be calm and they were incapable of touching each other again. They wanted to begin, but the gestures of the flesh had become impossible to them, and they felt an ineffable warning that had nothing to do with the commandments of moral­ity. It seemed that from the world of the more perfect if still shadowy union of which they had already had a foretaste as in a metaphor, a higher imperative had compelled them, and a higher intimation, curiosity, or premonition had breathed upon them.

  The siblings now remained perplexed and thoughtful, and after they had calmed their feelings they hesitantly began to speak.

  Ulrich said, aimlessly, the way one speaks into the air: “You are the moon—”

  Agathe understood it.

  Ulrich said: “You flew to the moon and the moon gave you back to me—”

  Agathe said nothing: Moon conversations are so wholeheartedly used up.

  Ulrich said: “It’s a metaphor. ‘We were beside ourselves,’ ‘We exchanged bodies without touching’ are metaphors too. But what is a metaphor? A little reality with a great deal of exaggeration. And yet I could have sworn, impossible though it truly is, that the exaggeration was very small and the reality had already become quite big.”

  He said no more. He thought: “What reality am I talking about? Is there a second one?”

  If one here leaves the conversation between brother and sister in order to follow the possibilities of a comparison that had at least some part in shaping it, it might well be said that this reality was truly most closely related to the fantastically altered reality of moonlit nights. For the moonlit world also cannot be fathomed if one sees in it only an occasion for a bit of romantic reverie that is better suppressed by daylight; but rather, if one wants to observe rightly, one must open oneself to the utterly unbelievable fact that all feelings really do change as if under a charm as soon as the piece of earth one happens to occupy plunges from the empty commotion of the day into the sentient corporeality of night. Not only do external relations melt away and re-form in the whispering nuptials of light and shadow, but inner relations, too, converge in a new way. The spoken word loses its self-will in the listening presence of a neighbor. All affirmations express but a single streaming experience. Night clasps all contradictions in her shimmering maternal arms, and at her breast no word is either false or true, but each is the incomparable birth of spirit out of darkness that man experiences with each new thought. Thus every event on a moonlit night is imbued with the nature of the unrepeatable. It is of the nature of intensification, and is of the nature of selflessness and surrender. Every imparting is a parting without grudge, every giving a receiving, every receiving a conception pregnant with the vibrancy of night. To be like this is the only access to the knowledge of what is occurring. For the self holds nothing back on these nights, no condensed residue of self-possession, scarcely a memory; the intensified self shines out into a boundless selflessness. And these nights are filled with the senseless feeling that something is about to happen such as the world has never seen before, indeed such as the impoverished reason of day cannot even imagine. And it is not the mouth that pours forth rhapsodies, but the body, from the head down to the feet, is stretched taut above the darkness of the earth and beneath the light of heaven in an exultant gladness that vibrates between two stars. And the whispering with one’s companions is full of a nameless sensuality that is not the sensuality of a person but of earthly life itself, of all that penetrates perception and sensation, the suddenly revealed tenderness of the world that ceaselessly touches all our senses and is touched by them.

  To be sure, Ulrich had never been aware of harboring a predilection for exulting in moonlight reveries; but as one commonly gulps life down without feeling, sometimes much later one feels a taste of it, now but a ghostly shadow on one’s tongue: and in this way he suddenly felt everything he had missed in the way of such raptures, all the nights he had spent heedless and lonely before he met his sister, as liquid silver poured over endless shrubbery, as flecks of moonlight in the grass, as pendant apple boughs, singing frost, and gilded black waters. Those were all details that did not cohere and that had never been together but that now commingled like the fragrance of a multitude of herbs arising from an intoxicating drink. And when he said this to Agathe, she felt it too.

  Then Ulrich summed up everything that he had said with the assertion: “What made us turn toward each other from the first moment could really be called a life of moonlit nights!” And Agathe breathed a deep sigh. That could mean any number of things, but probably it meant: Why don’t you know a magic spell against our being separated at the last moment? She sighed so naturally and confidingly that she did not even notice it.

  And this in turn started a movement that inclined them toward each other and kept them apart. Every strong excitement that two people have experienced together to the end leaves behind in them the naked intimacy of exhaustion. Even a quarrel will do that; how much more a tenderness that hollows out the marrow of the spine as if to fashion it into a flute! Thus Ulrich, touched, would have almost put his arms around Agathe when he heard her wordless lament, and was as enchanted as a lover on the morning after the first tempests. His hand was already touching her shoulder, which was still bare, and at this touch she started, smiling; but in her eyes there reappeared immediately the signs of involuntary dissuasion. Strange images now arose in his mind: Agathe behind bars. Or fearfully waving her hand to him from a growing distance, torn away by the separative force of unknown men holding her in their grip. Then again he himself was not just the one impotently left behind, but also the one enacting the separation. Perhaps these were perennial images of the doubts of love, merely used up in the average life; then again, perhaps not. He would have liked to talk with her about it, but Agathe was now looking away from him to the open window and hesitantly stood up. The fever of love was
in their bodies, but their bodies did not dare a repetition, and beyond the window, whose curtains were almost fully open, was what had seduced their imagination, without which the flesh is merely brutal or fainthearted. When Agathe took the first steps in that direction, Ulrich, guessing her intention, turned off the light in order to free their gaze into the night. The moon had come up behind the tops of the spruce trees, whose greenly glimmering black stood out in melancholy contrast to the blue-gold heights and the pallidly glittering distance. Reluctantly, Agathe surveyed that deep little piece of the world.

  “So it’s no more than moonlight romance after all?” she asked.

  Ulrich looked at her without answering. Her blond hair had turned fiery in the semidarkness against the whitish night, her lips were parted by shadows, her beauty was painful and irresistible. But probably he stood similarly before her gaze, with blue eye sockets in his white face, for she continued: “Do you know what you look like now? ‘Pierrot Lunaire.’ This calls for prudence.” She wanted to injure him a little in her excitement, which was almost making her weep. After all, it was behind the pale mask of Pierrot in his lunar loneliness that, ages ago, all useless young people appeared to themselves as creatures of dolorous whimsy, powdered-chalk white except for blood-drop red lips, and abandoned by a Columbine whom they had never possessed; this certainly did make the love for moonlit nights look rather ridiculous. But Ulrich, to his sister’s initially growing sorrow, readily agreed. “That’s true of ‘Laugh, clown, laugh!’ as well,” he bitterly affirmed. “That song has sent shudders of inmost assent down the backs of a thousand philistines.” But then he added softly, almost whispering: “This whole sphere of emotion is questionable! And yet I would give all the memories of my life for the way you look right now!” Agathe’s hand had found Ulrich’s. Ulrich continued softly and passionately: “What our age understands by an exalted state of feeling is a surfeit of emotion, and moonlight raptures have been debased to orgies of sentimentality. Our time does not even suspect that this elation must be either an incomprehensible mental disturbance or the fragment of another life!”