Agathe Read online

  As she was telling him this, Ulrich thought: “She’s actually hard. Even as a child she could be tremendously stubborn, in a quiet way. And yet she looks soft.” And suddenly he remembered the day he nearly lost his life in a forest that was being torn to shreds by an avalanche. A soft cloud of powdery snow, seized by an irresistible power, had become hard as a falling mountain.

  “Was it you who sent me the telegram?” he asked.

  “That was old Franz, of course! All that was already in place. He wouldn’t let me care for him, either. I’m certain he never loved me, and I don’t know why he had me come here. I felt bad and locked myself in my room as often as I could. And during one of those times he died.”

  “He probably did it to prove you had done something wrong,” he said bitterly. “Come!” And he drew her toward the door. “But what if he wanted you to stroke his forehead, or kneel next to his bed—if only because he had always read that this is the proper way to take leave of one’s father—and couldn’t bring himself to ask you?”

  “Maybe so,” Agathe said.

  They had stopped again and looked at him.

  “It’s just horrible, everything about it!” Agathe said.

  “Yes!” Ulrich said. “And one knows so little.”

  As they were leaving the room, Agathe stopped again and said to Ulrich: “I’m imposing on you with something that of course is of no concern to you: but it was during Father’s illness that I decided not to go back to my husband under any circumstances!”

  Her brother could not help smiling at her obstinacy. Agathe had a vertical furrow between her eyebrows and was speaking vehemently; she seemed to fear that he would not take her side. She reminded him of a frightened cat who out of sheer terror launches a frontal attack.

  “Does he consent?” Ulrich asked.

  “He doesn’t know yet,” Agathe said. “But he won’t consent.”

  The brother looked questioningly at his sister. But she vigorously shook her head. “Oh no, it’s not what you think. There’s no third person involved!”

  With this, their conversation was finished for the time being. Agathe apologized for not having considered that Ulrich must be hungry and tired, and led him into a room where tea had been served; finding that something was missing from the tray, she went to fetch it herself. Ulrich used the opportunity to recall her husband as clearly as he could, in order to understand her better. He was a man of medium height with a rigidly straight back, pudgy legs in crudely tailored trousers, rather thick lips under a bristly moustache, and a fondness for large-patterned ties, evidently to show that he was no ordinary schoolmaster but a modern pedagogue willing to move with the times. Ulrich felt his old misgivings against Agathe’s choice revive; but remembering the open candor that shone from Gottlieb Hagauer’s eyes and forehead, it was inconceivable that this man would harbor some secret vice. “He’s simply a model of enlightened, hardworking goodwill, a man doing his laudable best to advance the human race in his field without meddling in matters outside his domain,” Ulrich decided, and then, remembering Hagauer’s writing, he descended into thoughts that were not entirely pleasant.

  Such people can already be spotted in their school years. They are not conscientious (as is usually said of them, confusing the effect with the cause) so much as methodical and practical in their studies. They lay out every task beforehand the way one must lay out the clothes one will wear the next morning, piece by piece, down to the collar studs and cuff links, if one wants to dress quickly and without fumbling. There is no train of thought they cannot firmly affix to their minds with those five or six buttons they have at the ready, and there is no denying that the results speak for themselves and stand up to scrutiny. In this way they advance to the head of the class without being felt to be morally unpleasant by their classmates, while people like Ulrich, whose nature tempts them to now slightly exceed and then just as slightly fall short of what is required, are left behind in a way that treads as slowly and softly as fate itself, even if they are far more gifted. He noticed that secretly he was in awe of these shining examples, for their intellectual precision made his own romantic enthusiasm for exactness look a little dubious. “They don’t have a trace of soul,” he thought, “and are thoroughly good-natured. After their sixteenth year, when young people get inflamed over spiritual questions, they seem to fall behind a little and are not really able to understand new ideas and feelings, but here too they work with their ten buttons, and there comes a day when they can demonstrate that they understood everything all along, ‘of course without going to untenable extremes,’ and in the end it is they who in effect usher these ideas into public life, which for others have become vestiges of their faded youth or the kind of hyperbole one indulges in solitude.” And so, by the time Agathe came back into the room, Ulrich, though he still could not imagine what might have happened to her, felt that a battle with her husband, even without just cause, was something that would possess an utterly contemptible inclination to give him pleasure.

  Agathe apparently regarded it as futile to explain her decision rationally. Her marriage was in all external respects in perfect order, as was to be expected from a man of Hagauer’s character. No quarrels, almost no differences of opinion, not least because Agathe, as she told Ulrich, never confided her opinion to him on any subject. Of course no excesses, neither drinking nor gambling. Not even bachelor habits. Fair distribution of income. Well-ordered household. Quiet routine of social occasions with others and unsocial ones à deux. “So if you simply leave him for no reason at all,” Ulrich said, “you will be found at fault in the divorce; provided he sues.”

  “Let him sue!” Agathe exclaimed.

  “Maybe it would be good to grant him a small financial advantage if he agrees to an amicable settlement?”

  “All I took with me,” she replied, “was what I would need for a three-week trip, and a few childish things and mementos from my time before Hagauer. He can keep all the rest, I don’t want it. But he won’t get anything more out of me in the future!”

  Again she had spoken with surprising vehemence. One possible explanation was that Agathe wanted to avenge herself for having granted this man unfair advantages in the past. Ulrich’s pugnacity, competitive spirit, and gift for strategic ingenuity were now aroused, though he felt some misgivings as well; for it was like the effect of a stimulant that agitates the external emotions while the inner ones remain untouched. He changed the course of the conversation, hesitantly seeking a wider perspective: “I’ve read some of his writing and have heard about him too,” he said. “As far as I know, he’s considered a rising man in the field of education.”

  “Yes, he is that,” Agathe said.

  “Judging by what I know of his work, he’s not only well versed in every branch of pedagogy but also took a stand early on for reform in higher education. I remember reading a book of his where there was talk of the irreplaceable value of history and the humanities for a moral education on the one hand and of the equally irreplaceable value of science and mathematics as intellectual disciplines on the other, and thirdly, of the irreplaceable value of harnessing the élan vital through sports and military drill to prepare mind and body for action.”

  “That may be,” Agathe said, “but have you noticed the way he quotes?”

  “The way he quotes? Wait a minute: I vaguely remember noticing something. He uses a lot of quotations. He quotes the old masters. He—of course he quotes the moderns as well, and now I know what it is: he quotes in a way that is positively revolutionary for a schoolmaster—he doesn’t just quote the eminent scholars but also the aeronautics engineers, politicians, and artists of the day . . . But that’s pretty much what I already said, isn’t it . . .” he concluded with the sheepish feeling of a memory that has gone off the track and runs up against a buffer.

  “The way he quotes,” Agathe picked up the thread, “is to go as far as Richard Strauss in discussing music, or as far as Picasso in painting; but he’ll never, not ev
en as an example of something that’s wrong, bring up a name that hasn’t become a fixture in the newspapers at least by attracting their disapproval!”

  That was indeed the case. That was what Ulrich had been searching for in his memory. He looked up. He was pleased by the taste and acuity that were revealed in Agathe’s reply. “So that’s how he became a leader in the course of time, by being one of the first who followed that course in its wake,” he added, laughing. “All who come after him see him ahead of them! But do you like our leading figures?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t quote.”

  “Still, let’s be humble,” Ulrich said. “Your husband’s name stands for a program that many people regard as the best there is. His work represents a small piece of solid progress. His rise in the world won’t be long in coming. Sooner or later he’ll hold a university chair, even though for years he had to eke out a living as a schoolteacher; and I, you see, who had opportunities laid out before me on a straight path, am now in a position where I probably wouldn’t even get a lectureship. That’s something!”

  Agathe was disappointed, which was probably why her face assumed the porcelain-smooth and impassive expression of a lady as she amiably replied: “I don’t know, perhaps you need to show consideration for Hagauer?”

  “When is he expected?” Ulrich asked.

  “Not before the funeral. He has no time to spare. But under no conditions is he to stay in this house. I won’t allow it!”

  “As you wish!” Ulrich said with unexpected resolution. “I will pick him up and drop him off at a hotel. And if you want, I will say to him: ‘Your room is reserved for you here!’”

  Agathe was surprised, and suddenly delighted. “That will annoy him tremendously, because it costs money, and I’m sure he expects to stay here!” Her expression had instantly regained a wild and mischievous look, like that of a child contemplating a prank.

  “What are the arrangements, by the way?” her brother asked. “Does this house belong to you, to me, or to both of us? Is there a will?”

  “Papa left me a big package that’s supposed to contain everything we need to know.” They went to the study, which was behind the room where the body lay.

  Again they glided through candlelight and floral scent, past the horizon of those two eyes that could no longer see. For a second, in the flickering semidarkness, Agathe was no more than a shimmering mist of gold, gray, and rose. They took the package containing the will back to their tea table, where they then forgot to open it.

  For as they sat down, Agathe confided to her brother that to all intents and purposes she had been living apart from her husband, though under the same roof. She didn’t say for how long it had been that way.

  This made a bad impression on Ulrich at first. Often married women, when they think of a man as a possible lover, will tell him this kind of story; and although his sister had made her disclosure with embarrassment, and yet willfully, in an awkward and transparent effort to initiate something or other, it bothered him that she hadn’t thought of a more original line; he considered the whole thing an exaggeration. “Frankly,” he said, “I never understood how you could live with a man like that.”

  Agathe replied that their father had wanted it, and what could she have done about it?

  “But you were a widow then, not a child!”

  “That’s exactly why. I had returned to Papa; everybody was saying I was too young to live alone, because even though I was a widow, I was just nineteen years old; and then I just couldn’t stand it here.”

  “But why didn’t you find yourself another man? Or study something and start an independent life that way?” Ulrich asked, unrelenting.

  Agathe just shook her head. She paused briefly before answering: “I already told you, I’m lazy.”

  Ulrich felt this was no answer. “So you had a special reason for marrying Hagauer!?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were in love with someone you couldn’t have?”

  Agathe hesitated. “I loved my deceased husband.”

  Ulrich regretted that he had used the word “love” so tritely, as though he regarded the importance of the institution it refers to as inviolable. “One wants to give comfort,” he thought, “and just that is already like doling out charity.” Nevertheless he felt tempted to continue talking in the same vein. “And then you realized what had befallen you and you started to make trouble for Hagauer,” he said.

  “Yes,” Agathe said. “But not right away—quite late,” she added. “Very late, in fact.”

  At this point they got into a little argument.

  These confessions were visibly costing Agathe an effort, though she offered them of her own volition and evidently, as was natural at her age, considered the negotiation of sexual life to be an important topic for everyone. She seemed prepared from the start to take the chance of not being understood, sought his trust, and was firmly and not without candor and passion intent on securing her brother’s allegiance. But Ulrich, though morally still in a mood of largesse, was not able as yet to meet her halfway. For all his strength of spirit, he was not always free from the prejudices his mind rejected, having too often allowed his life to go one way and his mind another. And because he had too often exploited and abused his influence over women with a hunter’s delight in trapping and observing his quarry, he had almost always encountered the corresponding image of woman as game that collapses under the man’s love-spear, and his memory was deeply imprinted with the raptures of humiliation to which a woman in love subjects herself, while the man is far from experiencing any comparable surrender. This conception of masculine power and feminine weakness is still quite common today, even though new ideas have evolved with the successive waves of youth, and the naturalness with which Agathe talked about her dependence on Hagauer pained her brother. It seemed to Ulrich that his sister had suffered a degradation without being fully aware of it, by submitting herself to the influence of a man he disliked and persisting in that condition for years. He did not say this, but Agathe must have read something like it in his face, for she suddenly said: “I couldn’t very well run away from him right away, once I had married him; that would have been a little overwrought!”

  Ulrich—always the Ulrich in the state of older brother and somewhat obtuse dispenser of edifying counsel—jolted upright and cried out: “Would it really be overwrought to suffer revulsion and immediately draw all the necessary conclusions?!” He tried to soften his words by following them with a smile and looking at his sister in as friendly a way as possible.

  Agathe was also looking at him; her face was wide open from the effort of trying to read his features. “Surely a healthy person won’t be so piqued by an awkward situation?!” she persisted. “What does it matter, after all?”

  This had the effect of causing Ulrich to pull himself together, with the resolve to no longer entrust his thoughts to a partial self. He was now once more the man of functional understanding. “You are right,” he said, “what do processes as such really matter! What matters is the system of ideas through which we regard them, and the personal system these form a part of.”

  “How do you mean that?” Agathe asked distrustfully.

  Ulrich apologized for putting it so abstractly, but while he searched for a more accessible analogy, his brotherly jealousy returned and influenced his choice of terms: “Suppose a woman we care about has been raped,” he said. “Within the framework of a heroic system of ideas we would have to expect revenge or suicide; in a cynical-pragmatic framework, we would expect her to shake it off like a hen; and what would actually happen today would probably be a combination of the two; but this inner incertitude is more loathsome than anything.”

  But Agathe did not accept this way of putting it either. “Does it really seem so awful to you?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed to me that it must be humiliating to live with a person one does not love. But now—as you will!”

  “Is it worse than when a wom
an who wants to marry less than three months after her divorce is compelled by the State to be examined by an officially appointed gynecologist to see whether she’s pregnant or not, because of the laws of inheritance? I’ve read that that happens!” Agathe’s forehead seemed to bulge with protective anger, and the little vertical furrow between her eyebrows had appeared again. “And every one of them gets over it if she has to!” she said contemptuously.

  “I don’t disagree with you,” Ulrich replied. “All events, once they actually happen, pass like rain and sunshine. You’re probably much more sensible than I am in considering these things in a natural way; but a man’s nature is not natural, it impinges on nature and alters it and is therefore sometimes overwrought.” His smile was a plea for friendship, and his eyes saw how young she was. The skin on her face scarcely creased when she was agitated, but was further tautened and smoothed by the inner tension, like a glove on a clenched fist.

  “I never thought about this in such general terms,” she now said. “But after listening to you, it seems to me again that the life I’ve been leading has put me terribly in the wrong.”

  “It’s only because you’ve already volunteered so much without coming to the point,” her brother said, playfully settling the debt implied by their mutual confessions of fault. “How can I hit the mark if you won’t tell me anything about the man for whose sake you’re finally leaving Hagauer?”

  Agathe looked at him like a child or a student who feels misjudged by her teacher. “Does it have to be a man?! Can’t it happen by itself? Have I done something wrong by leaving him without a lover? I suppose I would be lying to you if I claimed that I had never had a lover; I don’t want to be so absurd; but I don’t have a lover now and I would resent it if you thought I couldn’t leave Hagauer unless I had one!”

  Her brother had no choice but to assure her that passionate women sometimes leave their husbands without having a lover, and that this was the more dignified course. —The tea for which they had met had been converted into an informal early supper, at Ulrich’s request. He was very tired and wanted to go to bed early in order to get a good night’s sleep, for the next day promised all sorts of business and unrest. Now, as they smoked their last cigarettes before parting, he didn’t know what to make of his sister. There was nothing either emancipated or bohemian about her, even though she was sitting there in the wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, it seemed to him now; as she gestured and moved in conversation, the light, masculine garment, which was semitransparent, like water, suggested the delicate form underneath, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, her lovely hair was gathered up in decidedly feminine style. But the center of this amphibious impression was still her face, which possessed the charm of a woman to a high degree and yet had something missing or held in reserve whose nature he could not make out.