Agathe Page 7

  The coming and going had receded in the meantime. The stream of visitors Agathe had referred to her brother the previous day had passed along, and after the reporter had taken his leave, Ulrich found himself alone. Something or other had put him in an embittered mood. Had his father not been right to lug the sacks of knowledge, shovel about in the heaped grains a little, shifting their order, and for the rest simply subject himself to the kind of life he conceived of as powerful? He thought of his own work, which lay untouched in a desk drawer. Probably no one would even be able to say of him, as they could of his father, that he had done spadework! Ulrich went into the small room where the body lay on its bier. This rigidly straight-walled cell amidst the ceaseless bustle that had arisen from it was fantastically uncanny. The dead man floated, stiff as a piece of bark, among the floods of activity, but there were moments when the image was reversed, and then the motions of life seemed rigid while the body appeared to be gliding along with an eerily quiet momentum. “What does the traveler care,” it said then, “for the towns left behind at the piers: I lived here and conducted myself as was expected of me, but now I am moving on!” . . . Ulrich’s heart constricted with the unease of a man who lives among others yet wants something different from what they want. He looked into his father’s face. What if everything Ulrich regarded as his own personal idiosyncrasy was nothing more than an objection to this face, an opposition childishly developed some time long ago? He looked around for a mirror, but there was none, and only that sightless face reflected light. He searched it for resemblances. Maybe there were some. Maybe everything was in this face: the bonds of blood and ancestry, the impersonal stream of heredity in which one is merely a ripple, the limitations, the discouragements, the eternal repetitions and circulations of the mind, which he hated with all the passion of his deepest will to live!

  Suddenly overcome by this discouragement, he thought of packing his bags and leaving before the funeral. If there really was something he could still achieve in life, what was he doing here?

  But in the doorway he ran into his sister, who had come looking for him.

  *One of the major story lines in The Man Without Qualities concerns the marriage of the brilliant and neurotic Clarisse to Walter, and their fraught relationship with Ulrich.

  4

  “I ONCE HAD A COMRADE”

  FOR THE first time, Ulrich saw her dressed as a woman, and after his impression of her the previous day, it almost seemed to him that she was in disguise. Through the open door artificial light fell into the tremulous gray of midmorning, and the black apparition with blond hair seemed to stand in a grotto of air that was flooded with radiance. Agathe’s hair was drawn back closer to her head, which made her face look more feminine than it had the day before. Her delicate breasts were enfolded in the black of her severe dress in that perfect balance between yielding and resistance that is characteristic of the featherlight hardness of a pearl, and the tall, slender legs resembling his own which he had seen yesterday were now curtained by a skirt. And because her appearance as a whole resembled him less today, he noticed the resemblance of their faces. It was as if he himself had stepped through the door and were walking towards him: only this version was more beautiful and steeped in a radiance in which he never saw himself. For the first time he was seized by the thought that his sister was a dreamlike repetition and variation of himself; but as the impression lasted only a moment, he forgot it again.

  Agathe had come to quickly remind her brother of duties that she had neglected to take care of, as she had overslept: she held their father’s will in her hands and drew Ulrich’s attention to some clauses that needed immediate attention. In particular, there was a somewhat fuzzy stipulation regarding the old man’s medals, which Franz, the servant, also knew about. Agathe had zealously, if somewhat irreverently, marked this point in the testament with a red pencil. The deceased had wanted to be buried with his medals, of which he possessed quite a few, but since it was not out of vanity that he wanted this done, he had added a long philosophical explanation, of which his daughter had read only the beginning, leaving it to her brother to explain the rest.

  “How can I explain it?” Ulrich said, after reading the passage through. “Papa wants to be buried with his medals because he considers the individualist theory of the state to be wrong. He recommends the universalist idea, because it is only through the creative community of the State that man receives a purpose that goes beyond the personal, and with it goodness and justice. By himself the individual is nothing, and that is why the monarch is a spiritual symbol. That, in short, is the reason why a man at the time of his death should wrap himself up in his medals, so to speak, the way a dead sailor is wrapped in the flag before his body is consigned to the sea!”

  “But I’ve read that the medals have to be given back,” Agathe said.

  “The heirs must return the medals to the Imperial Chamberlain’s Office. That’s why Papa had duplicates made. But evidently he doesn’t feel that the ones he bought at the jeweler’s were authentic enough, so he wants us to leave the originals pinned to his breast and not to replace them with the duplicates until the moment before the coffin is closed: that’s the trouble! Who knows, maybe it’s a silent protest against the regulation that he didn’t want to express in any other way.”

  “But by that time a hundred people will be here, there’ll be too much distraction and we could forget!” Agathe said.

  “We might as well do it now.”

  “There’s no time now; you’d better read the next part, what he writes about Professor Schwung. Professor Schwung may show up at any moment. I was already expecting him yesterday.”

  “So we’ll do it after Schwung leaves.”

  “It bothers me not to carry out his wish,” Agathe objected.

  “He’ll never know it.”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Oh?” Ulrich exclaimed, laughing. “Do you doubt it?”

  “I’m not sure about anything,” Agathe answered.

  “Even if it were not certain—we could never do anything right for him anyway!”

  “That’s true,” Agathe said. “So let’s do it later. But tell me one thing now,” she added: “Do you never worry about what’s expected of you?”

  Ulrich hesitated. “She has a good dressmaker,” he thought. “I needn’t have worried that she might be provincial.” But because her words were somehow related to the previous evening, he wanted to give an answer that would hold true and be useful to her, but couldn’t think of a way to begin that would prevent any possible misunderstanding, and finally came out with an undesirably juvenile remark: “Not only is our father dead, the ceremonies around him are dead too. His will is dead. The people who show up here are dead. I’m not trying to be mean; God knows how grateful one probably ought to be to those who contribute to the solidity of the earth: but all that is as limestone is to the ocean!” He caught a puzzled glance from his sister and realized how obscurely he was talking. “Society’s virtues are vices to the saint!” he concluded with a laugh.

  In a gesture that could be taken as patronizing or playful, he put his hands on her shoulders, purely out of awkwardness. But Agathe stepped back with a serious face and did not play along. “Did you make that up?” she asked.

  “No, a man I love said that.”

  She had something of the sullenness of a child who is being forced to think hard as she succinctly summed up Ulrich’s answers: “So you wouldn’t call a person good who is honest out of habit? But a thief who steals for the first time, with his heart almost leaping out of his chest, you would call good?”

  These odd words took Ulrich aback, and he became more serious. “I really don’t know,” he said curtly. “There are situations where I myself don’t much care whether something is considered right or wrong, but I can’t give you a rule to go by.”

  Agathe slowly detached her searching gaze from him and returned to the will again: “We hav
e to read further, here’s another marked passage,” she admonished herself.

  Before taking to his bed for the last time, their father had written a series of letters, and his will contained notes elucidating their content and instructions as to where they were to be sent. The specially marked passage referred to the letter for Professor Schwung, and Professor Schwung was that former colleague who after a lifelong friendship had galled and embittered the last year of the old man’s life by opposing his view on the statute regarding diminished responsibility. Ulrich immediately recognized the familiar long-drawn-out arguments about imagination and will, the sharpness of law and the ambiguity of nature, which his father had summarized for him once again shortly before his death. Nothing seemed to have been as much on his mind in his final days as Schwung’s denunciation of the “social school” of jurisprudence which he had joined, as an emanation of the Prussian spirit. He had just begun to outline a pamphlet that was to bear the title “The State and the Law, or Consistency and Denunciation,” when he felt his strength beginning to fail and saw, with bitterness, his enemy in sole possession of the field. In solemn words such as are only inspired by the imminence of death and the struggle to preserve the hallowed good of one’s reputation, he obliged his children not to let his work fall into oblivion, and imposed on his son in particular the duty to cultivate the influential connections he had gained thanks to his father’s tireless exhortations, in order to thoroughly crush Professor Schwung’s hopes of realizing his aims.

  Once one has written such a missive, it may well happen that, after the deed has been done, or rather earmarked for execution, one may feel the urge to forgive an erstwhile friend such errors as were inspired by lowly conceit. As soon as a man suffers greatly and, while still living, already feels his earthly envelope quietly coming apart at the seams, he is inclined to forgive and ask forgiveness; but when he feels better again, he takes it back, for the healthy body is by nature implacable; evidently the old gentleman had experienced both states of mind during his final vicissitudes, and the one must have seemed as justified as the other. But such a condition is intolerable for a distinguished jurist, and so his logically trained mind had devised a means of leaving his will in such a way that its integrity as a last will would remain unimpeachable by any subsequent counterclaims of emotion: He wrote a letter of forgiveness but left it unsigned and undated, instructing Ulrich to date it with the hour of his death and then sign the document together with his sister as proxies, as can be done with an oral will when the dying person does not have the strength to sign his own name. Truly, in his quiet way and without wanting to admit it, he was an odd duck, this little old man who had always subordinated himself to the hierarchies of being and defended them as their zealous servant while harboring all sorts of revolts for which, on the path he had chosen in life, he could find no outlet. Ulrich was reminded of the death notice he had received, which had probably been marshaled in the same frame of mind; indeed he almost saw a kinship with himself in it, though this time it was not with anger but with compassion, at least in the sense that at the sight of this hunger for expression he could understand the old man’s rage against a son who had made life easy for himself by indulging in unseemly liberties. For that is how fathers always regard their sons’ solutions to the problems of life, and Ulrich felt a twinge of filial piety as he thought of all that was still unresolved inside himself. But he no longer had time to find an adequate and understandable way to express any of this to Agathe, for he had barely begun when with a great surge the half-light in which they stood suddenly swept a man into the room. Propelled by his own momentum, he strode straight up to the halo of candlelight where, one step away from the bier and before the flummoxed servant could catch up to announce his arrival, he raised a hand in front of his eyes with an ample gesture. “Esteemed friend!” the visitor intoned with a solemn voice. The little old man lay with clenched jaws in front of his enemy Schwung.

  “Young friends: Above us the majesty of the starry firmament, within us the majesty of the moral law!” the visitor continued, regarding his faculty colleague through misted eyes. “Within this breast, now cold, there once dwelt the majesty of the moral law!” Only then did he turn his body around to shake hands with the brother and sister.

  But Ulrich took this first opportunity to acquit himself of his assignment. “Privy Councilor, you and my father were unfortunately adversaries in recent times?” he said, testing the waters.

  The white-bearded visitor gave the impression of needing to bethink himself before he understood. “Differences of opinion and not worth mentioning!” he magnanimously replied, gazing soulfully at the deceased. But when Ulrich politely persisted, hinting that his question related to a last will, the room suddenly became as tense as a backstreet dive when everyone knows: Someone has just drawn a knife under the table and hell will break loose at any moment. So even in the act of expiring the old man had found a way to inconvenience his colleague Schwung! Enmity of such long standing had of course ceased to be a feeling and become a habit of thought; unless something stirred up the affects of hostility, they simply were no longer there, and the accumulated substance of countless disagreeable episodes had congealed into a mutual contempt that was as independent of the coming and going of emotions as any unbiased truth could be. Professor Schwung felt this just as his now dead antagonist had felt it; it seemed to him utterly childish and superfluous to forgive, because this one conciliatory impulse before the end, a mere feeling at that, not a professional admission of error, lacked any probative force against knowledge accrued through years of contention, and was, in Schwung’s view, quite shamelessly intended to serve no other purpose than to put him in the wrong if he should wish to exploit his victory. It was of course an entirely different matter that Professor Schwung felt the need to take leave of his dead friend. Good lord, we knew each other as graduate students, before we were married! Do you remember that evening in the Burggarten when we drank to the setting sun and argued about Hegel? However many suns have set since then, I remember that one especially! And do you remember our first professional quarrel, which nearly turned us into enemies even back then? How beautiful that was! Now you are dead, and I’m happy to say I am still on my feet, albeit at your bier! Such are the well-known feelings of elderly people when their contemporaries die off. As we come into the ice years, poetry breaks through. Many people who haven’t made a poem since they were seventeen will suddenly write one at seventy-seven when drawing up their will. Just as the dead are called forth one by one at the Last Judgment—even though they have rested at the bottom of time along with their centuries like the cargoes of foundered ships!—so, too, in a last will things are summoned by their names, and their personality, which was lost through much handling, is restored to them. “The Bukhara rug with the cigar burn in my study,” it may say in such a final manuscript, or “the umbrella with the rhinoceros-horn handle I bought at Sunshine & Winter in May 1887”; even the bundles of stocks and shares are addressed and invoked individually by their numbers.

  And it is no coincidence that along with this last lighting-up of each particular object there awakens as well a desire to invoke a moral, an admonition, a blessing, a principle, that would conjure a powerful charm on this unreckoned multitude of things that emerge one last time on the brink of the final descent. That is why, together with the poetry that begins to stir at the time of testamentary contemplation, the spirit of philosophy too is awakened, and not surprisingly it is almost always an old and dusty philosophy that we haul out again after having forgotten it fifty years ago. Ulrich suddenly understood that neither of these two old men could possibly have given in. “Let life do as it will, as long as principles remain intact!” is a very sensible need if one knows that in a few months or years one will have been outlived by one’s principles. And the two principles that were still contending with each other in the old privy councilor were plain to see: his romanticism, his youth, and his sense of poetry called for a fine,
sweeping gesture and a noble utterance; his philosophy, on the other hand, demanded that he embody the imperviousness of the law of reason to sudden incursions of feeling and sentimental lapses of the kind his dead enemy had laid in his path like a snare. For the past two days Schwung had been thinking: Well, he’s dead now, and there’s nothing to stand in the way of the Schwungian view of diminished responsibility; and so his feelings had flowed toward his old friend in great surging billows, and he had worked out his scene of farewell like a carefully organized plan of mobilization that needs only a signal to be carried out. But a drop of wormwood had fallen into that plan, and its effect was clarifying. Schwung had begun with a mighty surge, but now he felt like someone who comes to his senses in the middle of a poem and the last lines won’t come. So there they were, face-to-face, white stubble beard and white beard stubbles, each with his jaws implacably clenched.

  “So what will he do?” Ulrich wondered, keenly intent on the scene before him. In the end Privy Councilor Schwung’s happy certainty that ¶318 of the Penal Code would now be adopted in accordance with his proposals prevailed over his wrath, and being freed from resentment, he would almost have liked to intone that old song, “I once had a comrade / You will find no better / The drum called to battle / He walked at my side,” so as to give vent to his now entirely benevolent and undivided feelings. And since he could not do that, he turned to Ulrich and said: “Believe me, young son of my friend, it is the moral crisis that leads the way; social decadence follows after!” Then he turned to Agathe and continued: “It was the mark of greatness in your father that he was always ready to support an idealistic view struggling to prevail in the foundations of the legal code.” Then he seized one of Agathe’s hands and one of Ulrich’s, shook them, and exclaimed: “Your father attached far too much importance to minor differences of opinion, which are sometimes unavoidable in long years of collaboration. I was always convinced that he had to do this in order to protect his delicate sense of justice from the barbs of reproach. Many professors will take leave of him tomorrow, but the like of him will not be found among them.”