The Man Without Qualities Page 9

  But as his condition had grown steadily worse in the course of the last year, he found a miraculous refuge in a thought he had never valued enough before. The idea was none other than that the Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent. During ages in which things seem to be going well outwardly, while inwardly they undergo the kind of regression that may be the fate of all things, including cultural development—unless special efforts are made to keep them supplied with new ideas—the obvious question was, presumably, what one could do about it. But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is at such times so particularly dense and intricate that many people obviously find it easier to believe that there is something occult at the root of things, and proclaim the fated fall of one thing or another that eludes precise definition and is portentously vague. It hardly matters whether the doomed thing is the human race, vegetarianism, or the soul; all that a healthy pessimism needs is merely something inescapable to hold on to. Even Walter, who in better days used to be able to laugh at such doctrines, soon discovered their advantages once he began to try them out. Instead of his feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine. His life, which had come to nothing, was now, all at once, tremendously accounted for, justified on a world-historical scale that was worthy of him, so that picking up a pen or pencil and laying it down again virtually took on the aura of a great sacrifice.

  With all this, however, Walter still had to struggle with himself, and Clarisse kept on tormenting him. She turned a deaf ear to his critical discussions of the times; with her it was genius or nothing. What it was she did not know, but whenever the subject came up her whole body began to tremble and tense up. “You either feel it or you don’t” was all the proof she could offer. For him she always remained the same cruel little fifteen-year-old girl. She had never quite understood his way of feeling, nor could he ever control her. But cold and hard as she was, and then again so spirited, with her ethereal, flaming will, she had a mysterious ability to influence him, as though shocks were coming through her from a direction that could not be fitted into the three dimensions of space. This influence sometimes bordered on the uncanny. He felt it most keenly when they played the piano together. Clarisse’s playing was hard and colorless, prompted by stirrings in her that he did not share, and that frightened him as they reached him when their bodies glowed till the soul burned through. Something indefinable then tore itself loose inside her and threatened to fly away with her spirit. It came out of some secret hollow in her being that had to be anxiously kept shut up tight. He had no idea what made him feel this, or what it was, but it tortured him with an unutterable fear and the need to do something decisive against it, which he could not do because no one but him noticed anything.

  As he stood at the window watching Clarisse coming back alone, he dimly knew that he would again not be able to resist the urge to make disparaging remarks about Ulrich. Ulrich had returned from abroad at a bad time. He was bad for Clarisse. He ruthlessly exacerbated something inside Clarisse that Walter dared not touch: the cavern of disaster, the pitiful, the sick, the fatal genius in her, the secret empty space where something was tearing at chains that might someday give way. Now she had entered and was standing bareheaded before him, sunhat in hand, and he looked at her. Her eyes were mocking, tender, clear—perhaps a little too clear. Sometimes he felt that she simply had a certain strength he lacked. Even when she was a child he had felt her as a thorn that would never let him find peace, and evidently he had never wanted her to be otherwise; perhaps this was the secret of his life, which the other two did not understand.

  “How deeply we suffer,” he thought. “I don’t think it can happen often that two people love each other as deeply as we must.”

  And he began to speak without preamble: “I don’t want to know what Ulo has been telling you, but I can tell you that the strength you marvel at in him is pure emptiness.” Clarisse looked at the piano and smiled; he had involuntarily sat down again beside the open instrument. “It must be easy to feel heroic,” he went on, “when one is naturally insensitive, and to think in miles when you’ve no idea what riches can be hidden in an inch!” They sometimes called him Ulo, his boyhood nickname, and he liked them for it, as one may keep a smiling respect for one’s old nanny. “He’s come to a dead end!” Walter added. “You don’t see it, but don’t imagine that I don’t know him.”

  Clarisse had her doubts.

  Walter said vehemently: “Today it’s all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence! He is intelligent, I grant you that, but he knows nothing at all about the power of a soul in full possession of itself. What Goethe calls personality, what Goethe calls mobile order—those are things he doesn’t have a clue about! ‘This noble concept of power and restraint, of choice and law, of freedom and measure, mobile order. . .’” The poet’s lines came in waves from his lips. Clarisse regarded these lips in amiable wonder, as though they had just let fly a pretty toy. Then she collected herself and interjected like a good little housewife: “Would you like a beer?” “Yes. Why not? Don’t I always have one?” “Well, there is none in the house.” “I wish you hadn’t asked,” Walter sighed. “I might never have thought of it.”

  And that was that, as far as Clarisse was concerned. But Walter had been thrown off the track and didn’t know how to continue.

  “Do you remember our conversation about the artist?” he asked tentatively.

  “Which one?”

  “The one we had a few days ago. I explained to you what a living principle of form in a person means. Don’t you remember, I came to the conclusion that in the old days, instead of death and logical mechanization, blood and wisdom reigned?”

  “No.”

  Walter was stymied; he groped, wavered. Suddenly he burst out: “He’s a man without qualities!”

  “What is that?” Clarisse asked, giggling.

  “Nothing. That’s just it, it’s nothing.”

  But Clarisse found the phrase intriguing.

  “There are millions of them nowadays,” Walter declared. “It’s the human type produced by our time!” He was pleased with the term he had hit upon so unexpectedly. As if he were starting a poem, he let the expression drive him on even before its meaning was clear to him. “Just look at him! What would you take him for? Does he look like a doctor, a businessman, a painter, or a diplomat?”

  “He’s none of those,” Clarisse said dryly.

  “Well, does he look like a mathematician?”

  “I don’t know—how should I know what a mathematician is supposed to look like?”

  “You’ve hit the nail on the head! A mathematician looks like nothing at all—that is, he is likely to look intelligent in such a general way that there isn’t a single specific thing to pin him down! Except for the Roman Catholic clergy, no one these days looks the way he should, because we use our heads even more impersonally than our hands. But mathematics is the absolute limit: it already knows as little about itself as future generations, feeding on energy pills instead of bread and meat, will be likely to know about meadows and young calves and chickens!”

  Clarisse had meanwhile put their simple supper on the table, and Walter was already digging into it, which may have suggested the analogy to him. Clarisse was watching his lips. They reminded her of his late mother’s. They were strong feminine lips that ate as if they were getting the housework done, and were topped off by a small clipped mustache. His eyes shone like freshly peeled chestnuts, even when he was merely looking for a piece of cheese on the platter. Although he was short, and flabby rather than delicate of build, he was a man of striking appearance, the kind who always seem to be standing in a good light. He now continued:

  “His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn’t look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he’s like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman’s eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He c
an box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect—why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities—yet he has none of them! They’ve made him what he is, they’ve set his course for him, and yet they don’t belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He’ll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context—nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only ‘how’ it is—some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that’s what interests him. I don’t know whether I’m making myself clear—?”

  “Quite clear,” Clarisse said, “but I think that’s all very nice of him.”

  Walter had unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike; his old boyhood sense of being weaker than his friend increased his jealousy. For although he was convinced that Ulrich had never really achieved anything beyond a few proofs of naked intellect and capacity, he could never shake off a secret sense of always having been Ulrich’s physical inferior. The portrait he was sketching freed him, like bringing off a work of art, as if it were not his own doing at all but something that had begun as a mysterious inspiration, with word after word coming to him, while inwardly something dissolved without his being conscious of it. By the time he finished he had recognized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.

  “So you like it, do you?” he said, painfully surprised. “You can’t be serious?”

  Clarisse was chewing bread and soft cheese; she could only smile with her eyes.

  “Oh well,” Walter said, “I suppose we used to think that way ourselves, in the old days. But surely it can’t be regarded as anything more than a preliminary phase? Such a man is not really a human being!”

  Clarisse had swallowed her mouthful. “That’s what he says himself!” she affirmed.

  “What does he say himself?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—that today everything is coming apart. Everything has come to a standstill, he says, not just him. But he doesn’t take it as hard as you do. He once gave me a long talk about it: If you analyze a thousand people, you will find two dozen qualities, emotions, forms of development, types of structure and so on, which are what they all consist of. And if you do a chemical analysis of your body, all you get is water with a few dozen little heaps of matter swimming in it. The water rises inside us just as it does inside trees, and it forms the bodies of animals just as it forms the clouds. I think that’s neatly put. But it doesn’t help you to know what to say about yourself. Or what to do.” Clarisse giggled. “So then I told him that you go fishing for days when you have time off, and lie around by the water.”

  “So what? I’d like to know if he could stand that for even ten minutes. But human beings,” Walter said firmly, “have been doing that for ten thousand years, staring up at the sky, feeling the warmth of the earth, without trying to analyze it any more than you’d analyze your own mother.”

  Clarisse couldn’t help giggling again. “He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnetism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It’s just that we can’t feel it. All that finally remains is formulas. What they mean in human terms is hard to say; that’s all there is. I’ve forgotten whatever I learned about it at school, but I think that’s what it amounts to. Anybody nowadays, says Ulrich, who wants to call the birds ‘brothers,’ like Saint Francis or you, can’t do it so easily but must be prepared to be cast into a furnace, plunge into the earth through the wires of an electric trolley, or gurgle down the drain with the dishwater into the sewer.”

  “Oh sure, sure,” Walter interrupted this report. “First, four elements are turned into several dozen, and finally we’re left floating around on relationships, processes, on the dirty dishwater of processes and formulas, on something we can’t even recognize as a thing, a process, a ghost of an idea, of a God-knows-what. Leaving no difference anymore between the sun and a kitchen match, or between your mouth at one end of the digestive tract and its other end either. Every thing has a hundred aspects, every aspect a hundred connections, and different feelings are attached to every one of them. The human brain has happily split things apart, but things have split the human heart too.” He had leapt to his feet but remained standing behind the table.

  “Clarisse,” he said, “the man is a danger for you! Look, Clarisse, what every one of us needs today more than anything else is simplicity, closeness to the earth, health—and yes, definitely, say what you like, a child as well, because a child keeps us anchored to the ground. Everything Ulo tells you is inhuman. I promise you I have the courage, when I come home, simply to have a cup of coffee with you, listen to the birds, take a little walk, chat with a neighbor, and let the day fade out quietly: that’s human life!”

  The tenderness of these sentiments had brought him slowly closer to her. But the moment fatherish feelings could be detected raising their gentle bass voice from afar, Clarisse balked. As he drew near, her face became expressionless and tilted defensively.

  When he had reached her side he radiated a gentle glow like a good country stove. In this warm stream Clarisse wavered for a moment. Then she said: “Nothing doing, my dear!” She grabbed a piece of bread and some cheese from the table and kissed him quickly on the forehead. “I’m going out to see if there are any nocturnal butterflies.”

  “But Clarisse,” Walter pleaded. “All the butterflies are gone this time of year.”

  “Oh, you never can tell.”

  Nothing was left of her in the room but her laughter. With her bread and cheese she roamed the meadows; it was a safe neighborhood and she needed no escort. Walter’s tenderness collapsed like a soufflé taken too soon from the oven. He heaved a deep sigh. Then he hesitantly sat down again at the piano and struck a few keys. Willy-nilly his playing turned into improvisations on themes from Wagner’s operas, and in the splashings of this dissolutely tumescent substance he had refused in the days of his pride, his fingers cleared a path and gurgled through the fields of sound. Let them hear it, far and wide! The narcotic effect of this music paralyzed his spine and eased his fate.

  18

  MOOSBRUGGER

  The Moosbrugger case was currently much in the news. Moosbrugger was a carpenter, a big man with broad shoulders and no excess fat on him, a head of hair like brown lamb’s wool, and good-natured strong paws. His face also expressed a good-natured strength and right-mindedness, qualities one would have smelled (had one not seen them) in the blunt, plain, dry workaday smell that belonged to this thirty-four-year-old man and came from the wood he worked with and a job that called as much for mindfulness as for exertion.

  Anyone who came up against this face for the first time, a face blessed by God with every sign of goodness, would stop as if rooted to the spot, because Moosbrugger was usually flanked by two armed guards, his hands shackled with a small, strong steel chain, its grip held by one of his escorts.

  When he noticed anyone staring at him a smile would pass over his broad, good-natured face with the unkempt hair and a mustache and the little chin tuft. He wore a short black jacket with light gray trousers, his bearing was military, and he planted his feet wide apart; but it was that smile that most fascinated the reporters in the courtroom. It might be an embarrassed smile or a cunning smile, an ironic, malicious, pained, mad, bloodthirsty, or terrifying smile: they were groping visibly for contradictory expressions and seemed to be searching desperately in that smile for something they obviously could find nowhere else in the man’s entire upright appearance.

  For Moosbrugger had kil
led a woman, a prostitute of the lowest type, in a horrifying manner. The reporters described in detail a knife wound in the throat from the larynx to the back of the neck, also the two stab wounds in the breast that penetrated the heart, and the two in the back on the left side, and how both breasts were sliced through so that they could almost be lifted off. The reporters had expressed their revulsion at this, but they did not stop until they had counted thirty-five stabs in the belly and explained the deep slash that reached from the navel to the sacrum, continuing up the back in numerous lesser cuts, while the throat showed marks of strangulation. From such horrors they could not find their way back to Moosbrugger’s good-natured face, although they were themselves good-natured men who had nevertheless described what had happened in a factual, expert manner and, evidently, in breathless excitement. They hardly availed themselves of even the most obvious explanation, that the man before them was insane—for Moosbrugger had already been in various mental hospitals several times for similar crimes—even though a good reporter is very well informed on such questions these days; it looked as though they were still reluctant to give up the idea of the villain, to banish the incident from their own world into the world of the insane. Their attitude was matched by that of the psychiatrists, who had already declared him normal just as often as they had declared him not accountable for his actions. There was also the amazing fact that no sooner had they become known than Moosbrugger’s pathological excesses were regarded as “finally something interesting for a change” by thousands of people who deplore the sensationalism of the press, from busy officeholders to fourteen-year-old sons to housewives befogged by their domestic cares. While these people of course sighed over such a monstrosity, they were nevertheless more deeply preoccupied with it than with their own life’s work. Indeed, it might happen that a punctilious department head or bank manager would say to his sleepy wife at bedtime: “What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger?”