Agathe Page 9

  Since the cortege was to be conducted through the town in a solemn procession on foot before the carriages were boarded, Ulrich was charged with leading the way, flanked on one side by the imperial and royal vice-regent, who had appeared in person to honor the final sleep of a member of the House of Lords, and on the other by an equally high-ranking gentleman, the elder in a delegation of three representing the House of Lords; behind them came the two other noblemen, then the rector and the senate of the university, and only after these, but ahead of the seemingly endless river of top hats worn by persons of varying and, in their sequence from front to rear, gradually decreasing dignity, came Agathe, surrounded by women in black and designating the point where private sorrow meted out by fate had its place among the pinnacles of public service. The unregulated attendance of people with “nothing but sympathy” only began behind those appearing in an official capacity, and it was even possible that it consisted of no one but the old servant couple trudging along by themselves behind the procession. So it was on the whole a procession of men, and the person walking at Agathe’s side was not Ulrich but her husband, Professor Hagauer, whose apple-cheeked face with the bristly caterpillar of a moustache above his mouth had become alien to her in the meantime, an impression augmented by the dense, black veil that permitted her to observe him in secret, and which made him look blue. Ulrich himself, who had been in his sister’s company throughout the many preceding hours, suddenly had the feeling that the ancient protocol of funeral procedure, which dated from the time of the university’s founding, had torn her away from him, for he missed her and was not permitted to turn around to see her; he tried to think of a joke to greet her with when they met again, but his thoughts were deprived of their freedom by the vice-regent, who was striding beside him with lordly bearing and for the most part in silence but who occasionally addressed him with a murmured statement he was obliged to catch—a quality of solicitude that had already been shown him by all of their Excellencies, all the way up to their Magnificences and Worships—for he was reputed to be Count Leinsdorf’s shadow, and the mistrust with which the count’s patriotic campaign was gradually coming to be regarded conferred distinction upon him.*

  There were moreover masses of onlookers crowding the sidewalks and filling the windows, and though Ulrich knew it would all be over in an hour, much like a theater performance, he nevertheless experienced the events of this day with a special vividness, and the universal sympathy with his fate lay like a heavily trimmed cloak around his shoulders. For the first time he felt the upright stance of tradition. The wave of emotion running ahead of the procession, the crowd’s chatter quieting, falling silent, and breathing freely again, the ecclesiastical magic, the dull thuds produced by clods of earth dropping on wood, already audible in his anticipation, the pent-up silence of the procession: all this plucked at the vertebrae as if at the strings of a primordial musical instrument, and with astonishment Ulrich felt within himself an indescribable resonance whose vibrations seemed to be raising his body from within, as if the surrounding solemnity were literally bearing him aloft. And as he was closer than usual to others on this day, he went on to imagine how different it might be if at this moment, in accordance with the original meaning of the pomp that was now being enacted as a half-forgotten custom, he were actually striding along as the heir to some great position of power. Sadness vanished at this thought, and death changed from an awful private affair into a transition that was accomplished through a public ceremony; there was no longer the gaping hole, stared at with dread, which every man or woman whose presence one is accustomed to leaves behind after the first days of their disappearance, but already the successor was walking in the place of the deceased, the crowd breathing its fealty to him, the ceremony at once a death rite and a coming of age for the one who would now take up the sword and set forth alone, for the first time without anyone to follow, toward his own end. “I should have closed my father’s eyes!” Ulrich inadvertently thought. “Not for his sake or my own, but—” he didn’t know how to finish the thought; but that he had never liked his father, and that his father had not liked him, seemed a petty overestimation of the importance of persons in the face of this order of things; and indeed, faced with death, any personal thoughts had the stale taste of emptiness, whereas all that was meaningful in the moment seemed to emanate from the giant body of the procession as it slowly advanced through the crowd-lined street, however pervaded by idleness, curiosity, and thoughtless compliance that body might be.

  But the music played on, it was a light, clear, splendid day, and Ulrich’s feelings swayed to and fro like the canopy that is carried in processions above the Holy of Holies. Occasionally Ulrich glanced at the windows of the hearse that was driving in front of him and saw his head with hat and shoulders reflected in them, and from time to time he would notice again on the floor of the hearse, next to the coffin with its armorial decor, the little droppings of candle wax from earlier burials that had not been properly cleaned away, and then, without any thought, he simply felt sorry for his father as he would for a dog that had been run over in the street. His eyes grew moist, and when his gaze moved beyond the black throng to the spectators by the sides of the street, they looked like freshly sprinkled flowers, and the notion that he, Ulrich, was now seeing all this and not the one who had spent all his days here, and who moreover loved ceremony much more than he did, was so strange that it seemed downright impossible to him that his father could not be among those who saw him departing from a world that he had, all in all, regarded as good. It was a deeply moving thought, but it didn’t escape Ulrich that the agent or undertaker who was leading this Catholic procession to the cemetery and keeping it in good order was a tall, muscular Jew in his thirties. He was graced with a long blond moustache, carried papers in his pocket like a tour guide, and rushed back and forth, fiddling with a horse’s harness or whispering something to the musicians. This reminded Ulrich that his father’s corpse had not been in the house on the last day and had only been returned shortly before the funeral, after being placed at the disposal of science, in accordance with a testamentary disposition inspired by the free spirit of humanistic inquiry, and it seemed rather likely that after this anatomical intervention the old gentleman had been only hastily sewed together again; whereupon, behind the windows reflecting Ulrich’s image, a haphazardly stitched-up thing rolled along as the focal point of this great, beautiful, solemn act of imagination and illusion. “With or without his medals?!” Ulrich asked himself in dismay; he had forgotten about it and did not know whether his father had even been dressed again before the closed coffin returned to the house. The fate of Agathe’s garter, too, was uncertain; it could have been found and he could imagine the jokes the students would have made. All of this was extremely embarrassing, and so the objections of the present again dissolved his feeling into many particulars, after it had, for a moment, nearly attained the smooth round wholeness of a living dream. All he felt now was the absurdity and confused vacillation of all human order and of himself. “Now I’m completely alone in the world,” he thought. “A mooring rope has snapped. I’m rising!” It was in this thought, which recalled the sensation he had felt on receiving the news of his father’s death, that his feeling now clothed itself as he walked on between the walls of the watching crowd.

  *For a description of the Great Patriotic Campaign, also known as the Parallel Campaign, and Count Leinsdorf’s and Ulrich’s role in it, see the introduction.

  7

  A FAMILY OF TWO

  ULRICH says: “When two men or women have to share a room for some time—while traveling, in a sleeping car or a crowded inn—they often strike up an odd sort of friendship. Everyone has a different way of rinsing his mouth or leaning over to take off his shoes or bending a leg when lying down in bed. Clothes and underwear are the same on the whole, but there are countless small and particular differences that reveal themselves to the eye. At first—probably due to the hypertense individualism
of our current way of life—there’s a resistance that could be taken for faint aversion, a guardedness against coming too close and suffering a breach of one’s personal boundaries. Once that is overcome, a fellowship of feeling forms that bears the mark of its unusual origin like a scar. After this transformation many people behave more cheerfully than usual; most of them more innocuously; many more talkatively; almost all more amiably. The personality is changed, one could almost say, exchanged beneath the skin, for one that is less individual. Something new is taking the place of the I—something that is felt to be distinctly uncomfortable and a diminution, yet irresistible. It is the first, germinal budding of a We.”

  Agathe answers: “This aversion in close proximity exists between women especially. I’ve never been able to get used to women.”

  “It exists between men and women too,” Ulrich says. “Only there it’s covered over by the obligatory transactions of love, which immediately claim one’s attention. But it happens quite often that lovers suddenly wake from their entwinement, and then they see—with astonishment, irony, or panic, depending on type—a totally alien creature basking in comfort at their side; in fact, with some people this goes on for many years. Then it is impossible for them to say which is the more natural: their ties with others or the self’s hurt recoil from these ties into its own imaginary uniqueness—because after all, both are in our nature. And both get confounded in the concept of the family! Life in the family is not the full life; young people feel robbed, diminished, not at home with themselves when they are in the family circle. Look at old unmarried daughters: they’re sucked dry by their family, drained of their blood. What they have turned into is a very peculiar hybrid of I and We.”

  Agathe, stretched out on the divan, has raised one knee and responds with animation to his train of thought: “That’s why I had to marry again! You yourself explained it by what you just said!”

  “And yet there is something to the so-called ‘sanctity of the family,’ this merging into one another and being at each other’s service, this selfless movement in a closed circle,” Ulrich continues, taking no notice, and Agathe wonders at the way his words so often move away from her right after coming so close. “Normally this collective self is just a collective egotist, and then a strong sense of family is the most insufferable thing one could imagine; but I can also imagine that absolute willingness to leap into the breach, to fight shoulder to shoulder and bear wounds for each other, as a primordially pleasant feeling that resides in the depths of human time, and in fact is already pronounced in the animal herd,” she hears him say, without being able to make much of it. Nor can she do more with his next sentence: “This condition degenerates easily, as is the case with all ancient conditions whose origin has been lost.” And it is only when he concludes by saying: “And one probably has to demand of the individuals that they be something quite out of the ordinary if the whole they make up together is not to become a mindless travesty!” that she feels again at ease in his presence and would like to prevent her eyes from blinking as she watches him so that he won’t disappear in the meantime, because it is so strange that he sits there saying things that vanish in the heights and suddenly drop down again like a rubber ball that was caught in the branches of a tree.

  The siblings had met in the drawing room in the late afternoon. Several days had passed since the funeral.

  It was a long room that was not only decorated in bourgeois Empire taste but also furnished with genuine pieces from the period; between the windows hung the tall rectangular mirrors encased in plain gilt frames, and the moderately stiff chairs were ranged along the walls, so that the empty floor seemed to have flooded the room with the darkened sheen of its parquet, filling it like a shallow basin in which one hesitated to set foot. At the edge of this stylishly inhospitable salon—since the study where Ulrich had sat down the first morning had been set aside for him—approximately where, in a niche in the corner of the room, the stove stood like a stern column, bearing a vase on its head (and precisely at the middle of its front, on a shelf that ran around it at waist height, a single candlestick), Agathe had created a highly personal peninsula for herself. She had had a divan moved in and had laid a rug at its feet whose antique red-blue, together with the couch’s Turkish pattern, which repeated itself in meaningless infinity, presented a sumptuous challenge to the delicate grays and soberly poised lineaments that were at home in this room by dint of forefatherly will. She further offended against that austere and high-minded will by placing a green, large-leafed, man-size plant, which she had retained from among the funeral decorations along with its pot, at the head of the couch as a “forest”—opposite the tall bright floor lamp that would enable her to read in comfort while lying down, and which in the room’s classicistic landscape had the effect of a searchlight or an antenna mast. This salon, with its coffered ceiling, pilasters on the walls, and small pillar cabinets, had not changed much in the last hundred years, because it was rarely used and had never really been included in the lives of its more recent owners; perhaps in their ancestors’ day the walls had been covered with delicate fabrics instead of the light gray coat of paint they wore now, and the upholstery on the chairs might have looked different, but since her childhood Agathe had known this salon as it presented itself now, and was not even sure if it was her great-grandparents or strangers who had furnished it like this, for she had grown up in this house and the only specific thing she knew was a memory of always entering this room with the shyness that is instilled into children in regard to something they might easily damage or soil. But now she had put away the last symbol of the past, her mourning clothes, and was dressed again in her lounging pajamas, lying on the rebelliously intruded divan, and had spent most of the day reading good and bad books she had amassed, interrupting herself from time to time in order to eat or fall asleep; and when the day thus spent was waning, she gazed through the darkening room at the pale curtains that, already steeped in twilight, were billowing out from the windows like sails, and this impression made her feel as if, haloed by the lamp’s hard glare, she had been voyaging through the stiffly delicate room and had just come to a halt. That was how she had been found by her brother, who registered her illuminated headquarters with one glance; for he too knew this drawing room and could even tell her that the original owner of the house was supposed to have been a rich merchant who later ran into trouble, which enabled their great-grandfather, who was an imperial notary, to acquire the attractive property at a price well within his means. There were all sorts of other things Ulrich knew about this salon, which he had examined thoroughly, and his sister was especially struck by the explanation that in their great-grandparents’ time this rigid decor was felt to be particularly natural; she did not find it easy to understand this, because to her the room’s furnishings looked like something spawned in a geometry class, and it took a while before she could feel her way into the sensibility of an age that was so satiated with the overbearing forms of the baroque that its own somewhat stiff affectation of symmetrical balance was veiled by the tender illusion of being in accord with a nature conceived to be pure, rational, and unadorned. But when finally, with the help of all the details Ulrich supplied, she had envisioned this shift of ideas, she found it nice to know so much about things that her experience of life up to then had led her to despise; and when her brother wanted to know what she was reading, she quickly covered her hoard of books with her body, even though she boldly insisted that she enjoyed reading bad books just as much as good ones.

  Ulrich had worked in the morning and had then left the house. His hope for a period of concentrated study had not been fulfilled so far, and the helpful effect that might have been expected from the interruption of his customary life had been outweighed by the distractions that his new circumstances brought in their wake. Only after the funeral did a change occur, when relations with the outer world, which had started up in such a lively fashion, had been cut off as if at a stroke. For it was only as
a kind of representation of their father that the siblings had been the center of sympathetic attention for a few days and come to feel the numerous kinds of connections attendant upon their position, and apart from Walter’s old father they knew no one in the town whom they would have wanted to visit;* nor had anyone invited them, in consideration for their mourning; and only Professor Schwung had shown up, not only at the funeral but also the following day, to inquire whether his dead friend had not left a manuscript on the problem of diminished responsibility, which one might hope to see published posthumously. This abrupt transition from ceaseless bubbling activity to leaden stillness produced an almost physical shock. Besides, they were sleeping in the rooms they had occupied as children, as there were no guest rooms in the house, upstairs in the attic on makeshift cots surrounded by the meager trappings of childhood, which have something of the simplicity of a padded cell, crowding the mind with the honorless luster of oilcloth on the tables or the linoleum wasteland on the floor into which the stone block construction kit once spewed its fixed ideas of architecture, and insinuating themselves even into one’s dreams. These memories, which were as senseless and limitless as the life for which they were supposed to have been a preparation, made it seem pleasant to the siblings that at least their bedrooms were adjacent, separated only by a closet used for clothes and storage; and because the bathroom was on the floor below, they were dependent on each other after waking as well, encountering each other in the emptiness of the stairs and of the house as soon as they got up in the morning, forced to take each other’s wishes into account, and having to tackle jointly the many problems posed by the unfamiliar household with which they had suddenly been entrusted. Naturally this alliance, as intimate as it was unforeseen, had an element of humor that did not escape them; it resembled the adventurous comedy of a shipwreck that had swept them back to the solitary island of their childhood; and both these circumstances led them after the first few days, over which they had no control, to strive for independence, but each of them did so more out of consideration for the other than for them­self.