The Man Without Qualities

  He was put off by Bonadea’s still giving no sign that she was done. Peering cautiously through the half-open door to the bedroom, he saw that she had stopped dressing. She felt it was indelicate of him to be so absentminded when they should be savoring the last drops of their precious time together; hurt by his silence, she was waiting to see what he would do. She had picked up a book that had in it, luckily, beautiful pictures from the history of art.

  Ulrich was irritated by her waiting and pursued his meditations in a state of vague impatience.

  30

  ULRICH HEARS VOICES

  Suddenly his thoughts focused, and as though he were looking through a chink between them, he saw Christian Moosbrugger, the carpenter, and his judges.

  In a manner that was painfully ridiculous to anyone not of his mind, the judge spoke:

  “Why did you wipe the blood off your hands?—Why did you throw the knife away?—Why did you change into a clean suit and underwear and clean clothes afterward?—Because it was Sunday? Not because they were bloodstained?—How could you go to a dance that same evening? What you had done did not prevent you from going out for a good time? Did you feel no remorse whatsoever?”

  Something flickers in Moosbrugger’s mind—old prison wisdom: Feign remorse. The flicker gives a twist to his mouth and he says: “Of course I did!”

  “But at the police station you said: ‘I feel no remorse at all, only such hate and rage I could explode!’” the judge caught him out.

  “That may be so,” Moosbrugger says, recovering himself and his dignity, “it may be that I had no other feelings then.”

  “You are a big, strong man,” the prosecutor cuts in, “how could you possibly have been afraid of a girl like Hedwig?”

  “Your Honor,” Moosbrugger answers with a smile, “she was making up to me. She threatened to be even more treacherous than I usually expected women of her sort to be. I may look strong, and I am—”

  “Well then,” the presiding judge growls, leafing through his files.

  “But in certain situations,” Moosbrugger says loudly, “I am very shy, even cowardly.”

  The judge’s eyes dart up from the file; like two birds taking off from a branch, they abandon the sentence they had just been perching on.

  “But the time you picked that fight with the men on the building site you weren’t at all cowardly!” the judge says. “You threw one of them down two floors, you pulled a knife on the others—”

  “Your Honor,” Moosbrugger cries out in a threatening voice, “I still stand today on the standpoint—”

  The presiding judge waves this away.

  “Injustice,” Moosbrugger says, “must be the basis of my brutality. I have stood before the court, a simple man, and thought Your Honors must know everything anyway. But you have let me down!”

  The judge’s face had long been buried again in the file.

  The prosecutor smiles and says in a kindly tone: “But surely Hedwig was a perfectly harmless girl?”

  “Not to me she wasn’t!” Moosbrugger says, still indignant.

  “It seems to me,” the presiding judge says emphatically, “that you always manage to put the blame on someone else.”

  “Now tell me, why did you start stabbing her?” the prosecutor gently begins at the beginning again.

  31

  WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

  Was it something he had heard at the session of the trial he attended, or had he just picked it up from the reports he had read? He remembered it all so vividly now, as though he could actually hear these voices. He had never in his life “heard voices”—by God, he was not like that. But if one does hear them, then something descends like the quiet peace of a snowfall. Suddenly walls are there, from the earth to the sky; where before there was air, one strides through thick soft walls, and all the voices that hopped from one place to another in the cage of the air now move about freely within the white walls that have fused together down to their inmost essence.

  He was probably overstimulated from work and boredom; such things happen sometimes; anyway, he didn’t find it half bad, hearing voices. Suddenly he was saying under his breath, “We have a second home, where everything we do is innocent.”

  Bonadea was lacing up a string. She had meanwhile come into his room. She was displeased with their conversation; she found it in poor taste. She had long since forgotten the name of the man who had killed that girl, the case the papers had been so full of, and it all came back to mind only reluctantly when Ulrich began to speak of him.

  “But if Moosbrugger can evoke this disturbing impression of innocence,” he said after a while, “how much more innocent that poor, ragged, shivering creature was, with those mouse eyes under that kerchief, that Hedwig, who begged him for a night’s shelter in his room and got herself killed for it.”

  “Must you?” Bonadea offered and shrugged her white shoulders. For when Ulrich gave this turn to the conversation, it came at the maliciously chosen moment when the clothes his offended friend had half put on when she came into his room, thirsting for reconciliation, were once more heaped on the carpet, forming a small, charmingly mythological crater of foam like the one that had given birth to Aphrodite. Bonadea was therefore ready to detest Moosbrugger, and to pass over the fate of his victim with a fleeting shudder. But Ulrich would not let it go at that, and insisted on vividly depicting for her Moosbrugger’s impending fate.

  “Two men who have no bad feelings against him at all will put the noose around his neck, only because that is what they are paid for. Perhaps a hundred people will be watching, some because it is their job, others because everyone wants to have seen an execution once in his life. A solemn gentleman in a top hat, frock coat, and black gloves will then tighten the noose, while at the same moment his helpers grab hold of Moosbrugger’s legs and pull, to break his neck. Then the man with the black gloves plays doctor, and lays a hand on Moosbrugger’s heart to check whether it is still beating—because if it is, the whole procedure has to be gone through once again, more impatiently and with less solemnity. Now, are you really for Moosbrugger or against him?” Ulrich asked.

  Slowly and painfully, like a person awakened at the wrong time, Bonadea had lost “the mood,” as she was accustomed to calling her fits of adultery. Now, after her hands had irresolutely held her slipping clothes and open corset for a while, she had to sit down. Like every woman in a similar situation, she had firm confidence in an established public order of such a degree of justice that one could go about one’s private affairs without having to think about it. But now, reminded of the opposite, compassionate partisanship for Moosbrugger as victim took hold of her, sweeping aside any thought of Moosbrugger the criminal.

  “Then you are always for the victim,” Ulrich insisted, “and against the act?”

  Bonadea expressed the obvious feeling that such a conversation in such a situation was not appropriate.

  “But if your judgment is so consistent in condemning the act,” Ulrich replied, instead of instantly apologizing, “then how can you justify your adulteries, Bonadea?”

  It was the plural that was in such especially bad taste! Bonadea said nothing but sat down, with a disdainful look, in one of the luxurious armchairs and stared up, insulted, at the dividing line between wall and ceiling.

  32

  THE FORGOTTEN, HIGHLY RELEVANT STORY OF THE MAJOR’S WIFE

  It is not advisable to feel kinship with an obvious lunatic, nor did Ulrich do so. And yet why did one expert maintain that Moosbrugger was a lunatic and the other that he was not? Where had the reporters got their slickly factual account of the work of Moosbrugger’s knife? And by what qualities did Moosbrugger arouse that excitement and horror that made half of the two million people who lived in this city react to him as if he were a family quarrel or a broken engagement, something so personally exciting that it stirred normally dormant areas of the soul, while his story was a more indifferent novelty in the country towns and meant nothing at all in Berlin
or Breslau, where from time to time they had their own Moosbruggers, the Moosbruggers in their own families, to think about. The awful way society had of toying with its victims preoccupied Ulrich. He felt an echo of it in himself too. No impulse stirred in him either to free Moosbrugger or to assist justice, and his feelings stood on end like a cat’s fur. For some unknown reason Moosbrugger concerned him more deeply than the life he himself was leading. Moosbrugger seized him like an obscure poem in which everything is slightly distorted and displaced, and reveals a drifting meaning fragmented in the depths of the mind.

  “Thrill-seeking!” He pulled himself up short. To be fascinated with the gruesome or the taboo, in the admissible form of dreams and neuroses, seemed quite in character for the people of the bourgeois age. “Either/or!” he thought. “Either I like you or I don’t. Either I defend you, freakishness and all, or I ought to punch myself in the jaw for playing around with this monstrosity!” And finally, a cool but energetic compassion would also be appropriate here. There was a lot that could be done in this day and age to prevent such events and such characters from happening, if only society would make half the moral effort it demands of such victims. But then it turned out that there was yet another angle from which the matter could be considered, and strange memories rose up in Ulrich’s mind.

  We never judge an act by that aspect of it which is pleasing or displeasing to God. It was Luther, oddly enough, who had said that, probably under the influence of one of the mystics with whom he was friends for a while. It could certainly have been said by many another religious. They were, in the bourgeois sense, all immoralists. They distinguished between the sins and the soul, which can remain immaculate despite the sins, almost as Machiavelli distinguished the ends from the means. The “human heart” had been “taken from them.” “In Christ too there was an outer and an inner man, and everything he did with regard to outward things he did as the outer man, while his inner man stood by in immovable solitude,” says Eckhart. Such saints and believers would in the end have been capable of acquitting even Moosbrugger! Mankind has certainly made progress since then, but even though it will kill Moosbrugger, it still has the weakness to venerate those men who might—who knows?—have acquitted him.

  And now Ulrich remembered a sentence, which was preceded by a wave of uneasiness: “The soul of the Sodomite might pass through the throng without misgiving, and with a child’s limpid smile in its eyes; for everything depends on an invisible principle.” This was not so very different from the other sayings, yet in its slight exaggeration it had the sweet, sickly breath of corruption. And as it turned out, a space belonged to this saying, a room with yellow French paperbacks on the tables and glass-bead curtains instead of doors; and a feeling stirred in his chest as when a hand reaches inside the split carcass of a chicken to pull out the heart: It was Diotima who had uttered that sentence the last time he saw her. It came, moreover, from a contemporary author Ulrich had loved in his youth but whom he had since learned to regard as a parlor philosopher, and aphorisms like this taste like bread doused with perfume, so that for decades one doesn’t want to have anything to do with any of it.

  Yet however strong the distaste that this aroused in Ulrich, he thought it disgraceful that he had let it keep him all his life from returning to the other, authentic statements of that mysterious language. For he had a special, instinctive understanding for them, which might rather be called a familiarity that leapt over the understanding, although he could never make up his mind to embrace them wholeheartedly as tenets of faith. They lay—such statements, which spoke to him with a fraternal sound, with a gentle, dark inwardness that was the opposite of the hectoring tones of mathematical or scientific language, though otherwise indefinable—like islands scattered among his preoccupations, without connection and rarely visited; yet, when he surveyed them, to the extent that he had come to know them, it seemed to him that he could feel their coherence, as if these islands, only a little separated from each other, were the outposts of a coast hidden behind them, or represented the remains of a continent that had perished primordial eras ago.

  He felt the softness of sea, mist, and low black ridges of land asleep in a yellowish-gray light. He remembered a little sea voyage, an escape along the lines of “A trip will do you good!” or “Try a change of scene!” and he knew precisely what a strange, absurdly magical experience had superimposed itself by its deterrent force once and for all, on all others of its kind. For an instant the heart of a twenty-year-old beat in his breast, whose hairy skin had thickened and coarsened with the years. The beating of a twenty-year-old heart inside his thirty-two-year-old chest felt like an improper kiss given by a boy to a man. Nevertheless, this time he did not shrink from the memory. It was the memory of a passion that had come to a strange end, a passion he had felt at twenty for a woman considerably older than he, not only in years but by virtue of her settled domestic state.

  Characteristically, he remembered only imprecisely what she looked like. A stilted photograph and his memory of the hours he had spent alone thinking of her took the place of live impressions of the face, clothes, voice, and movements of this woman. He had in the meantime become so estranged from her world that the fact of her having been the wife of an army major struck him as so incredible, it was funny. By this time, he thought, she will long have been a retired colonel’s wife. According to the regimental scuttlebutt she was a trained artist, a virtuoso pianist who had never performed publicly out of deference to the wishes of her family; later on, in any case, her marriage made such a career impossible. She did, in fact, play the piano beautifully at regimental parties, with all the radiance of a well-gilded sun floating above chasms of feelings, and from the first Ulrich had fallen in love not so much with this woman’s sensual presence as with what she stood for. The lieutenant who at that time had borne his name was not shy; his eye had already practiced on female small game and even espied the faintly beaten poacher’s path leading to this or that respectable woman. But for such twenty-year-old officers a “grand passion,” if they thought of such a thing at all, was something else entirely; it was a concept, something that lay outside their range of activity and was as devoid of experienced content, hence as luminously vacuous, as only a really grand concept can be. So when for the first time in his life Ulrich saw in himself the possibility of applying this concept, it was as good as done; the part played in this by the major’s wife was no more than that of the last contributory cause that triggers the outbreak of a disease. Ulrich became lovesick. And since true lovesickness is not a desire for possession but the world’s gentle self-unveiling, for the sake of which one willingly renounces possession of the beloved, the lieutenant proceeded to explain the world to the major’s wife in an unaccustomed and persistent manner such as she had never heard before. Constellations, bacteria, Balzac, and Nietzsche whirled around in a vortex of ideas the point of which, as she sensed with growing clarity, was directed at certain differences—not considered a proper subject of conversation in those days—between her own body and that of the lieutenant. She was bewildered by his insistence on linking love with subjects that, as far as she knew, had never had anything to do with love. One day, when they had gone out riding, as they walked beside their horses she left her hand in his for a moment and was appalled to find that her hand stayed there as if in a swoon. In the next second flames ran through them from their wrists to their knees and a bolt of lightning felled both of them so that they almost tumbled by the wayside, where they found themselves sitting on the moss, wildly kissing and then overcome with embarrassment, because love was so great and out of the ordinary that, to their surprise, they could find nothing to say or do other than what people usually do in such embraces. The horses, growing restive, at last released the lovers from this predicament.

  The love between the major’s wife and this too-young lieutenant remained short and unreal throughout its course. They both marveled at it; they held each other close a few more times, both sensing tha
t something was wrong and would not let them come fully together, body to body in their embraces, even if they shed all obstacles of clothing and morality. The major’s wife did not want to deny herself a passion she felt to be beyond her power to judge, but she was throbbing with secret reproaches on account of her husband and the difference in age. When Ulrich told her one day, on some threadbare pretext, that he had to take a long furlough, the officer’s lady breathed a tearful sigh of relief. By this time Ulrich was so far gone in love that he had no more pressing need than to get away as quickly and as far as possible from the vicinity of the cause of this love. He traveled blindly at random, until a coast put an end to the railroad tracks, took a boat to the nearest island, and there, in some place he had never heard of, minimally provided with bed and board, he wrote that first night the first of a series of long letters to his beloved, which he never mailed.