“You were never any different!” Gerda answered quickly.
“I’ve always been undecided,” Ulrich said simply, searching her face. “Would you be interested in hearing about what’s going on at my cousin’s?”
Something now flickered in Gerda’s eyes that was clearly distinct from her uneasiness at Ulrich’s proximity: she was burning to find out all she could on that subject, for Hans’s sake, and was trying to hide her eagerness. Ulrich perceived this with a certain satisfaction, and like an animal scenting danger, he instinctively changed course and began to talk of something else.
“Do you still remember my story about the moon?” he asked. “First I’d like to tell you something else like that.”
“More of your lies, I’m sure!” she snapped.
“Not if I can possibly help it. . . . You must remember, from the lectures you’ve attended, how people go about deciding whether something is a law or not? Either you start out with reasons for believing that it is a law, as in physics or chemistry, and even though your observations never quite add up to the precise results you’re looking for, they come fairly close in some definite pattern, and you work it out from there. Or else, as happens so often in life, you have no such reasons and find yourself facing a phenomenon about which you can’t quite tell whether it is a law or pure chance; that’s where things acquire a human interest. Then you translate a series of observations into a series of figures, which you divide into categories to see which numbers lie between this value and that, and the next, and so on; you arrange them in series where the frequency with which something happens shows or doesn’t show a systematic increase or decrease, and you get either a stable series or a distributive function. You then calculate the degree of aberration, the mean deviation, the degree of deviation from some arbitrary value, the central value, the normal value, the average value, the dispersion, and so forth, and with the help of all these concepts you study your given phenomenon.”
Ulrich laid all this out in so casual a tone that it would have been hard to tell whether he was only just working it out in his own mind or hypnotizing Gerda with a display of science for the fun of it. Gerda had moved away from him, leaning forward in an armchair with a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows as she looked down at the floor. To be spoken to in this matter-of-fact tone, an appeal to her intellect, put a damper on her rebelliousness, which she now felt fading away, together with the self-assurance it had given her. Her schooling had taken her through a few semesters at the university, skimming a vast body of new knowledge that could no longer be contained in the old framework of classic and humanistic studies. Such an education leaves many young people feeling powerless in facing a new time, a new world where the soil can no longer be worked with the old tools. She had no idea where Ulrich’s line of reasoning was taking her. She believed him because she was in love with him, and doubted him because she was ten years younger than he and belonged to a new generation keenly aware of its fresh energies; the two conflicting strands of feeling mingled hazily within her as she listened.
“Besides which, you see, we have data that are indistinguishable from those that demonstrate a natural law, yet they have no such basis. Statistical series can sometimes have the same regularity that we associate with natural law. I’m sure you can think of examples you’ve heard in some sociology lecture, like the statistics about divorce in America, let’s say. Or the ratio between male and female births, one of the most stable factors of the kind. Or the number of conscripts annually who try to evade their military service by some form of self-mutilation, also a relative constant, or the suicide statistics; even theft, rape, and bankruptcy occur, as far as I know, at more or less the same annual rate. . . .”
At this point Gerda’s resistance tried to break through. “Are you trying to explain progress to me?” she cried out, doing her best to sound sarcastic.
“But of course,” Ulrich came back at her, without breaking stride. “It’s called the law of large numbers, a bit nebulously. Meaning that one person may commit suicide for this reason and another for that reason, but when a great number is involved, then the accidental and the personal elements cancel each other out, and what’s left . . . but that’s just it: what is left? I ask you. Because you see, what’s left is what each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average, which is a “something,” but nobody really knows exactly what. Let me add that efforts have been made to find a logical and formal explanation for this law of large numbers, as an accepted fact, as it were. But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related to each other cannot be explained at all by conventional logic, and the point has been made, among others, that such phenomena must be analyzed not as individual instances but as involving some unknown laws of aggregates or collectives. I don’t want to bother you with the details, which I no longer have at my fingertips anyway, but I would certainly love to know, for myself, whether there are such laws of the collective phenomenon, or whether it is simply by some irony of nature that the particular instance arises from the happening of nothing in particular, and that the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average of what is basically meaningless. It would certainly make a radical difference to our sense of ourselves if we knew the answer, one way or another! Whichever it turns out to be, any possibility of leading an ordered life depends on this law of large numbers. If there were no such law of averages, we might have a year with nothing at all happening, followed by one in which you could count on nothing for certain, famine alternating with oversupply, no births followed by too many, and we would all be fluttering to and fro between our heavenly and our hellish possibilities like little birds when someone suddenly comes up to their cage.”
“Is all this true?” Gerda asked hesitantly.
“You ought to know it yourself.”
“Of course I do, as far as the details go! But what I don’t know is whether this is what you meant before, when they were all arguing. What you were saying about progress simply sounded like a deliberate provocation.”
“That’s what you always think about me. But what do we really know about the nature of our progress? Not a thing. There are all sorts of possibilities for the way things might turn out, and I simply mentioned just one more.”
“How things might turn out! That’s always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be.”
“You and your friends—always jumping the gun. There’s always got to be a supreme goal, an ideal, a program—an absolute. Yet in the end, all that ever comes of it is a compromise, some common denominator. Isn’t it tiring and ridiculous to be always reaching for the heights and always ending up settling for some mediocre result?”
It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. Nor did it make much difference which woman happened to be sitting there facing him; a body, introduced into a given magnetic field, invariably sets certain processes in motion. Ulrich studied Gerda, who was not answering his last question. There she sat, a skinny girl, with a little furrow of resentment between her eyes. Another hollow, vertical furrow could be seen in the V of her low-cut blouse. Her arms and legs were long and delicate. She suggested a limp springtime, aglow with a premature summer heat, together with the full impact of the willfulness locked in so young a body. He felt a strange mixture of aversion and detachment at the thought that he was closer to a decision than he had realized and that this young girl was destined to play a part in it. Willy-nilly he suddenly found himself telling her his impressions of the so-called younger generation in the Parallel Campaign, ending with words that took Gerda by surprise:
“These younger people are also very radical, and I’m not popular with them either. But I pay them back in the same coin, because I, too, am radical in my own way, and I can put up with any kind of disorder more easily than the intellectual kind. I like to see ideas not only developed but brought togethe
r. I want not only the oscillation but also the density of an idea. This is what you, my indispensable friend, criticize as my tendency to describe only what might be, instead of what ought to be. Well, I do know the difference. This is probably the most anachronistic attitude one can have nowadays, when intellectual rigor and the emotional life are at the farthest remove from each other, but our precision in technology has unfortunately advanced to such a point that it seems to regard the imprecision of life as its proper complement. Why won’t you understand? The chances are you’re incapable of understanding me, and it’s perverse of me to try to confuse a mind so well attuned to the times. Still, Gerda, I sometimes honestly wonder whether I might be wrong, after all. Possibly the very people I can’t stand are carrying out what I once hoped to accomplish myself. They may be doing it all wrong, not using their heads, one running this way and the other that way, each spouting an idea that he regards as the only possible idea in the world; each one of them feels tremendously clever, and they all agree in regarding our times as cursed with sterility. But suppose it’s the other way around, and every one of them is stupid, but all of them together are pregnant with the future? Every one of our truths seems to be born split into two opposing falsehoods, and this, too, can be a way of arriving at a result that transcends the merely personal. In that case the final balance, the sum total of all the experiments, no longer rests with the individual, who becomes unbearably one-sided, but with the experimental collective. In short, I ask you to make allowances for an old man whose loneliness sometimes drives him to excess.”
“You’ve certainly given me a lot to think about,” Gerda said grimly. “Why don’t you write a book? That way, you might be able to help yourself and us, too.”
“Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book?” Ulrich objected. “I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell.”
Gerda was wondering whether a book by Ulrich would really help anyone. Like all the young people in her circle, she overrated the power of the printed word. A total silence had fallen in the apartment since they had stopped talking, as if the elder Fischels had left the house in the wake of their indignant guests. And Gerda sensed the force emanating from the more powerful male body beside her, as she always did, contrary to all her resolutions, when they were alone together; the effort to resist made her tremble. Ulrich noticed it; he stood up, laid his hand on Gerda’s frail shoulder, and said to her: “Look at it this way, Gerda. Suppose the moral sphere works more or less like the physical, as suggested by the kinetic theory of gases: everything whirling around at random, each element doing what it will, but as soon as you work out rationally what is least likely to result from all this, that’s precisely the result you get! Such correspondences, strange as they are, do exist. So suppose we also assume that there is a certain number of ideas circulating in our day, resulting in some average value that keeps shifting, very slowly and automatically—it’s what we call progress, or the historical situation. What matters most about this, however, is that our personal, individual share in all this makes no difference; whether we individually move to the right or to the left, whether we think and act on a high or a low level, in an unpredictable or a calculated fashion, a new or an old style, does not affect this average term, which is all that God and the world care about.”
As he spoke he tried to put his arm around her, though it was palpably costing him an effort.
Gerda was furious. “You always begin by philosophizing,” she cried out, “and it always turns into the usual rooster’s cock-a-doodle-doo!” Her face was aflame, with flecks of color in it. Her lips seemed to be sweating, but there was something attractive about her indignation. “What you make of it is precisely what we don’t want!”
Now Ulrich could not resist the temptation to ask her, in a low voice: “Is possession so deadly?”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Gerda retorted in an equally low tone.
“It’s all the same, whether it’s a person you own or a thing, I know that,” Ulrich went on. “Gerda, I understand you and Hans better than you think. So what is it that you and Hans want? Tell me.”
“Nothing! That’s just it,” Gerda exclaimed triumphantly. “There’s no way to state it. Papa also keeps on saying: ‘You must make clear to yourself what it is you actually want. Then you will see what nonsense it is.’ Well, everything is nonsense when you make it clear to yourself. To be sensible is never to get beyond the commonplace. I know you’ll have something to say about that, you and your sensible way of thinking.”
Ulrich shook his head. “And what about this demonstration against Count Leinsdorf?” he asked gently, as though he were not changing the subject.
“Oh, so you spy on us!” Gerda exclaimed.
“Call it spying if you like, I don’t mind; but tell me about it, Gerda.”
Gerda showed some embarrassment. “Nothing special. Just some sort of demonstration by the Young Germans—marching past his residence, yelling ‘Shame!’ and things like that. The Parallel Campaign is a shame!”
“In what way?”
Gerda shrugged.
“Do sit down again,” Ulrich pleaded. “You’re making far too much of it. Let’s have a quiet talk about it, shall we?”
Gerda obeyed.
“Now listen to me, and tell me if you think I’m on the right track. You say that possession kills. You’re thinking of money, to begin with, and of your parents. I agree that they’re dead souls. . . .”
Gerda looked offended.
“Very well, let’s not talk about money but of ‘having’ in other ways. Take the man who ‘has’ himself in hand; the man who ‘has’ his convictions; the man who lets himself be ‘had’ by another person or by his own passions or merely his own habits or successes; the man who wants to conquer something, the man who wants anything at all: you reject all that? You want to be nomads, nomads forever on the move, as Hans once called it, if I remember. Moving on toward some other meaning, or state of being? Am I right so far?”
“All you’re saying is quite right, in an awful sort of way; the intelligence doing a good imitation of the soul.”
“And intelligence is implicated in all that ‘having’, isn’t it? The intelligence is what measures, weighs, classifies, and collects everything, like an old banker. But what about all the things I talked with you about today that have quite a lot to do with our souls?”
“A cold kind of soul.”
“You’re absolutely right, Gerda. Now all I have to do is to tell you why I’m taking the part of the cold souls or even the bankers.”
“Because you’re a coward.” Ulrich noticed that as she spoke she bared her teeth like a terrified little animal.
“So be it,” he replied. “But surely you believe me capable, if nothing else, of being man enough to escape by, if necessary, climbing a lightning rod or down the tiniest foothold on a wall, if I were not so sure that every attempt at breaking out only leads back to Papa.”
Gerda had refused to enter into this conversation with Ulrich ever since their last talk on a similar subject. The feelings he was talking about were hers and Hans’s alone, and she dreaded, even more than Ulrich’s sarcasm, his coming over to her side, which merely left her at his mercy before she could tell whether he meant what he said or was just acting the Devil quoting scripture. From the moment, earlier on, when she had been taken by surprise at the sadness in his words—she was now enduring the consequences of having so briefly let down her guard—she had been visibly engaged in a violent inner struggle. But Ulrich was in a similar fix himself. He was far from taking a perverse pleasure in his power over the girl; he simply did not take Gerda seriously, and since this involved a certain element of dislike, he generally expressed himself freely to her, without regard for her feelings. But for some time now, the more zestfully he took the world’s part against her, the more he felt curiously inclined to confide in her, to let her see him as he really was, without deceit or making himself look good, and want
ing to see her true inner self as naked as a garden slug. He now looked at her thoughtfully and said: “I feel like letting my eyes rest between your cheeks like clouds in the sky. I don’t really know how clouds feel in the sky, but then, I know as much as anybody about those moments when God seizes us like a glove and slowly turns us inside out on his fingers. You and your friends make it too easy for yourselves. You sense the negative side of the world we all live in, and you loudly proclaim that the positive world belongs to your parents and elders, and the world of the shadowy negative to you, the new generation. I don’t exactly relish playing the spy for your parents, my dear Gerda, but I put it to you that in choosing between the banker and an angel, the more realistic character of the banker’s profession counts for something too.”
“Would you like some tea?” Gerda said sharply. “What can I do to make you comfortable here? I want you to see me at my best as the perfect daughter of the house.” She had pulled herself together again.
“Then suppose you marry Hans?”
“But I don’t want to marry him!”
“You must have some plan or other—you can’t go on living forever on your opposition to your parents.”
“One of these days I shall leave home, make myself independent, and he and I will remain friends.”
“Please, Gerda, let’s suppose that you and Hans will be married or something like it; it can hardly be avoided if things keep going the way they are. And now try to imagine yourself brushing your teeth in the morning, and Hans making out the income tax return, in an otherworldly state of mind.”
“Do I have to know that?”
“Your Papa would say so, if he had any notion of otherworldly states of mind; most people on life’s voyage, I’m sorry to say, know very well how to stow their uncommon experiences so deep in the hold of their ship that they never perceive them at all. But let me ask a simpler question: Will you be expecting Hans to be faithful to you? Marital fidelity is part and parcel of the ownership complex, you know. You would have to accept Hans’s finding inspiration in another woman. Indeed, according to your principles, you would have to see it as an enrichment of your own life.”