I was always convinced that he did so in order not to expose his delicate sense of justice to the slightest reproach. Many eminent scholars will be coming tomorrow to take their leave of him, but none of them will be the man he was!”

And so the encounter ended on a conciliatory note. When he left, Schwung even assured Ulrich that he might count on his father’s friends in case he should still decide to take up an academic career.

Agathe had listened wide-eyed, contemplating the uncanny final form life gives to human beings. “It was like being in a forest of plaster trees!” she said to her brother afterward.

Ulrich smiled and said: “I’m feeling as sentimental as a dog in moonlight.”


5

 

THEY DO WRONG

 

“Do you remember,” Agathe asked him after a while, “how once when I was still very small, you were playing with some boys and fell into the water right up to your waist and tried to hide it? You sat at lunch, with your visible top half dry, but your bottom half made your teeth start chattering!”

When he had been a boy home from boarding school on vacation—this had actually been the only instance over a long period— and when the small shriveled corpse here had still been an almost all-powerful man for both of them, it was not uncommon for Ulrich to balk at admitting some fault, and he resisted showing remorse even when he could not deny what he had done. As a result, he had, on one occasion, caught a chill and had to be packed off to bed with an impressive fever.

“And all you got to eat was soup,” Agathe said.

“That’s true,” her brother confirmed with a smile. At this moment the memory of his punishment, something of no concern to him now, seemed no different than if he were seeing on the floor his tiny baby shoes, also of no concern to him now.

“Soup was all you would have got anyway, on account of your fever,” Agathe said. “Still, it was also prescribed for you as a punishment.”

“That’s true,” Ulrich agreed again. “But of course it was done not in anger but in fulfillment of some idea of duty.” He didn’t know what his sister was getting at. He was still seeing those baby shoes. Or not seeing them: he merely saw them as if he were seeing them. Feeling likewise the humiliations he had outgrown. And he thought: “This having-nothing-to-do-with-me-anymore somehow expresses the fact that all our lives, we’re somehow only half integrated with ourselves!”

“But you wouldn’t have been allowed to eat anything but soup anyway!” Agathe reiterated, and added: “I think I’ve spent my whole life being afraid I might be the only person in the world who couldn’t understand that sort of thing.”

Can the memories of two people talking of a past familiar to both not only supplement each other but coalesce even before they are uttered? Something of the kind was happening at this moment. A shared state of mind surprised and confused both brother and sister, like hands that come out of coats in places one would never expect and suddenly grasp each other. All at once they both knew more of the past than they had supposed they knew, and Ulrich was again seeing the fever light creeping up the walls like the glittering of the candles in this room where they were now standing. And then his father had come in, waded through the cone of light cast by the table lamp, and sat down by his bed.

“If you did it without realizing the full extent of the consequences, your deed might well appear in a milder light. But in that case you would first have had to admit to yourself that it was so.” Perhaps these were phrases from the will or from those letters about Paragraph 318 foisted back onto that memory. Normally he could not remember details or the way things were put, so there was something quite unusual in this recollection of whole sentences in formal array; it had something to do with his sister standing there before him, as though it were her proximity that was bringing about this change in him.

“ ‘If you were capable, spontaneously and independent of any outward necessity, of choosing to do something wrong, then you must also realize that you have behaved culpably’,” he continued, quoting his father aloud. “He must have talked that way to you too.”

“Perhaps not quite the same way,” Agathe qualified this. “With me, he usually allowed for mitigating circumstances arising from my psychological constitution. He was always instructing me that an act of the will is linked with a thought, that it is not a matter of acting on instinct.”

“ ‘It is the will’,” Ulrich quoted, “ ‘that, in the process of the gradual development of the understanding and the reason, must dominate the desires and, relative to them, the instincts, by means of reflection and the resolves consequent thereon.’ “

“Is that true?” his sister asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m stupid, I suppose.”

“You’re not stupid!”

“Learning always came hard to me, and I never quite understand.”

“That hardly proves anything.”

“Then there must be something wrong with me, because I don’t assimilate what I do understand.”

They were close together, face-to-face, leaning against the jamb of the doorway that had been left open when Professor Schwung took his departure. Daylight and candlelight played over their faces, and their voices intertwined as in a responsory. Ulrich went on intoning his sentences like a liturgy, and Agathe’s lips moved quietly in response. The old ordeal of those admonitions, which consisted in imprinting a hard, alien pattern on the tender, uncomprehending mind of childhood, gave them pleasure now, and they played with it.

And then, without having been prompted by anything preceding, Agathe exclaimed: “Just imagine this applied to the whole thing, and you have Gottlieb Hagauer.” And she proceeded to mimic her husband like a schoolgirl: “You mean to say you really don’t know that Lamium album is the white dead nettle?’ ‘But how else can we make progress except through the same hard process of induction that has brought our human race step by step through thousands of years, by painful labor full of error, to our present level of understanding, as at the hand of a faithful guide?’ ‘Can’t you see, my dear Agathe, that thinking is also a moral obligation? To concentrate is a constant struggle against one’s indolence.’ ‘Mental discipline is that training of the mind by means of which a man becomes steadily more capable of working out a growing series of concepts rationally, always consistently questioning his own ideas, that is by means of flawless syllogisms categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive, or by induction, and finally of submitting the conclusions gained to verification for as long as is necessary to bring all the concepts into agreement!’ “

Ulrich marveled at his sister’s feat of memory. Agathe seemed to revel in the impeccable recitation of these pedantic dicta she had appropriated from God knew where, some book perhaps. She claimed that this was how Hagauer talked.

Ulrich did not believe it. “How could you remember such long, complicated sentences from only hearing them in conversation?”

“They stuck in my mind,” Agathe replied. “That’s how I am.”

“Do you have any idea,” Ulrich asked, astonished, “what a categorical syllogism is, or a verification?”

“Not the slightest!” Agathe admitted with a laugh. “Maybe he only read that somewhere himself. But that’s the way he talks. I learned it by heart as a series of meaningless words by listening to him.