I think it was out of anger because he talks like that. You’re different from me; things lie inert in my mind because I don’t know what to do with them—so much for my good memory. Because I’m stupid, I have a terrific memory!” She acted as though this contained a sad truth she would have to shake off in order to go on in her exuberant vein: “It’s the same even when he’s playing tennis. When, in learning to play tennis, I deliberately for the first time place my racket in a certain position in order to give a specific new direction to the ball, which up to that point had been following the precise course I intended, then I intervene in the flow of phenomena: I am experimenting!’ “

“Is he a good tennis player?”

“I beat him six-love.”

They laughed.

“Do you realize,” Ulrich said, “that with all the things you’re making Hagauer say, he’s actually quite right? It just sounds funny.”

“He may be right, for all I know,” Agathe replied. “I don’t understand any of it. But do you know that a boy in his class once translated a passage from Shakespeare quite literally, and the effect was touching, beginning with ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths,’ and without any feeling for what the boy had done, Hagauer simply crossed it out and replaced it, word for word, with the old Schlegel version!

“And I remember another instance, a passage from Pindar, I think: The law of nature, King of all mortals and immortals, reigns supreme, approving extreme violence, with almighty hand,’ and Hagauer polished it: The law of nature, that reigns over all mortals and immortals, rules with almighty hand, even approving violence.’

“And wasn’t it lovely,” she urged, “the way that little boy, whom he criticized, translated the words so literally it gave one the shivers, just the way he found them lying there like a collapsed heap of stones.” And she recited:” ‘Cowards die so much before they die, / The brave ones just die once. / Among all the miracles, why should men fear death / Because it happens to everyone whenever it comes.’ “ With her hand high around the doorpost as though it were a tree trunk, she flung out the boy’s roughhewn version of Caesar’s lines with a splendid wildness, quite oblivious of the poor shriveled body lying there under her youthful gaze alight with pride.

Frowning, Ulrich stared at his sister. “The person who won’t try to ‘restore’ an old poem but leaves it in its decayed state, with half its meaning lost, is the same as the person who will never put a new marble nose on an old statue that has lost its own,” he thought. “One could call it a sense of style, but that’s not what it is. Nor is it the person whose imagination is so vivid that he doesn’t mind when something’s missing. It’s rather the person who cares nothing for perfection and accordingly doesn’t demand that his feelings be whole’ either. She’s capable of kissing,” he concluded with a sudden twist, “without her body going all to pieces over it.”

At this moment it seemed to him that he need know nothing more of his sister than her passionate declamation to realize that she, too, was only ever “half integrated” with herself, that she, like himself, was a person of “piecemeal passions.” This even made him forget the other side of his nature, which yearned for moderation and control. He could now have told his sister with certainty that nothing she did ever fitted in with her surroundings, but that all was dependent on some highly problematic vaster world, a world that begins nowhere and has no limits. This would satisfactorily explain the contradictory impressions of their first evening together. But his habitual reserve was stronger, and so he waited, curious and even slightly skeptical, to see how she would get herself down from the high limb she had got herself out on. She was still standing, with her arm raised against the doorpost, and one instant too many could spoil the whole effect. He detested women who behaved as though they had been brought into the world by a painter or a director, or who do an artful fade-out after such a moment of high excitement as Agathe’s. “She could come down,” he thought, “from this peak of enthusiasm with the dim-witted look of a sleepwalker, like a medium coming out of a trance. She doesn’t have much choice, and it’s bound to be awkward.” But Agathe seemed to be aware of this herself, or possibly something in her brother’s eye had put her on guard. She leapt gaily from her high limb, landed on both feet, and stuck out her tongue at him.

But then she was grave and quiet again, and without saying a word went to fetch the medals. And so brother and sister set about acting in defiance of their father’s last will.

It was Agathe who did it. Ulrich felt shy about touching the defenseless old man lying there, but Agathe had a way of doing wrong that undercut any awareness of wrongdoing. Her movements of hand and eye were those of a woman tending a patient, and they had at times the spontaneous and appealing air of young animals who suddenly pause in their romping to make sure that their master is watching. The master took from her the decorations that had been removed and handed her the replicas. He was reminded of a thief whose heart is in his mouth. And if he had the impression that the stars and crosses shone more brightly in his sisters hand than in his own, indeed as if they would turn into magical objects, it might really have been true in the greenish darkness in the room, filled with glimmerings of light reflected off the leaves of the big potted plants; or it might have been that he felt his sisters will, hesitantly taking the lead and youthfully seizing his. But since no conscious motive was to be recognized in this, there again arose in these moments of unalloyed contact an almost dimensionless and therefore intangibly powerful sense of their joint existence.

Now Agathe stopped; it was done. Yet something or other still remained, and after thinking about it for a while she said with a smile: “How about each of us writing something nice on a piece of paper and putting it in his pocket?”

This time, Ulrich instantly knew what she meant, for they did not have many such shared memories, and he recalled how, at a certain age, they had loved sad verses and stories in which someone died and was forgotten by everyone. It might perhaps have been the loneliness of their childhood that had brought this about, and they often made up such stories between them, but even then Agathe had been inclined to act them out, while Ulrich took the lead only in the more manly undertakings, which called for being bold and hard. And so it had been Agathe’s idea, one day, that they each should cut off a fingernail to bury in the garden, and she even slipped a small lock of her blond hair in with the parings.