I looked him straight in the eye and said: “In this situation I count for more than Selma Lagerlof, because I’m not doing it for ‘research.’ “

He looked at me, and then he said: “The only thing I can suggest is for you to bring a letter of introduction from your embassy to the superintendent of the clinic.” He took me for a foreign writer, not realizing that I was Siegmund’s sister.

We finally agreed that I would not be coming to see Moosbrugger the psychiatric patient but Moosbrugger the prisoner. Siegmund got me a letter of introduction from a charitable organization and a permit from the District Court. Afterward Siegmund told me that Dr. Friedenthal regards psychiatry as a science that’s half art, and called him the ringmaster of a demons’ circus. I rather liked that.

What I liked best was that the clinic is housed in an old monastery. We had to wait in the corridor, and the lecture hall is in a chapel. It has huge Gothic windows, and I could see inside from across the courtyard. The patients are dressed in white, and they sit up on the dais with the professor. And the professor bends over their chairs in a friendly way. I thought: “Maybe they’ll bring Moosbrugger in now.” I felt like flying into the lecture hall through that tall window. You’ll say I can’t fly: jump through the window, then? But I’d never have jumped; that was not how I felt at all.

I hope you’ll be coming back soon. One can never express things. Least of all in a letter.

This was signed, heavily underlined, “Clarisse.”


8

 

A FAMILY OF TWO

 

Ulrich says: ‘When two men or women have to share a room for any length of time when traveling—in a sleeping car or a crowded hotel—they’re often apt to strike up an odd sort of friendship. Everyone has his own way of using mouthwash or bending over to take off his shoes or bending his leg when he gets into bed. Clothes and underwear are basically the same, yet they reveal to the eye innumerable little individual differences. At first—probably because of the hypertensive individualism of our current way of life—there’s a resistance like a faint revulsion that keeps the other person at arm’s length, guarding against any invasion into one’s own personality. Once that is overcome a communal life develops, which reveals its unusual origin like a scar. At this point many people behave more cheerfully than usual; most become more innocuous; many more talkative; almost all more friendly. The personality is changed; one might almost say that under the skin it has been exchanged for a less idiosyncratic one: the Me is displaced by the beginnings—clearly uneasy and perceived as a diminution, and yet irresistible—of a We.”

Agathe replies: “This revulsion from closeness affects women especially. I’ve never learned to feel at ease with women myself.”

“You’ll find it between a man and a woman too,” Ulrich says. “But there it’s covered up by the obligatory rituals of love, which immediately claim all attention. But more often than you might think, those involved wake suddenly from their trance and find—with amazement, irony, or panic, depending on their individual temperament— some totally alien being ensconced at their side; indeed, some people experience this even after many years. Then they can’t tell which is more natural: their bond with others or the self’s bruised recoil from that bond into the illusion of its uniqueness—both impulses are in our nature, after all. And they’re both entangled with the idea of the family. Life within the family is not a full life: Young people feel robbed, diminished, not fully at home with themselves within the circle of the family. Look at elderly, unmarried daughters: they’ve been sucked dry by the family, drained of their blood; they’ve become quite peculiar hybrids of the Me and the We.”

Clarisse’s letter came as a disturbance to Ulrich. The manic outbursts in it bother him much less than the steady and quasi-rational working out of some obviously demented scheme deep within her. He has told himself that after his return he will have to talk to Walter about it, and since then he has deliberately been speaking of other things.

Agathe, stretched out on the couch with one knee drawn up, eagerly picks up what he has just said: “You yourself are explaining, with what you’re saying, why I had to marry again!”

“And yet there is also something in the so-called sanctity of the family, in the entering into one another, serving one another, the selfless movement within a closed circle…,” Ulrich continues, taking no notice, and Agathe wonders at the way his words so often move away from her again just when they have been so close. “Usually this collective self is only a collective egotist, and then a strong family feeling is the most insufferable thing imaginable. Still, I can also imagine this unconditional leaping into the breach for one another, this fighting shoulder-to-shoulder and licking each other’s wounds, as an instinctual feeling of satisfaction rooted deep in the beginnings of the human race, and even marked in herd animals…,” she hears him say, without being able to make much of it.