“How am I to judge the situation properly when you won’t let me know anything about the man for whom you are, after all, really leaving Hagauer?”

Agathe stared at him like a child or a pupil whose teacher is being unfair. “Does there have to be a man? Can’t it happen of itself? Did I do something wrong by leaving him without having a lover? I would be lying if I said that I’ve never had one; I don’t want to be so absurd; but I haven’t got a lover now, and I’d resent it very much if you thought I’d really need one in order to leave Hagauer!”

Her brother had no choice but to assure her that passionate women were known to leave their husbands even without having a lover, and that he even regarded this as the more dignified course.

The tea they had come together to share merged into an informal and haphazard supper, at Ulrich’s suggestion, because he was very tired and wanted to go to bed early to get a good night’s sleep on account of the next day, which was likely to be busy with bothersome details. They smoked their final cigarettes before parting, and Ulrich still did not know what to make of his sister. She did not have anything either emancipated or bohemian about her, even if she was sitting there in those wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, as it now seemed to him; as she moved and gestured in talking, the light masculine outfit suggested the tender form beneath with the semitransparency of water, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, she wore her beautiful hair up, in true feminine style. But the center of this ambivalence was still her face, so rich in feminine charm yet with something missing, something held in reserve, whose nature he could not quite make out.

And that he knew so little about her and was sitting with her so intimately, though not at all as he would with a woman for whom he would count as a man, was something very pleasant in his present state of fatigue, to which he was now beginning to succumb.

“What a change from yesterday!” he thought.

He was grateful for it and tried to think of something affectionately brotherly to say to Agathe as they said goodnight, but as all this was something new to him, he could think of nothing to say. So he merely put his arm around her and kissed her.

 

3

 

START OF A NEW DAY IN A HOUSE OF MOURNING

 

The next morning Ulrich woke early as smoothly as a fish leaping out of water, from a dreamless sound sleep that had wiped out every trace of the previous day s fatigue. He prowled through the house looking for breakfast. The ritual of mourning had not yet fully resumed; only a scent of it hung in all the rooms; it made him think of a shop that had opened its shutters early in the day, while the street is still empty of people. Then he got his scientific work out of his suitcase and took it into his father’s study. As he sat there, with a fire in the grate, the room looked more human than on the previous evening: Even though a pedantic mind, always weighing all pros and cons, had created it, right up to the plaster busts facing each other symmetrically on the top bookshelves, the many little personal things left lying about—pencils, eyeglass, thermometer, an open book, boxes of pen nibs, and the like—gave the room the touching emptiness of a habitat that had just been abandoned. Ulrich sat, not too far from the window, in the midst of it, at the desk, the room’s nerve center, and felt a peculiar listlessness. The walls were hung with portraits of his forebears, and some of the furniture dated from their time. The man who had lived here had formed the egg of his life from the shells of theirs; now he was dead, and his belongings stood as sharply there as if he had been chiseled out of the space; yet already die order of things was about to crumble, adapt itself to his successor, and one sensed all these objects that had outlasted him quickening with a new life as yet almost imperceptible behind their fixedly mournful air.

In this mood Ulrich spread out his work, which he had interrupted weeks and months ago, and his eyes immediately alighted on the equations in hydrodynamics where he had stopped. He dimly remembered having thought of Clarisse as he used the three basic states of water to exemplify a new mathematical operation, and Clarisse having distracted him from it. There is a kind of recollection that evokes not the word itself but the atmosphere in which it was spoken, and so Ulrich suddenly thought: “Carbon…” and got the feeling, as if from nowhere, that at this instant all he needed to continue was to know all the various states in which carbon occurred; but he could not remember, and thought instead: “The human being comes in twos. As man and as woman.” He paused at this for quite a while, evidently stunned with amazement, as if he had just made some earthshaking discovery. But beneath this stalling of his mind something different was concealed. For one can be hard, selfish, eager, sharply profiled against the world, as it were, and can suddenly feel oneself, the same Ulrich What’s-his-name, quite the opposite: deeply absorbed, a selfless, happy creature at one with an ineffably tender and somehow also selfless condition of everything around him. And he asked himself: “How long is it since I last felt like this?” To his surprise it turned out to be hardly more than twenty-four hours. The silence surrounding Ulrich was refreshing, and the condition he was reminded of did not seem as uncommon as he ordinarily thought. “We’re all organisms, after all,” he thought, relaxing, “who have to strain all their energies and appetites in an unkind world to prevail against each other. But together with his enemies and victims each one of us is also a particle and an offspring of this world, not at all as detached from the others and as independent as he imagines.” In which case it was surely not incomprehensible that at times an intimation of oneness and love arises from the world, almost a certainty that the normal exigencies of life keep us from seeing more than half of the great pattern of the interrelationships of being. There was nothing objectionable in this for a man of mathematical-scientific bent and precise feelings; on the contrary, it reminded Ulrich of a study by a psychologist whom he happened to know personally, which dealt with two main opposing groups of concepts, one based on a sense of being enveloped by the content of one’s experiences, the other on one’s enveloping them, and advanced the connection that such a “being on the inside” and “looking at something from the outside,” a feeling of “concavity” and “convexity,” a “spatiality” as well as a “corporeality,” an “introspection” and an “observation,” occurred in so many other pairs of opposites of experience and in their linguistic tropes that one might assume a primal dual form of human consciousness behind it all. It was not one of those strictly factual academic studies but one of the imaginative kind, a speculative groping into the future, that are prompted by some stimulus outside the scope of everyday scientific activity; but it was well grounded and its deductions were persuasive, moving toward a unity of feeling back in the mists of creation, whose tangled wreckage, Ulrich thought, might be the origin of the present-day attitude that vaguely organizes our experience around the contrast between a male and a female mode of experience but is secretly and mysteriously shadowed by ancient dreams.

Here Ulrich tried to secure his footing—literally, as one uses ropes and crampons for a descent down a dangerous rock face—and began to reflect further:

“The most ancient philosophies, obscure and almost incomprehensible as they are to us, often speak of a male and a female principle,” he thought.

“The goddesses that existed alongside the gods in primitive religions are in fact no longer within our emotional range,” he thought. “Any relationship we might have to such superhuman women would be masochistic!

“But nature,” he thought, “provides men with nipples and women with rudimentary male sex organs, which shouldn’t lead us to conclude that our ancestors were hermaphrodites. Nor need they have been psychological hybrids either. And so it must have been from outside that they received the double possibility of a giving and a receiving vision, as a dual aspect of nature, and somehow all this is far older than the difference of gentler, on which the sexes later drew to fill out their psychological wardrobe….”

As he thought along these lines he remembered a detail from his childhood that distracted him, because—this had not happened for a long time—it gave him pleasure to remember. Here it must be mentioned that his father had in earlier days been a horseman and had even kept riding horses, to which the empty stable by the garden wall, the first sight Ulrich had seen on his arrival, bore witness. Riding was evidently the only aristocratic inclination his father had presumed to adopt, out of admiration for his feudal friends’ way of life.