“You’d think siblings should have already gone at least halfway!” Agathe interjected in a voice that had become husky.

“Twins, perhaps.”

“Aren’t we twins?”

“Certainly!”

Ulrich suddenly veered away. “Twins are rare. Twins of different sexes are extremely rare. If in addition they are not the same age and have hardly known each other for the longest time, it adds up to a phenomenon that’s truly worthy of us!” he declared, striving to get back to the shallows of amusement.

“But it was as twins that we met!” Agathe insisted, undeterred.

“Because we happened to be wearing similar clothes?”

“Maybe. And anyway! You can say it was chance, but what is chance? I believe chance is precisely fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it. Didn’t it ever seem like chance to you that you were born precisely as you and nobody else? Our being brother and sister is the same thing, doubled!” That was how Agathe explained it, and Ulrich submitted to this wisdom. “So we declare ourselves twins!” he agreed. “Symmetrical creatures of nature’s whim, we will from now on be the same age, the same height, have the same hair, wear identically striped clothes with the same ribbon tied under our chins as we follow our path through the throngs of humanity; but let me point out that people watching us as we pass will find us both touching and somewhat absurd, as always when something reminds them of the mysteries of their becoming.”

“We could dress in an opposite way,” Agathe retorted, amused. “One in yellow when the other one’s in blue, or red next to green, and we could dye our hair violet or purple, and I’ll make myself a hump and you give yourself a belly: and still we’ll be twins!”

But the joke was depleted, its pretext worn out, and they fell silent for a while.

“Do you realize,” Ulrich said suddenly then, “that this is a very serious matter we’re talking about?” No sooner had he said this than his sister again lowered the fan of her lashes over her eyes and, hiding her interest, let him go on talking by himself. Maybe it only looked as if she had closed her eyes. The room was dark, and what lamplight there was did not clarify so much as submerge all contours beneath planes of pale light. Ulrich had said: “There’s not only the myth of the human being who was divided in two; we could also think of Pygmalion, Hermaphroditus, or Isis and Osiris: beneath the differences, it always remains the same. This desire for a double of the opposite sex is very ancient. It seeks the love of a being who is completely the same as oneself and yet an other, distinct from oneself, a magical creature who is oneself and yet remains a magical creature and who, above all, has the advantage over anything we merely imagine of possessing the breath of autonomy and independence. This dream of a quintessential love, free of the limitations of the bodily world, meeting itself in two beings that are the same unsame self, has risen countless times in solitary alchemy from the alembic of the human skull—”