In the half darkness his face quivered in self-mockery. But Agathe’s trust was in this face and not in the confusion of the words. She had seen faces twitching like this a moment before they swooped down; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an infinitely long distance.

Her answer was curt: “Being brother and sister just isn’t enough!”

“Well, we’ve already made it ‘twin brother and sister,’” Ulrich retorted, now soundlessly rising, for he had the impression that fatigue had at last overcome her.

“We ought to be Siamese twins,” Agathe added.

“Agreed, then, Siamese twins!” her brother repeated, carefully detaching her hand from his and laying it on the quilt, and his words sounded buoyant, their weightlessness still expanding after he had left the room.

Agathe smiled. Gradually she descended into a lonely sorrow whose darkness, imperceptible to her weariness, soon blended with that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile tiptoed into his study and there, for two hours during which he was unable to work, until he too grew tired, he made his first acquaintance with the experience of being cramped by consideration for another person. He marveled at the number of things he would have liked to do during that time and that had to be suppressed on account of the noise they would make. This was new to him. And it almost irritated him a little, although he did his utmost to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be physically conjoined with another person. He had little information about how two such nervous systems function together, like two leaves on a single stalk, connected not only through their blood but even more through the effect of their complete interdependence. He assumed that every excitement in one psyche would also be felt by the other, while the process that evoked it took place in a body that was not, in the main, one’s own. “An embrace, for instance: you’re embraced in the other,” he thought. “You may not even consent to it, but your other self floods you with an overwhelming wave of consent! What business is it of yours who kisses your sister? But her arousal, you can’t help loving it together with her! Or it’s you who are making love, and now you must somehow involve her in it, you can’t just flood her with senseless physiological processes. . . !?” Ulrich felt a strong appeal and a great discomfort in this train of thought; it was difficult to draw an accurate distinction between new points of view and a distortion of the ordinary ones.

18

TOO MUCH GAIETY

Agathe proved naturally adept at making use of the advantages social life offered her, and her brother was pleased with her assured bearing in a circle of extremely arrogant individuals. The years she had spent as the wife of a secondary-school teacher in the provinces seemed to have fallen off her without leaving a trace. For the time being, however, Ulrich summed it all up with a shrug, saying: “The high nobility find it amusing that we should be called the Siamese Twins: they’ve always been more interested in menageries than, for example, in art.”