After resting with this in silence for a while, Agathe asked, smiling: “And how does this fit in with the age of love being over and only sex and comradeship being left?”

“It doesn’t fit in with that at all!” Ulrich exclaimed, laughing as well.

His sister, after some reflection, remarked with startling harshness—it seemed to be an intentional repetition of the words he had used on the evening of their reunion: “All men want to play little brother and little sister. There really must be something stupid behind it. These little brothers and sisters call each other Daddy and Mommy when they’re a little tipsy.”

Ulrich was taken aback. It was not merely that Agathe was right: Gifted women are also merciless observers of the men they love; they just don’t have theories and hence make no use of their discoveries unless provoked. He felt somewhat affronted. “This has been explained psychologically, of course,” he said hesitantly. “And it couldn’t be more obvious that the two of us are psychologically suspect. Incestuous tendencies, demonstrable in early childhood, along with an anti­social mentality and a rebellious stance toward life. Maybe even insufficiently stable monosexuality, though in my case—”

“Mine too!” Agathe interrupted, laughing again, though not entirely willingly. “I don’t like women at all!”

“It makes no difference,” Ulrich said. “Psychic entrails, in any case. You can also say there’s a sultanic need to be the only one who adores and is adored, to the exclusion of the rest of the world; in the ancient Orient this brought forth the harem, and today we have family, love, and the dog. And I can say that the craving to possess a person so exclusively that no one else can come near is a sign of personal loneliness in the human community that even socialists rarely deny. If you want to see it that way, we are nothing but a bourgeois abnormality. —Oh look, how magnificent!” he broke off, pulling on her arm.

They were standing at the edge of a small marketplace surrounded by old houses. Round about the neoclassical statue of some mental giant they could see the many-colored vegetables, the large canvas umbrellas above the market stands, pieces of fruit rolling on the ground, baskets being dragged, dogs being chased away from the splendors in their crates, the red faces of rough-hewn men and women. The air rumbled and shrilled with the industrious clamor of voices and smelled of sun shining on the welter of earthly things. “Just seeing and smelling the world, how can one not love it?” Ulrich asked exuberantly. “And we can’t love it, because we are not in agreement with what is going on in their heads,” he added.

This separation was not exactly to Agathe’s taste, and she did not respond. But she pressed her body against her brother’s arm, and they both understood that to mean the same as if she had gently put her hand on his mouth.

Ulrich said laughing: “Look, I don’t like myself either! This is what happens when one always finds fault with other people. But even I have to be able to love something, and so a Siamese sister who is neither me nor herself, and just as much me as herself, is clearly the only point where everything intersects!”