He had cheered up again. And as often happened, his mood swept Agathe along. But they never again talked as they had on the first night of their recent reunion or before. That had disappeared like castles in the clouds: when they loom above city streets teeming with life instead of over the solitary countryside, they are hard to believe in. Perhaps the cause of this was only that Ulrich did not know what degree of solidity might be ascribed to the experiences that moved him; but Agathe often believed that all he saw in them was a fantastical aberration. And she could not prove to him that it was not so: for she always spoke less than he did, never struck the right note, and did not feel confident enough to try. She merely felt that he was evading the decision, and that he must not do that. And so in effect they were both hiding in their amusement and pleasure without depth or weight, and Agathe grew sadder day by day, even though she laughed just as often as her brother.

*Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus (born ca. 519 BC) was a Roman statesman who, according to legend, was working a plow on the farm to which he had retired when he was approached by a delegation from Rome begging him to assume the reins of government at a time of crisis for the republic.

19

PROFESSOR HAGAUER PUTS PEN TO PAPER

But this changed, thanks to Agathe’s husband, to whom all along they had given so little consideration.

On a morning that put an end to those days of mirth, she received a heavy letter in a foolscap envelope stamped with a large round yellow seal bearing the white imprint of the Imperial and Royal Rudolfs­gymnasium in ——. Instantly, even while she still held the missive unopened in her hand, out of nothing there arose houses, two-storied: with the mute mirroring of well-polished windows; with white thermo­meters on the outside of their brown frames, one on each floor, for reading the weather; with Greek pediments and baroque scallops over the windows, heads projecting from the walls and other such mythological sentinels that looked as if they had been made in a cabinetmaker’s workshop and painted to look like stone. The streets ran through the town the way they had entered, as brown and wet country roads with deep ruts, and the stores standing on either side with their brand-new window displays looked like ladies of thirty years earlier who have lifted their long skirts but cannot make up their minds to step from the sidewalk into the dirt of the street. The provinces in Agathe’s head! Ghosts inside Agathe’s head! Incomprehensible not-quite-disappearedness, even though she had thought herself unmoored from it forever! Even more incomprehensible: that she had ever been bound to it in the first place! She saw the way leading from her front door past the walls of familiar houses to the school, a route she had often taken when she accompanied Hagauer from his home to his place of work in the early days, when she was still intent on not missing a single drop of the bitter healing potion. “Is Hagauer now eating lunch at the hotel?” she wondered. “Does he now tear the pages off the calendar the way I used to do every morning?” All this had suddenly assumed again such mindless hyperreality that it seemed it could never die, and with quiet horror she saw awakening within her the familiar feeling of intimidation, consisting of indifference, lost courage, satiation with ugliness, and the state of her own tenuous, aerial nature. With a kind of avidity she opened the thick letter her husband had addressed to her.