Agathe forgot that she had just said something that resembled and did not resemble a lie. She saw shining through the disillusionment in Ulrich’s words the vision of a sharing in each other next to which the usual proofs of love, goodness, and sympathy lost their meaning; and she understood that this was why he spoke of the world more than of himself, for if it was to be more than idle dreaming one would have to dislodge oneself along with reality like a door from its hinges. At this moment she was far away from the man with the sparse beard and timid severity who wanted to do her good. But she couldn’t say it. She just looked at Ulrich, then looked away without speaking. Then she distracted herself with something, then they looked at each other again. After the shortest time the silence gave the impression of having lasted for hours.

The dream of being two people and one—: in truth the effect of this fable was at some moments not unlike that of a dream that has stepped outside the boundaries of night, and now again she found herself suspended between belief and denial, in a state of feeling in which reason had nothing more to say. It was only the body’s constitution, impervious to all influence, that relegated feeling back to reality. These bodies, loving each other as they did, displayed their existence before the searching gaze with surprises and delights that renewed themselves like a peacock’s fan poised amid the streams of desire; but as soon as the gaze no longer dwelt on the hundred eyes of the spectacle that love offers to love but sought to penetrate into the thinking and feeling person behind it, the bodies turned into cruel dungeons. Each found itself facing the other again, as so often before, not knowing what to say, because for everything that longing might have still wanted to say or repeat, a far too steep overarching gesture was needed, as if leaning across an abyss, for which there was no solid foundation.

And it was not long before the bodily motions, too, inadvertently slowed down and froze. Outside the windows, the rain was still filling the air with its pulsing curtain of drops and the lulling, hypnotic sounds through whose monotony the sky-high desolation flowed downward. It seemed to Agathe that her body had been alone for centuries; and time flowed as if it were flowing with the water from the sky. The light in the room now resembled a hollowed-out silver cube. Blue smoke from cigarettes carelessly left burning twined around her and Ulrich like sweet-scented scarves. She no longer knew whether she was tender and vulnerable to the core of her being or impatient and sore at her brother, whose perseverance she admired. She sought his eyes and found them glaring like two moons afloat in this precarious atmosphere. And at that moment something happened to her—it did not seem to come from her will but from outside—: the surging water beyond the windows suddenly became like the flesh of a sliced fruit and was pressing its swelling softness between herself and Ulrich. Perhaps she was ashamed or even hated herself a little for it, but an utterly sensual exuberance—and not at all merely what is called sensual abandon but also, indeed much rather, a voluntary and free disengagement of the senses from the world—began to take possession of her; she was just barely able to anticipate it and even hide it from Ulrich by suddenly leaping from the couch, telling him with the speediest of excuses that she had forgotten to take care of something, and leaving the room.