The coming and going had receded in the meantime. The stream of visitors Agathe had referred to her brother the previous day had passed along, and after the reporter had taken his leave, Ulrich found himself alone. Something or other had put him in an embittered mood. Had his father not been right to lug the sacks of knowledge, shovel about in the heaped grains a little, shifting their order, and for the rest simply subject himself to the kind of life he conceived of as powerful? He thought of his own work, which lay untouched in a desk drawer. Probably no one would even be able to say of him, as they could of his father, that he had done spadework! Ulrich went into the small room where the body lay on its bier. This rigidly straight-walled cell amidst the ceaseless bustle that had arisen from it was fantastically uncanny. The dead man floated, stiff as a piece of bark, among the floods of activity, but there were moments when the image was reversed, and then the motions of life seemed rigid while the body appeared to be gliding along with an eerily quiet momentum. “What does the traveler care,” it said then, “for the towns left behind at the piers: I lived here and conducted myself as was expected of me, but now I am moving on!” . . . Ulrich’s heart constricted with the unease of a man who lives among others yet wants something different from what they want. He looked into his father’s face. What if everything Ulrich regarded as his own personal idiosyncrasy was nothing more than an objection to this face, an opposition childishly developed some time long ago? He looked around for a mirror, but there was none, and only that sightless face reflected light. He searched it for resemblances. Maybe there were some. Maybe everything was in this face: the bonds of blood and ancestry, the impersonal stream of heredity in which one is merely a ripple, the limitations, the discouragements, the eternal repetitions and circulations of the mind, which he hated with all the passion of his deepest will to live!

Suddenly overcome by this discouragement, he thought of packing his bags and leaving before the funeral. If there really was something he could still achieve in life, what was he doing here?

But in the doorway he ran into his sister, who had come looking for him.

*One of the major story lines in The Man Without Qualities concerns the marriage of the brilliant and neurotic Clarisse to Walter, and their fraught relationship with Ulrich.

4

“I ONCE HAD A COMRADE”

FOR THE first time, Ulrich saw her dressed as a woman, and after his impression of her the previous day, it almost seemed to him that she was in disguise. Through the open door artificial light fell into the tremulous gray of midmorning, and the black apparition with blond hair seemed to stand in a grotto of air that was flooded with radiance. Agathe’s hair was drawn back closer to her head, which made her face look more feminine than it had the day before. Her delicate breasts were enfolded in the black of her severe dress in that perfect balance between yielding and resistance that is characteristic of the featherlight hardness of a pearl, and the tall, slender legs resembling his own which he had seen yesterday were now curtained by a skirt. And because her appearance as a whole resembled him less today, he noticed the resemblance of their faces. It was as if he himself had stepped through the door and were walking towards him: only this version was more beautiful and steeped in a radiance in which he never saw himself. For the first time he was seized by the thought that his sister was a dreamlike repetition and variation of himself; but as the impression lasted only a moment, he forgot it again.