But Ulrich took this first opportunity to acquit himself of his assignment. “Privy Councilor, you and my father were unfortunately adversaries in recent times?” he said, testing the waters.

The white-bearded visitor gave the impression of needing to bethink himself before he understood. “Differences of opinion and not worth mentioning!” he magnanimously replied, gazing soulfully at the deceased. But when Ulrich politely persisted, hinting that his question related to a last will, the room suddenly became as tense as a backstreet dive when everyone knows: Someone has just drawn a knife under the table and hell will break loose at any moment. So even in the act of expiring the old man had found a way to inconvenience his colleague Schwung! Enmity of such long standing had of course ceased to be a feeling and become a habit of thought; unless something stirred up the affects of hostility, they simply were no longer there, and the accumulated substance of countless disagreeable episodes had congealed into a mutual contempt that was as independent of the coming and going of emotions as any unbiased truth could be. Professor Schwung felt this just as his now dead antagonist had felt it; it seemed to him utterly childish and superfluous to forgive, because this one conciliatory impulse before the end, a mere feeling at that, not a professional admission of error, lacked any probative force against knowledge accrued through years of contention, and was, in Schwung’s view, quite shamelessly intended to serve no other purpose than to put him in the wrong if he should wish to exploit his victory. It was of course an entirely different matter that Professor Schwung felt the need to take leave of his dead friend. Good lord, we knew each other as graduate students, before we were married! Do you remember that evening in the Burggarten when we drank to the setting sun and argued about Hegel? However many suns have set since then, I remember that one especially! And do you remember our first professional quarrel, which nearly turned us into enemies even back then? How beautiful that was! Now you are dead, and I’m happy to say I am still on my feet, albeit at your bier! Such are the well-known feelings of elderly people when their contemporaries die off. As we come into the ice years, poetry breaks through. Many people who haven’t made a poem since they were seventeen will suddenly write one at seventy-seven when drawing up their will. Just as the dead are called forth one by one at the Last Judgment—even though they have rested at the bottom of time along with their centuries like the cargoes of foundered ships!—so, too, in a last will things are summoned by their names, and their personality, which was lost through much handling, is restored to them. “The Bukhara rug with the cigar burn in my study,” it may say in such a final manuscript, or “the umbrella with the rhinoceros-horn handle I bought at Sunshine & Winter in May 1887”; even the bundles of stocks and shares are addressed and invoked individually by their numbers.