Thus the scene ended on a conciliatory note, and on leaving, Schwung even assured Ulrich that he might count on his father’s friends in case he should still decide to take up an academic career.

Agathe had listened, wide-eyed, contemplating the uncanny final form that life gives to a human being. “That was like being in a forest of plaster trees!” she said to her brother afterward.

Ulrich smiled and responded: “I feel as sentimental as a dog in moonlight!”

5

THEY DO WRONG

“DO YOU remember,” Agathe asked him after a while, “Once when I was still little you were playing with other boys and fell into the water up to your waist, and you wanted to hide it, so you sat at the table with your dry upper half, but the chattering of your teeth led to the discovery of the lower half?”

When he had been a boy home from boarding school for the holidays—which over a long period had actually only happened that one time—and when the small, shriveled cadaver was still an almost omnipotent man for both of them, Ulrich would not infrequently balk at admitting some misdemeanor and refuse to show any remorse, even when he could not deny the evidence of what he had done. That was how, on that day, he caught a fever and had to be quickly put to bed. “And all you got to eat was soup!” Agathe said.

“That’s true,” her brother confirmed, smiling. The memory of his punishment, which had nothing to do with him now, seemed no different than if he saw standing on the floor the small shoes he had worn as a child, which had nothing to do with him either.

“Soup was all you would have got anyway, on account of your fever,” Agathe continued, “but all the same it was administered as a punishment for you!”

“True!” Ulrich agreed again. “But of course that was not done out of malice, but in the fulfillment of a so-called duty.” He didn’t know what his sister was getting at. He himself was still seeing the child’s shoes. Not seeing them but seeing them as if he were seeing them. Feeling as well the insults and humiliations he had outgrown. And thinking: “Somehow this ‘nothing-to-do-with-me-now’ expresses the fact that at no time in our lives are we completely inside ourselves!”

“But you wouldn’t have been allowed to eat anything but soup anyway!” Agathe repeated, and added: “I think I’ve spent my whole life being afraid that I might be the only person who can’t understand this!”