*For a description of the Great Patriotic Campaign, also known as the Parallel Campaign, and Count Leinsdorf’s and Ulrich’s role in it, see the introduction.

7

A FAMILY OF TWO

ULRICH says: “When two men or women have to share a room for some time—while traveling, in a sleeping car or a crowded inn—they often strike up an odd sort of friendship. Everyone has a different way of rinsing his mouth or leaning over to take off his shoes or bending a leg when lying down in bed. Clothes and underwear are the same on the whole, but there are countless small and particular differences that reveal themselves to the eye. At first—probably due to the hypertense individualism of our current way of life—there’s a resistance that could be taken for faint aversion, a guardedness against coming too close and suffering a breach of one’s personal boundaries. Once that is overcome, a fellowship of feeling forms that bears the mark of its unusual origin like a scar. After this transformation many people behave more cheerfully than usual; most of them more innocuously; many more talkatively; almost all more amiably. The personality is changed, one could almost say, exchanged beneath the skin, for one that is less individual. Something new is taking the place of the I—something that is felt to be distinctly uncomfortable and a diminution, yet irresistible. It is the first, germinal budding of a We.”

Agathe answers: “This aversion in close proximity exists between women especially. I’ve never been able to get used to women.”

“It exists between men and women too,” Ulrich says. “Only there it’s covered over by the obligatory transactions of love, which immediately claim one’s attention. But it happens quite often that lovers suddenly wake from their entwinement, and then they see—with astonishment, irony, or panic, depending on type—a totally alien creature basking in comfort at their side; in fact, with some people this goes on for many years. Then it is impossible for them to say which is the more natural: their ties with others or the self’s hurt recoil from these ties into its own imaginary uniqueness—because after all, both are in our nature. And both get confounded in the concept of the family! Life in the family is not the full life; young people feel robbed, diminished, not at home with themselves when they are in the family circle. Look at old unmarried daughters: they’re sucked dry by their family, drained of their blood. What they have turned into is a very peculiar hybrid of I and We.”

Agathe, stretched out on the divan, has raised one knee and responds with animation to his train of thought: “That’s why I had to marry again! You yourself explained it by what you just said!”