“And yet there is something to the so-called ‘sanctity of the family,’ this merging into one another and being at each other’s service, this selfless movement in a closed circle,” Ulrich continues, taking no notice, and Agathe wonders at the way his words so often move away from her right after coming so close. “Normally this collective self is just a collective egotist, and then a strong sense of family is the most insufferable thing one could imagine; but I can also imagine that absolute willingness to leap into the breach, to fight shoulder to shoulder and bear wounds for each other, as a primordially pleasant feeling that resides in the depths of human time, and in fact is already pronounced in the animal herd,” she hears him say, without being able to make much of it. Nor can she do more with his next sentence: “This condition degenerates easily, as is the case with all ancient conditions whose origin has been lost.” And it is only when he concludes by saying: “And one probably has to demand of the individuals that they be something quite out of the ordinary if the whole they make up together is not to become a mindless travesty!” that she feels again at ease in his presence and would like to prevent her eyes from blinking as she watches him so that he won’t disappear in the meantime, because it is so strange that he sits there saying things that vanish in the heights and suddenly drop down again like a rubber ball that was caught in the branches of a tree.

The siblings had met in the drawing room in the late afternoon. Several days had passed since the funeral.

It was a long room that was not only decorated in bourgeois Empire taste but also furnished with genuine pieces from the period; between the windows hung the tall rectangular mirrors encased in plain gilt frames, and the moderately stiff chairs were ranged along the walls, so that the empty floor seemed to have flooded the room with the darkened sheen of its parquet, filling it like a shallow basin in which one hesitated to set foot. At the edge of this stylishly inhospitable salon—since the study where Ulrich had sat down the first morning had been set aside for him—approximately where, in a niche in the corner of the room, the stove stood like a stern column, bearing a vase on its head (and precisely at the middle of its front, on a shelf that ran around it at waist height, a single candlestick), Agathe had created a highly personal peninsula for herself. She had had a divan moved in and had laid a rug at its feet whose antique red-blue, together with the couch’s Turkish pattern, which repeated itself in meaningless infinity, presented a sumptuous challenge to the delicate grays and soberly poised lineaments that were at home in this room by dint of forefatherly will. She further offended against that austere and high-minded will by placing a green, large-leafed, man-size plant, which she had retained from among the funeral decorations along with its pot, at the head of the couch as a “forest”—opposite the tall bright floor lamp that would enable her to read in comfort while lying down, and which in the room’s classicistic landscape had the effect of a searchlight or an antenna mast. This salon, with its coffered ceiling, pilasters on the walls, and small pillar cabinets, had not changed much in the last hundred years, because it was rarely used and had never really been included in the lives of its more recent owners; perhaps in their ancestors’ day the walls had been covered with delicate fabrics instead of the light gray coat of paint they wore now, and the upholstery on the chairs might have looked different, but since her childhood Agathe had known this salon as it presented itself now, and was not even sure if it was her great-grandparents or strangers who had furnished it like this, for she had grown up in this house and the only specific thing she knew was a memory of always entering this room with the shyness that is instilled into children in regard to something they might easily damage or soil. But now she had put away the last symbol of the past, her mourning clothes, and was dressed again in her lounging pajamas, lying on the rebelliously intruded divan, and had spent most of the day reading good and bad books she had amassed, interrupting herself from time to time in order to eat or fall asleep; and when the day thus spent was waning, she gazed through the darkening room at the pale curtains that, already steeped in twilight, were billowing out from the windows like sails, and this impression made her feel as if, haloed by the lamp’s hard glare, she had been voyaging through the stiffly delicate room and had just come to a halt.