Agathe averted her face from Ulrich, whom she had been watching, and looked out of the window. Low suburban buildings, icy street, heavily muffled people—images of an ugly bleakness rolled past, reproaching her for the desert waste of a life into which she felt she had drifted as a result of her negligence. She was now no longer sitting up straight but had let herself slide down into the cab’s upholstery, with its musty smell of old age, in order more comfortably to see out of the window, and remained in this ungraceful position, in which the jolts of the car rudely clutched and shook her belly. This body of hers, tossed about like a rag, gave her an uncanny feeling, for it was the only thing she owned. Sometimes, waking up in her boarding school in the half-darkness of morning, she had felt herself drifting into the future inside her body as if in the shell of a small boat. Now she was about twice the age she had been then, and the same half-darkness pervaded the car. But she still could not imagine her life and had no idea what it should be like. Men were a complement and a completion of one’s own body but did not fill it with meaning; one took them as one was taken by them. Her body told her that in just a few years it would begin to lose its beauty: which meant losing the feelings that, coming as they did directly out of its self-certainty, were only to a small degree expressible in words and thoughts. Then everything would be over without anything having been there. It occurred to her that Ulrich had spoken in a similar way about the futility of his gymnastics, and while she forced her face to remain averted from him, still looking out of the window, she resolved to ask him about it.

9

FURTHER COURSE OF THE EXCURSION TO THE SWEDISH RAMPART. THE MORALITY OF THE NEXT STEP

The siblings had left the cab by the last, low, and already quite rural looking houses on the edge of the town and set off, walking steadily uphill, along a wide, furrowed country road with frozen wheel tracks that crumbled beneath their feet. Soon their shoes were coated with the dismal gray of this parquet for peasants and cart drivers, in sharp contrast with their elegant city clothes, and though it was not cold, a fierce wind blowing down on them from above made their cheeks burn, and the glazed brittleness of their lips made it hard to talk.

The memory of Hagauer urged Agathe to explain herself to her brother. She was convinced that this failed marriage must be incomprehensible to him in every way, even by the simplest social standards; yet, though the words inside her were already prepared, she could not make up her mind to overcome the resistance of the steep incline, the cold, and the air beating against her face. Ulrich was striding ahead, in a broad track left by some object dragged behind a cart, which they were using as a path; she saw his broad, lean shoulders and hesitated. She had always imagined him hard, unyielding, and something of an adventurer, perhaps only because of the disapproving remarks she had heard from her father and occasionally also from Hagauer, and the thought of this brother, estranged and escaped from the family, had made her ashamed of her own acquiescence in life. “He was right not to bother about me!” she thought, and her dismay at having so often put up with unwanted situations repeated itself. But in truth she had in her the same tempestuous, contradictory passion that had made her proclaim those wild lines of poetry standing between the doorposts of the room where her father’s dead body lay. Pressing on to catch up with Ulrich, she fell short of breath, and suddenly that serviceable road rang with questions such as it had probably never heard before, and the wind was torn by words that had not yet resounded in any wind among these hills.