She said this without emotion, very humbly. Ulrich had in fact never known this backward-streaming movement of life, since his own life had always been set on expansion, and it merely reminded him that his sister had at times sounded noticeably unhappy about herself. But he failed to ask her about it, for they had meanwhile reached a hilltop that he had chosen as their destination and were coming near its far edge. It was a mighty elevation associated by legend with a Swedish siege in the Thirty Years’ War because it looked like a fortification, even though it was much too big for that, a green bulwark of nature, without bush or tree, that fell away as a high bright wall of rock on the side overlooking the town. A deep-set, empty world of hills surrounded this promontory; no village, no house was to be seen, only the shadows of clouds and gray pastures. Once again Ulrich felt the spell of this place, which he remembered from his youth; the town still lay far below in the distance, anxiously huddled around a few churches that looked like hens with their chicks, so that one suddenly felt like bounding into their midst with a single leap and wreaking havoc among them, or sweeping them up in the grip of a giant hand. “It must have felt glorious to those Swedish adventurers, coming to a place like this after riding along for weeks and then, from the saddle, catching sight of their quarry for the first time!” he said, after explaining to his sister the significance of the place. “It’s only at such moments that the weight of life is ever really lifted from us—the burden of our secret grievance that we all have to die, that everything is so brief and probably so futile!”

“What moments do you mean?” Agathe asked.

Ulrich did not know how to answer. He did not want to answer at all. He remembered that as a young man he had always felt the need in this place to clench his teeth and keep silent. At last he replied: “Those moments of risk and tumult when events run away with us: the meaningless moments, basically!” As he said this, he felt his head perched on his neck like a hollow nut, with old phrases inside it like “the grim reaper” or “My trust in nothing now is placed!” and with them the faded fortissimo of the years when the boundary between the expectations of life and life itself has not yet been established. He thought: “What experiences have I had since then that were unequivocal and happy? None.”

Agathe responded: “I’ve always acted without meaning, that only makes for unhappiness.”

She had walked very close to the edge of the cliff; her ears were deaf to her brother’s words, she did not understand them and saw before her a somber, barren landscape whose sadness corresponded to her own. When she turned around, she said: “It’s a place to kill oneself,” and smiled; “the emptiness in my head would dissolve with infinite tenderness into the emptiness of this view.” She took a few steps back to Ulrich. “All my life,” she continued, “I’ve been reproached for having no ambition, for not loving anything, not respecting anything, in short for lacking the will to live. Papa used to scold me for it, Hagauer faulted me for it: So now do tell me, for God’s sake, tell me finally when, at what moments, does anything in life seem necessary?”