“What should be done?” Ulrich replied in the same tone as before. “Once at our cousin’s I suggested to Count Leinsdorf that he should found a world secretariat for precision and soul, so that churchgoers wouldn’t be the only people who know what they are supposed to do. Of course I was only joking. We created science for the sake of truth a long time ago, but the idea that something similar might be needed for what is left over seems so foolish in our time that one would be ashamed to propose it in earnest. And yet everything you and I have been talking about would lead us to this secretariat.” He had abandoned his speech and leaned back against his bench. “I suppose I’m dissolving into thin air again if I add: But how would that turn out today?” Since Agathe did not answer, the room became still. Ulrich said after a while: “By the way, sometimes I myself believe that I cannot stand this conviction! When I saw you earlier,” he continued in a lowered voice, “standing there on the Rampart, I don’t know why, I had a wild urge to suddenly do something. I’ve actually done some really rash things in the past; the magic lay in this: after it had happened, there was, besides me, something more. Sometimes I can even imagine a person becoming happy as a result of committing a crime, because it gives him a certain ballast, and with it, maybe, a steadier course.”

Again his sister did not immediately answer. He observed her calmly, even searchingly, but the experience he was talking about did not return; in fact, he was not thinking anything. After a little while she asked him: “Would you be mad at me if I committed a crime?”

“Now how do you expect me to answer that?” Ulrich asked. He was again bent over his knife.

“Is there no such thing as a decision?”

“No, there are no real decisions in our time.”

After that Agathe said: “I want to kill Hagauer.”

Ulrich forced himself not to look up. The words had entered his ear lightly and softly, but after they had passed, they left an imprint in the memory, like a wide wheel track. He had immediately forgotten the tone of her voice; he would have needed to see her face in order to know how her words were to be understood, but he did not want to accord even that much significance to them. “Fine,” he said, “and why not?! Could there be a person today who hasn’t wanted something like that at some time? Do it, if you really can! It’s the same as if you had said: I want to love him for his faults!” Only now did he straighten up again and look his sister in the face. Her expression was stubborn and surprisingly agitated. Still gazing at her, he slowly declared: “You see, something here doesn’t add up; on this frontier between what goes on inside us and what happens outside, some kind of intermediary link is missing these days, and transmuting them into each other is not possible without tremendous losses; one could almost say that our evil wishes are the shadow side of the life we are actually living, and the life we are actually living is the shadow side of our good wishes. Just imagine you really did that: it wouldn’t be anything like what you thought, and you would at the very least be terribly disappointed...”