Arnheim is fabulously wealthy. He is also a great man of letters. The State refused him a commission in the Austrian army because he was a Jew, and he is too grand to have served as an NCO. He has taken into his household a black boy named Soliman whom he first intends to educate, but later ignores. Just before the following excerpt, he has been soliloquizing in the presence of Soliman about the inadequacy of the old aristocracy, and the unsuitability of the new business class.
He wondered whether he had not allowed his mood to trick him into going too far. What if Soliman missed his master’s meaning and misunderstood the words to suggewst that he was entitled to think less highly of the upper classes? But something unexpected happened. Soliman had been fidgeting on his seat for a while and he now interrupted his master with a question.
“If you please, sir, Soliman asked, “about my father: Is he a king?”
Arnheim gave him a startled look. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said, still somewhat sternly, though inwardly a little amused. But as he gazed at Soliman’s serious, almost resentful face, he found it touching. I pleased him to see he boy asking everything so seriously. He is a dimwit, he thought, and a really tragic case. Somehow he equated witlessness with a heavy feeling of well-being. In a gently didactic manner, he went on to give the boy something more of an answer to his question. “There is hardly any reason to assume that your father is a king. More likely he had a hard living to earn, because I found you in a troupe of jugglers on a beach.”
“How much did I cost?” Soliman persisted.
“My dear boy, how can you expect me to remember that today? It couldn’t have been much. But why worry about that now? We are born to create our own kingdom. Next year sometime I may let you take a commercial course, and then you could make a start as a trainee in one of our offices. Of course it will depend on you what you make of it, but I shall keep an eye on you. You might, for instance, aim at eventually representing our interests in places where the colored people already have some influence. We’d have to move with care, of course, but being a black man might turn out to have certain advantages for you. …
—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities 593-4 (Vintage Paperback ed. 1995)
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