Concrete

  The day after tomorrow I’ll be in Palma, I’ve suddenly decided to go, she said, There you are, you see, my little brother. Going to Palma is the most sensible thing you could do. These last words immediately riled me because they were said teasingly, but I didn’t respond to them, and said goodbye to my sister fairly briefly, though not without telling her that I would call her as soon as I had arrived in Palma and was in my hotel. I’m curious to know how your Mendelssohn Bartholdy will come along, she added, though naturally she couldn’t have expected me to reply. On the other hand I was touched by her last words, which were a simple injunction to look after myself. However, I didn’t want to give way to sentimentality and suppressed a sudden urge to cry as I put down the receiver. How fragile we are! I thought. We’re full of such brave words and constantly go on every day about how hard and sensible we are, and then from one moment to the next we cave in and have to choke back our tears. Naturally I’ll call my sister every week, as I’ve always done from abroad, and I’m sure she’ll call me every week. That’s what we’ve always done. When you’re in the Melia — you know it of course, she had added. Naturally, I had replied. However marvellous the prospect was of being in Palma in two days’ time, I was still extremely fearful about what was actually in store for me there — which of course I couldn’t know. No, no one who travels, even if he keeps returning to a place where he thinks everything is thoroughly familiar, can ever be completely sure. If I’m lucky, I thought, I’ll get my usual room. If I’m lucky I’ll get over the first few days, which will be dangerous as far as my health is concerned. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to start work in a few days. Every time when I’m about to make a journey, when I’ve packed my bags and everything is settled and there’s no turning back, I have this fear of all the dreadful consequences attendant upon the journey. At such times I would dearly love to cancel everything. Then I realise that Peiskam is by no means as frightful as I’ve been making it out to be for months, that it really is a marvellous, comfortable house which has everything to be said for it, and that it is not in the least like a morgue. At such times I feel a specially keen affection for all the rooms, all the furniture, and I walk all round the house, putting my hand lovingly on the individual pieces of furniture. Then I sit in my armchair in the bedroom and wonder whether it’s worthwhile going away and incurring such a tremendous effort. But I must get away, I told myself. Just because it may be the last time, I’ve got to get away. I mustn’t give way now and make myself look ridiculous, especially not in front of myself. I mustn’t appear a fool to myself. You must discuss everything with Frau Kienesberger, go and see the specialist, get all the necessary medicaments, pack them in your case, and then clear out. You must turn your back on this house and everything in it, since you know full well that everything in it has been threatening to crush you and stifle you in recent months. You must leave behind you everything that has pushed you so ruthlessly to the very extremity of existence, and you must do it without emotion. At that moment I was ashamed of the feelings which I had just had for my house and which seconds later I could only regard as diabolical. This private sentimentality at once disgusted me. Were it not for the fact that I have all my life, as I know, been a man of quick decisions, I would have stayed put from the start in one place as if paralysed — I know this too. As it is, I’ve always had the knack of taking myself by surprise, with regard to travelling or work or whatever else. I’ve always had to employ this technique of surprise. When I visited the old man at Niederkreut, I was still thinking of not making the journey to Palma, believing it might be possible to discipline myself by means of regular visits, at intervals of a few days, to the old man at Niederkreut and other old people — and young people too — and that I should be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy without going away. But after the old man had told me the story about the London telephone directory and its connection with his will, it was clear to me that I had to go away. Sarah Slother — that certainly makes an impressive story. But it would have been absolutely the high point in this endless Austrian winter, and all subsequent visits would have been profoundly disappointing. And what the other neighbours have to offer is, I know, insufficient to help me on to my feet and so help me get on with my work. The old man’s story about his Sarah Slother had simply triggered off my sudden decision to make the trip to Palma which, as I now reflected, had probably been planned long before by my sister. She actually came to Peiskam, first to suggest to me the idea of going to Palma and then to make me actually go — certainly not, as I now had to admit, simply in order to amuse herself and to tyrannize me, as I had believed all along, but to rescue me. My big caring sister! At that moment I despised myself. Once more I was the weak one. Again and again I played my accustomed role, however much I rebelled against it. And she played hers. While she had long since made her entrance in Vienna, I was waiting to go on in Palma. Everything about us, in fact, was theatrical — terribly real, yet theatrical. As I sat in my armchair, contemplating the relentless decay to which the furniture and everything else in the room bore witness, I thought with a shudder of having to spend the whole winter here in Peiskam, a winter that drags on interminably into May, and of having to rely on what I call neighbourhood help, on the old man at Niederkreut, for instance, and on the minister and suchlike folk. Having to scrape along, as we say, through the wet, cold, foggy months, meeting all these people who over the years had become stale and lack-lustre and whose society had long since become unendurable. This thought wrapped itself round my head like a winding sheet. To have to give myself up to all these people, yet at the same time to be all alone in Peiskam, where suddenly treachery lurked once more in every corner. Making my own breakfast and my own supper and having to endure constant nausea from one breakfast to the next, from one supper to the next, from one disappointment in the weather to the next. Having to read the newspapers every day with their diet of local political dirt and all the garbage they carried on their political, economic and cultural pages. Yet not being able to escape from the newspapers because, despite everything, I have a compulsion to devour this journalistic dirt every day, as if I were afflicted by a perverse and gluttonous appetite for the newspapers. Not being able to escape from all this public and published dirt, in spite of having the will to do so, the will to survive in fact, because I can’t escape from this gluttonous appetite of mine — for all the horror stories emanating from the Ballhausplatz, where a half-crazed Chancellor is at large, issuing half-crazed orders to his idiotic ministers, for all the horrendous parliamentary news which daily jangles in my ears and pollutes my brain and which all comes packaged in Christian hypocrisy. I must pack up as soon as possible and leave this chaos behind, I said to myself, and I looked at the cracks in the walls and in the furniture and noted that the windows were so dirty that it was not even possible to see through them any longer. How does Frau Kienesberger spend her time? I asked myself. At the same time I had to tell myself that we invariably made excessive demands of everything and everybody: nothing is done thoroughly enough, everything is imperfect, everything has been merely attempted, nothing completed. My unhealthy craving for perfection had come to the surface again. It actually makes us ill if we always demand the highest standards, the most thorough, the most fundamental, the most extraordinary, when all we find are the lowest, the most superficial, the most ordinary. It doesn’t get us anywhere, except into the grave. We see decline where we expect improvement, we see hopelessness where we still have hope: that’s our mistake, our misfortune. We always demand everything, when in the nature of things we should demand little, and that depresses us. We see somebody on the heights, and he comes to grief while he is still on the low ground. We want to achieve everything, and we achieve nothing. And naturally we make the highest, the very highest demands of ourselves, completely leaving out of account human nature, which is after all not made to meet the highest demands. The world spirit, as it were, overestimates the human spirit. We are always bound to fail because we
set our sights a few hundred per cent higher than is appropriate. And if we look, wherever we look, we see only people who have failed because they set their sights too high. But on the other hand, I reflect, where should we be if we constantly set our sights too low? I looked at my suitcases, the intellectual one and the unintellectual one, so to speak, from my armchair, and if at that moment I’d had the strength I could have burst into uproarious laughter at myself, or else into tears. I was caught up once more in my own personal comedy. I’d changed course, and once again it was simply a laughing matter or a crying matter, depending on how I felt, but, since I wanted neither to laugh nor to cry, I got up and checked whether I had packed the right medicaments. I had put them in my red-spotted medicine bag. Had I packed enough prednisolone, spironolactone and potassium chloride? I opened the medicine bag, looked inside, and tipped out the contents on the table by the window. I reckon I can manage for about four months, I told myself and put the medicaments back in the bag. We are disgusted by chemicals, I said to myself, half aloud, as I had become accustomed to doing through being alone so much, but to these chemicals, which we despise more than anything else in the world, we nevertheless owe our lives, our existence. Were it not for these chemicals we’re so ready to curse we should have been in the graveyard - or dumped somewhere else - many years ago; at least we shouldn’t be on this earth any longer. Now that there’s no longer anything in me for the surgeons to cut out I’m entirely reliant on these medicaments. Every day I thank Switzerland and her industries on Lake Geneva for the fact that they exist and that consequently I exist, just as no doubt millions of people daily owe their existence, however wretched, to these people in their glass boxes near Vevey and Montreux, who are more denigrated than anyone else today. Since virtually the whole of humanity today is sick and dependent on medicaments, it’s hardly too much to ask that it should reflect that it owes its existence, in the largest possible measure, to these chemicals which it so often curses. I shouldn’t have been around for the last thirty years at least; I should have missed all the things I’ve seen and experienced in these thirty years, all the sights and experiences to which my heart and soul are so fervently attached. But man is so constituted that he reserves his strongest curses for the very things that keep him together and keep him alive. People gulp down the tablets that save their lives, yet they are constantly marching through the streets of today’s run-down cities in their brainless urge to condemn and to demonstrate against these life-saving tablets. Man is so abysmally stupid that he continually attacks his saviours in the most loudmouthed and utterly unthinking manner, encouraged of course by the politicians and the politically controlled press. I myself owe everything to chemicals — to put it briefly — and have done for the last thirty years. With this thought I packed my medicine bag again — in the so-called intellectual case, not in the one with the clothes. Three days ago, I thought, sitting down again in my armchair, I hadn’t the slightest thought of leaving Peiskam. I hated it, it was threatening to crush me and stifle me, but the thought of simply leaving it never occurred to me, probably precisely because my sister was constantly hinting that I should leave Peiskam as soon as possible. She was continually mentioning place names; now I realise it was just to get me to react. She mentioned the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, often Rome, Sicily and finally Palma a number of times. But it all made me the more intent on starting my work in Peiskam. She goes on and on, I thought, and won’t go away. She should go somewhere else, God knows where. I don’t care if she goes to the south seas, so long as she goes away and stays away — she had got on my nerves to such an extent. And I wondered what she wanted in Peiskam, which she ran down all the time, continually calling it the morgue and the bane of both our lives, which she would dearly love to get rid of if only I would agree. Family homes are fatal, she said, everything one inherits from one’s parents is fatal. Anyone who has the strength should get rid of these inherited family homes and inherited property as quickly as he can and free himself from them, because they only strangle him and invariably stand in the way of his development. That would suit you down to the ground, I said - to make a profit out of Peiskam as well, and I was surprised to notice that this didn’t even hurt her. Now it occurs to me that she was concerned only about me and about coming to my aid, dreadful woman though I called her privately whenever I had the opportunity. It’s eighteen months since you last left Peiskam, she said a number of times. I was furious because she never let up in her attempt to get me away from Peiskam. No one is as fond of travelling as you, yet you’ve been sitting around here for eighteen months and are dying. She said this quite calmly, like a doctor, as it now strikes me. If you stay here you’ll never be able to start on your Mendelssohn Bartholdy, that I’ll guarantee. You’re determined to remain unproductive. For one thing Peiskam is a morgue, for another it’s a dungeon in which your life is in constant danger, she said. Whereupon she went on for a long time enthusing about the Timeo, which she had once visited with me fifteen years earlier. Can’t you just see the bougainvillaeas? she said. But everything she said annoyed me. She went on and on at me with no thought of leaving. Until in the end she got fed up because she had to recognise that I was not to be persuaded to leave Peiskam again in order to save myself. And so she left. But now she had her triumph.