Page 3 of Extinction

  THE WILL

  My arrival at Wolfsegg was unobtrusive and unannounced, and for this they never forgave me. I did not drive straight up to see them but got out of the taxi in the village. I asked the driver to drop me at a point where I was sure of being unobserved, near the school, at the entrance to the village where the main road branches off toward the mines. I was thus able to walk right across the village square without meeting anyone. All the villagers seemed to have withdrawn into their houses, not wishing to show themselves at this time, when my parents and my brother were presumably lying in state up at Wolfsegg. It was as though the whole village were in mourning, I thought, for I had forgotten that it was always deserted at midday, even on normal weekdays. Under no circumstances did I want to drive up to the house. Naturally the driver knew who I was. I had gotten off the train at Attnang-Puchheim and walked across the platforms to the taxi. At the station I had the impression that people recognized me, but I avoided their gaze by walking faster than usual, going straight to the taxi and telling the driver to take me to Wolfsegg as quickly as possible. Yet during the drive I did not think about Wolfsegg, where I was going, but about Rome, which I had left that morning. It’s only with reluctance that you’re driving along the road to Wolfsegg, only with reluctance that you’re here, I thought, as the taxi took me through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, away from the Alpine foothills and toward the Hausruck, which I have always felt to be the most delightful and restful country, and would perhaps have acknowledged as the most beautiful, had I ever been able to dissociate it from Wolfsegg and my family. We were driving through my favorite landscape, through the dense woods near Kien and Stocket, toward Ottnang. You’ve always loved the local people, I told myself during the drive—simple people, the simplest people, farmworkers, miners, craftsmen, farmers’ families, quite unlike your relatives up at Wolfsegg, who always treated you abominably, even as a child. And during the drive I asked myself why I had always loved the people who lived down here and not the ones who lived up there, why I had always respected the people who lived in this low-lying area and despised, indeed detested, those who lived on the heights. All your life you’ve felt happy among the people down here but miserable among your own kind, the people up there, always at home with the people on the low ground but never with your own people on the high ground. I saw how beautiful the landscape was and remembered how fond I was of its inhabitants. You were especially fond of the miners, of the way they treated you and the way they treated one another. After all, you grew up with them, I told myself, you went to school with them and shared several years of your life with them. Having been preoccupied during the journey with thoughts of the countryside and its inhabitants, I realized only when I got out of the taxi that I had not spoken a word to the driver, who knew me by sight, though I did not know what he was called and did not ask. I usually ask all the local people their names—a habit I acquired from Uncle Georg, who had a great knowledge and love of people. No one was so good at getting along with people, especially simple, unsophisticated people. He taught me how to do the same, how to talk to them and strike the right balance between them and me. Uncle Georg loved simple people; it was with them that he got along best, and I can say the same of myself. There was not a soul in the village square. Even the cats, which usually lay around in the noonday heat, had disappeared. I would be able, I thought, to walk up to Wolfsegg unimpeded and actually unobserved. The inn curtains were drawn, the baker’s window empty, the butcher’s shade lowered. Everything seemed to bear witness to our family tragedy. From Rome I had managed to call Zacchi in Palermo and tell him that I was not going to find it easy to go back to Wolfsegg only three days after returning from there. I had said this in a quite unseemly tone, it now occurred to me, which I ought never to have used with a person like Zacchi, who is as close a friend as Maria or Gambetti. As I crossed the square, I regretted having called Zacchi at all, for throughout our conversation he seemed to show scant understanding of my situation, whereas Maria understood everything, even the strange remarks I made, which she no doubt instantly recognized as typical of me. And to Gambetti too I said more than I should have, inveighing against my family without being able to retract what I said and launching into one of my uncontrolled tirades, which I myself hate more than anybody but cannot help indulging in when something demands to be said. I’m going back to hell, I told Gambetti, at five tomorrow morning. Terrible, I added, without reflecting, without considering for a moment that such remarks were quite uncalled for and fundamentally contemptible, or at least improper. It was monstrous to speak of my family like this at a time when I might be expected to show a modicum of respect. But I can’t deny my nature, I have to show myself as I am, as these parents of mine made me, I thought as I crossed the square. If people see me they’ll say to themselves, He was always odd, and now, before going up to Wolfsegg to see his family, he first has to walk across the village square. Such an ill-bred, disloyal, unlovable person! Yet it struck me at once that the village people would not judge me as my family judged me; this was how my family always thought of me, in the same outrageous way as I thought of them. Unlike my family up there, who despise me, these people respect me; unlike my family up there, who more or less hate me, these people love me. The village people have always loved me, and I’ve always loved them, especially the miners. Most of the villagers are miners and worked in our lignite mines; some still do, but fewer than before. The village people were always my one consolation, I told myself as I crossed the square. I could say things to them that I could never say to my family; as a child I could cry my heart out to them and meet with understanding. Down here in the village everything is natural and humane, I thought as I walked on, while up at Wolfsegg everything is artificial and inhumane. I wondered why this should be, what was the cause. But the time it took to cross the square was too short to allow me to pursue this question, which now gave way to another. How will I find my sisters? What state will they be in? I wondered, taking in at one glance the whole sweep of the landscape stretching for well over a hundred miles from east to west, a prospect that can be enjoyed only from here, from no other point in Austria. From the precise spot where I always stopped, because it afforded the best view, I suddenly saw the whole panorama on this cloudless day and drew a deep breath. Why, I asked myself, do we permit such magnificent scenery to be disfigured and destroyed by people who seem intent only on despoiling it? I’ve arrived at the right moment, I thought, and walked on. It was as if the whole village were dead, for I could still not hear a sound. There were none of the noises that could usually be heard from the windows, reminding one of the activities of the people living behind them, and I connected this fact with our own misfortune. They all share our misfortune, I thought. I did not slacken my pace as I walked up the avenue, which would have been natural, but walked even faster, suddenly seized with a shameless curiosity that made me break into a run. I stopped in front of the big gateway by the Home Farm and peered between the enormous branches of the chestnut trees into the park and across to the Orangery, for it was there that from time immemorial the dead of Wolfsegg had always lain in state. And indeed the Orangery was open; in front of it the gardeners walked to and fro, carrying wreaths and bouquets. I decided not to go directly to the Orangery, as I was not yet ready to see my dead parents and my dead brother, but used the interim to observe more closely what was happening in front of it. This was still possible, as no one had spotted me. I was again struck by the calm demeanor of the gardeners and their characteristic way of moving as they silently carried the wreaths across from the Home Farm to the Orangery. They also brought buckets of water across from the stable. A huntsman appeared and seemed about to enter the Orangery, but then he turned back and disappeared in the direction of the Farm. I stood pressed against the wall in order to get a better view. We must observe people when they don’t know they’re being observed, I thought. The gardeners continued to cross from the Farm to the Orangery, carrying wreaths
and bouquets, buckets of water and wooden planks. Large wooden tubs containing cypresses and palms had been placed in front of the Orangery, as well as one of the agaves that had been carefully cultivated by the gardeners. How painstakingly such tropical plants are cultivated and cosseted here in the north, I thought, as I pressed myself against the wall, feeling somewhat guilty, yet at the same time relishing my role as observer. I could observe the gardeners undisturbed, expecting at any moment to catch sight of one of my sisters or some other relative and feeling no urgent need to see my parents and my brother lying in state, which was what the slightest decency would doubtless have required. Perhaps I was afraid of a sudden confrontation with my dead parents and my dead brother. I was less afraid of their dead faces than I had been of their living faces, but I feared them nevertheless and chose to remain pressed up against the wall for a little while longer before entering the park. The theatricality of the proceedings in front of the Orangery was suddenly borne in upon me. It was like watching a stage on which the gardeners were performing their parts with wreaths and bouquets. But the main character’s missing, I thought; the real play can’t begin until I make my entrance as the principal actor, so to speak, who has come hotfoot from Rome to take part in this tragedy. What I see from the gateway, I thought, are only the preliminaries to the drama, which will be opened by me and nobody else. The whole scene, together with the invisible one taking place offstage in the main building, now seemed like a dressing room, in which the actors don their costumes, apply their makeup, and run through their lines, just as I was doing. For I felt like the principal actor preparing himself for his entrance, reviewing all the possibilities, not to say subtleties, recapitulating what he had to do and say, going through his lines again and mentally rehearsing his movements, while nonchalantly watching the others engaged in their own supposedly secret preparations. I was surprised at my nonchalance as I stood by the gateway reviewing my role in the drama, which suddenly seemed to be no longer new but to have been rehearsed hundreds, if not thousands, of times already. I know this drama inside out, I thought. I had no qualms about the lines I had to speak—they would come automatically. The steps I had to take and my manual movements were all so perfectly rehearsed that I had no need to give any thought to how I should perform them to the best effect. I’ve come from Rome to play the chief role in this tragedy, I thought, forgoing none of the shameless enjoyment this thought afforded me. I’ll give a good performance, I thought. It did not occur to me that I was a thoroughly contemptible character who was quite unaware of the baseness of his present behavior. This play, this tragedy, is centuries old, I thought, and everything enacted in it will be more or less automatic. The main actor will be surprised to find how well it all goes off, how well the rest of the cast have learned and practiced their lines, for I had no doubt that my sisters and all the others who were probably waiting for me were likewise running through their parts and had no wish to make fools of themselves in front of the audience of mourners by fluffing their lines or stumbling onstage. I was convinced that they had set their hearts on giving a highly professional, not an amateurish performance, for we know that the art of the funeral, above all in country districts, is the highest form of histrionics imaginable and that at funerals even the simplest people display a mastery far superior to anything found in our theaters, where amateurism usually prevails. My sisters will be walking up and down, rehearsing this funeral not just as a drama, I thought, but as a gala performance. And the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg, also a member of the cast, is going through his part too, though it can’t be more than a bit part. They’re walking up and down, waiting for me to arrive and rehearsing this tragedy, which has suddenly been inserted into the Wolfsegg theater schedule. The funeral will be tomorrow, I thought; it’s always three days after the death. The curtain has not yet gone up. The costumes are not yet quite right, I thought, and the lines don’t yet come trippingly off the tongue. And what is more beautiful than a drama in which all the costumes are black, in which black is the dominant color? And in which all the extras from the village appear in black? We haven’t had this drama at Wolfsegg for ages, not since my paternal grandfather tripped over the root of a fir tree behind the Children’s Villa and died instantly at the age of eighty-nine. My family has always been on standby for a funeral; they’ve always had all the props and costumes ready, but it’s taken a long time for the occasion to present itself. All they’ve had to do is dust everything off. In fact the black banners had already been hung on the house, as I saw. The gardeners are carrying out my sisters’ instructions, I thought, more likely Caecilia’s than Amalia’s. At the same time I wondered what role they had assigned to the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg, what lines they had allotted him, what words he would have to deliver when the drama began. I had met him once, at my sister’s wedding a few days earlier, and doubted whether he would be permitted to deliver any lines of his own. Wolfsegg suddenly has had to be transformed from a wedding set into a funeral set, I thought. As I stood by the wall I was still amazed that my journey from Rome via Vienna had gone so smoothly and that everything had run on schedule. Neither the railroad workers nor the airline staff had struck, and the connections had been perfect. My sisters can’t have finished clearing away the wedding decorations, I thought, and now they’re having to put up funeral decorations everywhere in exact accordance with the time-honored plan. They’re familiar with this plan, I thought, as my mother used to go through it with them in every detail at least twice or three times a year—for fun, she said, and because you never quite know. Weddings and births too are celebrated according to a preordained plan. My sisters know, for instance, that a funeral requires not just one but two laurel branches from the Orangery to be placed behind the lamps on the left and right of the entrance hall and two cypresses to be placed on the balcony, one on the far left and one on the far right; these must be of equal height, but not tall enough to reach up to the dining-room windows. Wolfsegg has precise plans for every kind of solemnity, and all these plans are kept in the top right-hand drawer of my mother’s writing desk. My father did not have to force her to comply with these strict procedures, as she quickly developed a passion for them. And she always had a passion for funerals, though she certainly did not envisage her own, or at least she never envisaged its taking place so soon, I told myself. It occurred to me as I stood by the wall that she would have taken charge of her own funeral if this had been possible. I imagined my sisters carrying out my mother’s wishes regarding her funeral. The word eagerness came to mind. To anyone else but me it would have been natural to have the taxi drive up the avenue to the main entrance. Having recognized me, the taxi driver was somewhat surprised that I got out where I did, between the two inns, and no one would understand why I walked through the village and across the square, I thought. But I wanted to walk up to Wolfsegg, and the deserted village square suited my purpose ideally. I not only felt I was unobserved, I was unobserved. And after all I had no luggage, which in itself was unusual, given that I had come from Rome. Moreover, having no luggage, I could walk with my hands in my trouser pockets. I entered the avenue with my hands in my pockets, thus evincing a monstrous insolence that not even the village people would have understood. At the age of forty-eight I arrive from Rome for the funeral of my parents and my brother and walk up to the house with my hands in my pockets, I thought, pressing myself against the wall to avoid being seen by the gardeners as they crossed from the Farm to the Orangery with their wreaths. A lying in state is always a great spectacle, I thought, a work of art that takes shape little by little under many hands that are adept at creating such a work of art. Repressing all thoughts of my parents and my brother lying in state in the Orangery, I reflected not on the tragedy itself but on the work of art that accompanied it, on the splendor attendant upon a lying in state, not on the terror. Since I had always been a keen watcher and an even keener observer, having made watching and observing one of my chief virtues, it was natural that I
should stand by the wall, watching and observing. The gardeners afforded a perfect opportunity. I had always enjoyed watching and observing them, and during these moments, which I deliberately spun out into hundreds and thousands, I was able, from my present vantage point, to enjoy this experience once again. Such observation is of course a forbidden art, but we cannot forgo it once we have acquired the taste. Another huntsman arrived from the Farm, carrying a long candlestick, which he handed to a gardener who emerged from the Orangery, presumably in order to receive it. These candlesticks, about ten feet in height, are placed at each end of the catafalque in order to throw the most favorable light on the body lying in state. Four in all are placed by the catafalque. I recalled that they had all been given a fresh coat of gold paint many years earlier. This had intrigued me at the time, for I fancied that they were being painted and polished for a particular funeral and that it was already known whose it was to be. I was mistaken, for decades had elapsed since the last funeral, my paternal grandfather’s. When there has been no funeral in a family for a long time it is commonly supposed that several will take place in rapid succession. This has been proved correct at Wolfsegg, I thought, which means that there will now be a lull. Misfortunes seldom come alone, they say; hence funerals seldom come alone. They come in threes, one after another, just as misfortunes proverbially come in threes. Yet this time, I thought, one misfortune has brought three sudden deaths but led to only one funeral—one times three, three times one. I now heard, wafting up from the village through the trees and shrubs on the hillside, the strains of a familiar piece by Haydn played by a wind band. They’re probably rehearsing the music for tomorrow’s funeral in the Music House, I thought, the Music House being an old building next to the school. After a few bars the music stopped and there was total silence. Then the band struck up again, starting from the beginning, went on a few bars longer than before, and stopped again. As usual during rehearsal, they started several times, played a few bars, each time a few more than before, then stopped. Always the same piece by Haydn. As a child I loved to listen to the villagers’ music making, especially the wind band, and I still do. I rate it as highly as so-called serious music, in many cases more highly, knowing that so-called serious music would be inconceivable without popular music, especially the music played at country weddings and funerals. What would weddings and funerals be without such music? I wondered. Village musicians usually have a perfect ear for what they are playing, and when they are good they are nearly always a match for professional musicians. They also have the advantage of being amateurs, of playing for love, not professional ambition, which as we know can amount to a professional disease. How differently they played at my sister’s wedding, I thought—briskly and cheerfully! Their music is now slow and melancholy, though also by Haydn. Haydn is the composer I revere most, along with Mozart, and whose music I most enjoy, next to Mozart’s. Perhaps Haydn should be rated much higher, as he has always been overshadowed in the history of music by the universally loved Mozart. I love both, but Haydn is the greater of the two, I thought. This music by Haydn was in tune with the noontide atmosphere, with the shimmering air and the movements of the gardeners, carefully carrying their wreaths and bouquets from the Farm to the Orangery, unflustered and unfaltering. I was reminded of the many afternoons in my childhood when the sound of the band, playing the same piece, probably in the same scoring, had wafted up to my room from the village. But whereas they normally play only simple pieces, I thought, they’re now playing something complicated, something quite demanding, as they say. For Wolfsegg it had to be something fairly complicated, a more demanding kind of music for a better class of people, for those now lying in state in the Orangery were their betters. It must have been a shock for the village people when they learned of the deaths. For as far back as anyone can remember, I thought, Wolfsegg has never known such a calamity, and at that moment I was sorry that I could not be down in the village and hear what the local people were saying, what they were thinking and feeling. I was sorry that I could not visit their houses and share their undoubtedly genuine grief. My father had their respect, if not their affection, I thought, though he enjoyed the affection of some. My brother enjoyed nearly everyone’s affection. My mother was respected but not loved. All in all, they must have been greatly affected by the tragedy, I thought. But what do they really think? This was a question I could not answer. For centuries the village has depended on us, I thought, and even today the villagers owe their livelihood to us, especially the miners, the brickworkers, and the farmworkers. Directly or indirectly everybody in the village depended on Wolfsegg, around which it clustered, as if for protection, some three hundred feet below. In a village like this, in a region like this, a single moment can change everything. And in a family like mine, I thought. For a long time, I told myself, still standing by the wall, I’ve acted in a quite unpardonable manner, or at least in one that contravenes all normal standards of decency, by delaying my entrance. But I was probably too much of a coward to go straight into the park, let alone to walk across to the Orangery, if only to the entrance, too much of a coward even to approach the entrance, let alone to go in and see my parents and my brother lying in state. I would have found it quite impossible; I would not have had the strength. I was capable of standing by the wall and looking through the gateway toward the Orangery, but certainly not of signaling my arrival right away. I lack the nonchalance that would have enabled me to walk directly and unhesitatingly into such a dreadful scene. But who would have the strength to do that? I asked myself, watching the gardeners pushing a handcart with a number of planks across from the Farm and unloading them in front of the Orangery. I know their names, I thought, watching them intently as they unloaded the planks, and not only their names but their families and where they come from. I went to school with one of them; we were in the same class. He was better than I was at everything, especially arithmetic; he also had a neater hand, though that’s not saying much. One of them lives on the outskirts of the village, on the boundary between Wolfsegg and Ottnang. His father worked for the council as a gravedigger, I recalled. He was a respected figure, and the children loved him, though one wouldn’t expect them to love a gravedigger. Country children have a natural attitude to death and are not afraid of it, whereas town children are afraid of anything connected with death. The second was destined for the priesthood and sent by the parish to the monastery at Kremsmünster, where he was a complete failure, though at school he had been an excellent pupil and was regarded as the most gifted. So he came back to Wolfsegg and served an apprenticeship with a carpenter. But after a time he tired of carpentry and applied to us for a job as gardener. Having served his apprenticeship as a gardener with us, he is now a qualified carpenter and a qualified gardener. My mother often spoke of this stroke of luck. It was a clever move on her part to have him train as a gardener at her expense, with full board, as it saved her the expense of employing another man as a carpenter. My mother thought of everything, especially such practical matters and practical advantages. The third comes from a miner’s family. He too went to the village school with me and immediately became an apprentice gardener, but not at Wolfsegg. He served his apprenticeship at Vöcklabruck, where an aunt took him under her wing and supported him until he had completed his training. The three of them and I used to play together as children, I thought. We used to run into the woods and over the hills together. Their houses probably haven’t changed to this day, I thought, unlike most of the houses, which I imagine have been modernized and to some extent disfigured by their owners. None of them was keen on modern furniture. They attached importance to quality, and so their houses are likely to have remained almost unchanged. Each has three children, about as old as I was then, I thought, and hence all the problems that children bring, which I don’t have. It would have been a simple matter for anyone else to go up to the gardeners, shake hands with them, and stand and talk to them for a while, but I could not, although I wanted to. I’ve traveled half t
he world, I told myself as I watched the gardeners, I have the world more or less in my pocket, I can conduct myself with the utmost naturalness, not to say the utmost sophistication and assurance, anywhere in the world and in all strata of society, as they say. Yet I could not go up to the gardeners, shake hands with them, and talk to them briefly. I should have gone straight up to them, I thought, as soon as I arrived at the gate and saw them in front of the Orangery. Yet instead of resolutely going across and speaking to them, which would have been the obvious thing to do, I shied away from them and pressed myself against the wall, more or less out of shame and timidity, lest they should see me. It would have been far better to start off by greeting the gardeners, I told myself. But I missed the chance, I let it slip by. With the huntsmen it would have been a different matter, I thought, but how could I behave like this with the gardeners, for whom I have the highest respect and both liking and affection? On the other hand, this dillydallying by the wall was typical of me, I told myself. I’m not the sort of person who can walk straight into any scene and make an unrehearsed entrance. It’s in my nature to hold back and withdraw to a suitable observation post. What suits me best is the indirect approach. Once a year the gardeners’ families are invited to tea at the Children’s Villa. This is an age-old tradition. The gardeners come up to Wolfsegg with their families to be entertained at the Children’s Villa, in my time by my mother and father. It was always a great event. At the end, when dusk had fallen, the gardeners’ children were given presents. I cannot recall that Johannes and I were ever included in this touching presentation ceremony. On such occasions my mother was in her element. As she solemnly distributed the presents, everyone felt that it came from the heart and that for once she was not acting. Maybe the gardeners’ lifestyle had a beneficent effect on her, I thought, for when she was with them at these tea parties she was a quite different person and showed none of the traits that normally made her so unappealing. With the huntsmen I found her unappealing, but not with the gardeners. The gardeners at Wolfsegg always had a salutary influence. It was not for nothing that as soon as I could walk I was always going over to see them. Even in Rome I often think of them. Lying awake in bed, unable to sleep, I often imagine that I am with them, and I am always happy. I now felt as though I had sneaked in, as though the gardeners I was observing were pure beings, while I was an impure being and destined to remain so for the rest of my life. I don’t belong here anymore, I thought, and certainly not among them. Yet all my life my dearest wish was to be one of them. It was an absurd idea, a preposterous idea that only a madman like me could entertain. All my life I have tried to form ties with simple people, but of course I have never succeeded. Now and then I believed I had, and for a long time I clung to this mistaken belief, especially when I was with the gardeners and the miners, to whom I was always attracted, but it was an illusion that invariably ended painfully. The more my family kept me away from so-called simple people and tried to alienate me from them, the more I longed to be with them. For years I was aware of a perverse craving for their company and sought to rid myself of it, knowing it to be senseless, but I did not have the strength to free myself, and I still suffer from it. While our supposed inferiors always strove upward to our level, I always strove downward to theirs. Our inferiors were always unhappy in their station, while I, their better, was unhappy in mine. I suffered from being their better, they from being my inferior. All my life I have wanted to insinuate myself into the company of simple people, who are really anything but simple, I thought as I pressed myself against the wall. I’ve tried many tricks in the hope of taking them in, but they’ve always seen through me and blocked my way, just as my family blocked their way, having seen through them. In my Roman apartment I often imagine myself among them, I thought as I stood pressed against the wall, mixing with them, starting to speak their language, to think their thoughts, to adopt their habits. But I succeed only in dreams, not in reality. What I long for is quite illusory. I am not simple, I have to tell myself at such times, and they are not complicated. I am not like them and they are not like me. It is wrong to say that my family, their supposed betters, are mendacious and that they are not, for they, our inferiors, are just as mendacious in their own way as my family are in theirs. I may say that our inferiors are good people, that they are not greedy and overweening, but the truth is that in their own way they are equally greedy and equally overweening. All the same, I can honestly say that I am happier among simple people than among my own kind, yet I have always shuddered at the thought that I am wrong about them and guilty of betraying my own kind and myself. We always betray ourselves when we favor others and make them out to be better than they really are, I thought. We misuse them by pretending to belong to their kind, yet at the same time we misuse ourselves even more heinously, to their advantage and our own detriment. But we never succeed entirely in remaining ourselves and being with them, or succeed so rarely that it does not count. When we are with them we usually divest ourselves of everything that makes us what we are. Once we become aware of this, we find it discreditable and lose whatever confidence we had when we embarked upon the game. For we are only playing a game when we believe we have to identify with them for whatever reason—because we long to do so, because we can no longer bear to be ourselves and see them as some sort of ideal. This is a lifelong error, which gives rise to lifelong humiliation. Simple people are not as simple as we think, and complicated people are not as complicated as we think. From my vantage point by the wall I now saw the gardeners carrying big black sheets across from the Farm to the Orangery. These are known as catafalque sheets and are stored in a special room for use at lyings in state. I remember witnessing exactly the same scene as a child, with the gardeners (not the present ones, of course) carrying the catafalque sheets across from the Farm to the Orangery. At that time, of course, I did not stand by the wall but stood in front of the Orangery, calmly watching the gardeners from close quarters and not feeling the least shame or compunction, even though it was my beloved grandfather who was lying in state inside. Yet now, forty years on, I have to hide by the wall, for reasons that are not entirely clear but are depressing all the same. Suddenly I felt depressed. As I stood there I no longer had the natural self-confidence I had had as a child, which would have enabled me to go up to the gardeners and shake their hands, to tell them how fond of them I was and how much I had always admired them, to go up to them and be myself. I could not bring myself to do this. I was afraid to. It’ll be a disaster, I thought, if the natural comes up against the artificial, if I, an undoubtedly artificial person, come up against the undoubtedly natural gardeners. But then I told myself that I was only pretending to be artificial when in fact I was perfectly natural, just as I was only pretending that the gardeners were natural, when they were no less artificial and no more natural than I. My hands were cold, although the weather was hot. As a child I could always find the right words, I thought, but now I can’t. At one time I didn’t need to worry about how to communicate with the gardeners or the miners—it came quite naturally. And then I went out into the world, to Paris and London and Rome, I thought, only to end up far more inhibited than I’d ever been. I’ve pursued my studies and acquired a supposedly greater knowledge of people, yet I end up not knowing how to go up to the gardeners, shake hands, and exchange a few words with them. For a moment I felt that in all the years I had spent doing everything possible to free myself from Wolfsegg and make myself independent—not only of Wolfsegg but of everything—I had not in fact freed myself and made myself independent but maimed myself quite alarmingly. I am maimed, I told myself. Whereupon I nevertheless went up to the gardeners and shook hands with them. They were not surprised by my sudden appearance. I addressed them by their names and shook their hands. I told them that I had walked up from the village and watched them from the gateway for a time. They did not understand this, but they attached no importance to what I said and looked uncomprehendingly toward the gateway. They were more reserved than usua
l, in keeping with the occasion, but it was a quite natural reserve; they spoke only in answer to questions, and when I asked them how they were they remained silent. They expected me to go straight into the Orangery to see the dead, but I did not go in. Looking across to the door of the house, which I saw was wide open, then toward the Farm, where there was no one to be seen, then again across to the door, I asked the gardeners if my sisters were in the house. They said they were. I walked toward the doorway, a big black rectangle over which a black banner hung from the balcony. I recalled that a week earlier the park had been full of happy, colorfully dressed people, celebrating the wedding of the young couple, my sister Caecilia and her wine cork manufacturer, until a sudden storm had put an end to the outdoor festivities, causing the guests either to rush to their cars and set off for home or take refuge in the house, there to spend the whole night eating, drinking, and dancing. A dance band from Ebensee played throughout the night, so that those who retired at midnight could not get to sleep. It was not until five in the morning that the band stopped playing, the last revelers stopped dancing, and silence descended, I recalled as I walked toward the door. Even I had been infected by the general gaiety. I had not been just an observer but had joined in the celebrations. I had even danced twice, once with Amalia and once with Caecilia, but naturally these two dances had been enough for me. I did not dance at all badly; no one who has learned to dance ever forgets how. At least I danced with Caecilia better than the wine cork manufacturer, although fat people don’t dance badly, I told myself, usually better than thin people, and they’re more musical. The numerous young cousins I saw at the wedding soon got on my nerves, I recalled, and I was again struck by the superficiality of today’s twenty-year-olds, by their lack of interest in anything but their insensate craving for amusement. It was impossible to have a proper conversation with these young relatives. I cannot remember having a conversation, or even an amusing exchange of words, with any of them. When they were not dancing they stood around, stolid and humorless, visibly tormented by a deadly boredom that would afflict them all their lives because they had done nothing about it when there was still time. It’s too late, I thought, for any of these young people to escape this deadly lifelong boredom; by now they’re almost completely taken up with their fancies, their jobs, their girls and their women, totally absorbed in their perversely superficial concerns. Talking to them, one finds that they have nothing in their heads but this ghastly superficiality and think only about their trust funds and their cars. When I talk to one of them, I thought, I’m talking not to a human being but to an utterly primitive, unimaginative, single-minded show-off. The people who attended the wedding were primitive show-offs belonging to what passed locally for high society, all attired in their tasteless made-to-measure suits. The scene was dominated by men wearing trousers with ostentatious stripes down the sides, jackets with enormous deerhorn buttons on the lapels, and black felt jackets and neckbands inherited from their elders. Caecilia, moreover, had dressed up her wine cork manufacturer in the kind of leather shorts that not even my paternal grandfather had worn, no doubt secretly hoping to make him even more of a figure of fun, I thought. Knowing her as I do, I was probably not wrong. She had also fitted him out with the jacket that this same grandfather had been wearing when he tripped over the root of the fir tree and was carried home from the woods, to be laid out first at the Farm and then in the Orangery. This jacket, I thought, observing the bridegroom, has already lain in state once, as my sister knows. For some perverse reason she’s quite deliberately fitted out her wine cork manufacturer in a jacket that once lay in state in the Orangery; she’s made him wear a dead man’s clothes on his wedding day. How awful he must have felt, wearing this dead man’s jacket at his wedding! I thought. My sister’s baseness knows no bounds. But quite possibly it was my mother’s idea. That was more likely, for my mother always had the most monstrous ideas and usually acted from base motives. What is more, the poor man was wearing my grandfather’s buckled shoes; I could see that he was scarcely able to walk in them and was obliged to adopt a comic gait in order to keep himself upright. The clothes he was wearing were a hundred and twenty years old, as Caecilia announced to anyone who inquired, trying to make herself interesting and at the same time, consciously or unconsciously, making her husband look ridiculous in front of the assembled guests. Basically she was presenting her husband as a clown, I thought. On the other hand, I thought, they all wore clownish costumes. Aside from a few doctors and attorneys from Wels and Vöcklabruck and a few relatives from Vienna and Munich, they all wore clothes that were at least a hundred years old, and so naturally they all appeared clownish. Weddings like this had always depressed me, and I had soon stopped attending them or accepting invitations to them. But it would have been impossible to stay in Rome and miss my sister’s wedding. Nor would I have dreamed of offending her in this way, and I was surprised to find how well I had borne up at the wedding. And it’s the last wedding I’ll attend, I told myself, as though ruling out the possibility that my other sister, Amalia, would ever marry or that my brother would marry within the next ten years. The wedding guests were so vulgar and stupid, I thought. We are pleased to see someone we have known virtually all our life and shake hands with him, but in no time we find that he has meanwhile become an idiot, I thought. And the young people are even more stupid than their elders, in whose stupidity there is usually at least a modicum of the grotesque. We always imagine, mistakenly, that others will have developed, in one direction or another, as we have. But we are wrong: most of them have stayed put and not developed in any direction, becoming neither better nor worse, but merely old and totally uninteresting. We expect to be surprised to find how somebody we have not seen for ages has developed, but the real surprise is to discover that he has not developed at all, that he is simply twenty years older, that he is no longer slim but has a paunch, and that he wears big tasteless rings on fat fingers that once were attractive. We expect to have much to talk about with this or that old friend, only to find that we have nothing to say to each other. We ask ourselves why, and the only answer that occurs to us is that the weather has changed, that there is a national crisis, that socialism has now shown its true colors, and so forth. Having imagined that our friend of long ago is still our friend, we discover in no time that this was a cruel error. With this woman you can discuss painting, with that woman you can discuss poetry, or so you think, but you are wrong. The one knows as little about painting as the other knows about poetry: all they can talk about is cooking—how potato soup is made in Vienna and in Innsbruck—or what a pair of shoes costs in Merano and a similar pair in Padua. What good conversations you were once able to have with a certain person about mathematics, you think, or with another about architecture, but it turns out that the mathematical interests of the one and the architectural interests of the other got bogged down twenty years ago in the morass of growing up. You can no longer find any purchase, anything to hold on to, and they are put out by this, without knowing why. Suddenly you are just someone who annoys them. It will be a more or less ludicrous wedding, I had thought before leaving Rome for Wolfsegg, and afterward it struck me as far more ludicrous than I had dared to imagine. But the only comment I heard from others was that it was a magnificent wedding, a wedding to end all weddings, as they say. I’ll take care not to express my opinion because theirs is the one that counts, I thought. The wedding service itself, however, was thoroughly entertaining, exquisitely comic. The chapel was of course packed to capacity, and half the congregation had to stand in the hall during the service. Naturally I refused to sit in the front row with my family but stood in the hall with the kitchen maids and gardeners. Having a sharp ear, I was able to hear everything the priest said. As he was slightly drunk, there was something improvised about his conduct of the service, which was therefore not at all boring, as is usual on such occasions, but amused everyone. Only my mother must have been sweating blood, as they say. In his address to the bridal couple the
priest interwove fact and fiction and concluded with the general proposition that all life was life in the Lord until the end and nothing else. But at the climax of the ceremony, when he had to ask the bride and groom whether they would take one another to their lawful wedded husband and wife, he forgot the bride’s name and, after a noticeable pause, had to call for help and ask someone to tell him her name. My father rapped it out smartly, provoking instant peals of laughter in the chapel and the hall. He had forgotten the bridegroom’s name too, and my father, by now quite furious, once more had to oblige. This caused even louder peals of laughter than the first instance of priestly amnesia. I was tempted to shout the words wine cork manufacturer over the heads of the congregation but just managed to restrain myself. So this bit of meanness on my part remained a secret, I thought. It is always ridiculous when the bride says I will, but even more ridiculous when the bridegroom says it. This struck me again on the present occasion. How, I wondered, can we take the bride’s I will seriously, when we know it to be a lie, no less a lie than the bridegroom’s—this double I will that has to be uttered and inaugurates decades of martyrdom? The marital vows inaugurate the matrimonial yoke. Nothing else. And there is nothing people long for more than to say I will and thereby surrender themselves to their own annihilation, I thought. It seemed to me as though I had witnessed a little self-contained comedy or farce, and I felt a great desire to applaud when the priest had delivered his last line and disappeared with the altar boys, my little six- and seven-year-old cousins. But again I controlled myself. I was anxious to remain inconspicuous, for if I had caused a stir it would have been quite impossible for me to stay on at Wolfsegg, and I had no wish to draw attention to myself and cause anyone to remark that the troublemaker was at it again. The little centuries-old nuptial drama, I thought, culminates in the words I will, whereby the Catholic Church takes full possession of those who have uttered them. The priest was invited up to the second floor, where he waited for the announcement that the wedding breakfast was served in all the second-floor front rooms. My mother was in charge of everything, as usual on such occasions, and cut the bridal couple down to the size that befitted them, that of two marionettes, one fat and one thin, placed side by side in the middle of the table with their backs to the balcony and the world outside—the fat wine cork manufacturer and my sister Caecilia. Caecilia repeatedly stroked his left hand with her right, not because she felt any need to do so but because she thought it was required of her. After the guests had partaken of the undoubtedly excellent meal and the undoubtedly first-class wine—from Baden, of course—my mother rose and made a short speech that gave inimitable expression to her gift for hypocrisy, saying that she now had the best son-in-law she could imagine and the happiest daughter anyone could imagine. She went over to the wine cork manufacturer, showered him with kisses in front of the whole company, embraced Caecilia, and then asked us all to go down to the park. The weather being fine, a large number of tables had been placed on the lawn, and soon the gardeners and huntsmen were mixing with their so-called betters. Many villagers had come up to join in the celebration and did so without restraint. Again it was the gardeners and the miners that I found most appealing. The wind band had taken up position on a newly constructed platform and worked its way gradually through its whole repertoire, which it repeated every hour. It was said that the sound of revelry could be heard as far away as Atzbach, nearly four miles to the east. My brother was noticeably reserved during the proceedings and soon withdrew, not to be seen again. From an early age he had disliked such festivities, but his reasons were different from mine. Mine had to do with the superficial and ultimately pathetic character of such celebrations, which I could not endure for more than a few hours, but his had to do with his health. On such occasions he would immediately develop a headache. All his life he suffered from headaches, just like my father, whose headaches spoiled his enjoyment of every thing. My brother is eminently suited to marriage, I thought, but he still hasn’t married and I can’t think why. He definitely needs an heir; my mother’s always pressing him to marry and constantly quarrels with him on the subject. I kept thinking about this throughout the wedding. Of course he’ll get married one day, I thought, before it’s too late, in haste, to a grocer’s daughter from Wels or Vöcklabruck or a nurse from Salzburg, or an innkeeper’s daughter from Unterrach or Strasswalchen. Men like my brother wait till they’re fifty and time’s running out; then they close their eyes and take the plunge, so placing the crown of life on the old fools they’ve become. Up to this point they let every chance slip by, all the best matches, as they say, failing to capitalize on their so-called adventures or regularize one of their relationships. My brother doubtless thinks that his bed belongs not just to one woman but to several, and even if it doesn’t belong to many, it never belongs to the present occupant, but to the next, who is then expelled from it in her turn, out of fear of lifelong imprisonment, I thought. Silly Caecilia has married, my brother was probably thinking to himself, but I won’t marry until I’m over fifty, whereupon he probably clapped his hand to his forehead and retired with the resultant headache. Like his father, he’s taken to wearing old hats, I thought, old jackets, old trousers, and old shoes. Everything he wears has to be old. Like most men of his class and background, he regards this as the best way to demonstrate that he belongs to this class and this background; he thereby conforms with the taste of the upper crust, of which he has always considered himself part. Having bought himself a hat, he exposes it to the rain, leaving it on a peg on the balcony of the Huntsmen’s Lodge for a few weeks until it is weatherworn, then places it over a pan of boiling water and puts it on when it is still hot, so that it will take on the shape of his head. He immerses his trousers in water for a short time, then hangs them from the window in the wind before wearing them. He does the same with his jackets, and when he buys new shoes he first takes a good walk through the garden mud so that they will not look absolutely new. For nobody wears new shoes, nobody wears new jackets or hats. Everything new is utterly despised and detested, and that is as it should be. And the same applies to new houses, new churches, new roads, new inventions, and of course new people. To everything new, in fact, including of course new ideas. Over the centuries this society has become accustomed to despising and detesting everything new, and in this way it has become old and ceased to renew itself. My poor brother, I often used to say to myself—he’s been completely devoured by what he regards as the one true society that can confer salvation. There’s nothing left of him to remind one of his individual personality. Like his father he leads the same life as millions of other products of this old society, who are all exact replicas of himself. Everything he has on him and around him has to be old and weatherworn, I thought—except his car, which has to be the newest and best, and hence the most expensive. He has made a habit of buying a new car each year. Since my mother travels in it, having no car of her own and not even a driver’s license, she has always insisted on its being the best and most beautiful car available. And this best and most beautiful car, the Jaguar, has been their undoing, I thought. Their car cult has proved fatal. Though normally a quiet man, he was quite uncontrolled when driving, a wielder of power, something he could never be outside the car, thanks to Mother, who saw herself as the only legitimate wielder of power. But in the Jaguar Johannes wielded the power, and she had to submit. He may not have decided on the direction they took, but he decided on the speed, while she sat terrified in the passenger’s seat, unable to do anything about it—which naturally went against the grain, as they say. My father loved the tractor, not the car, which was too light for him, and he never missed a chance to get up on one of our McCormicks, even when he had no reason to. Sitting on a tractor, he was the happiest man in the world. And the most independent. On the tractor he was himself, he said, and sad though this seemed, I believed him. I’ve reached the point where I can be alone and happy only on the tractor, he once told me. Johannes, on the other hand, often said that he
had to get into the car in order to be able to breathe freely and pursue his thoughts, whatever he meant by that. It depressed me to hear him say this, but I have to accept it as the truth. My brother’s getting more and more like my father, I often thought. Recently he’s become so much like him, I reflected at the wedding, that it won’t be long before he is our father. His gait, his posture, and his voice are getting more and more like my father’s. He’ll soon be an exact replica of my father in posture, gait, and temperament, and hence in mental attitude. The firstborn son is predestined, as it were, to be the father, and he soon will be, I thought—it’s only a matter of time, a very short time. Sometimes when my brother’s speaking, I thought, I have a feeling that it’s my father speaking; sometimes when I hear my brother’s step I have a feeling that it’s my father’s step; sometimes when my brother is thinking I have a feeling that it’s my father thinking. In Johannes my parents got the son they had wished for, I thought. They couldn’t have wished for a better or more suitable son. He got closer and closer to the ideal image they had always had of a son, at the same speed as I moved farther and farther away from it. This was why they came to love him more and more and increasingly despised, detested, and abhorred me, though they dared not acknowledge the truth to themselves, given the many self-protective devices that were built into their minds. The image is almost complete, I thought at Caecilia’s wedding, almost completely identical with the model they adopted as their ideal image, though admittedly only with hindsight, as they say. My brother let himself be brought up to become the ideal image, but I always resisted such an imposition. I had never been interested in embodying an ideal image conceived by my parents. I was unwilling to conform to any model and thus unable to embody any such image. Johannes could be molded and knocked into shape, as they say, but I could not. And they began this molding process very early; when the infant clay was no more than three or four years old they realized that it could be shaped into their ideal image, and so they proceeded to mold Johannes and knock him into shape. They met with no resistance from him, but from me they met with the utmost resistance. Right from the beginning I succeeded in evading the parental sculptors; I at once repulsed them and would not allow them near me. They molded Johannes to their liking and were delighted with the result, not realizing that this entailed his ultimate destruction and annihilation. They ruthlessly transformed his natural head into an ideal head and thus destroyed it in what seems to me the vilest and most shameless fashion, making of him what they were unable to make of me, an ideal blockhead, who in due course would become what they longed for, their own creature, who was entirely complaisant and acquiesced in their intentions right down to the minutest detail. My brother, I thought, is completely in thrall to my parents, above all to my mother, having offered no resistance and found it easier to yield than to defend himself against every parental enormity and indignity. Only behind the wheel of the Jaguar was he allowed to give free rein to his thoughts. On these nightmare journeys, as my mother called them, he was free, but once out of the car, the poor man had to pay for this freedom a thousand times over, I thought. I’m sure that when he’s fifty there’ll be a proper wedding here. But a dead man can’t marry, I now reflected as I passed through the doorway. The entrance hall was empty. The lamps, as I expected, were decorated with laurel branches, each with two branches in conformity with the funeral plan. Silence reigned, the strange, sweetish silence characteristic of a house in mourning. The hall floor had been washed a few hours earlier, scrubbed by the housemaids on their knees. The oldest housemaid is seventy-four, but she still counts as a maid, and even on her deathbed, having reached a great age, like most of our maids, possibly over eighty, she will still be described as a maid. My mother maintained that the housemaids at Wolfsegg had always been happy, but she also said that they never had it easy. This is still true. They wear gray aprons, by which they can be recognized at a distance, made by our tailoress in the village, their hair is brushed back flat, and they wear no adornments whatever, which according to my mother was as it should be at Wolfsegg. That suits them best, she would say. They usually come to us at fourteen or fifteen and grow old in our service. They have nothing to laugh about, as they say, but—again according to my mother—they are highly regarded by everybody at Wolfsegg. Their numbers have been radically reduced in recent years. At one time there were twelve, including the kitchen maids, the oldest of whom is now over seventy, but now there are only five, all told. Most of them, according to my mother, were born with unpleasant voices, or they developed such voices in the course of time, for at Wolfsegg they were never allowed to speak in their natural voices. My mother trained them to speak in an unnatural tone, as quietly and deferentially as possible, she said, with the result that their natural voices were inevitably distorted. Nearly all the housemaids now come from the village, but at one time my mother preferred to take on girls from the Mühlviertel, where labor was cheap, she said, if possible from large peasant families, because such girls were well known for being satisfied with anything (my mother’s phrase), as well as efficient and generally hardworking. Recently, however, the supply from the Mühlviertel has dried up, as the girls there prefer to become factory hands rather than housemaids. To my mother this was evidence of the decline of the Mühlviertel, and not only of the Mühlviertel but of the world in general. The housemaids were naturally staunch Catholics and showed a becoming deference to both ecclesiastical and secular authority. The most favored housemaids always came from the Freistadt district and Aigen-Schlägel, where the borders of Bohemia, Bavaria, and Austria converge and there is no railroad. They were always the most devout girls, my mother said, the most decent girls. She recruited them herself by visiting the convents at Freistadt and Aigen-Schlägel to make known her requirements. The nuns or monks usually let her take two or three young, unspoiled girls back to Wolfsegg, where they were introduced to the job and put to the test. This introductory test involved scrubbing the entrance hall, which was a huge task, given the length and breadth of the hall, and required a superhuman effort. But the girls were so impressed by my mother’s bearing and by the estate itself, the like of which they had never seen in all their lives, that they thought nothing of scrubbing the hall, no matter what torment it cost them. Not all of them passed the test, but if a girl failed to scrub the whole of the hall at the first attempt and my mother imparted the dread news that she could not take her on, she always managed to complete the task at the second attempt. My mother was implacable, above all toward herself, and subjected those around her to at least the same degree of implacability. The housemaids worked themselves to death, as they say, but they were happy to be allowed to work at Wolfsegg, as they put it. My mother paid them next to nothing, but in witness, as it were, of the good treatment they received at Wolfsegg, they reached a great age, as I have said. They worked themselves to death and yet, absurdly, lived to a great age. None died young, or at any rate before the age of sixty. They were all given a fine funeral, as my mother put it, and their families were always grateful for the fact that one of their members was privileged to work at Wolfsegg. This attitude has not changed, I thought, as I entered the empty, freshly scrubbed hall with its broad larchwood floorboards. The spiders’ webs that normally darkened its corners had been removed for the wedding; the windows had been cleaned and the lamps smeared with oil to make them glisten. The gardeners had told me that my sisters were in the house, together with the new master, as they naively called the wine cork manufacturer. The three of them will be up on the second floor, I thought, not guessing that I’m already in the entrance hall and thus roughly underneath them. I did not want to go straight up and join them, however, but waited in the hall for a few minutes, standing at the foot of the stairs that lead to the second floor, in front of a picture of my great-great-great-granduncle Ferdinand, who is reputed to have saved the emperor’s life by throwing himself between him and a Hungarian traitor who was about to lunge at him. This act of heroism cost my great-great-great
-granduncle his life, though it is rumored that he was posthumously moved up a grade in the aristocratic hierarchy. The man looks rather like Descartes, I thought. This had never struck me before. He was actually a contemporary of the philosopher, and it was his dress, rather than his face, that accounted for the resemblance. Yet I was suddenly amazed by the resemblance. Why haven’t I noticed it before? I asked myself, looking at the picture with growing curiosity. In this picture my great-great-great-granduncle has the beard and the arched eyebrows that are characteristic of Descartes. The picture is by no means ridiculous, I thought, and I wondered whether this great-great-great-granduncle in oils had also been a philosopher, as his looks suggested. I decided to research the matter in our libraries and find out whether we had any works by him, perhaps some Essays or philosophical writings that had hitherto been unknown to me. I was sure I was not mistaken in seeing a writer and a philosopher depicted on the canvas and surmised that I would be able to locate his works in one of our five libraries. Knowing his name, I had only to initiate a search. I was not in the least surprised that my family had never spoken of the philosopher Ferdinand, for it is typical of them that they never so much as mention intellectuals, or do so only in order to disparage them. I even fancied that I had heard about the philosopher Ferdinand, as I now dubbed him, and might even have read something of his without knowing that the author was identical with the man in the painting at the foot of the stairs. It now occurred to me to scrutinize the other paintings of my ancestors that hung on the staircase. Until now I had inspected them only cursorily, aware that they were my ancestors but not knowing which, as they had never interested me. I had always treated our pictures as the rest of the family did, looking at them from time to time but unable to say what or whom they represented, treating them as little more than darkened patches of color that had for the most part been assigned their present positions on our walls, for whatever reason, centuries earlier. No one ever thought about them, let alone investigated them. Who knows what really hangs on these walls? I thought. It may turn out that we have several philosophers among our ancestors, maybe a whole series of scholars and thinkers. It’s possible that the pictures on our walls really are as priceless as has always been rumored in the family. But what really interested me was not so much the value as the subjects of these pictures, which run into the hundreds. To say nothing of the many paintings lying around in our attics, I thought, largely forgotten and in lamentable condition, thanks to the shameful neglect that Wolfsegg has suffered for centuries. One day I must bring in a restorer from Vienna, I thought, to identify, classify, and value all these pictures. As this idea took hold of me, I thought of someone I knew who was the principal restorer employed by our biggest museum and had recently restored the most valuable Velázquez it possessed. And it possessed very valuable works by Velázquez, as I know, more valuable than any in the Prado. The names Velázquez and Prado suddenly set me wondering whether we might even have a Velázquez at Wolfsegg without knowing it, since for centuries we have had many Spanish relatives. We have always had Spanish guests here, and they still turn up during the hunting season. Wolfsegg has always had close connections with Spain. And with Italy. And of course with Holland, where after all Rembrandt and Vermeer and other great painters lived and worked. I suddenly had this fantastic idea, and I was still absorbed by it as I stood in the chapel, to which I now repaired in order to avoid going upstairs right away to meet my sisters. I’ll take it slowly, without drawing attention to myself, I thought as I entered the chapel, where the wedding decorations had already been removed and replaced by funeral decorations. How quickly they’ve transformed the scene, I thought. All the objects that were usually highly polished and gleaming—the candelabra and bowls, the glasses and chains—had been covered with black sheets, and black sheets also hung over the two windows. Only the sanctuary lamp burned, so that one was not plunged into total darkness on entering the chapel. I recalled the priest’s lapse of memory that had caused such mirth among the wedding guests and heard again the peals of laughter it had provoked. I remembered my own malicious reaction and again heard my father shout out the name Caecilia, reactivating the nuptial scene after it had come to a halt. How long do we go on hearing the voice of someone who was alive a few days ago and has suddenly died? I wondered. For a moment I felt I must kneel down, as is customary on entering the chapel, but before I could do so I realized how theatrical, how utterly artificial and hypocritical, it would be to take my place in a pew and kneel down when I did not feel the slightest need to but merely thought it would be natural for anyone to kneel down after entering the chapel, especially in my situation. But what is my situation, in fact? I asked myself, walking a few steps forward and then stopping. I recalled that as a child I had never found the chapel the haven of peace and repose that others said it was but considered it an eerie and frightening place. Whenever I entered the chapel, even at the age of fifteen or twenty, it had seemed to me a place of terror and damnation, a hall of judgment, a lofty courtroom where sentence was passed on me. I could see the relentless fingers of the judges pointing down at me, and I always left the chapel with my head bowed, as one who had been humiliated and punished. The Catholic Church would have a lot to answer for, I told myself, if I were to reckon up what its teaching did to me as a child, how it ruined and destroyed me. Cold-blooded though it is, I thought, it would be appalled by my indictment. My mother used to send me to the chapel to agonize helplessly over the hundreds of sins I had committed. I always trembled on entering the chapel and left it in a state of shock. The only pleasant memories I have of it are associated with the May Devotions. Although the whole world has meanwhile changed completely, they still go to chapel here as if nothing had happened, I thought. At Wolfsegg they behave as if the world had not changed in the last hundred years, though in reality it has not only changed but been turned on its head, I might say. My family always regarded Wolfsegg as they regarded the pictures on their walls, which have always hung in the same places and must never be changed or taken down. And they took the same view of themselves: they must not change in any way. Anyone who changed or let himself be changed, like Uncle Georg and myself, was ostracized; he was no longer one of them, no longer had anything to do with them. Yet it would be wrong to say that time has stood still at Wolfsegg, for my family belong to the present: they exist in the present age, they are of this age, they embody the age, as is proved by their present existence. Indeed, they are permeated by the age, I thought, to a far greater extent than others. But in their own way. It is wrong to say that my family are relics of a bygone age, for they exist in the present. But in their own way. Contrary to what one might think on observing them for a while, they do not belong to an age that is no longer relevant to our own. They belong to our own age. But in their own way. Everyone who exists in the present has a share in the present, I thought. It is wrong to think that my family have no part to play in the present, for the truth is that they play a more vital part in it than others: they dominate the age and have a truer understanding of it than others, exercising a considerable influence on the world around them. They are people of a particular kind, their own kind, and it is immaterial whether or not one rejects their kind, whether or not one is repelled by it. To say that my family belongs to a different world is nonsense. That they have a very curious lifestyle and lead an extremely curious existence, that they take no cognizance of the way the world and humanity are changing, is another matter, but they unquestionably belong to the present age. The most foolish proposition of all would be that they belong to another age or another world, for they actually belong much more to this age and this world than millions of others, and they still play a dominant role in it. This is possibly their big trick, I thought—giving the appearance of belonging to a different age and a different world. It may be this trick that enables them to get along not all that badly, as they say, for on the whole they do quite well. They are better off than millions of others, who claim to belong to the prese
nt age and the present world—a claim that my family has never made, perhaps because they are endowed with a superior instinct with regard to the conditions that prevail in the present world and the present age. I would say that my family is more in tune with the age than most people I know. I was preoccupied by these thoughts as I stood in the chapel, unable to decide whether to go up and join my sisters. We take it upon ourselves to exclude people like my family from the present world and present society, maintaining that they do not fit in, that they are out of tune with the times, because we feel that we are wrong about them, for it is precisely their lifestyle that is really in tune with the times, and this becomes clearer to me with every day that dawns. To say that I reject their lifestyle does not mean that they do not belong to the present age or are out of tune with it. I might even go so far as to say that it is they who are on the right track, the track that leads, not to destruction and annihilation, but to security and stability, even though we may dislike the manner in which they pursue these goals, I thought. To say that I have nothing to do with these people does not mean that they should be eliminated, as is frequently supposed—an almost universal supposition that is almost universally acted upon. It now occurred to me that while rejecting this supposition, I had meanwhile cast myself in the role of their eliminator and extinguisher and thus sided with the very people whose thinking I now condemned as inept and inadmissible. The majority is not necessarily in tune with the times just because it’s the majority, I thought, though this too is a common belief that is often acted upon, to the detriment of the times. A minority may also be in tune with the times, often more in tune than the majority; even an individual may be more in tune with the times than the majority, indeed more so than everybody else. The majority has always brought misfortune, I thought, and even today we have the majority to thank for most of our ills. The minority and the individual are crushed by the majority because they are more in tune with the times and act accordingly. Ideas that are in tune with the times are always out of tune with them, I thought, for such ideas are always ahead of the times if they are truly in tune with them. Hence whatever is in tune with the times is in reality out of tune with them, I thought. I had once had a long conversation with Zacchi on this subject. If I say I am in tune with the times, this means that my thinking must be ahead of the times, not that I act in accordance with them, for to act in accordance with the times means to be out of tune with them, and so forth. I once spent several days discussing this question with Zacchi, in Orvieto, where he has a house in the hills, a bequest from one of his admirers. The basic truth is that however repugnant the inhabitants of Wolfsegg may appear to the individual or even to the majority, it is they who are really in tune with the times we live in, as we are bound to realize if we consider them carefully and dispassionately, without letting ourselves be fooled by current opinion, which is whipped up by the politics of the day, I thought. There has been political opinion for centuries, and there have been incontrovertible facts that contradict it. And it is an incontrovertible fact, I told myself, that the world is now in a state of chaos, while order reigns at Wolfsegg—I am careful not to say that order still reigns there, but merely that it reigns. While the world in general is unable to emerge from its coma and return to a state of consciousness, the people at Wolfsegg are fully conscious. Even though they reject me, even though I have withdrawn from them in disgust, I do not dispute that they act—or acted, I should say—more consciously than most of the rest of the world. In their own way, I added. At this point it struck me that what I had just been thinking was total nonsense, or at any rate a piece of mental foolery that led nowhere, a mental dead end. In order to pursue the notion that it was the people at Wolfsegg who were in tune with the times and not the rest of the world, I would have needed Zacchi or Gambetti, I thought—either would have done—but alone I was doomed to failure, as so often in my thinking, hoodwinked by a fallacy, by a philosophical impertinence. But we must always reckon with failure, lest we succumb to indolence, I thought. There is nothing outside our heads that must be combated more resolutely than indolence, and we must be equally resolute in combating indolence within our heads and proceed against it with all the ruthlessness at our command. We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought. But we naturally do not act with the intention of failing, nor do we think with the intention of failing. Nietzsche is a good example of a thinker who pursued his thinking so far into failure that ultimately it can be described only as demented, I had once remarked to Zacchi. In these cold, whitewashed walls I was able to develop, my mother used to say, as I now recalled, standing in the entrance hall and debating whether I should go straight upstairs and see my sisters or first go and see the others, who, as I now saw, were gathered in the kitchen. The kitchen maids and housemaids in the kitchen were conversing in the restrained tones proper to a house in mourning. I lingered outside the kitchen door, trying to make out what they were talking about, but I caught only odd words that I could not string together, though I gathered that they were talking about their families, as the name Mühlviertel kept recurring. Though conscious of the impropriety of loitering outside the kitchen door, I went on standing there, unable to decide whether to put an end to my stage-by-stage approach to my sisters by going upstairs and greeting them or to spin it out by opening the kitchen door and greeting the women and girls inside. There was a sudden burst of laughter in the kitchen, and it occurred to me that if they were suddenly to open the door I would be found eavesdropping. The thought made me shudder. I could not help thinking that my behavior was absolutely indefensible. Whatever I decided to do—whether to open the door and greet the women and girls in the kitchen or to go upstairs and greet my sisters—I had already made myself guilty in my own way, which was naturally both offensive and incomprehensible. The conversation in the kitchen had become clearer, and I followed it attentively as I stood in the hall. It turned on the various funerals they had attended and the accidents that had led to them. An old man of seventy-eight had fallen into the stream; an old woman of sixty-six had hanged herself from a bedroom window; a child had been run over by a horse and cart delivering sacks of coal to his family at our miners’ settlement. They talked of how the bodies had had an unpleasant smell and the wreaths had been very expensive, of how there were more and more morticians, how the bereaved families no longer wore mourning for six months, as they used to, how not even the closest relatives did so any longer, not even the widows. They seemed to be preparing their afternoon coffee in the kitchen. They have coffee around two, I thought, but they don’t put the water on for the family upstairs until about five; that’s when they themselves have supper, whereas the family dines at half past seven. I was pleased to think that the day-to-day customs at Wolfsegg had not changed. In the kitchen there was talk of a train driver who had been attacked and killed, leaving five children to be provided for, of how his widow was looking for a job so that she could support the five children, as the state paid nothing to the dependents of murder victims, even when the murderer was caught, and of how unfair the law was in Austria. They also talked about how the kitchen maids had been pushing a cart with a number of wooden benches from the Children’s Villa to the main house, when the cart overturned. Then one of them made some remark about egg-laying hens, at which they all laughed loudly, then suddenly stopped, as if ashamed of their laughter, realizing that it was unseemly. If I go in and greet them I’ll put myself out of favor, I thought, and so I went upstairs. Even in this atmosphere of mourning I was secretly amused
by the fact that I had come from Rome with no luggage or, to be more precise, with only my wallet and a handkerchief. I’ll have all the pictures on the walls and in the attics examined and get a rough idea of their value, I told myself as I passed the painting of my great-great-great-granduncle Ferdinand on my way upstairs. Take it easy, don’t get out of breath, I told myself, stopping on the landing to listen. My sister Amalia was obviously talking to her brother-in-law, who is my brother-in-law too, the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg, who had supplied the Baden wines. I had hardly spoken to him at the wedding, not because I was too proud but because he chose to avoid me and repeatedly ran away from me, doubtless fearful of the questions I might ask him. I can still see him standing by himself under the oak tree in the park, I thought. This seemed to be my chance to go up and talk to him, to find out more about him than I already knew, which was precious little, as my sister had never been very forthcoming about her fiancé, but when I went up to the oak tree my brother-in-law had vanished. He had been watching me, and seeing that I was about to approach him, he had at once escaped by going across to the Orangery for no obvious reason, as there seemed to be no one there. So I was left standing under the oak tree without my rich brother-in-law. I had not been able to talk to him at the wedding breakfast either, as he averted his gaze whenever I looked his way. He obviously disliked being observed, though it is perfectly natural for the bride’s brother to observe his sister’s husband in order to see how he behaves, what he has to say for himself, how he comports himself, not only outwardly but inwardly, as it were. But the wine cork manufacturer chose to keep out of my way. Not once during my stay at Wolfsegg did I have an opportunity to talk to him, I now recalled, though I was naturally eager to do so. People of his type, especially if they come from Baden, from the wine-growing districts, are adept at making themselves scarce if someone wants to talk to them, I thought at the time; they avoid anyone who wants to question them and are very smart when it comes to taking evasive action. We may describe a person as stupid but at the same time have to admit that he is smart. Fat people are always smarter than others, and basically more mobile. But their mobility is only a physical characteristic, for their minds, if that is the right word, are completely immobile. I had wanted to put my brother-in-law through a number of tests and imagined that this would be easy. I had wanted to question him, to see what made him tick, as they say, but I had grossly overrated my interpersonal skills and failed dismally. But why does my brother-in-law avoid me? I wondered. What is it about me that scares him off? After all, I am the brother of the bride, now his wife, and entitled to inquire about him. It was undoubtedly felt that my sister had acted monstrously in marrying this man, more or less without asking any questions, without really knowing him, for it was clear that she did not know him. All she would say was that our aunt in Titisee had known him and his family very well ever since he was born. But that’s not enough, I thought. And my mother was of the same opinion, having pondered the matter much more profoundly than I, but she could not prevent the wedding, for Caecilia was insistent and stood her ground, as they say, for the first time in her life. This was to commit a crime against her mother, who from the beginning actually described the marriage as nothing short of a crime committed by Caecilia against her, and her alone, though she confided this to no one but us, not wishing to lose face. It had been a foregone conclusion that her two daughters would remain at her beck and call all their lives, at Wolfsegg in other words, and that marriage was ruled out. Until all her plans were frustrated by our aunt in Titisee with this absurd idea of hers, as my mother put it. The wedding was a blow for Amalia too, I thought, for the two sisters were tacitly committed to lifelong mutual loyalty, which meant that neither would marry, as marriage would entail separation. This separation had now occurred in consequence of what seemed to me an utterly bizarre marriage, which my mother maliciously referred to as a union, a word that had always been used pejoratively at Wolfsegg. The wine cork manufacturer, however, spoke only of their union, never of their wedding, because the term was familiar to him, a native of Baden, and he did not find it embarrassing, not being conversant with our local irony. I don’t regard him as a rogue or a fortune hunter, I thought, but as a fool aspiring to supposedly better things, a type that we encounter wherever we go, in every bar and restaurant and in all but the most intimate company. He’s not cunning enough to be a rogue or a fortune hunter, I thought—he’s just an honest social climber. I could of course have forced him to answer my questions, I told myself; it would not have been difficult to confront him, but I had no wish to do so. Maybe I didn’t want to be exposed to his grotesque Baden dialect, I thought. I had visited my aunt in Titisee several times and always been put off by the bonhomie of the Badeners, which I found insincere, like the easy charm of the Viennese, whose malicious stolidity I have always abhorred. I have always been irritated, indeed depressed, by the notion of easy charm or bonhomie, involving as it does a vulgar approach to life and human nature and, if pursued to extremes, a thoroughly base distortion of our view of the world. The wine cork manufacturer, I may say, wormed his way into Wolfsegg, for my sister took him there deliberately to spite my mother, using him as an accessory in the capital crime she was committing against her. A man who’s never heard anything by Max Bruch! my mother once said over dinner when we were talking about the wine cork manufacturer and only about him. My mother had not the foggiest idea of music, yet she of all people felt obliged to ridicule her future son-in-law more than he had been ridiculed already, not just by her but by all of us, by invoking the dubious name of Max Bruch, whose violin concerto never failed to send her into raptures. To my friends in Rome I did not breathe a word about the wine cork manufacturer until the wedding was more or less fixed. I then told a malicious version of the story to Zacchi and Gambetti, and to Maria, who could not contain herself for laughter on hearing my account. Only later did it strike me that my behavior had been contemptible, redounding not so much to the discredit of my new brother-in-law as to my own and amounting in effect to a self-denunciation. Unable to take my brother-in-law seriously, I resorted to the bitter irony that I always have to hand when I cannot bear to be serious. People like the wine cork manufacturer have always roused my ire and brought it to white heat, as they say, because they present a distorted image of humanity, an intolerable caricature that brings out all its ridiculousness, which is not to be confused with helplessness. It is one thing to be confronted by a simple person, quite another to be confronted by a proletarian, the one being tolerable and reassuring, the other intolerable, disturbing, and grotesque, I thought. The proletarian is a creature of industry and did not exist before industrialization. He is a slave to the machine, constantly degraded and vulgarized by the machine, but unable to defend himself against this indignity. The simple person, on the other hand, at least as I see him, has never been enslaved by the machine, has never let it degrade and destroy him, I thought. The petit bourgeois and the proletarian are pitiful but insufferable products of the machine age; we are shocked when confronted with them and forced to contemplate what the machine and the office have made of them. The bulk of humanity has been destroyed and annihilated by the machine and the office, I thought. The wine cork manufacturer has been destroyed and annihilated by his office and the machines in his wine cork factory and has thus become insufferable, I thought as I reached the second floor and paused at the top of the stairs. I do not know what made my sister choose this particular man as a husband. On the other hand, I know that she had found no one else willing to marry her, having failed in her many attempts, as she was bound to with a mother like hers, who forbade her daughters to have any relationships with men. Even at the age of thirty my sisters were still bound by this maternal prohibition and dared not flout it for fear of being disowned and stripped of their rights. My mother often threatened to disinherit them if they disobeyed her orders, and so they complied, fearing nothing so much as being disinherited, for it is fair to say that they felt c
ompletely helpless when left to their own devices. Once when Caecilia expressed a desire to go to Salzburg for two days with a friend, whom she injudiciously described as a boyfriend, she was forbidden to leave the house for a week. Amalia fared no better when she proposed similarly dangerous excursions, as my mother called them. How ought I to behave toward the wine cork manufacturer? I asked myself as I stood at the end of the passage, hearing their voices but unable to make out what they were saying, though it clearly related to the funeral. What is my best course? How should I act after making my entrance? Such deliberations usually lead nowhere and merely make things harder, complicating what is actually quite straightforward, though it appears exceedingly tricky and complicated. I knew that everything would work out, as they say, that there was no need to agonize over such supposedly difficult questions as how to conduct myself on returning home and meeting those who were waiting for me, who had witnessed the tragedy or been the first to be hit by it. We know that everything will sort itself out, but we do not trust this knowledge; we therefore ignore it and subject ourselves to the most dreadful mental torment. If my sisters were alone, I thought, there wouldn’t be the slightest difficulty: I’d already be discussing the immediate future with them. But the presence of the wine cork manufacturer prevented me from making a spontaneous entrance. He’s in my way, I thought, inhibiting my natural impulses. Now, after only a week, the wedding turns out to have been a ghastly mistake, I thought. It will drive a wedge between Caecilia and Amalia and cause a fundamental rift, far more than the momentary pique that caused Amalia to move into the Gardeners’ House for a ludicrously short time in order to punish her sister. The wine cork manufacturer is sitting in there with them, discussing what they ought to be discussing with me, I thought, meddling in matters that don’t concern him and possibly taking charge of Wolfsegg in his feebleminded way, airing his petit bourgeois ideas and opinions, which can never amount to intelligent insights. After less than a week he’s already established himself at Wolfsegg and taken over, I thought as I moved to a position from which I could hear almost everything they were saying. I was anxious above all to hear anything they said about me, anything at all, but all I heard was that the mortician had already paid three visits and they could not reach an agreement with him, that eighty wreaths and forty bouquets had already arrived, that they had arranged for substantial obituaries to appear in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten and other Upper Austrian newspapers, as well as in the Munich and Vienna papers, and that they were thinking of putting one in the Frankfurter Allgemeine too. They’re talking quietly so that they can’t be heard, I thought, but I could hear every word, learning for the first time that from the passage one could hear almost everything that people said in the drawing room, even when they spoke very quietly. I was alarmed to discover this, having always believed that nothing said in the drawing room could be heard outside it. This is an important discovery, I thought; I must watch what I say in the drawing room. They’re sure they can’t be heard, but I can follow every word. All the time the wine cork manufacturer said nothing but yes or no in answer to the simplest questions. My sisters were conducting the discussion, and this partly reassured me. Then suddenly he said that the catafalque should be raised a little, whereupon I began to listen more attentively. The catafalque was too low, he said. The mourners would have the greatest difficulty in seeing the dead, and the only thing to do was to raise the catafalque. After a certain amount of to and fro they all decided to give instructions for the catafalque to be raised. They went on to talk about the gardeners, then about the huntsmen, then about how rooms had been booked for the guests, who would be coming from far and wide, at all the inns in the village, as well as in Ottnang. More than once they mentioned the Gesswagner, which was my favorite eating place whenever I wished to escape from the Wolfsegg cuisine. It had big rooms with old-fashioned beds, and the guests we accommodated there at various times had always found it comfortable. The inn is deservedly famous, as is the butcher’s shop belonging to it. The name Gesswagner instantly brought back memories of the many happy hours I had spent there with the local people—miners, farmers, carpenters, and roadworkers, whom I have to thank for broadening my outlook early in life. Gesswagner is to me a magic word, for at no other inn have I experienced such natural good cheer. It is the focal point of Ottnang, a village known for its lighthearted, cheerful inhabitants, as well as for its band, which is rivaled only by our own. But naturally the name Gesswagner had no such happy associations for the others. Suddenly they were on me. They could not understand why I had not gotten in touch earlier, for they had telegraphed me as soon as they knew of the accident. No phone call, nothing, said Amalia. I had entered the drawing room. They stood up but could think of nothing to say. I embraced my sisters and shook hands with my brother-in-law. Without another word I accompanied Caecilia down to the Orangery. My first impression was that they respected me as the sole heir. They had no choice, and it occurred to me that I was being received like this because all their hopes were now pinned on me. It occurred to me too that they were now at my mercy, forced to rely on me for help and, above all, to heed what I said. It struck me that they could no longer exist without me and depended on my generosity, knowing that I was the natural heir and that they must rally round me, as the accident had left them helpless. The deserter who had been rejected, detested, and execrated had suddenly become the master, the provider, the deliverer. In this moment of reunion they staked everything on me, fervently hoping that I would forget everything that they and the dead had done to me, in order to save them, as I was more or less obliged to do. This was my undoubted intention, and I gave them to understand it, not in so many words but by my demeanor, which I cannot precisely describe. My brother-in-law was forced into the same position, expecting me to extend to him the protection I extended to my sisters and to consider him in my deliberations regarding the future. But I knew as little as they did about what was to happen, for the fact that Wolfsegg as a whole, with all its internal and external ramifications, now devolved upon me and upon me alone was something I had not considered, either in Rome the previous day, when I had received the fatal telegram, or between then and now, when I had been wholly preoccupied by my immediate return to Wolfsegg and had no time—or allowed myself no time—to think about the problems posed by its future. I had refused to think about them, as I did not wish to burden myself with these problems until my parents and my brother had been buried. Moreover, the news of their death had been far too sudden. As I have said, I was not shattered by the news, terrible though it undoubtedly was, but accepted it with a kind of indifference, which I did not have the strength to abandon and was therefore unwilling to abandon. I had simply taken out the photographs, put them on my desk, and fantasized about them, I may say, more or less to distract myself from the horror of what had happened. I now saw that this was the best thing I could have done. On receiving the telegram I was controlled, not shattered. I kept a hold on myself, as they say, and my head remained clear, but naturally I did not consider the full consequences of the news in detail, as I wanted to protect myself. I had to protect myself; I could not and would not allow myself to be crushed by the fact that my parents and my brother were now dead. Caecilia led the way to the Orangery, and as I followed her I reflected that my sisters and my brother-in-law were now entirely reliant on me, that their attitude to me had completely changed. This was inevitable. Now that my parents and my elder brother were dead, I was suddenly cast in a role they could never have imagined me playing, that of provider and protector. But I’m still the same person, I thought. I haven’t changed, I won’t change, even if they expect me to. Yet if they were not to despair and lose their hold on everything, they had to believe that I would. The fact is that on the way to the Orangery, despite the sadness of the occasion, which affected me too, I decided that my sisters would have to be paid off, as I had no intention of letting them stay on at Wolfsegg or allowing the estate to go on being run as it had been up to now.
Of course, I did not know how else it should be run, only that things could not go on as they had for centuries, right up to the present day. As she led me to the Orangery, Caecilia had the demeanor of the bereaved daughter and sister, broken by the sudden death of her parents and her brother, and perhaps she really was broken. Dressed in black, in a tight-fitting woolen dress and with her hair in a bun, she looked very smart. So did Amalia, I thought. She also looked good in black. If only they wouldn’t go around in those dreadful dirndls, I thought; they look so much better in black. When I first saw my brother-in-law standing beside Caecilia, he seemed quite helpless. He was no longer the triumphant though complex-ridden bridegroom of the week before, for the accident and its immediate consequences had made it quite impossible for him to conceal his futility and ineptitude. The couple had faced me in all their depressing insignificance. Instead of supporting Caecilia, as would have been natural, he was supported by her, or so it seemed to me when I entered the drawing room and looked first at Caecilia and her husband, and then at Amalia, who seemed more composed than the others. They had seen to everything, they said. I did not know quite what this meant but assumed it meant that they had made all the necessary arrangements. Before we reached the Orangery Caecilia said that Amalia had sent a telegram to Spadolini at the same time she had sent mine. It was up to me to decide who else should be told of the tragedy in addition to those they had already informed. She had taken it for granted that Spadolini should be notified. It was clear that Caecilia knew precisely what to make of Mother’s relations with Spadolini. My sisters were always in the know, I thought. The wine cork manufacturer is nothing but a nuisance, I thought, but I can’t count him out, as I have the impression that Caecilia will make a point of pushing him forward, as her protector, so to speak. This did not worry me, as I was not afraid of the wine cork manufacturer, even though he was now my brother-in-law. He’ll remain a marginal figure of no consequence, I thought. When I entered the drawing room, Caecilia had placed herself behind him, using him as a protective shield, so to speak, and making it only too obvious that she intended to push him to the fore. This at once struck me as ludicrous, not to say tasteless; I thought it unworthy of her but did not pursue the thought. It was not important, but at the same time I found it irritating, though I was fully aware that some confusion was inevitable in the present circumstances. Given the new situation at Wolfsegg, my sisters were at pains to show me that they had changed, but they only half succeeded, as they had not really changed. They were the same as ever. At first I fancied that they had changed, but this soon proved to be an error when I said I wanted to see my dead parents and my dead brother. Before we reached the Orangery I was still convinced that what my sisters required of me was nothing short of total self-abnegation. Do your best to protect them, I told myself, but be on your guard, or you’ll come off worst. After all, they’ve been trained by your mother and know how to exploit a tragedy like this for their own ends. I loathed myself for being able to entertain such a thought, but I did not do so without reason, and it was vital that I should. My family, including my sisters, had never recoiled from anything if it suited their designs, so why should they act differently now? I asked myself Yet at the same time it occurred to me how deep-rooted my distrust must be if I could harbor such a thought at this moment, and I loathed myself for it. Distrust has always been the rule among us; we have developed our distrust to a quite abnormal degree, to the point where it is an absolutely invariable habit to distrust everyone and everything. But my distrust was confined to Wolfsegg and my family—elsewhere I distrusted no one. No sooner was I at Wolfsegg than my distrust reemerged; it belonged to Wolfsegg, like all other supposedly bad qualities, which are really just the natural means we employ in order to assert ourselves and avoid being worsted. In Rome I had expected to find my sisters despondent and reacting nervously to everything, but they were utterly calm. Or perhaps I was mistaken, perceiving only their outward calm and failing to discern their inward disquiet and nervousness. In Rome I thought I would find the whole house in a state of agitation, but nobody was agitated, and I wondered how great a misfortune it would take to knock my sisters off balance, to paralyze them. They were not knocked off balance, they were not paralyzed. They not only had retained their composure, as they say, but were fully alert when I entered the drawing room. It did not occur to them to ask me about my journey or the reason for my late arrival, whether I had come by rail or by air, as it was absolutely self-evident that I should arrive at that very moment and no other. They haven’t asked one question, I thought, and they haven’t offered me anything. They expect me to take over, to take charge of everything, to be strong. It did not seem to occur to them that I might be incapable of taking on the task that had suddenly fallen to me. Without a moment’s hesitation they’ve loaded it all on me, I thought, yet at the time they knew more than I did. Possibly they had witnessed the accident; at least they were the first to learn of it. On the way to the Orangery I did not even know how it had happened, and I was inhibited from asking; I did not feel up to questioning them about it. But it can only have been a road accident, I thought. It had not occurred to my sisters to tell me about the nature of the accident; they spared themselves this ordeal in the first few minutes after my arrival, as neither of them wished to be the first to tell me the actual cause of my parents’ and my brother’s death. They behaved as if they were sworn to silence, having reached a prior agreement on this delicate and painful matter. As they said nothing, I spoke first, saying that it had been impossible for me to come earlier. This was a lie, but they obviously believed it. They know about Italian conditions, which are always chaotic where travel is concerned. The unions see to it that there are almost daily strikes and daily chaos throughout Italy. My sisters are well aware of these chaotic conditions, as I have told them about them often enough and they read about them in the newspapers. I therefore had no qualms about saying I had been unable to come earlier, because they were bound to put it down at once to these chaotic conditions and not suspect me of lying. To my family the word Italy has always been synonymous with chaos; Italy is the land of chaos. They have often asked me why I choose to live in Italy of all countries, where these chaotic conditions have prevailed for decades, and I have always replied that it is precisely because of these chaotic conditions that I choose to live in Italy, and in Rome, where they are at their most chaotic, where everything is unpredictable and impossible. I used to tell them that I chose to live in Rome precisely because Italy was the most chaotic country in Europe, probably in the whole world, and because Rome was the center of this chaos. They did not understand, and I never felt inclined to go into further explanations of my interest in Italy. A big city as such is not enough for me, I would tell them: it has to be a chaotic big city, a chaotic world city. But they could make no sense of such notions, or of any other notions of mine. They haven’t even asked me if I’d like a cup of tea or a glass of water, I thought, but then I relented, as I felt sorry for them in their present situation. When someone has come straight from Rome to Wolfsegg, which is after all a strenuous journey, it is usual to ask him whether he is hungry or thirsty, but they did not ask me. They were having coffee when I arrived, but they did not offer me any. I should have poured myself a cup, I thought, but I did not do so, as I wanted to go down to the Orangery as soon as possible to see my dead parents and Johannes. I did not want to put off the ordeal any longer. When we arrived at the Orangery Caecilia was surprised that I did not shake hands with the gardeners or even address them. Not knowing that I had already spoken to them and inquired about their well-being half an hour or more earlier, she found it odd that I should behave like this to the gardeners, who were still bringing large wreaths across from the Farm and stood aside to allow us, the master and mistress, as it were, to enter the Orangery. I went in while Caecilia remained by the door. I was alarmed to find that the bodies were placed at different heights, my father’s higher than my mother’s, and that while my father and brothe
r lay in open coffins, my mother’s was closed. I turned around to Caecilia, as if for an explanation, before approaching the coffins, but the reason dawned on me at once: my mother’s body was not in a fit state to lie in an open coffin. I learned later that her body had been so mutilated in the road accident—beyond recognition, the papers said—that her coffin had to be sealed at once. She had been virtually decapitated, whereas there were no signs of injury on the bodies of my father and Johannes, whose necks had been broken when they were thrown against the windshield. The car had collided with a truck coming from Linz, and an iron bar from the truck had struck my mother’s head, almost severing it. She had been sitting in the middle of the car, as she always did when the three of them were driving together, and the iron bar had pierced the frame and killed her. They had all died painlessly, I was told. Having seen my mother’s closed coffin, I turned around and saw that there were tears in Caecilia’s eyes. Behind her stood the gardeners. I stood for two or three minutes in front of the coffins, then turned and left the Orangery. Standing by the dead, I had caught the unmistakable smell of bodies lying in state and decided to leave the Orangery before I was nauseated by it. I also felt it better not to linger by the bodies, which seemed to have nothing to do with me. I was sickened by the sight but far from moved, as they say. I felt only nausea and disgust. Any links I had were with my living parents and my living brother, I thought, not with these malodorous corpses. I naturally took care not to betray these feelings to my sisters or anyone else. I did not even recognize the faces as those of my father and brother; they were so changed that they seemed to belong to strangers who had nothing to do with them. Let’s go, I said to Caecilia. As we walked back to the house my eye was caught by the black banner hanging shamelessly from the central balcony. I was irritated to note that it was somewhat off center and pointed this out to my sister. I have always disliked sloppiness of this sort. Earlier, when I had just arrived and looked across at the house from the gateway, I had not noticed the irregularity, but now it disturbed me more than anything else. My sister beckoned one of the gardeners over and told him to move the banner to the middle of the balcony. It shouldn’t be too difficult, she said. By way of an excuse she explained to me that everything had had to be done in great haste. The gardener went up and moved the banner, while I gave instructions from below, telling him exactly where the middle of the balcony was and where the banner should hang. As I did so I began to feel nervous and at once tried to conceal this by telling Caecilia how good she looked in her black dress. Black suits you best, I said. It was not meant maliciously, but she instantly assumed that it was. She could not credit me with an honest observation that was not prompted by some ulterior motive; she at once thought it malicious and chose not to respond to my compliment. No, honestly, I said, that black dress suits you perfectly. Ignoring me, she locked up at the pigeons sitting on the windowsills, which this year were so caked with droppings that they looked quite disgusting. The pigeons were a big problem at Wolfsegg; year in, year out, they sat on the buildings in their hundreds and ruined them with their droppings. I have always detested pigeons. Looking up at the pigeons on the windowsills, I told Caecilia that I had a good mind to poison them, as these filthy creatures were ruining the buildings, and moreover there was hardly anything I found as unpleasant as their cooing. Even as a child I had hated the cooing of pigeons. The pigeon problem had been with us for centuries and never been solved; it had been discussed at length and the pigeons had constantly been cursed, but no solution had been found. I’ve always hated pigeons, I told Caecilia, and started to count them. On one windowsill there were thirteen sitting close together in their own filth. The maids ought at least to clean the droppings off the windowsills, I told Caecilia, amazed that they had not been removed before the wedding. Everything else had been cleaned, but not the windowsills. This had not struck me a week earlier. Caecilia did not respond to my remarks about the pigeons. The gardeners had let some tramps spend the night in the Children’s Villa, she said after a long pause, during which I began to wonder whether I had given Gambetti the right books, whether it would not have been a good idea to give him Fontane’s Effi Briest as well. The tramps had lit a fire, she went on, and it had spread in the downstairs room where they spent the night, but the gardeners had put it out. The tramps had disappeared shortly after the outbreak of the fire, no one knew where to, but that was unimportant, as they would not be found anyway. The room that was burned out was the one where we kept the dolls we had as children, said Caecilia. As she said this she looked over the village to the mountains. Our dolls, of all things—it had to be our dolls, I thought, but I could think of nothing to say about the occurrence. I found it rather pleasant that tramps should have spent the night in the Children’s Villa and that it was they who had started the fire, as I did not know there were any tramps still around; I thought they had died out long ago. Naturally the gardeners would let them spend the night in the Children’s Villa. Caecilia probably expected me to inveigh against the gardeners, but to her great surprise I praised them. They’re the most loyal employees we have, I said, the most reliable, the most natural, the ones I’m fondest of. Just because Caecilia expected me to criticize the gardeners I spoke up for them, fully aware that I was saying the first thing that came into my head. I’ll have the Children’s Villa put in order, I said suddenly. This remark came as a shock to her, though it did not immediately strike me as being of any great consequence. She looked up and stared straight into my eyes. By saying this I had pronounced myself master of Wolfsegg, for I had said, in so many words, I’ll have the Children’s Villa put in order. Never before had I said I would have anything put in order at Wolfsegg, for until then I had not been entitled to say such a thing. On the contrary, I had always been shorn of my rights; for decades I had had no rights whatever. The truth is that I had never been accorded even the most marginal rights. The Children’s Villa is a jewel, I said, and must be restored to its original condition, in precise accordance with the old prints. I had the idea of starting work almost at once on restoring the Children’s Villa; I felt a great urge to do so. And the Home Farm must be restored too, I said; it’s completely run-down. It’s not that we’re short of money. Caecilia remained silent and let me go on. This was the method she always used—letting me go on until I had said far more than was good for me, more than it behooved me to say, until I had given too much away and she was able to score the winning point. Again I said too much and gave myself away. And I’ll get my restorer in from Vienna to catalogue and value our pictures, I said. No sooner had I said this than I felt embarrassed and tried to change the subject. I didn’t expect to be back here so soon, I said. I didn’t intend to come back for a long time. Rome is the ideal place for me. I can’t live in any other city, and certainly not in the country. Wolfsegg’s out of the question for me now, I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, I thought. The Children’s Villa is my favorite building, I said. Do you remember how we played Confucius, which we invented and wrote ourselves? We didn’t know what or who Confucius was, but the word Confucius inspired us to invent a play. By the way, what happened to all the plays we wrote? I asked Caecilia. She said she did not know. They must be in the attic of the Children’s Villa, I said—that’s where I last saw them. You painted your most beautiful set for Confucius, I said. And Amalia was a wonderful Confucia. The libraries must be opened up, I said. All those books must be aired. We don’t know what treasures we have there, shut off from the air and covered with dust. Wolfsegg must gradually become a living place again, as I imagine it. Caecilia said nothing. For decades our parents have kept everything locked up, I said. I looked across at the gardeners again. Two huntsmen came through the gateway and greeted me from a distance. Only hunting, never anything but hunting, I said, feeling more alone than ever. The pigeons were cooing so much that I looked up at the windows, especially the top-floor windows. Their cooing is always particularly dreadful when it’s going to rain, I said. My pupil Gambetti hates
pigeons too, I said. Rome’s full of pigeons, and they ruin everything beautiful, all the architecture. The pigeons should be decimated, I said, and was instantly embarrassed at having used the word decimated. One of the gardeners came across and asked me whether the closed coffin should be raised any further. Yes, said my sister, although the gardener had addressed his question to me. He went away to raise my mother’s coffin, with the help of a colleague. The gardeners are the best thing about Wolfsegg, I said, but Caecilia pretended not to hear. The accident had taken place on Wednesday evening. In the kitchen there was a pile of newspapers that the maids had brought in. I had gone to the kitchen in search of a cup of so-called house coffee, and the pile of papers on the little table by the window at once caught my eye. At first I resisted the urge, but was unable to stop myself from sitting down and scanning the newspapers. They reported our family tragedy in the usual vulgar fashion, with all the insensitivity and attention to detail that typifies the Austrian press, sensationalizing it with the ruthless cruelty that I had always found alarming in press reports of other people’s tragedies, while admiring the cold-bloodedness of such reports, which were avidly lapped up by readers, myself included. Ever since childhood I have been a keen newspaper reader with an appetite for crude sensationalism, but this time I was naturally sickened by what I read. It seemed that my parents had driven to Styria with Johannes in order to see a dealer and inspect the latest American harvester. Like all the agricultural equipment at Wolfsegg, it had to be a McCormick. My parents spent the afternoon in Styria and were driven around by Johannes to visit friends and do some shopping, Styria being a good place for shopping. Toward evening they had driven to Linz and attended a Bruckner concert, conducted by Eugen Jochum, in the Brucknerhaus by the Danube, one of the ghastliest cultural centers in the world. Immediately after the concert they had driven back in the direction of Wolfsegg, with my father at the wheel. The fatal accident had occurred just beyond Wels, on Federal Highway I, right at the junction where the road to Gaspoltshofen branches off. Even the newspapers did not know exactly how the accident had happened, but they were not sparing with their abominable pictures. They even printed a large photograph of my mother’s headless body. I gazed at the picture for a long time, though all this time I was naturally afraid that someone might come into the kitchen and catch me at it. I drank some of the house coffee that was standing on the oven, still hot, and opened one newspaper after another. Each of the front pages carried at least one picture of the accident, and the captions had all the crudeness and vulgarity that have always typified the provincial press. They have no reason to worry about standards; it is the total lack of standards that makes them so popular and guarantees their high circulation and immense turnover. I was now experiencing at first hand the quite uninhibited crudeness of these provincial garbage sheets, and the longer I sat reading these provincial garbage sheets and studying the pictures, the more they disgusted me. Each paper felt obliged to outdo the next in vulgarity. Family wiped out, screamed one headline, under which I read: Three concertgoers mutilated beyond recognition. Full report and pictures on center pages. I at once searched for the center pages, shamelessly leafing through the paper to find the illustrated report promised on the front page and simultaneously keeping my eye on the kitchen door, fearful of being caught in the act. I mustn’t immerse myself entirely in these reports of the accident, I told myself, as I may not notice if someone comes into the kitchen and catches me at it. In this way, my hands trembling for the first time, I read virtually everything the newspapers had written about my family, and as I read I had the impression that while it was all written in the most mendacious manner, it was at the same time all true—unutterably vulgar yet at the same time strictly factual. Everything in these press reports was mutilated beyond recognition, as my mother’s body was said to have been, yet it was all absolutely authentic. However mendacious the press may be, I told myself, what it prints is nevertheless true. When the papers lie they’re in fact being truthful, and the more they lie, the more truthful they are. Reading the newspapers, I have always found them mendacious, yet what they print is nothing but the truth. I have never been able to escape this absurdity, and I could not escape it now as I read the reports of my parents’ accident, which must be one of the most dreadful on record in Upper Austria. One of the pictures showed my mother’s head, attached by a sliver of flesh to the torso, which was still in the seat. The caption read: The head almost severed from the body. The accident naturally gave the newspapers a chance to print something about Wolfsegg—unadulterated nonsense, as may be imagined. They described my parents as a happily married couple who had devoted their lives to work and the good of the community. My brother was one of the best sportsmen in the country. My father was described by one paper as a forester well known for his prudent management, by another as the respected economic councillor, and by a third as the respected huntsman, the selfless leader of the Upper Austrian Farmers Union. One paper reproduced the photograph of Johannes on his sailboat at Sankt Wolfgang, with the caption: A picture from happier days. I have no idea how this picture found its way to the editor’s desk. The Linzer Volkszeitung had a red banner headline reading: Two generations wiped out. None of the reports failed to mention that we were a Christian family, that my father was a benefactor of the Church and my mother a good wife and mother. The Linzer Volkszeitung noted: They are survived by one son, who works in Rome as an academic, and his two sisters. I read that the burial was to take place on Saturday morning and that Wolfsegg had lost its master. It could be clearly seen on the pictures that the metal rod had penetrated right through the vehicle, my mother’s head propelling against the rear window and almost severing it. All three passengers, including my mother, had been found in their seats. The car had plowed with full force into the truck, which was thought to have braked suddenly at the Gaspoltshofen turnoff. It was carrying a consignment of metal rods to a firm in Schwanenstadt. The newspapers concluded that the blame lay with the driver of the truck but that he could not be held legally responsible, as a driver who rams another vehicle is always to blame. The local population shares the family’s grief, I read. I also read that the funeral would be conducted by the archbishop of Salzburg, a family friend. The archbishop of Salzburg and my father had been at school together as boarders at Lambach High School. A whole village mourns, I read. Hearing footsteps in the hall, I got up and put the newspapers back on the table as I had found them, with the cook’s spectacles on top. The kitchen is a big, vaulted room. When we were children it was our favorite place, especially in winter, as it was always warm, even in the coldest weather, when the rest of the house was poorly heated. The kitchen was always the most entertaining place until we were five or six, when I made friends with the gardeners and Johannes opted for the huntsmen. The cook has been with us for decades. She at once treated me as the master, assuming that this dignity had now passed from my father to me. It was intended to pass to my brother, but now the burden had fallen on me. I was not yet aware of its full implications. Would you like a cup of coffee, sir? she asked. I said I had already helped myself to coffee. Would you like to read the papers, sir? she asked, in the same tone of voice. No, I said, at once taking refuge in a lie, though it occurred to me that the cook was bound to know I had been reading her papers, that I had fallen upon them with avidity. No, thank you, I said, unconvincingly. So-called simple people have a fine ear for the wrong tone of voice and the dishonest use of language. She said she had no idea how many guests were expected, which made her calculations difficult. But you probably don’t know either, sir. I said I had no idea and had only just arrived home, from Rome. Yes, from Rome, she said. I’ve forgotten how to talk to simple people, how to conduct any kind of conversation with them, I thought. This depressed me. Since I’ve been in Rome I’ve forgotten how to communicate with simple people, I thought. At one time I would have found it easy to talk to the cook, to ask her a question, listen to her answer, follow it up with another question, and
so forth, but I had lost the skill. With the gardeners I was lucky, having been able to hold a brief conversation with them, but with the cook I failed, probably because I was preoccupied all the time by the thought that she knew I had fallen avidly upon the newspapers and that she was bound to think this indecent, that she had caught me out in low conduct. On the other hand, it seemed to me quite natural to be distressed, in such a distressing situation, to be so agitated as to be unable to behave normally and have a simple conversation with the cook. I saw no reason to reproach myself. I did not think my conduct at all surprising, but it was nonetheless humiliating to have been caught out. I felt like a criminal as I stood facing this woman, who had meanwhile noticed that her spectacles were not exactly where she had left them. I may have imagined all this, but I had a strong suspicion that she knew I had been through her papers and lapped up everything about the accident with my usual avidity. But my avidity has abated and is no longer as gross as it was just now, I thought. The cook can see that I am base and contemptible, I thought. She can see it in my demeanor. Knowing this for sure, she is exploiting her knowledge by staring at me in this searching manner. For a so-called simple person, especially a female of the species, this is extraordinary behavior, I thought. She was hiding her hands behind her back, as if tying her apron, but this was only pretense, as she was embarrassed at being caught out in a show of disrespect, in what struck me as a quite unbecoming show of disrespect. By subjecting me to such scrutiny she’s betraying the fact that she herself is base and contemptible, I thought. This was no way to look at the master, I thought. Why should this happen to me? On the other hand, I realized that my own situation was even more embarrassing, for I was the first to be guilty of low conduct: hers was merely a reaction to mine. Her shamelessness was in no way comparable with mine. Her shamelessness is nugatory beside mine, I thought, which is far more basic. I should have forbidden myself to look at the newspapers, I should have ignored them, but then I would have been untrue to my character, which required me to leaf through them. Seeing the cook eyeing the pile of newspapers, I was sure I had been caught out. For a moment I hated the woman. But then I saw that she was afraid of me, and my attitude changed. I no longer felt any real hatred, for although she could undoubtedly read my guilt in my face and believed she had seen through me, it would have been unforgivably stupid to be afraid, even for a moment, of a person like the cook, who after all depended on me and was a stupid person of the most harmless kind. To be honest, I must say that I dislike these broad, rosy peasantish faces larded with stupidity. I have always disliked them, but that is unfair, as there is more good nature in these broad, rosy peasantish faces than in any others. Yet I’ve always been suspicious of this good nature, I thought. And of good nature generally, of the very notion of good nature, which I can’t make anything of and basically find repugnant. The cook knew me as a child, I thought. I can’t pretend to her, so why am I getting worked up about her? She knows me through and through. But of course that isn’t true, I thought: what does this woman know about me, about what I am and who I am? It’s ludicrous to agonize over my relations with the cook. No, no more coffee, I said, ill-temperedly, and left the kitchen. I saw Caecilia coming toward me; behind her was Amalia, and behind Amalia was my brother-in-law, the wine cork manufacturer. You’ll have to get used to your brother-in-law and the word brother-in-law, I told myself. Suddenly all three of them were in front of me, seemingly about to accuse me. I have no idea what put this absurd idea into my head, but it seemed as though I was suddenly confronted by accusers, about to be accused for some reason, possibly for all kinds of reasons. But Caecilia said simply that they were going across to the Home Farm to talk to the huntsmen, who would be carrying the coffins at the funeral. They had to discuss who was to carry which coffin. As only the huntsmen were mentioned, I said that naturally the gardeners too must be involved in carrying the coffins. It irritated me to have to talk constantly about coffins. What struck me as strange about this conversation was that we spoke constantly of coffins, though it was normal on such occasions to speak of one coffin. The huntsmen can’t carry all the coffins, I said. The huntsmen and the gardeners will carry the coffins. Two will be carried by the huntsmen and one by the gardeners. The huntsmen will carry Father’s coffin, and of course Mother’s, and the gardeners will carry Johannes. Caecilia and Amalia cut the wine cork manufacturer out of this conversation about who should carry the coffins. He was relegated to the background and had no say in the matter. It’s obvious, I said, that Mother’s coffin should be carried by the huntsmen, and as I said this I remembered her relations with them. And obviously Father should be carried by the huntsmen, as he was their huntsman. (For decades he was the Master of the Upper Austrian Hunt, a title he received during the Nazi period and retained for twenty years afterward.) First the huntsmen, carrying Father and Mother, followed by the gardeners, carrying Johannes—it’s quite simple, I said. My sisters were suddenly clinging to me like leeches. It seemed as though they were loading everything onto me, having already loaded the whole of Wolfsegg onto me. When I looked at them in their black dresses they made the same comic but repulsive impression as they did in their tasteless dirndls. The mocking expressions had gone from their faces, but the embittered look remained. They suddenly had quite unhealthy, grayish-white faces, made all the more depressing by the black dresses they were wearing. When one of them spoke, the other could not wait to join in. They constantly interrupted each other—nothing had changed. Both had their hair combed back in the same way, and they were wearing identical shoes. Amalia had moved back to the main building from the Gardeners’ House and reverted to being Caecilia’s sister, I thought, her fellow conspirator. No longer conspiring against me, it seemed, but for me, which I found distasteful. I was repelled by the shameless opportunism that they suddenly directed at me now that my parents and my brother were dead. These sisters, who for decades regarded me as a monster and a base deserter, now cling to me and put on their helpless-little-women act, I thought. I mustn’t get carried away by these thoughts and feelings, or I’ll lose control. I’ll stay quite calm. They started filling me in on how the accident had happened, though I had been filled in already by the newspapers. One would interrupt the other and take over from her, and my brother-in-law had no chance to say anything. I let them go on, and as they talked I found that their accounts of the accident were quite different from what I had read in the newspapers. Everyone recounts his tragedy, as it were, as he sees it. The way the papers see it is different from the way my sisters see it, and probably also from the way my brother-in-law sees it. They all give quite different accounts of the same tragedy, each recounting a different tragedy, though it’s actually the same tragedy. Just as we read many different accounts in as many different newspapers, so my sisters give their own differing accounts of the same tragedy, so that in the end there are as many tragedies as there are people recounting them. Everyone recounts the tragedy as he sees it, refracted by his own feelings, always the same tragedy, yet at the same time always a different one, I thought. Caecilia’s account was quite different from Amalia’s. Amalia constantly interrupted Caecilia’s account, and Caecilia constantly interrupted Amalia’s. My brother-in-law said nothing. Amalia always spoke of her mother’s head being severed by an iron rod, but Caecilia spoke of its being pierced by a crosspiece. I said nothing, not wishing to betray the fact that I was already familiar with the press reports, having read them all in the kitchen. Under no circumstances must I reveal this. I was not going to show myself in the worst possible light on the very first day. My sisters thought I knew hardly anything about the accident, and so they talked freely, recounting everything in their voluble and totally undisciplined fashion. The Lambach police had informed them of the tragedy as they were about to go to bed, and so instead of going to bed they had had to go to Lambach to identify the bodies, Amalia said. The car was completely wrecked, and as it was dark at the scene of the accident, the police had held lamps over them and made t
hem stick their heads inside the totally demolished car so that they could properly identify the three bodies. Listening to all this, I did not find it hard to believe that my sisters were even baser characters than I was. Any nervousness they showed while telling their story could not hide their cold-bloodedness. It was a joke, they both said, almost simultaneously, that our parents and Johannes were taken away to Wels by ambulance long after they had died. The police had behaved correctly. The accident naturally caused quite a stir, and a number of farmers came running to the scene. Some of them in hastily buttoned nightshirts, Amalia said. At first they did not mention that my brother-in-law had been present too, though it was he who drove them to the scene of the accident. Although they had at once had to go through every possible formality, they were condemned to complete inactivity until the following morning. Amalia first went to the post office to send the telegram to me. They could of course have telephoned me, but the telegram relieved them of this ordeal. This I find understandable. They had then sent my brother-in-law to the Home Farm to collect the black banners, and it was he who hung the first one, from the balcony. Initially there had been a ghastly silence, said Caecilia. First of all Amalia went across and told the huntsmen of the accident. They were already puzzled about the whereabouts of the car in which the master and mistress had left for Styria the previous afternoon. Caecilia then informed the gardeners. Caecilia had told Amalia to send a telegram to Spadolini as well as to me, with the message Mother died. Caecilia, Amalia. They were sure that Spadolini would come to the funeral. At first they had thought of having Spadolini himself, Archbishop Spadolini, to celebrate the requiem mass, but then, feeling sure that I would approve, they had decided to ask the archbishop of Salzburg, with good reason, Amalia said. The burial service too would be conducted by the archbishop of Salzburg. Spadolini himself would be sure to stay in the background, they said. They would naturally never be able to forgive themselves for depriving their mother of having the mass celebrated by Spadolini, they said, but I at once saw that this was pure hypocrisy. It was of course right and proper that the archbishop of Salzburg should celebrate the mass and conduct the burial. Privately I thought it self-evident that Spadolini, having been Mother’s lover, should celebrate the mass and conduct the burial, but I kept this to myself. I could not put myself beyond the pale for the rest of my life by suggesting anything so outrageous. So I told my sisters that we should stick to the existing arrangements, that the archbishop of Salzburg should celebrate the mass and conduct the burial. It had already been decided in my absence and could not be altered. I gained a certain advantage by deferring to them and agreeing to what they had arranged. I said that in addition to the archbishop of Salzburg and Spadolini there were certainly at least three other bishops who would come to the funeral—the bishops of Linz, Innsbruck, and Sankt Pölten, with all of whom my father had been on friendly terms. He had gone to school with them and always kept in touch with them, even during the Nazi period, I thought. I told my sisters that these bishops had always had good relations with our parents, even during the Nazi period. I could not resist saying this, and it was well judged, ensuring that my conversation with my sisters did not become unduly sentimental and hence hypocritical. Basically I dreaded this funeral more than any other. All the local funerals I had attended in recent years were as nothing compared with this, and I suddenly realized what was in store for me on Saturday, the day of the funeral. How right I had been to tell Zacchi on the telephone that I had been overwhelmed by a calamity! My sisters meanwhile turned to my brother-in-law and instructed him to go across to the Farm to see whether there were not two more funeral sheets in the attic, as Caecilia maintained, in a big cardboard box marked Sunlicht. I nearly laughed out loud when I heard her say the word Sunlicht in that silly tone of hers. The box is marked Sunlicht, she told her husband, who at once went across to the Farm. I guessed that she wanted to be alone with Amalia and me and that this was her sole reason for dispatching her husband on his errand. She simply wanted to get rid of him. He’s an intruder, I thought, and she may have been thinking the same. She too, his own wife, feels that my brother-in-law is a foreign body related only by marriage, I thought. But the idea did not amuse me as much as it should have done—I found it embarrassing. The wine cork manufacturer has gone across to the Farm just so that Caecilia can talk to Amalia and me undisturbed, I thought. When he was no more than twenty yards away from us Caecilia said that her husband got on her nerves, that he was always clinging to her and never left her alone for a moment. This surprised me, for until then I had had the impression that it was she who clung to him. No, he was the leech, she said. Only a week after the wedding she already regarded her husband as a leech and told us so. I saw that Amalia had difficulty suppressing a laugh. How easily one is affected by laughter, even in a dreadful situation like this! I thought. Indeed, such dreadful situations actually provoke laughter. Anyone caught up in a misfortune like ours quickly takes refuge in laughter, I thought. Amalia said that her brother-in-law had not helped them at all in their desperate plight. He had stood at his window and not done a thing. Several times they had asked him to help, for instance by calling the morticians at Vöcklabruck, whom they had engaged for the funeral, but he had done nothing to make himself useful. He had done nothing but go on about what a shock the accident had been for him, without considering how much more of a shock it had been for his wife and her sister, who unlike him could not lock themselves in their rooms and do virtually nothing. People like him can’t cope with such a misfortune, I said. It just lays them low, and they haven’t the strength to get back on their feet. Unlike us, I said, on whom such a misfortune has a far profounder and more devastating effect. We too are laid low, but we immediately get back on our feet and get over it. I immediately regretted saying this but could not take it back. It was actually I who said that we were able to get over our misfortune, not they. What I meant was that we were able to get to grips with misfortune, even the greatest and most appalling misfortune, while the petit bourgeois was not. Of course I did not use the term petit bourgeois, but kept it to myself. The petit bourgeois, I thought, is shattered by such a misfortune and makes an exhibition of himself with his sentimentality—we don’t. The petit bourgeois and the proletarian become accident victims themselves, as it were—we don’t. The petit bourgeois and the proletarian, unlike us, never have the strength to cope with such a devastating misfortune, I thought. I told my sisters that such a misfortune was too much for my brother-in-law’s resources, but they did not understand—they did not appreciate what I meant, or the implied contempt. People like my brother-in-law, I said, must be counted out after a devastating misfortune like ours. As I said this the wine cork manufacturer had not yet disappeared into the Farm but was still making his way toward it. People like my brother-in-law, I added, are by nature too indolent to cope with such misfortunes, because they are far too indolent in every way. They don’t take a cold look at the world, as we do when we have to. My brother-in-law isn’t one of us, I said. Amalia just grimaced. Caecilia turned away without a word, probably to see where her husband was, but by now he was inside the Farm. People like the honest wine cork manufacturer have a totally sentimental view of life, I thought to myself—we don’t. We are repelled by their sentimentality. This sentimentality is also a species of baseness, which they constantly employ to put others at a disadvantage. Their sentimentality makes life easy for them, while causing untold misery to others; they constantly parade their sentimentality, which only disgusts the likes of us. I told my sisters that at Wolfsegg my brother-in-law had landed himself on a slippery slope. Amalia found this amusing, but Caecilia did not. Saying nothing, she turned and looked me coldly in the face. This was tantamount to admitting that her absurd marriage had been a mistake. I was not deceived by the look she gave me. After barely a week, I thought, the scene is completely transformed. It couldn’t be worse. Only a madman could have married you, I told Caecilia, though this was not said with the acerbity that
she read into it, and I was sorry I had said it. It was meant as a joke, but I saw that it cut her to the quick. Caecilia still hates me, I thought. She’s still the same old Caecilia. And Amalia supported her with her sisterly hatred. I have both of them to contend with, I thought, yet at the same time I was sorry for them, for although I did not know precisely what my sisters would have to go through in the immediate future, I had some idea, and the portents were not good. Caecilia suddenly felt that her husband was a nuisance—the husband whom she had brought to Wolfsegg from Baden to spite her mother, to punish her in the only way she knew how, the husband from Freiburg, the most Catholic of all Catholic strongholds. A week after the wedding she was already taking the wine cork manufacturer apart, so to speak, because the sole reason for her marrying him had evaporated and no longer existed. The reason had been my mother’s attitude to her daughters and their relations with men, and hence to their future. Now that she’s dead, the bottom has fallen out of the marriage, I told myself. The wine cork manufacturer was now redundant, though he was not yet aware of this. Not only Caecilia, I thought, but both sisters have begun to think about how to get rid of the wine cork manufacturer, who has lost his usefulness overnight. They dared not say so, of course, but it was obvious from their attitude to him. He gets on my nerves the whole time, Caecilia said more than once, and Amalia said nothing. The facade could no longer be maintained, for it concealed nothing but a deepening aversion. My brother-in-law had been sent away under a ludicrous pretext, I thought, so that my sisters could talk to me about him in the way they liked best—behind his back. The fact that he already got on Caecilia’s nerves the whole time proved that he had always done so, yet in spite of this she had taken up with him and brought him to Wolfsegg, with the connivance of her aunt in Titisee, who was intent upon one-upping my mother. Our aunt from Titisee, I thought, will turn up from the Black Forest and claim her seat in the front row reserved for the family, knowing that she has triumphed. Even if Caecilia’s marriage could already be considered a failure, this would only add to our aunt’s triumph, for she had achieved what she set out to do: she had delivered a body blow to her sister-in-law by prevailing upon my sister, her niece, to take up with this man and marry him shortly afterward. Her triumph is in no way diminished by the fact that the victim of the conspiracy is now dead, I thought; it’s my sister who now has to foot the bill for her aunt’s machinations. She’s landed with the wine cork manufacturer, and he’s begun to play his part. However pathetic his performance, I thought, it’ll be hard to drop him from the cast. At any rate it’ll be hard for Caecilia. I couldn’t care less, as I can get him out of Wolfsegg whenever I want. That’s for me to decide, and I don’t intend to put up with him at Wolfsegg for long, I told myself. And my sister won’t be at Wolfsegg much longer either. Perhaps she senses what I’m thinking—she may even know for certain, I thought. But that’s not my worry. If you enter into a grotesque marriage, as my sister has done, you have to take the consequences, I thought. The consequences of marrying a wine cork manufacturer are bound to be painful, indeed excruciating, and they’re beginning to show. We utter a warning, but it goes unheeded, I thought; we always say the same thing, but the ears it’s intended for don’t hear it. Caecilia turned a deaf ear when I said to her, Hands off the wine cork manufacturer—quit this perverse scheming against your mother. Our aunt from Titisee has incurred a twofold guilt, I thought, toward my mother and toward Caecilia, toward all of us, actually. She never got over the fact that my mother sent her into exile, as it were, thirty years ago because she could no longer bear to have her living at Wolfsegg along with my father, her brother. She exiled her to a small hunting lodge in the Black Forest that has always belonged to the family. Look what your precious Titisee aunt has done, I said to Caecilia. She understood me. I did not say this in a comforting way but in a tone of reproof that is not easily forgiven. He gets on my nerves, she had said, plainly indicating for the first time that she hated him. She wants him out of the way, I thought, and has sent him over to the Farm, where he’ll probably spend ages searching the attic for a box of funeral sheets that don’t exist, as she knows perfectly well. It was outrageous to send her husband up to the attic, where one sends only servants. He never leaves my side, she had said, which could mean only that she already loathed the wine cork manufacturer. I can’t sleep with the windows shut, she said, and he won’t sleep with them open. I’m forever opening the windows, and he’s forever shutting them, all night long. There was not just disappointment in her voice but real indignation, elemental hatred. I noticed that although the wedding decorations had been taken down, a few items were still hanging here and there, overlooked during the hasty funeral preparations. There were carnations, for instance, behind the lamps at the front door of the Farm, which should have been decorated with laurel to betoken mourning. My sister naturally did not say in so many words that her husband smelled, but she might just as well have done so. My mother need not have agonized over the quickest way to break up the marriage, which she had always described as grotesque, I thought; she could have spared herself the agony. I did not begrudge my dead mother this small triumph; in fact it seemed sad that she could no longer have the satisfaction of knowing that this marriage, which she once said she detested from the bottom of her heart and which had been engineered by our Titisee aunt and Caecilia, though chiefly by the former, was already on the rocks, as they say, only a few days after the wedding. While the wine cork manufacturer searched the attic for the funeral sheets in the box marked Sunlicht, his wife was running him down quite shamelessly, unaware of how contemptible her behavior was. The slender thread linking the wine cork manufacturer to Wolfsegg had snapped, although he could not know this. Caecilia had come over to my side, and Amalia was equally unscrupulous in her calculations. They’re trying to salvage whatever can still be salvaged, I thought. To do this they had to ally themselves with me, knowing that I now held the reins. The master they had never considered had suddenly materialized, and having always treated me with hostility, they had nothing good to expect of me. It was therefore vital that they should give an initial impression of weakness, I thought, in order to be able to confront me later from a position of strength. I could see that this was the only tactic available to them. I’m not mistaken, I told myself. I needed a bath, or at least a shower, so I left my sisters and went upstairs. On the way one of the kitchen maids came up and handed me my wallet, which she said I had left in the kitchen. I could not imagine how this had happened, but assumed that I must have taken my wallet out of my jacket pocket without thinking and put it on the kitchen table, where the cook had found it under the newspapers. I’ve given myself away, I thought: if my wallet was found under the newspapers, that’s proof positive of my guilt. I put the wallet in my pocket and went up to my room. We fancy we can get away with lying and not be exposed, I thought, but then we’re exposed by our own carelessness. The air and rail journey from Rome had taken its toll, and I began to feel tired. My room looked as if I had only just moved out. I had not tidied it before returning to Rome, and no one had done so since. They said they’d tidy my room and put everything in order as soon as I’d left, I thought, but nothing had been done, as they had not reckoned on my returning so soon, I had caught them out once more in a bit of negligence. On the other hand, I thought, it’s quite pleasant to come into the room and find everything more or less in disorder. Nothing had been tidied; no one seeing my room would have guessed that I had been in Rome for the past week. Everything seemed to indicate that I had left only a few hours ago, or even less. In all the excitement they had even forgotten to make my bed. They’ve certainly no idea that it hasn’t been made, I thought. Normally they’d have made it, but they haven’t, and this raises doubts about what Caecilia always calls their fanatical obsession with tidiness. I undressed, threw my clothes on the floor, then went into the bathroom and took a shower. I wanted to shave but had no shaving cream, and so, naked except for a bath towel, I went across the hall to my
father’s room to get his. He doesn’t need his shaving cream anymore, I thought. In my father’s bathroom everything was as he had left it, as though he were about to return at any moment. Nothing had been tidied there either. What are they thinking of? I wondered. To my knowledge they have precious little to do all day, yet they don’t even tidy my father’s bathroom; it’s not worth their while to tidy his bathroom, even when he’s dead. Is there no respect for the dead? I asked myself, but I dismissed the thought as distasteful, though it still seemed strange that, two whole days after my father’s death, they had not even tidied his bathroom. But it’s excusable in view of the mourning, I thought. At first unable to find the shaving cream, I rummaged in the bathroom cupboard until I found it. My father, like me, disliked electric shavers and preferred a wet shave. It’s not fair on the skin to use an electric shaver, I told myself, and returned to my bathroom with the shaving cream. In the hall, between my father’s room and mine, I ran into Amalia, who was startled to see me completely naked. Having discarded the bath towel in my father’s bathroom and forgotten to wrap it around me again, I found myself standing naked in front of Amalia, who took advantage of the semidarkness of the hall to stare at me in what seemed a far from sisterly manner. As she remained stock-still, showing no sign of making herself scarce upon seeing me, I walked up to her and asked her if she had never seen a naked man before. Now you can see what I look like—not bad, eh? I said, and stuck my tongue out at her, whereupon she turned on her heel and ran down to the entrance hall. I had not stuck my tongue out at Amalia in thirty years. Fully refreshed, and quite cheered by this incident, I set about shaving. As I did so I thought how badly my sisters had been reared, how my mother had turned them into a pair of ill-bred grown-ups, and not just physically: they were ill-bred and twisted both physically and mentally. Applying the shaving cream to my face and looking at myself in the mirror, I saw a joker; the joker immediately stuck his tongue out at himself and repeated the action several times, enjoying the joke at his own expense. There is nothing more enjoyable than shaving after a journey, even a short journey like mine, which had all the same been quite strenuous. Standing naked in front of the mirror and sticking my tongue out at myself, I no longer felt like a person with a less than normal life expectancy, as I had until now. I went into the bedroom and dressed. For some time I debated whether or not I should put on a black suit, but in the end I opted for a normal everyday outfit, an old brown-and-green Roman jacket and trousers to match. If my sisters were different, I thought, if they weren’t quite so silly, I might find it possible to live with them at Wolfsegg, but then I considered what it would be like without them. It was clear that they were not going to stay with me at Wolfsegg. Caecilia and Amalia will have to go. That’ll be best for all concerned, I thought. They’ve dug themselves in here for life, but now they’ll have to go—never mind where, just go, I thought, for their own good. The play’s more or less over, I thought. Now that the principal characters are dead, lying in state in the Orangery, the minor figures, my sisters, no longer have any business in the theater. The curtain has come down. But not quite, I thought: the satyr play has begun, the most difficult part of the whole show. When I met Caecilia down in the entrance hall, she asked me at least to put on a black tie. At first I refused, but then I conceded that she was right and went back to my room to put one on. I was now properly dressed. I went to the window and saw the wine cork manufacturer walking from the Farm to the Orangery with a large box. My brother-in-law’s actually found the box marked Sunlicht, containing the funeral sheets, I thought. And I thought it didn’t exist! But all the same my sister behaved atrociously, sending her husband, whom she can no longer stand, up into the attic at the Farm simply and solely so that she could be alone at last, as she put it, with Amalia and me. The wine cork manufacturer has an awkward, unpleasant gait, I thought, and when he’s carrying a weight like that it’s even more unpleasant, as it makes him bowlegged. He’s weighed down by the box, though it’s not all that heavy. He carries it in such a way that he seems to have a box on his shoulders instead of a head, I thought. It was a comic sight. In front of the Orangery one of the gardeners relieved him of the box; after that he just stood there, as if not knowing what to do next, the personification of helplessness. I could have gone over and helped him, but I refrained. Such people cannot be helped but remain comic figures, never knowing what to do. The gardeners who had come across from the Farm spoke to him briefly but then went away, as they had other things to attend to. Again I heard snatches of music floating up from the village; they had made some headway in their rehearsal of the Haydn piece. A ponderous piece, I thought. My brother-in-law walked up to the wall to get a view of the village. I watched him trying to make himself taller by getting a foothold on a ledge protruding from the wall, but he could not manage it and looked around, fearful lest someone had seen how clumsy and ridiculous he was. He could not see me, as I was standing behind the window of my room, and at that time in the afternoon the light conditions made it impossible to see in. At this time of day, I told myself, I can stand at the window and watch whatever is going on outside without being seen. Having failed in his attempt to get higher up the wall, the wine cork manufacturer wiped the dirt off his jacket and shoes and looked around again, in all directions. It struck me that his arms were too short. His suits, though tailor-made, are awkward and tasteless, with a provincial, South German cut, and the fabrics he chooses are of the hideous kind favored by the petit bourgeois who has an ambition to better himself and is wholly taken up with this ambition. This is the brother-in-law that our Titisee aunt has wished on us, I thought. The white-shirted wine buff from Baden. Caecilia’s earlier claim that she was married to the best husband in the world could only provoke derision, but such derision could not be given free rein that afternoon: it had to be confined behind the windowpanes. This man deserves no sympathy, I thought, because he was far from guiltless when he entered upon this relationship, of which my sister’s heartily sick only a week after the wedding, but it’s something that Caecilia will have to come to terms with by herself. I’m not going to get mixed up in it, though that doesn’t mean that I won’t go on observing, I thought, and drawing conclusions from what I observe. It was quite unbearable to contemplate having to spend evening after evening sitting with this man, and with my sisters, who never know what to say to me, just as I never know what to say to them. The shock of the accident will only tide me over the next few days until that comes to pass and I’m exposed to what I dread—having to live with the embittered faces of my sisters and the fatuous face of my brother-in-law, bursting into mindless mirth every moment over the least triviality. On the other hand, I reflected, arrogance is not an appropriate means to use against people around us whom we despise and therefore find unbearable. Yet without arrogance we’d be lost. It’s a weapon that has to be used against a world that would otherwise swallow us whole. If we had no arrogance it would give us no quarter. We have to use our arrogance in self-defense, I told myself, deploying it wherever we’re in danger of being devoured. For let’s not deceive ourselves: the people we call stupid and consider beneath us are the most ruthless of all. They don’t care about our feelings, so long as they can discomfit and finally destroy us. Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it’s only feigned, I thought. The truth is that we project our arrogance in order to assert ourselves. It is a perfectly logical proposition to say that I am arrogant in order to survive. Before long, of course, we don’t know whether our arrogance is feigned or genuine, but it’s not necessary to ask ourselves this question all the time; to do so would make us crazy and ultimately demented. It’s a matter of indifference to me that my brother-in-law doesn’t know who Max Bruch is, for even if he had known when my mother put him on the spot over dinner, it wouldn’t have made him a better person. She could just as easily have asked me some question that I couldn’t answer. I don??
?t know all that much; in my own way I’m no better informed than the wine cork manufacturer, I thought, and it’s quite immaterial how cultured a person is. Indeed, anyone whose culture earned my mother’s admiration would have been essentially an awfully mindless creature, what I would call a cultural idiot, but the wine cork manufacturer thinks it important to know who Max Bruch is, who Friedrich Kienzel is, and so forth. Even if he didn’t know who Kant was, this would have no bearing whatever on his character. But the wine cork manufacturer has no character, I thought. I’ve always wondered about the wine cork manufacturer’s lack of character, about the kind of insolence that camouflages itself as helplessness and is quite unscrupulous in its upward mobility. Caecilia was conned, I thought as I watched my brother-in-law standing by the wall. What wouldn’t he be capable of? I wondered. What couldn’t he set his hand to, as they say? But then it occurred to me that if he actually did do something, if he did set his hand to something, he would do it so incompetently as to make himself even more ludicrous. If he were not so lacking in character he would long since have endeared himself to the gardeners, but they’ve been avoiding him—a sure sign something’s wrong with him, I thought, since the gardeners have an incredible instinct where people are concerned. They sense who is to be trusted and who isn’t, and they’ve avoided the wine cork manufacturer from the start, as I saw at the wedding. They positively distrusted him, not just as they would normally distrust any stranger, but quite unequivocally. He must have behaved toward them in a way that made him seem both helpless and characterless. It’s always been instructive to see who is trusted by the gardeners; they’ve never been wrong. Even the way they relieved my brother-in-law of the box he was carrying was indicative of their distrust. It suddenly seemed ridiculous to spend so much time at the window watching my brother-in-law, and so I went down to the entrance hall, though not without stopping in front of the portrait of my great-great-great-granduncle Ferdinand. My Descartes has meanwhile lost some of his philosophical stature, I told myself; with a face like that he can’t have written any Essays. Amalia appeared from the kitchen and said that as it was now late afternoon the first visitors would probably be arriving to express their condolences—a dozen had already turned up that morning—and not just people from the village like the headmaster and the doctor. We should be ready to receive them, she said, preferably in or near the entrance hall. The chapel, or even the kitchen, would be a suitable place to receive them, as she did not want them going up to the second floor. It would be best to exchange just a few words with them, not more, and then send them away. I dreaded the thought of how the very people I really loathe would be coming up to see us one after another—middle-class people from the neighboring towns who would unhesitatingly seize upon the opportunity to visit us, as their right, without being invited, and to drive their cars into the grounds without so much as a by-your-leave. I could already see these inquisitive visitors getting out of their cars one after another and importuning us with their sickening condolences, which we would have to receive graciously. At all events I’ll shake their hands more coldly than any I’ve shaken before, I thought, and so avoid adding any cordiality to our relations with these people. Mentally I was already practicing my handshake and rehearsing the bland words I thought I would have to say to them. But these were not the people I was afraid of. I’ll deal with them cursorily, in a way that won’t cause me the slightest irritation, I thought. The people I was afraid of were the two former Gauleiters who I knew had announced their intention of attending the funeral, and the fairly large contingent of SS officers, whom I had once believed to be long dead or at least to have received their due punishment, but who, as I learned some years back, had gone underground and remained in contact with my family for decades, with my parents and many other relatives. They’ll use this funeral, I thought, to appear publicly again for the first time. But I can’t prevent them from attending the funeral, I thought. They’ll come whether I want them to or not. The former Gauleiters won’t be put off. I know that one of them sent thousands of people to Austrian or German prisons and that his signature consigned thousands of others to Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. And I know that the other sent just as many people, mainly Jews, to concentration camps in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. To say nothing of the so-called League of Comrades, which inevitably parades at every funeral and seems to me to be a wholly National Socialist organization, for its mentality is thoroughly National Socialist and its members, wherever one sees them, no longer have the least compunction in brazenly wearing their National Socialist insignia on their chests. I was actually afraid of the Gauleiters, not knowing how I should greet these friends of my father’s—first of all his school friends, or lifelong friends as he called them, and then those he remained in close touch with after the war, knowing them to be informers and murderers. Despite this knowledge he supplied them with a hiding place and food and everything they needed to make ends meet, as he would have put it. For years, it seems, he hid them in the Children’s Villa, though at the time we children had no inkling of this. I later recalled that for years we were not allowed in the Children’s Villa. There was a simple explanation for this: in the postwar years our parents used it to hide their National Socialist friends. They wisely made sure that the villa looked completely uninhabited and let the exterior fall into disrepair, while the wanted men inside—informers, murderers, and members of the Blood Order—lived not at all badly, for my family never had to suffer from a shortage of food; even during and after the war they had everything in abundance, as they say, while the rest of the population, as my mother called them, starved and went without. The Children’s Villa was the Gauleiters’ hiding place, but I fancy that my parents’ many SS friends were also allowed to share in our abundance. I got to know gradually about this period, which had always seemed a weird time to us children when I was thirteen or fourteen, as may be imagined. We were expressly forbidden to enter the Children’s Villa, but when I was about fifteen it was finally thrown open to us, for I remember that at that time we used to put on our plays there. Even today, although I have always loved the building, I find it a rather sinister place because of the way it was desecrated. My parents may have hidden and supported other adherents of their National Socialist faith, not only in the Children’s Villa but in various hunting lodges we owned, even, I suspect, in the one above Weieregg, which is almost inaccessible. My parents always kept quiet about these dark doings, and it was impossible to get anything out of them. As they vouchsafed no information, the only evidence of their close association with these people was the fact that they corresponded with them all regularly until their deaths. While my parents dined with the Americans or toasted General Eisenhower at their champagne breakfasts, the Gauleiters sat just a few hundred yards away, no doubt enjoying equal conviviality and an equal abundance of food and drink. Wolfsegg has always been a perverse place, and my parents pushed this perversity to the limit. The huntsmen were probably privy to this perversest of all its secrets, I think, and never dared betray it to the gardeners. I shall now have to receive these people, I thought; there’s nothing else for it. Today they all live scot-free in agreeable circumstances, in all the country’s beauty spots, and draw enormous state pensions. But today’s society gets what it deserves, I thought. It deserves these perverse conditions, being itself totally perverse. Basically, I thought, these people—the Gauleiters, the SS officers, and the members of the Blood Order—are its people. These are the people my countrymen regard as heroes, not just as yesterday’s heroes, as is frequently maintained, but to an even greater extent as today’s heroes. These National Socialists are the people they look up to and secretly acknowledge as their leaders. I’ll have to shake hands with these secret leaders of my countrymen, I thought. I won’t be able to prevent these secret leaders from taking their places in the front ranks when the cortege moves off. I was sickened by this embarrassing prospect, this obscenity that I would have to face. My sisters had gleefully recited to me the n
ames of all who had announced that they would attend the funeral, and the list was headed by the Gauleiters, the SS officers, and the members of the Blood Order. But I must cope with this situation, I told myself severely. Not just for days, but for weeks on end, these Gauleiters, SS officers, and members of the Blood Order used to sit around at Wolfsegg or stroll through the grounds, and for decades my parents supported them. This was why Uncle Georg always found visiting my parents unendurable and why I too had to leave on hearing that such company was expected. National Socialism is the greatest blight on Austria, along with Catholicism, I thought, just as Fascism, combined with Catholicism, was the greatest blight on Italy. But things are different in Italy. The Italians did not let themselves be swallowed up by either Fascism or Catholicism, whereas the Austrians let themselves be swallowed up by both. The bishops (including two archbishops, I thought, for Spadolini is the archbishop) will be followed—with measured tread, as they say—by the Gauleiters, the SS officers, and the members of the Blood Order. And these will be followed by the National Socialist Catholic population, I thought. And the music will be played by our National Socialist Catholic band. The National Socialist salvos will be fired, and the National Socialist bells will toll. And if we’re in luck our National Socialist sun will shine throughout the ceremony, and if we’re out of luck we’ll be drenched by the National Socialist rain. My sisters and Johannes knew nothing about this secret Wolfsegg, even as teenagers. It was mainly my sisters’ stupidity that prevented my parents’ divulging anything. For when we were suddenly allowed back in the Children’s Villa in our middle teens, we naturally wanted to know why we had not been allowed in before, why we had been forbidden to go near it. Our parents, as former party members, said nothing. But naturally they could not keep the secret forever, and one day it came out. One of the Gauleiters paid a visit to Wolfsegg, and no sooner had he entered the house than he began to talk, in my presence, of the time he had spent in the Children’s Villa as the best years of his life. Standing next to him, I heard about how he and his comrades had lived in the Children’s Villa for nearly four years. How they had eaten and how they had drunk! He was eternally grateful to my mother, who was highly embarrassed because I was present. The Gauleiter became more and more effusive in his expressions of gratitude and could not be silenced. He went into raptures above all about the fresh air, the fresh eggs that my mother brought him and his friends every day, and the fresh milk from the Wolfsegg cows. The entrance hall resounded to the Gauleiter’s laughter, with which he frequently interrupted his speech of thanks before resuming his triumphal performance. He lives at Alt Aussee on a state pension that is paid monthly and, like all Austrian state pensions, subject to half-yearly increments of four or five percent. The state awarded him this pension thirty years ago, when his crimes had been hushed up and proceedings against him quashed, as they say, without batting an eyelid—as they also say. I thought of Schermaier, a miner from Kropfing, below Wolfsegg, who not only worked in the mines but also, in partnership with his wife, ran a smallholding with three cows. I used to go and see Schermaier whenever I became desperate at Wolfsegg; even today I am closer to him than to anyone else in the vicinity and always visit him when I am over at Wolfsegg. During the war, a neighbor of his informed on him for listening to the Swiss radio. The informer, who had been his best friend at school, had him taken to court and sent first to the penitentiary at Garsten and then to a German concentration camp in Holland. His neighbor and former best friend had him driven out of his home for two years to the very prisons and extermination camps that tomorrow’s mourners, the Gauleiters, have on their consciences. Schermaier was denounced, committed to penitentiaries and concentration camps, and virtually ruined for the rest of his life, I thought, and nobody gave him a second thought. He was not compensated for the cruelty he suffered. After the war, the informer who had had him sent to the penitentiaries and concentration camps begged him on bended knees not to take revenge. Schermaier took no revenge and does not speak about the matter to anyone, though when I visit him and his wife for a simple meal she sometimes bursts into tears because she has still not gotten over that period of their lives. Schermaier received no proper compensation; the state fobbed him off in the most disgusting fashion with a derisory lump sum for all he had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, yet on the first of every month the mass murderer at Alt Aussee gets an enormous pension from the same state and is assured of a life of luxury, I thought. The state humiliated Schermaier and will never redeem his humiliation, I thought, yet shortly after the war the same state restored the mass murderer of Alt Aussee to full enjoyment of his civil rights and thereby endorsed all his actions and beliefs. I hate this state, I thought. I can’t do anything other than hate it. I won’t have anything to do with this state, or no more than is absolutely necessary, I thought. This state has so often demonstrated its absolute lack of character that it has forfeited all respect, whether it calls itself socialist, progressive, or democratic. This state is unspeakable, I thought, without character and without shame, yet it has never been ashamed of its characterlessness and its shamelessness but seen fit to flaunt them on every possible occasion. What kind of a state is it, I ask myself, that pays a fat pension to a mass murderer and showers him with honors and commendations, yet no longer troubles about Schermaier? What kind of a state is it that allows the mass murderer to live in luxury and has forgotten about Schermaier? I’ll go and see Schermaier as soon as I can, I thought, and left the house. The band was still rehearsing its Haydn. The gardeners were pulling the Wolfsegg hearse across from the Farm to a position behind the Orangery. The wine cork manufacturer was standing in their way. They asked him to move, and he withdrew into the background. My sisters were in the Orangery, and I debated whether I should go in myself. Schermaier is neither a Catholic nor a National Socialist, I thought. There aren’t many like him, but there are some. And there aren’t many women like his wife, but there are some. I decided to go into the Orangery. My sisters were in front of the coffins, busily adjusting the ribbons on the wreaths so that the printed messages could be read. The Gauleiters had already sent theirs. Had it been possible, I would have opened the lid of my mother’s coffin, but of course it was not possible. Yet the idea kept running through my head that I must look inside the coffin in which my mother lay. The word lay struck me as grotesque. My father’s face was now quite sunken and gray, and yellow patches had formed on it that I had not noticed on my first visit to the Orangery. Johannes had become unrecognizable. His face was that of a stranger, quite repulsive. Under the black sheets the gardeners had stacked large blocks of ice to slow the process of decomposition, which was clearly well advanced, as the season was unfavorable to corpses. They’ve brought the ice from the Grieskirchen brewery, I thought. The coffins must have been expensive, probably the most expensive that were to be had, I thought. But at least they were unadorned. Plain wood, nothing else. They’ve folded my father’s and my brother’s hands because it’s customary, I thought, but I was put off by the sight of their folded hands. They’ve dressed my father in Styrian costume, the kind with broad decorative stripes, I thought, and big deerhorn buttons on the lapels, and they’ve dressed my brother in his favorite hunting outfit, the one he bought in Brussels. I went closer to the coffins, my sisters having moved aside to make way for me. They must have been repelled, or at least irritated, by my self-assurance as I now stood in front of the coffins. I noticed that I was quite motionless. I had imagined I would tremble, but no part of my body moved. I contemplated the dead lying in state as though they had no connection with me, as though they were strangers. They no longer had any facial features; they did not even have faces. They’re decomposing rapidly, I thought. They’ll have to be buried soon, otherwise they’ll pollute the atmosphere. The Orangery was already filled with the sickly-sweet smell of decay that I had found unbearable as a small child when my mother took me to see the dead lying in state. Even as a child I could not stand corpses, but my mother continuall
y confronted me with them, taking me with her to funerals and lyings in state. She never took Johannes, only me, and this is something I cannot explain. I was thus quite used to the sight of the dead lying in state, though it was my mother who forced me to look at them; I would naturally not have chosen to. My sisters stood behind me. I could hear their breathing, but I did not know what they were thinking. They must be thinking I’m the cold-blooded, unfeeling wretch they always took me to be, I thought. They always called me cold and unfeeling. Whether they were right or not is not for me to say. But as I stood before the coffins I was neither cold nor unfeeling, but shattered, I might say, were this not such a common expression, yet I did not move; my body remained motionless. I never wanted my parents to die, I told myself as I stood in front of their bodies; never for a moment did I wish them dead. Standing in front of them, I told myself that although I had always cursed and even despised them, although I had no respect for them, only contempt, and although I had every reason to despise them heartily, as they say, I had never wanted them to die. And in Johannes I had lost a childhood friend, but our childhood lay so far back, well over thirty years back, that I had no reason to shed tears for my dead brother. At that moment I might even have welcomed tears, if only because my sisters were standing behind me, possibly expecting me to weep, to blub, as they say, to break down. But I did not weep, I did not blub, I just stood there motionless. I went up to my mother’s coffin and tried to raise the lid—I do not know what suddenly prompted me to do this—but I could not raise it, as it was screwed down. I stepped back, sensing the embarrassment that this action had caused my sisters. I turned around abruptly, taking them by surprise, and looked into their embittered, horrified faces. Unable to stand in front of the coffins any longer, I went out of the Orangery. I asked one of the gardeners why my mother’s coffin was sealed. He told me that it was already sealed when the morticians had delivered it to Wolfsegg; the two others were not sealed, but my mother’s was. Yes, naturally, I said—of course. They put her mutilated, decapitated body straight into the coffin and immediately sealed it, I thought. So that no one would have the idea of looking at the mutilated body again. But I’ve had the idea, I told myself, though of course I won’t have the coffin reopened. For a moment I had thought of having it reopened and wondered how to give the necessary instructions, but then I forbade myself even to think of having the coffin opened and revealing the mutilated body. That would have been an obscenity. Yet I could not rid myself of the thought of having the coffin reopened—by the gardeners, I thought, when my sisters aren’t present. I could not stop thinking about reopening my mother’s coffin and spent a long time walking up and down outside the Orangery, obsessed by the thought, while my sisters remained inside. I had to stop thinking about it and tried to distract my mind by beckoning one of the gardeners over and asking him whether the blocks of ice under the bodies would last till the following morning. (The funeral was scheduled for ten o’clock; funerals usually took place at eleven o’clock, but when a member of our family died the funeral was always scheduled for ten.) The gardener told me that there was enough ice for another four days. He was surprised that I addressed him by name. People think that when we have been away for a few years we no longer remember their names, but I have a good memory for names, and naturally I knew his, and those of the others. I had hoped that by exchanging a few words with the gardener about the ice blocks I would be able to rid my mind of the monstrous idea of having my mother’s coffin opened, but naturally I did not succeed in so short a time, and so I started up a conversation with the gardener as he weeded the gravel in front of the Orangery. I said I was sure he remembered the time when we were at school together. He said he did. I mentioned the names of some of our classmates, and he remembered them at once. I reminded him of some of the funny things that had happened at school. He could not help laughing, but he stopped when he saw my sisters emerge from the Orangery, unaware that I had been standing in front of it, talking to the gardener. Although my sisters were now standing next to me, I went on talking to the gardener about our school days, determined to distract my mind from the idea of having my mother’s coffin opened, yet becoming more and more obsessed by it. Above all, I thought, we have to check what’s really in the coffin. We have to find out whether it really is Mother we’re burying, whether the coffin contains the whole of her remains and not just some of them. While asking the gardener how heavy the ice blocks were, I was in fact preoccupied with the notion that my mother’s coffin might not contain the whole of her body, but I naturally dared not put this into words, even to myself. My sisters stood to one side, taking no part in the conversation. They never talked to the gardeners about personal matters, as they had no interest in them and the lives they led. They never remembered their names or, I believe, the names of any of our employees. It would never have occurred to them to talk to the gardeners about anything unconnected with their work, and for this reason, if for no other, I went on talking to the gardener. Keeping my eye on my sisters and at the same time ignoring them, I asked him when his father had died. (Ages ago, when I was five or six, his father had made me a recorder out of hazel-wood.) Two years ago, he said. But I was not really interested in when his father had died. My question was only a device to distract myself from my obscene thoughts about my mother’s coffin and at the same time to distance myself from my sisters, to punish them for some quite unspecified offense. I went on talking to the gardener, unable to stop thinking of opening my mother’s coffin, ignoring my sisters and prolonging my conversation with the gardener. It was astonishing that he had worked at Wolfsegg for so many years under conditions that were far from easy, I said, knowing that this would get home to my sisters. Conditions at Wolfsegg were always extremely difficult, I said, without being more specific. There was no need to be specific, for my tone of voice conveyed what I meant about the conditions at Wolfsegg, and the gardener at once understood what I meant—that for decades, if not for centuries, the owners had always made life difficult. On the other hand, I told myself, it’s fortunate for us—and by us I meant my family as a whole—that we have good workers like him. My sisters listened attentively, though they had their backs to us, pretending that there was no reason to pay any attention to me and the gardener. Caecilia pressed the toe of one shoe into the ground at the side of the path, as though to trace a letter in the soil. This was a habit she had had as a child. She said something to Amalia that I did not catch, but this was only pretense, as they were both absorbed by what I was saying to the gardener. In this way we were all three playing games, all spying and eavesdropping on one another. It struck me that just as I was exploiting the gardener, simply in order to take my mind off my obscene thoughts about my mother’s coffin, so they were exploiting each other in order to spy on me. I stopped talking to the gardener and joined my sisters, thinking that they would be able to stifle my obscene thoughts, that their almost incessant chatter, which was doubtless a reaction to the terrible situation created by the accident, would provide the distraction I sought. I suggested that we go over to the Children’s Villa. I have no idea what prompted this suggestion. We all three walked over to the Children’s Villa. On the way I remembered how Schermaier had never spoken about the time he spent in the prisons, the penitentiaries, and the concentration camp in Holland, and decided that if he did not speak about it I would one day write about it. In Extinction, the book I’m planning, I’ll write about Schermaier, about the injustice he suffered and the crimes committed against him, I thought. His wife still wept when forced to think of those bitter years that had brought them both such unhappiness, but she too never said why she wept. It’s my duty, I thought, to write about them in my Extinction, to cite them as representatives of so many others who never speak about what they suffered during the Nazi period and permit themselves only to weep now and then—all the victims whom the National Socialists have on their conscience, the National Socialist criminals whose crimes are never mentioned today, having been hushed up
for so many years. I’ll say quite simply that our National Socialist society was able, with impunity, to destroy him for the rest of his life, even though it could not annihilate him. On the way to the Children’s Villa I promised myself that in my Extinction I would find a way of drawing attention to him, even if I could not restore to him the rights of which the Nazis had deprived him. My Extinction will provide the best opportunity to do this, I thought, if I ever manage to get it down on paper. Thinking about the Schermaiers made me forget the monstrous idea of having my mother’s coffin opened. When we arrived at the Children’s Villa and my sisters were unlocking the door, I began to talk to them about the Schermaiers, whom they knew well, as I reminded them. I told them that I could not get the Schermaiers out of my mind. I had no hesitation, I said, in describing them as the best people I knew, yet it was on these people that the full horror of National Socialism had been visited. His best friend informed against him, I said, as Caecilia unlocked the door. His best friend was base enough to denounce him and have him sent to a concentration camp. I could not get it out of my mind, I said. In Rome I often lay on my bed, unable to stop thinking of how our nation was guilty of thousands, tens of thousands, of such heinous crimes, yet remained silent about them. The fact that it keeps quiet about these thousands and tens of thousands of crimes is the greatest crime of all, I told my sisters. It’s this silence that’s so sinister, I said. It’s the nation’s silence that’s so terrible, even more terrible than the crimes themselves, I said. And to think that I have to receive these murderers! I’ll refuse to shake hands with them, I said. I can’t exclude them from the funeral, but I won’t shake their hands. If I did, I too would be guilty of a crime. It was in the Children’s Villa, I said, the building I loved best as a child, that our parents hid these common criminals and provided them with a life of luxury at a time of the greatest hardship. And they were never ashamed of it, I said. On the contrary, they boasted of their base behavior, I said. All this time my sisters did not say a word. Our parents made themselves guilty, I said, by harboring and sheltering these loathsome people, who should have been tried and sentenced. And executed, of course. What must people like the Schermaiers think, I said, when they see how these murderers are treated, when they see mass murderers going around scot-free, leading a life of luxury, while they themselves are forgotten and live in the most miserable conditions? This state is like my family, devoted to Nazi criminality. And the Catholic Church, I went on, is no better. The Church only ever seeks its own advantage, keeping quiet when it ought to speak out and taking cover, when things get too dangerous, behind Jesus Christ, whom it has exploited for two thousand years. I’m nauseated by these people, I said, who will follow the coffins tomorrow, heads bowed, with nothing to fear, all of them highly esteemed members of our society. In my own way, I said, I’ll distance myself from all these people whom I’ve always hated. I won’t let them near me. I’m not Father, I’m not Mother, I said. The Children’s Villa was almost completely bare. What’s happened to the beautiful pictures, I wondered, that I saw here only a year ago in the entrance hall, one on each side, and on the walls of the downstairs rooms? I was told that my mother had sold these pictures, painted by early ancestors of ours, to an antique dealer from Wels, for a knockdown price. I always despised my mother’s lack of appreciation for exceptional works of art. My father had no time at all for pictures, unless he was told that they were valuable. This used to impress my mother too; nothing else did. Neither had an eye for art. The walls of the downstairs rooms were now cold and unwelcoming, I thought, though only a year ago they had been so attractive. But the Children’s Villa has in any case been degraded by having accommodated two mass murderers for so long, I thought. That has made it intolerable. On the other hand, I had earlier considered restoring the Children’s Villa, and this now seemed a good idea. I was instantly taken with the idea and said to my sisters, No matter what took place here, the Children’s Villa is the first building I’ll have restored, from top to bottom. It’ll be as it was before its degradation. The Children’s Villa is the most beautiful building at Wolfsegg, I said. And summer is the best time for restoration work. The Wolfsegg money should be spread around, I said. It’s madness to let it molder in banks. My sisters did not understand me. In any case the place must be aired, I told them. I said we should open all the windows. It’s frightfully stuffy in here, I said. As it was a fine, warm day, we opened all the windows one after another, first in the ground-floor rooms and then upstairs. This was done in complete silence; even my sisters did not speak to each other. I recalled that only three or four days earlier I had described the Children’s Villa to Gambetti, and now, as we opened the windows, I had proof of how accurate my description had been. The windows really were as big as I had described them, taller than any others at Wolfsegg except those in the main house, taller than any in the Huntsmen’s Lodge or the Gardeners’ House. And on the ceilings were the plaster moldings that I had tried to describe to Gambetti, representing scenes from German classical plays—Lessing’s Nathan, Schiller’s Robbers, Goethe’s Faust. No one knows whose work they are, but I think they were done by itinerant artists, of whom there were many in the last century. These artists would settle in a place for months or even years on end and create works of art like these in return for a good meal and a pair of shoes. There are big cracks running through the moldings—it’s high time they were repaired, I thought. My sisters had no idea of the subjects represented by the moldings. From Nathan, I said, but I could see that this meant nothing to them. They knew about Faust, of course, but they did not know the scene represented on the ceiling. They had naturally heard about The Robbers at school, as I had, but they had forgotten the play itself; they remembered only the title and the fact that it was something classical. I tried to tell them something about The Robbers but immediately gave up trying to explain anything, realizing that it was pointless. I could now see that I had given Gambetti a fairly exact description of these moldings. He had listened with great attention. The influence of the Roman school on this anonymous art is unmistakable, I had told him. In all such moldings north of the Alps, I said, we at once see the Italian influence. The Italians have always been the best stucco artists. I now remembered everything I had told him about the stucco artists who had decorated the Children’s Villa. I now have proof, I told myself, that when once I’ve seen a picture or a molding I can remember it with absolute precision for years, indeed for decades, and if required I can describe it so accurately that my description corresponds exactly with what I once saw. I need to see and study a picture or a molding only once in order to retain a precise image of it for years, even for decades, as I now see. When I told my sisters that I had just made an interesting discovery—that I was able to remember pictures I had once seen and give an account of them years later—they did not understand. In the first place they could not follow my thoughts, and in the second place they did not know Gambetti. They had heard me speak of him in passing now and then, but largely because of their hostility to me they had no time for anything Roman, which I naturally loved, having been fascinated by it before I had ever been to Italy and visited Rome. They did not understand me at all. They’re determined not to understand me, I thought—it’s become a principle with them, a lifetime habit, not to understand me. They’ve never wanted to understand me, and they still don’t want to. The Children’s Villa meant almost everything to me, but to them it meant practically nothing. They were thus fairly indifferent to what I had just said about the Children’s Villa and the Gauleiters, feeling that it was directed only against the family, and our parents in particular. And they found it especially odious that I should accuse our parents just now, when they had been dead scarcely two days. They did not appreciate how painful it was to me to see the Children’s Villa, my favorite building at Wolfsegg, my favorite work of architecture, besmirched once more by the National Socialist Gauleiters. Such thought processes are completely alien to them and impossible to follow. When we ha
d opened all the windows and a welcome draft of fresh air flowed in, I told my sisters that I wanted to leave the windows open so that the fresh air could flow freely into the Children’s Villa for several days. Exhausted by the absurd task I had set them, as it must have seemed to them, they sat side by side on a seat covered with green velvet in the left-hand room of the attic. Once again I saw the mocking faces so familiar from the photo I kept in my desk in Rome. For a moment they showed me these mocking faces in the afternoon light, then they turned and looked out the window, across the village and toward the mountains. Slavishly, they both turned their heads simultaneously in the direction of the mountains. Like two puppets, I thought, they turned to face the distant mountains. I could now order them to do anything and they would obey. I had them entirely in my hands. Yet I felt this to be not a triumph but an intolerable burden. I was saddled with them. You’re in for a surprise with these two, I thought. And what if there’s a storm? Amalia asked. What do you mean, a storm? I said. What if a storm comes up and smashes all the windows? There’ll be no storm, I said, not for days. Seeing my sisters sitting exhausted on the seat, I had a strong urge to lecture them, to say something Roman, something offensive, as it were, that would enable me to endure their presence, as I felt I could endure it no longer. But I abandoned the idea. It won’t do any good, I told myself—it’ll only make matters worse. My attention was fixed mainly on Caecilia, who seemed to have forgotten about her wine cork manufacturer. If only my brother-in-law were not so helpless, I said. Caecilia did not answer, and Amalia pretended not to hear. Beastliness has its limits, I said, meaning that one should not pursue one’s hatred of someone—meaning our mother—to the point of marrying an idiot just to punish the person one hates. I naturally did not say this but kept it to myself. What I did say was: You must give your husband something to occupy him. It’s not fair to leave him entirely alone, in every sense of the word. Since I’ve been here he’s done more or less nothing but hang around the park and get on people’s nerves. Caecilia stood up and went out of the room, down the stairs, through the entrance hall, and into the open. Amalia had also stood up, and we both watched Caecilia walk away from the villa. She’s running away from us, I thought, the silly goose, having messed up her life. The words silly goose were spoken only to myself, but so loudly that Amalia must have heard. I don’t understand why our parents christened you Amalia and Caecilia, I said. Catholic National Socialist romantics, I thought. I then left the Children’s Villa with Amalia and went over to the Orangery, where my brother-in-law was standing. The personification of idleness, I thought as I saw him. The wine cork manufacturer was displeased at being caught out as a personification of idleness, especially by me. Now you have to talk to him, I thought, and so I went straight up to him. No Caecilia in sight, and no sign of Amalia either. There he is, I thought, abandoned by everybody and not knowing where he belongs—certainly not here at Wolfsegg. I invited him to accompany me to the house. I feel like something to eat, I said. We’ll be able to find something in the kitchen. I was astonished by the chummy way I said this. It was not intentional, but this was how it came out. The wine cork manufacturer walked beside me. I’ve rescued him from his impossible situation for a while, on my own initiative, I thought. For a moment I even felt sorry for him, but not for long, for after only a few yards he struck me once more as an obtrusive person. How these people behave! I thought. They don’t behave at all—they just do what comes naturally. There was no one in the kitchen. I looked for something to eat and found some delicious things in the well-stocked refrigerator. We may despise certain people, I told myself, sitting opposite the wine cork manufacturer, yet at the same time we may envy them their unconcern, their nonchalance, their lack of self-restraint—for instance in the way they eat. At first they’re hesitant and take only a little, then suddenly, without the least compunction, they wolf down more or less everything we put in front of them. Again I was repelled by the fat, fleshy fingers and the signet ring forced onto the little finger of the right hand. He probably won’t be able to get it off, I thought, if he ever wants to. He had crossed his legs under the table and pushed his belly against it. His cuff links are even bigger than his signet ring, I thought—a matching set. He was waiting for me to say something, as if anxious for me to start a conversation, but I felt no inclination to start a conversation with the wine cork manufacturer. I remembered having told Zacchi that I would be back in Rome in three or four days. But that won’t be possible, I thought. I’ll have to stay on at Wolfsegg for a week, maybe longer. I can now see that a week won’t be long enough, because the tiresome part will come after the funeral, I told myself. I’ll have to go to the attorneys’ offices and various other offices, the district commissioner’s, and so on. At present I could see only the tip of the iceberg. It’s odd, I said to my brother-in-law, to see my father and brother lying in state, but not my mother. On the other hand, I said, their faces no longer bear any relation to their real faces. They’re the faces of strangers who don’t have anything to do with me. They must be buried as quickly as possible. He had hardly gotten to know his parents- and brother-in-law, I said, and now they were dead. As I said this, I caught sight of the words fall victim in the newspaper lying on top of the pile in front of me, to which a few more copies had been added. The phrase fall victim was ludicrous, like everything the papers wrote. I asked my brother-in-law whether he had read the newspaper reports of the accident. I had long since finished eating, but he was still wolfing down big slices of bread and sausage. With a shake of the head he declined even to open the papers. He could not possibly do so in front of me—it would be quite impermissible. I found this unpardonably tasteless. He was looking at the papers lying in front of me, yet at the same time he shook his head, refusing my offer of a chance to inform himself further about the accident and the precise course of events. There have been so many fatal accidents at that particular junction, I said, affecting the style of the newspapers. It can be seen quite clearly and doesn’t look particularly dangerous, yet again and again accidents take place there, most of them fatal, I said. My brother-in-law was meanwhile playing the moralist. As he wolfed down the bread and sausage, he first drew up his legs, then pulled back his arms, which were spread across the table, making sure that his cuff links did not come in contact with the plate of open sandwiches I had prepared for him. Munching his bread and sausage, he seemed to be asking how I could possibly imagine that he would have the effrontery to read these tasteless newspapers with their horror stories in my presence, or for that matter at all, at a time of family grief. He had glanced contemptuously at the front pages, which showed pictures of the victims, yet I could see that his contempt was accompanied by a certain disappointment at being prevented, by my presence, from staring at them unrestrainedly. He was pretending to be incapable of such unworthy conduct, whereas I had been quite capable of it, I thought. As he masticated his bread and sausage he kept eyeing the newspapers, especially when he thought I was not looking. They clearly interested him, and he would certainly have read them with the utmost avidity had he been alone, uninhibited by the presence of someone whom he was bound to think incapable of even contemplating such shameless conduct, let alone engaging in it. Yet all the time I knew that I had engaged in it two hours earlier. Not right now, he said. Coming from my brother-in-law, these words were as hypocritical as if they had come from me, for at that moment I could have said the same. The round went to me because he said it and I did not. I was the decent person who could control himself, whereas he had to put on an act by uttering the profoundly hypocritical words not right now. As soon as he had uttered them he too was bound to see how hypocritical they were. After all, I thought, the man wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t see at once what the words really meant and what effect they had on me. He must have known that I saw through them. They slipped out more or less inadvertently and lost any credibility they might have had in their passage from brain to air. Now that my brother-in-law had been unmasked as a h
ypocrite in a profoundly sad situation, a situation that was literally one of deadly earnest, I could go a step further and show my magnanimity by pushing the papers toward him before he had finished all the open sandwiches. I suggested that he read them in order to get an idea of how the press saw the accident. He should take a look at them, I said, leaning back in my chair, as though not wanting to disturb him in his reading. I recalled something that Zacchi had once said about me—that I was infernally skillful at concealing my own beastliness. I was still amused by Zacchi’s remark. He made it at the Ancora Verde in Trastevere, where we had gone with Maria to talk about a planned excursion to Castel Gandolfo and about Sartre’s The Words, which we had all three read simultaneously without knowing it. We discussed The Words until late in the night, at much greater length than any book we had discussed before. As he chewed the last of the bread and sausage, the wine cork manufacturer began leafing through the newspapers, looking now at an illustrated page, now at an unillustrated one, and stretching out his legs as people do when reading a newspaper. He’s really made himself at home with the accident and its exploiters, I thought. Nothing in his demeanor betrayed the least embarrassment. He was farsighted and could not see well close up. But he avoids wearing glasses, I thought. He held the paper up to the light from the window, far enough away from his eyes to be able to take everything in. He should have had glasses long ago, I thought, the kind of reading glasses I’ve had for years, but people like him are too vain to resort to glasses. I’ll tell Caecilia that her husband should get himself some glasses without delay, and I’ll also tell her that he read all about the accident in the newspapers lying on the kitchen table in my presence.