Bruck-on-Leitha, moreover, is such an ugly place, as are most of the places in Burgenland. Anyone who can do so leaves the Burgenland, Irrsigler says, but most of them cannot, they are sentenced to Burgenland for life, which is at least as terrible as imprisonment for life at Stein-on-Danube. The Burgenlanders are convicts, says Irrsigler, their native land is a penal institution. They try to make themselves believe that they have a beautiful homeland, but in reality Burgenland is boring and ugly. In winter the Burgenlanders choke in snow and in summer they are eaten alive by mosquitoes. And in spring and autumn the Burgenlanders only wallow in their own filth. In the whole of Europe there is no poorer and no filthier region, Irrsigler says. The Viennese are forever persuading the Burgenlanders that Burgenland is a beautiful province, because the Viennese are in love with Burgenland filth and with Burgenland dimwittedness because they regard this Burgenland filth and this Burgenland dim-wittedness
as romantic, because in their Viennese way they are perverse. Anyway,
apart from Herr Haydn, as Herr Reger says, Burgenland has produced nothing, Irrsigler says. I come from Burgenland means nothing other than I come from Austria's penal institution. Or from Austria's mental institution, Irrsigler says.
The Burgenlanders go to Vienna as if to church, he says. A Burgenlander's fondest wish is to join the Vienna police, he said a few days ago, I failed to do so because I was too weak, because of
physical weakness. Anyway I am an attendant at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and just as much a public servant. In the evening, after six, I do not lock up any criminals but works of art, I lock up Rubens and Bellotto. His uncle, who had entered the services of the Kunsthistorisches Museum immediately after the First World War, had been envied by everyone in the family. Whenever they had visited him at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, once in every few years, on free-admission Saturdays or Sundays, they had always followed him
totally intimidated through the rooms with the great masters and had not ceased to admire
his uniform. Naturally his uncle had soon become Senior Attendant and had worn a small brass star on his uniform lapel, Irrsigler said. With all that reverence and admiration they had, as he was leading them through the rooms, understood nothing of what he said to them. There would have been no point in explaining Veronese to them, Irrsigler said a few days ago. My sister's children, Irrsigler said, admired my soft shoes, my sister stopped in front of the Reni, in front of that most tasteless of all painters exhibited here. Reger hates Reni, therefore Irrsigler hates Reni too. Irrsigler has achieved a high degree of mastery in appropriating Reger's statements, indeed he now utters them almost perfectly in Reger's characteristic tone. My sister visits
me and not the museum, Irrsigler said. My sister does not care for art at all. But her children are amazed at everything they see when I guide them through the rooms. They stop in front of the Velazquez and refuse to move away from it, Irrsigler said. Herr Reger once invited me and my family to the Prater, Irrsigler said,
the generous Herr Reger, on a Sunday evening. When his wife was still alive, Irrsigler said. I stood there, watching Reger, who was still
engrossed, as they say, in contemplating Tintoretto's
White-Bearded Man, and simultaneously saw Irrsigler, who was not in the Bordone Room, recounting to me chunks of his life story, i.e. the images with Irrsigler from the past week at the same time as Reger, who was sitting on the velvet settee, and naturally, had not yet noticed me. Irrsigler had said that even as a small child his fondest wish had been to join the Vienna police, to be a policeman. He had never wanted to have any other profession. And when, at the time he was twentythree, they had confirmed
physical weakness in him at the Rossau barracks, a
world had collapsed for him. In his state of extreme hopelessness, however, his uncle had got him an attendant's position at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. He had come to Vienna with nothing but a small scuffed portmanteau, to his uncle's flat, who had let him stay with him for four weeks, after which he, Irrsigler, had moved as a lodger to the Mölkerbastei. In that rented room he had lived for twelve years. During those first few years he had seen nothing of Vienna at all, he had gone to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in the early morning, towards seven, and had returned home in the evening, after six, his midday meal all those years had invariably consisted of a slice of bread with salami or with cheese, consumed with a glass of water from the tap in a small dressing room behind the public cloakroom. Burgenlanders are the most undemanding of people, I have myself worked with Burgenlanders at various building sites in my youth and lived with Burgenlanders in various builders' hutments, and I know how undemanding these Burgenlanders are, they only need the most indispensable things and actually manage to save some eighty per cent or even more of their wages by the end of the month. As I was scrutinizing Irrsigler and actually observing him intently, as I had never observed him before, I could see Irrsigler standing with me in the Battoni Room the previous week and me listening to him. The husband of one of his great-grandmothers had come from the Tyrol, hence the name Irrsigler. He had had two sisters, the younger one, as late as the sixties, had emigrated to America with a hairdresser's assistant from Mattersburg and had died there of homesickness, at the age of thirty-five. He had three brothers, all of them living in Burgenland as casual labourers. Two of them, like himself, had come to Vienna to join the police but had not been accepted. And for the museum service, he said,
a certain intelligence was absolutely necessary. He had learned a lot from Reger. There were people who said Reger was mad because only a madman could for decades go every other day except Monday to the picture gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but he did not believe that.
Herr Reger is a clever, educated man, Irrsigler said. Yes, I had said to Irrsigler, Herr Reger is not only a clever and educated man, but also a famous man, after all he had studied music in Leipzig and Vienna and written music reviews for
The Times and was writing for
The Times to this day, I said. Not an ordinary scribbler, I said, not a chatterbox, but a musical scholar in the truest sense of the word and with the full seriousness of a great personality. Reger was not to be compared with all those garrulous musical columnists who poured out their garrulous refuse in the daily papers day after day. Reger was in fact a philosopher, I said to Irrsigler, a philosopher in the full clear meaning of the term. For over thirty years Reger has written his reviews for
The Times, those little musical-philosophical essays which would no doubt one day be brought together and appear in book form. This sojourn in the Kunsthistorisches Museum is undoubtedly one of the prerequisites of Reger's being able to write for
The Times in just the way he does write for
The Times, I said to Irrsigler, regardless of whether or not Irrsigler understood me, probably Irrsigler did not understand me at all, I thought and still think. That Reger writes his musical criticism for
The Times is not known to anyone in Austria, or at most a few people know about it, I said to Irrsigler. I might also say
Reger is a private philosopher, I said to Irrsigler, regardless of the fact that it was a rather stupid thing to say to Irrsigler. At the Kunsthistorisches Museum Reger finds what he does not find anywhere else, I said to Irrsigler, everything that is important, everything that is useful to his thinking and to his work. People may regard Reger's behaviour as mad, which it is not, I said to Irrsigler, here in Vienna and in Austria Reger is not taken note of, I said to Irrsigler, but in London and England, and even in the United States, people know who Reger is and what an outstanding expert Reger is, I said to Irrsigler. And do not forget the ideal temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius, which is maintained here all the year round at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, I also said to Irrsigler. Irrsigler only nodded his head. Reger is a figure highly thought of throughout the world of musical scholarship, I said to Irrsigler yesterday, only here, in his native country, no one wants to know about him, on the contrary, here in his native country, Reger, who has left all the others in his field far behind him, that whole revolting provincial incompetence, is being hated, yes, nothing less than hated in his native Austria, I said to Irrsigler. A genius like Reger is hated here, I said to Irrsigler, regardless of the fact that Irrsigler had not understood at all what I meant by saying to him that a genius like Reger was hated here, and regardless of whether it is actually correct to speak of Reger as of a genius,
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