, she was never satisfied, I did everything for her, she could buy every dress she wanted, he said. I pampered her, he said. At the height of being pampered, he said, she took off to Zizers bei Chur, to that awful place. They all run off to Switzerland when they’re short of ideas, he said, I thought. But Switzerland turns into a deadly prison for all of them, little by little they choke on Switzerland in Switzerland, as my sister will choke on Switzerland, he could see it, Zizers will kill her, her Swiss husband will kill her, Switzerland will kill her, so he said, I thought. Zizers of all places, that perverse creation of a place name, so he said, I thought. It may have been our parents’ plan, he said, my sister and I together for life, our parents’ calculation. But this parental plan, this parental calculation didn’t work out. We’ll have a son, my parents may have thought, and then a sister, and the two of them will live together till death do them part, caring for one another, destroying one another, that may have been my parents’ idea, their devilish idea, so he said. Parents make a plan, but naturally this plan doesn’t work out, so he said. My sister didn’t keep to the plan, she’s the stronger one, so he said, I’ve always been the weak one, absolutely the weak link, so Wertheimer. He could barely catch his breath going uphill and still outraced me. He couldn’t climb stairs and still got to the fourth floor faster than me, it was all a suicide attempt, I thought now while observing the restaurant, a futile attempt to escape life’s clutches. Once he traveled to Passau with his sister because his father had convinced him that Passau was a beautiful town, a restful town, a remarkable town, but the minute they arrived in Passau they saw that Passau was one of the ugliest towns imaginable, a town over-eagerly imitating Salzburg, a town bursting with helpless and ugly and repulsively gauche ambition, which has the perverse arrogance to call itself Three River City. They took only a few steps in this Three River City before they turned around and, because the next train to Vienna didn’t leave for hours, took a taxi back to Vienna. After their experience in Passau they renounced all travel plans for years, I thought. In later years, when his sister expressed a desire to travel, Wertheimer merely said to her:
remember Passau! thereby nipping any travel debate in the bud. A desk from the age of Joseph II now stood where his auctioned Bösendorfer grand piano had been, I thought. But we don’t always have to be studying something, I thought, it’s perfectly enough merely to think, to do nothing but think and give our thoughts free rein. To give in to our philosophical worldview, simply submit to our philosophical worldview, but that’s the hardest thing, I thought. Wertheimer wasn’t up to such a feat when he had the Bösendorfer auctioned off, not even later, unlike me, I was up to it, I thought. This capacity also allowed me to vanish from Austria one day with just a small travel bag, at first to Portugal, then to Spain, and take up residence in the Calle del Prado, right next to
Sotheby’s . Suddenly, overnight so to speak, I had become
a philosophical worldview artist . This sudden verbal invention of mine made me laugh out loud. I took a few steps toward the kitchen window although I’d already realized I couldn’t look through the kitchen window because, as already mentioned, it’s covered with filth from top to bottom. Austrian kitchen windows are all totally filthy and we can’t look through them and naturally it’s to our greatest advantage, I thought, not to be able to look through them because then we find ourselves staring into the mouth of catastrophe, into the chaos of Austrian kitchen filth. So I reversed the few steps I had taken to the kitchen window and remained where I had been standing the whole time. Glenn died at the perfect moment, I thought, but Wertheimer didn’t commit suicide at the perfect moment, whoever commits suicide never commits suicide at the perfect moment, whereas a so-called natural death always occurs at the perfect moment. Wertheimer had wanted to compete with Glenn, I thought, to show his sister, to
pay her back for everything by hanging himself only a hundred steps from her house in Zizers. He bought himself a train ticket for Zizers bei Chur and went to Zizers and hanged himself a hundred steps in front of his sister’s house. For several days they couldn’t identify the body. It took four or five days after finding the body until a hospital official in Chur was struck by the name
Wertheimer , he connected the name Wertheimer with the wife of the chemical-plant owner, whom he knew previously as Frau Wertheimer, and, puzzled, inquired in Zizers about a connection between the suicide victim Wertheimer lying in his morgue and the wife of the chemical-plant owner in Zizers. Wertheimer’s sister, who hadn’t even known that someone had hanged himself a hundred steps from her front door, drove straight to the morgue in Chur and identified the body, as they say. Wertheimer’s calculation worked perfectly: he thrust his sister into a lifelong guilt complex through the means and place of his suicide, I thought. That calculation is just like Wertheimer, I thought. But in doing so he made himself ridiculous, I thought. He had already left Traich with the intention of hanging himself from a tree a hundred steps from his sister’s house, I thought. Suicide calculated well in advance, I thought, no spontaneous act of desperation. I wouldn’t have left Madrid to go to his funeral in Chur, I thought, but since I was already in Vienna it was natural to go to Chur. And from Chur to Traich. But now I was seriously wondering whether it wouldn’t have been better to go to Vienna directly after Chur and not stop in Traich, at the moment it wasn’t clear to me what I was looking for here apart from catering to a distinctly cheap sort of curiosity, since I had talked myself into the necessity of my being here, pretended it was necessary, faked it. I didn’t tell Wertheimer’s sister that I intended to go to Traich, and I wasn’t thinking of it in Chur either, it was in the train that I first had the idea of getting out in Attnang-Puchheim and going back to Traich, spending the night in Wankham, as of course I had been used to doing from my previous visits to Traich, I thought. I’ve always thought, one day I’ll go to Wertheimer’s funeral, of course I never knew when, only that it would happen, even though I never voiced this thought, above all not in Wertheimer’s presence, whereas he, Wertheimer, very often told me that
he would go
to my funeral one day, that’s what I was thinking about while waiting for the innkeeper. And I had been certain that Wertheimer would kill himself one day for all these reasons, which were constantly in the front of my mind. Glenn’s death, as it turned out, was not the crucial factor, his sister had to leave him, but Glenn’s death had been the beginning of the end, the triggering moment being his sister’s marriage with the Swiss. Wertheimer had tried to save himself by walking through Vienna without ever stopping, but the attempt failed, rescue was out of the question, visits to his beloved blue-collar districts in the Twentieth and Twenty-first districts, above all Brigittenau, above all Kaisermühlen, the Prater with its indecencies, the Zirkusgasse, the Schüttelstrasse, the Radetzkystrasse, etc., all pointless. For months he had criss-crossed Vienna, day and night, to the point of collapse. It was no use. Even the hunting lodge in Traich, which he initially saw as a lifesaver, turned out to be a miscalculation; as I happen to know, he first locked himself into the hunting lodge for three weeks, then went to the woodsmen and burdened them with his problem. But simple people don’t understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer had no other choice but to kill himself after his sister left him, I thought. He wanted to publish a book, but it never came to that, for he kept changing his manuscript, changing it so often and to such an extent that nothing was left of the manuscript, for the change in his manuscript was nothing other than the complete deletion of the manuscript, of which finally nothing remained except the title,
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