Thomas Bernhard - Extinction

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. Ofcourse 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 names 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 deer-horn 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 continually 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 coffinand 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 hazelwood.) 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 ofthem 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 had 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 fallvictim 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 hypocrite 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. I’ll tell her that he read them attentively, with extreme nonchalance and without a trace of embarrassment, savoring every morsel of news as he sat opposite me eating his bread and sausage — three or four slices; I was not sure exactly how many. I’ll say to Caecilia, Your husband even had difficulty with the big pictures taken during the night of horror, but fortunately he was sitting by the kitchen window, where the light fell at just the right angle. Observing my brother-in-law, I began to wonder how I could exploit this scene to his detriment when I reported it to his wife. Warming to my plan, I imagined a thoroughly theatrical scene in which I would go up to my sister and tell her how avidly her husband had read the newspapers. I would tell her that contrary to all her protestations, but in accordance with my suspicions, the wine cork manufacturer was actually a pretty unsavory character. I heard myself telling her, Your husband sat opposite me, reading the newspapers without any compunction, taking no notice of me, although I wanted to discuss something important with him. But he didn’t listen to me. I’m actually capable of such an outrageous perversion of the truth, I thought as I observed my brother-in-law. I knew I was not above such low conduct, having engaged in it hundreds of times before, having made a habit of it and evolved a routine, a regular routine, I thought. My brother-in-law was avidly reading the papers with my express permission, after a decent show of hesitation, though no more than a show. He was actually reading them, whereas I had of course just flicked through them, as they say, when I was alone in the kitchen two hours earlier. He looked at the pictures quite calmly and without embarrassment, whereas I had done so furtively, apprehensive lest I should be caught doing something improper, indeed shameful, and fully aware that I was committing a heinous offense. My brother-in-law, however, could afford to enjoy the newspapers under my indulgent gaze and with my express permission. I could see how much he enjoyed opening one paper after another and reading the reports. Anyone else would have put them down after a while and turned his attention to me, I thought, but my brother-in-law was not like that. He completely ignored me. He regarded the permission I had given him as an unlimited dispensation, preferring to immerse himself in the newspapers and digest his bread and sausage, rather than engage in conversation with me, which was bound to be disagreeable, as he not only felt but knew. He was using the newspapers as a means of avoiding me. The fact is that he constantly avoids me, I thought. He doesn’t seek contact with me, as I believed for a moment when I saw him standing in front of the Orangery, looking futile and stupid, not knowing what to do with himself. I had been quite mistaken, and I was certainly wrong to think that I had a duty to speak to him, that I must take him to the kitchen and place myself at his disposal. Yet I really took him with me because I wanted to needle him, not out of any sense of duty, I thought. I took him to the kitchen only to find out more about him. Getting him something to eat was merely a pretext I used in order to worm this or that bit of information out of him that I could then use against Caecilia and him. The imbecile is at least a producer of imbecilities and a revealer of all kinds of secrets, I had thought. This was my reason for taking him to the kitchen. But now I no longer wished to worm anything out of him. I was content simply to observe him, so that later, at a suitable moment, I could report my observations to Caecilia, or rather, to put it bluntly, falsify my observations for my own ends, to the detriment of them both. I would say to Caecilia, He sat there and kept me waiting the whole time. He was particularly interested in the shots of Mother’s severed head. The pictures of Father thrown back in the car seat next to Johannes, whose head was totally shattered, at least internally, were of great interest to my brother-in-law, your husband, I’ll tell her. How dare such a man immerse himself in this journalistic filth in my presence, I’ll say, especially at such a sad time for us all? I won’t say tragic, I’ll say sad: tragic is theatrical hyperbole— sad has a more human ring. My sister is bound to be horrified to learn that my brother-in-law is such a low character. But is that what I want? I asked myself. It’ll make him a more important figure than he is. On the other hand, I can’t ease up on him if I mean to expel him, to drive him out of Wolfsegg, though clearly I won’t need to make the slightest effort to achieve this. He’ll see to it himself, and my sisters will help in their underhanded way. My brother-in-law’s days are numbered, I thought. There he sat, not devouring the newspapers, as they usually say, but devoured by them. And there I was sitting opposite him and giving him my blessing, for he could do what I had been unable to do: he could read the newspapers without feeling embarrassed and apprehensive, under the aegis of his suddenly all-powerful brother-in-law. After all, I’m his brother-in-law now, just as he’s mine, I told myself, but I’m the one to be feared, the one who’ll determine the future and decide what’s going to happen to Wolfsegg. That’s the difference between us. The powerful brother-in-law is sitting opposite the powerless one who has no say in anything, I thought. The wine cork manufacturer from Baden was able to enjoy the newspapers to the full, while I had to deny myself this enjoyment. Such people always have it easy, I thought — we never do. They never have to exert themselves — we always do. Given our present situation, I would naturally have refused to peruse the newspapers if someone had suggested it. I would have had to forgo them and leave them untouched. But my brother-in-law, after a moment’s hesitation, acts upon my suggestion and falls upon these newspaper reports. Dreadful, isn’t it? was the only thing I said to him as he sat immersed in the newspapers. Twice I uttered the word dreadful, aword I often use in relation to such press reports of accidents. Dreadful is the right word in such a context, and I use it often, too often, I told myself, far too often, even in contexts where it’s inappropriate. But in the present context it was entirely appropriate. I used it now, but my brother-in-law did not look up. He did not let himself be distracted by it, he did not let it interfere with his appetite for sensation. My father must have been driving too fast, I said. My brother-in-law pretended not to hear. Nobody knows why my father was driving and not Johannes, I said, because Johannes usually took the wheel. For a long time my father had been shortsighted, I said. People over sixty should have their driver’s license revoked, I said. It’s people over sixty who cause all the accidents. They’re the ones who cause all the disasters on our roads, because their reactions are too slow. I was embarrassed at having said this, as it sounded like a typical sentence from one of the newspapers that lay on the table. Newspaper editors purvey nothing but dirt, I thought — but the dirt they throw at us is our own dirt. The world that these purveyors of dirt present in the newspapers is essentially the real world, I said. The printed world is the real world. The world of dirt printed by the newspapers is our own world. Whatever is printed is real, and the real is only what we suppose to be real. I could not expect my brother-in-law to understand me. He was probably not listening, for he did not react to what I said but went on looking at a picture showing my mother’s head, separated from the torso by at least ten inches, on a laboratory slab. Using ambulances to take away the dead is absurd, I said. My brother-in-law did not look up. I remembered describing him to Gambetti before the wedding, when I had seen him only once, as a fat man of less than forty who was getting progressively fatter, so that his clothes were getting progressively tighter, and whose fatness, due to overeating, caused breathing difficulties when he spoke, so that he had to speak in short sentences. His breathing is stertorous, I had said, and when you’re walking with him he keeps stopping and stretching out his hand to point to some object, or if there’s no object for him to point to, he’ll point vaguely in some direction at the interesting landscape, hoping in this way to divert attention from his shortness of breath. Everything about him is a function of his obesity, I had told Gambetti. Feeling embarrassed at denigrating my future brother-in-law to such an extent, I had said to Gambetti, I’m appalled by my meanness, but then I apologized for using such a distasteful word as appalled, for as his teacher I should never have used such a banal expression. I clearly remember telling Gambetti that although we were constantly annoyed by others when they talked in clichés, we succumbed to the same lamentable habit ourselves. Appalled was a quite inept expression, I told Gambetti. My brother-in-law, I went on, was the type of person who was known in Southwest Germany as a Baden gourmet, an average petit bourgeois who had attained a degree of affluence and liked to flaunt it, to whom it was important to be fat and overweight, to cut an imposing figure. To be thin was seen in that part of the world as a sign of sickness, something menacing that was to be shunned because it was associated with the devil. To these people any form of asceticism was repugnant, whereas the fat man represented the ideal. Fatness was reassuring, and in Southwest Germany, especially Baden, they attached the greatest importance to reassurance, and so, for that matter, did all Germans. Fat men were trusted and worthy of emulation, but thin men were distrusted. Gambetti only laughed at my theory, and I joined in his laughter. Such people are terribly idle, I now thought, sitting opposite my brother-in-law, but their idleness isn’t what I would call creative idleness — it’s the stolid idleness of the pig, I thought, which today is possibly more human than the human being, who has become more and more piglike in the last hundred years. My brother-in-law could not be roused from his idleness. I took advantage of the situation to give free rein to my own thoughts. I won’t be so unmolested for a long time, I thought. It was about half past four, and the people who were coming to express their condolences could not be kept waiting. This time spent in the kitchen with my brother-in-law would probably be my last chance to be more or less alone, I thought, even though I had my brother-in-law sitting opposite me. Dreadful, isn’t it? I said, but he did not react. These people always pretend to be the life and soul of the party, to love wine and conviviality, I had told Gambetti, but they’re actually anything but convivial. They have to have conviviality at any price, and if you refuse to join in they’re ruthless; everything inside them turns to hatred. They use their conviviality to subjugate those around them and make life hell for them if they refuse to come up with the conviviality they crave. At least this is what I always feel, I told Gambetti, when people insist on forcing their conviviality on me. As I observed my brother-in-law I had visions of Rome, until in the end I fancied I was in my study in Rome, even though I was sitting opposite my ponderous brother-in-law in our kitchen at Wolfsegg. My father’s faulty vision ultimately proved fatal, I said. They’ll be delivering the new harvester, I said, but who knows whether we’ll need it? I said this in the tone of the owner of Wolfsegg, as a farmer, so to speak. I repeated these words several times in my mind and was amazed by their farmerly tone. It was like hearing my brother speak, I thought. Uttering these words, I had turned myself into a farmer, which I had no desire to be. They’ll probably all demand that I become a farmer; they probably expect I’m one already, I thought. I was aware of this after uttering these words. That’s naturally what’s in their minds, I thought, but all my life the last thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a farmer. Of course they expect me to give up everything else, to sacrifice it all in order to provide them with the farmer they need, the farmer they must have. They undoubtedly expect me to give up Rome and are already going around full of glee at the prospect. They expect me to give up everything connected with Rome, even to be capable of doing so, I thought, but that’s absurd. Yet the idea took root in my mind that they actually believed it, because they had to believe it. As the heir apparent I was expected to surrender virtually my whole being in order to run Wolfsegg for them. It was out of the question. Gambetti, Zacchi, Maria, even Spadolini, and all the others, I thought — there’s no way I’m going to give up that atmosphere for an inherited nightmare. But all the time there’s a gleeful look in their faces, in my sisters’ faces, I thought, because I’ve now been hit by something they never dreamed of for a moment, by the ultimate absurdity: I am to become a farmer, to run Wolfsegg, to have the whole of Wolfsegg hung around my neck, and they, my sisters, are to be the beneficiaries of this nightmare scenario. My brother-in-law, still immersed in the newspapers, had no idea of what was passing through my mind as he indulged his appetite for sensation. He’d also be a beneficiary of the violence they’re planning to do me, I thought, of the self-surrender they expect — the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg im Breisgau with his forty-five workers and office staff who probably do nothing but piss on him, as they say. But my sisters don’t really know me, I told myself. They actually believe that I’ll enter into my inheritance in the manner laid down. We’ve always known about the will; it doesn’t even need to be opened in order to be understood. My dear Gambetti, I had said on the telephone, you don’t know what I have coming to me, because you don’t know what Wolfsegg’s like. I could hear these words of mine quite clearly. While my brother-in-law, as I could see, was still enthralled by the newspapers, fascinated by the press reports of the accident, I could hear myself saying to Gambetti, Wolfsegg won’tkillme — I’ll see to that. And it occurred to me that perhaps Gambetti did not understand me. He had thought I was telephoning to decline the invitation to dinner with his parents, when all I wanted was to tell him briefly that my parents and my brother Johannes had died, fallen victim to a road accident, I said, which was a quite unsuitable formulation for a language teacher to use. However, I had never described myself as a language teacher; I simply called myself his teacher, just as I called him my pupil. I’m not a specialist teacher, I now reflected. I merely convey knowledge that is relevant to German literature. I naturally try to do my job well and convey knowledge that is worth more than the fee he pays me, which I only accept pro forma, as it were. I claim my fee as a matter of principle, and it is paid to me as a matter of principle, if for no other reason than to maintain the necessary distance in our teacher-pupil relationship. I could forgo my fee, but that would be extremely foolish, the first step toward destroying this relationship, I thought, observing my brother-in-law even more closely. I could do this quite unimpeded, for he took no notice of me whatever and sat there as though I had long since gotten up and left the kitchen. If I had gotten up and left the kitchen, I thought, he wouldn’t even have noticed. Our terrible misfortune has long since lost its sensational aspect, I told myself, and the living proof of this is sitting opposite me. My brother-in-law comes from a family whose peasant ancestors moved to a small town, prompted by an ambition to better themselves, whatever that means. They staked everything on shaking off first their peasant origins for small-town respectability, then their small-town respectability for something higher, the nature of which I cannot define. My brother-in-law is the end product of this strenuous process, as it were, which is naturally doomed to failure. For such people stake virtually everything on getting away from their real selves, but they never succeed, because they lack the intellectual energy, because they have not discovered the intellect — the intellect around them or the intellect within them — and have therefore not taken even the first step, which is the precondition for taking the second. They suddenly find themselves stranded, like my brother-in-law, no longer knowing what to make of the world around them, or of themselves, and end up getting on everyone’s nerves. Wolfsegg has simply acquired a new comic figure, I told myself as I observed my brother-in-law, but this hasn’t made the comedy any more bearable or any more interesting. This new comic figure is not amusing, only tiresome — not a wag, but a drag. For a moment I wished I had brought Gambetti with me, but Gambetti would certainly not have wished to act as my intellectual shield against all the distasteful conditions at Wolfsegg. He might even have been a liability, I thought. Even as a protective shield he would only have given me trouble, and I’ve enough of that already. At Wolfsegg our relations would have been quite different from those we enjoy in Rome. I would not have been able to devote the same attention to him as I do in Rome. Everything that makes his company such a pleasure would have been impossible. Wolfsegg air is not Roman air, the Wolfsegg atmosphere is certainly not the Roman atmosphere: Wolfsegg, in short, is not Rome. It would have been a grave error to bring Gambetti to Wolfsegg. The proper garment for the funeral, in view of the climate, would undoubtedly be my loden, I thought, but I won’t wear it. I’ll wear one of the Roman coats I have hanging in the closet, if only to distinguish myself from the others. Princes of the Church are always afraid of catching a chill and wear lodens over their vestments when officiating out of doors. And everybody else is bound to be wearing a loden. If I wear one of my Roman coats I’ll be able to distinguish myself from them, I thought, and thereby document the fact that I’m no longer a Wolfsegger but a Roman. I’ll present myself as a Roman, which is what they’ve nicknamed me for years. I’ll make my entrance like a Roman. The coat I had in mind was one that I had bought in Padua the previous year. Tomorrow I must come across as a metropolitan, I thought. I’ll wear Roman shoes and a Roman scarf. In this way I’ll distinguish myself outwardly from the loden-clad masses, whom I’ve always detested. The loden-clad masses will do everything they can to overpower me, I thought, but I’ll know how to defend myself. Tomorrow’s Roman won’t let himself be worsted by the loden-clad masses. I was still sitting in the kitchen with my brother-in-law when I heard the first mourners arrive, not just local people who had come to offer their condolences, as I thought at first, but guests who would be staying the night at Wolfsegg. I stood up, and so did my brother-in-law, who until now had been buried in the newspapers. There was a knock on the door. Only now did it occur to me to wonder where the kitchen maids and the cook were and what had become of my sisters. The first guests had made their way to the end of the entrance hall without being received by anyone and now knocked on the kitchen door, causing me instant embarrassment. I later took my sisters to task, asking them how it was possible that the first guests had not been received at the door and had been able to get to the end of the entrance hall without being greeted. My sisters had undertaken to receive all the guests, not only those who merely came to offer condolences but those who would be staying overnight, and had placed a guest list on one of the hall tables, stating precisely where each of the guests was to spend the night, or in some cases more than one night. Some were to be put up in the village, but close relatives and close friends like Spadolini were to stay in the main house, the Huntsmen’s Lodge, or the Gardeners’ House, where rooms were said to have been prepared for them. Spadolini was to be put up in the main house, I discovered, on looking through the list.