Thomas Bernhard: Extinction

the most feared child at Wolfsegg. Clear-sighted from the beginning, he is reputed to have developed an early passion for exposing his family. As a small child he would spy on them and confront them with their unprincipled conduct. No child at Wolfsegg was known to have asked so many questions and demanded so many answers. My parents would always reproach me by saying that I was getting like my uncle Georg, as though he were the most dreadful person in the world. You’re getting like your uncle Georg, they would say, but they achieved nothing by holding up Uncle Georg as a warning example, because right from the start there was no one at Wolfsegg whom I loved more. Your uncle Georg is a monster, they would say. Your uncle Georg is a parasite! Your uncle Georg is a disgrace to us all! Your uncle Georg is a criminal! The list of horrific designations they came up with for Uncle Georg never produced the desired effect on me. Every few years he would come over from Cannes to visit us for a few days, occasionally for a few weeks, and during these visits I was the happiest person in the world. I had a great time whenever Uncle Georg was at Wolfsegg. It suddenly became a different place. It had the air of the big city about it. The libraries were aired, books moved around, and rooms that at other times seemed like cold, dark, silent caverns were filled with music. The rooms at Wolfsegg, usually forbidding, became cozy and homey. Voices that usually spoke in harsh or suppressed tones suddenly sounded quite natural. We were allowed to laugh and to speak in normal conversational tones, not only when instructions were being given to the staff. Why do you always talk French when the servants are present? Uncle Georg asked my parents fiercely — it’s quite ridiculous! It made me happy to hear him say such things. Why don’t you open the windows during this glorious weather? he would ask. Whereas the mealtime conversation normally centered on pigs and cattle, on wagonloads of timber or on whether the warehouse prices were favorable or unfavorable, we suddenly heard words like Tolstoy, Paris, or New York, Napoleon or Alfonso XIII or Meneghini, Callas, Voltaire, Rousseau, Pascal, or Diderot. I can’t see what I’m eating, my uncle would say without the least compunction, whereupon my mother would jump up from the table and open the shutters. You must open the shutters wider, he would say to her, so that I can see my soup. How can you exist in this semidarkness all the time? It’s like living in a museum! Everything looks as though it hasn’t been used for years. What’s the point of having that fine china in the cupboards if you don’t eat off it? And your expensive silver? I admired Uncle Georg. There was never any boredom when he was around. He did not sit stiffly and rigidly at table like the others but constantly turned to one or another of us to ask a question, tender sound advice, or pay a compliment. You must wear more blue, he once told my mother — gray doesn’t suit you. You look as if you were in mourning, and it’s fifteen years since Father died. You, he once told my father, look like one of your own employees. That made me laugh out loud. When the meal was served, a procedure normally attended by complete silence, he would joke with the maids, which was something my mother found hard to endure. It won’t be long, he once said, not in the least inhibited by the presence of the maids, before there’s nobody to serve you. Then you’ll suddenly come alive. There’s a whiff of revolution in the air. I’ve got a hunch that something’s coming that’ll liven everything up again. Hearing such remarks, my father would shake his head and my mother would stare fixedly into my uncle’s face, as though she had no qualms about showing her dislike for him. In Mediterranean countries everything’s quite different, he said, but he did not elaborate. I was seventeen or eighteen at the time and wanted to know in what way things in the Mediterranean countries differed from things in Central Europe; he said he would explain it to me one day when I visited these countries myself. Life in the Mediterranean countries is a hundred times more rewarding than here, he said. I was naturally eager to know why. Central Europeans behave like puppets, not like human beings, he said. They’re all tense, they don’t move naturally, everything about them is stiff and ultimately ridiculous. And unendurable. Like the language they speak, which is the most unendurable language. German is quite unendurable. I was thrilled when he talked about the Mediterranean countries. It’s a shock to come back here, he said. It did not worry him in the least that his remarks spoiled the appetites of his audience. And what atrocious food! he exclaimed. In Germany and Austria, and even in German-speaking Switzerland, it’s not food, it’s just junk! The much vaunted Austrian cuisine is just a joke, an insult to the stomach and the whole of the body. When I’m back in Cannes it takes me weeks to recover from Austrian cooking. And what’s a country with no sea? he exclaimed, without pursuing the idea. After taking a mouthful of wine he would wrinkle up his nose. I could see that he even disapproved of Austrian mineral waters, which are generally well thought of, but he made no comment on them. He must be infinitely bored at Wolfsegg, I thought at the time, for he never had the chance to take part in a lively conversation, which was what he always enjoyed most. Sometimes, at least early on in one of his visits, he would try to initiate one, for instance by throwing the name Goethe into the arena, more or less apropos of nothing, but they did not know what to do with it, let alone with names like Voltaire, Pascal, or Sartre. Being unable to keep up with him, they contented themselves with disliking him, and their dislike intensified from day to day until in the end it turned to overt hatred. They were always intimating that while they worked hard, he had apparently made idleness, and the cultivation of idleness, into the daily content of his life, into a lifelong ideal. You know, he once told me, I come to Wolfsegg not to see the family but to see the house and the landscape, which bring back my childhood. Then, after a pause, he said, And to see you. In his will he left instructions that he was to be buried not at Wolfsegg, as the family expected, but in Cannes. He wished to be buried by the sea. Dressed in somewhat pompous and utterly provincial outfits, my parents rushed to his funeral expecting to inherit an immense fortune, only to be confronted, as I have already indicated, by what my mother called the greatest disappointment of our lives, which was all they had to take home with them. The good Jean, the son of a poor Marseille fisherman, inherited stock to the value of twenty-four million schillings and real estate worth at least twice as much. Uncle Georg left his art collection to the museums in Cannes and Nice. His gravestone, erected by the good Jean, was to bear only his name, followed by the words: who left the barbarians behind him at the right moment. Jean adhered strictly to Uncle Georg’s instructions. When my parents visited the grave a year ago on their way to Spain, they are said to have been so outraged that my mother swore she would never visit it again. She thought the epitaph a monstrous disgrace, and on her return to Wolfsegg she is said to have talked of nothing but the crime that her brother-in-law had perpetrated. I went for long, interesting walks with Uncle Georg in the country around Wolfsegg, as far as Ried in one direction and Gmunden in the other. He always had time for me. Thanks to him I know that there are more things in the world than cows, domestics, and public holidays that have to be strictly observed. I owe it to him that I learned not only how to read and write but how to think and fantasize. It is to his credit that I attach great importance to money, but not the greatest, and that, unlike my parents, I regard people outside Wolfsegg not as a necessary evil but as an endless challenge, a challenge to get to grips with them as the greatest and most exciting monstrosity. Uncle Georg initiated me into the secrets of music and literature and familiarized me with composers and writers, who now became living people, not just plaster figures that had to be dusted three or four times a year. I owe it to him that I began reading the books that seemed to have been locked away in our libraries forever and a day and have never stopped reading them, that I finally learned to philosophize; that I developed not into the sort of person who automatically became a cog in Wolfsegg’s financial and economic mill but into one who could properly be called a free agent. I have him to thank for the fact that I have never made the kind of brainless educational journeys, so called, that my parents went in for, taking me with them in my early years — to Italy and Germany or to Holland and Spain — but have learned the art of travel, one of the greatest pleasures in the world and one that I still enjoy. Thanks to Uncle Georg I have become acquainted not with dead but with living cities; I have visited not dead but living peoples, read not dead but living writers, heard not dead but living music, and seen not dead but living pictures. Instead of sticking the great names of the past on the inner walls of my brain like so many dreary transfer pictures from an equally dreary history, he presented them to me as living actors on a living stage. Every day my parents would show me a totally uninteresting world that progressively paralyzed my mind, a world in which life was basically not worth living, whereas Uncle Georg showed me the same world as one that was invariably interesting. Thus, as quite a small child I already had a choice between two worlds: my parents’, which I always found uninteresting and merely tiresome, and Uncle Georg’s, which seemed packed with tremendous adventures and in which one could never be bored but wished to live forever, hoping that it would never end; the automatic consequence was that I wanted to live in this world perpetually, for all eternity. To put it simply, my parents always took everything as it came, whereas Uncle Georg never took anything as it came. From their birth my parents lived by the laws laid down for them by their predecessors and never dreamed of making themselves new laws to live by, laws of their own, whereas Uncle Georg lived solely by his own laws, which he himself had made. And these self-made laws he was forever overturning. My parents followed a preordained path, and they would never have thought of deviating from it for a moment, but Uncle Georg went his own way. To cite another instance of the difference between them and my uncle: they hated what they called idleness and could not imagine that a thinking person simply did not know what idleness was and could not afford it, that when a thinking person indulged in apparent idleness he was actually in a state of extreme tension and excitement. This was because theirs was true idleness and they did not know what to do with it, for when they were idle there was actually nothing going on, as they were incapable of thinking, let alone of engaging in a rigorous mental process. For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness. My parents’ idleness was of course genuine idleness, for when they did nothing there was nothing going on in them. By contrast, one might say, the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people like my parents and my family in general. Yet on the other hand, my parents did have an inkling of the nature of Uncle Georg’s idleness, and this was why they hated him, for they guessed that his idleness, being quite different from theirs, not only could become dangerous, but always was dangerous. The thinking person who is idle appears as the greatest threat to those for whom idleness means simply doing nothing, who actually do nothing when they are idle. They hate him because, in the nature of things, they cannot despise him. At the age of four Uncle Georg is said to have taken himself off to Haag, a village about five miles away, where he told total strangers that he came from Wolfsegg and did not intend going back. The villagers, understandably at a loss to know what to make of this strange child, brought little Georg back, kicking and screaming, to his parents. Most of the time his parents, and others who were put in charge of him, more or less had to chain him to Wolfsegg like a little dog to stop him from running away. He told me that as a very small child he had resolved to stay at Wolfsegg no longer than was absolutely necessary. But naturally I waited for the moment when I could free myself from Wolfsegg without hardship, he once told me in Cannes, that is to say until I had all the means that were necessary for total freedom. Of course, Wolfsegg itself is a wonderful place, he said, but the family has always soured it for me. Your father, he once said, is a weak character. He’s actually a kind man, but insufferable. And your mother’s a greedy woman who married him only for venal motives. Of course, she was a nobody. She’s said to have been pretty, but there’s no sign of that now. Your father isn’t basically a greedy man. It was your mother who aroused a kind of primitive greed in him. But even before he met your mother I didn’t get along with him. We were complete opposites. Sure, he’s good-natured, he still is, but please don’t be angry when I say he’s a stupid person. Your mother has him completely under her thumb. Yet at school he was better than I was. Everything he did was excellent. He handed in the best work. He was popular, and I wasn’t. He always got better grades than I did. But although we were dressed alike, I always looked smarter than he did. I don’t know why. But I only say this, said Uncle Georg, because basically I’ve always loved your father, who after all is my brother. And the last time he was in Rome Uncle Georg actually told me more than once that he still loved his brother more than anyone else in the world. If only that woman, your mother, hadn’t appeared on the scene! A woman turns up and marries a man, against his will, and then proceeds to drive out his good qualities, his good character, and destroy him, or at least to turn him into a puppet on a string. Your mother made your father her puppet. My God, Uncle Georg exclaimed, how your father could have developed if he’d found himself a different wife! I know no woman more uncultured than your mother, he said. She goes to the opera but doesn’t understand the least thing about music. She looks at a picture but understands nothing about painting. She pretends she reads books but she doesn’t read any. Yet at mealtimes she prattles away nonstop and talks down all around her with her arrant nonsense. All the same she ought to know how money can be made to multiply by itself, not in the perverse, idiotic way that she goes about it and that your father has taken over from her. Uncle Georg was referring to his own gift for making money and continually adding to his fortune. It’s almost unbelievable that your father and I are from the same stable, he often said. I’ve always had lots of ideas, he said, but your father’s never had one. I’ve always traveled because I’ve wanted to and have a passion for travel, but your father’s never felt the slightest need to travel and has only ever done so because it’s the thing to do. He always arranged his journeys in accordance with stupid plans made for him by others, all of them revolting individuals who called themselves art experts. You must go to Rome and visit the Sistine Chapel. You must see the Giorgione in the Accademia, called Читать дальше