Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters

walking. Yet it had always been a great joy to know that at the end of the journey to Kilb I would find Joana in her parents’ little one-story house. I always made these journeys in the spring or the fall, never in summer and never in winter. Country girls, as soon as they are capable of making plans, set their sights on Vienna, the big city, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and that hasn’t changed. Joana had to go to Vienna, as she wanted at all costs to make a career for herself. She just couldn’t wait for the day when she would board the Vienna train for good, so to speak. But Vienna brought her more heartache than happiness, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Young people set off for the capital and come to grief, in the truest sense of the word, in the very place where they have placed all their hopes, thanks to the appalling society they find there, as well as to their own natures, which are generally no match for this cannibalistic city. After all, Auersberger too had set his heart on making a career in Vienna, yet he’d made no more of a career there than Joana; all this time he’s been chasing after a career that has so far eluded him, I reflected in the wing chair. He made life too easy for himself, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and so did Joana: when it comes to making a career in the big city things don’t just happen by themselves, and in Vienna they’re even less likely to happen by themselves than they are elsewhere. The mistake they both made, I now reflected in the wing chair, was to think that Vienna would come to their aid, that it would grab them under the arms, so to speak, and stop them from falling. But the city doesn’t grab anyone under the arms: on the contrary, it constantly seeks to fend off the unfortunate people who repair to it in search of a career, to destroy them and annihilate them. It destroyed and annihilated not only Joana, but Auersberger too, who once believed that in Vienna he would be able to develop into an important composer, a composer of international importance, though to tell the truth he was not only unable to develop in Vienna — he was utterly ruined by the city. The genius he brought with him from Styria, of which there were unmistakable signs some thirty years ago, I now reflected, soon wasted away in Vienna; first it suffered a body blow, and then it became stunted, like countless other geniuses before it, especially musical geniuses. In Vienna he inevitably succumbed to atrophy and dwindled into a so-called successor of Webern , and he has remained a successorof Webern ever since. And Joana dreamed all her life of making a career for herself as a ballerina at the Opera, and finally of becoming a famous actress at the Burgtheater, yet all her life she remained a dilettante both as a dancer and as an actress, a movement therapist, so to speak, giving private lessons in deportment. It’s now twenty-five years, I thought, since I used to write playlets for her, which she would then perform for me during the afternoons and evenings we spent in her high-rise in the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, and which we would record on tape for all time, as it were — dozens of pieces for two voices, in which she would try to prove how gifted she was and I would try to show off my literary and histrionic talents. These plays have been lost; they were quite devoid of literary merit, but for years they kept Joana and me alive, I now thought, sitting in the wing chair. For years I would set out, every two or three days, from my apartment in the Eighteenth District and catch the No. 71 tram out to the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, call at Dittrich’s liquor store opposite Joana’s high-rise and buy three or four two-liter bottles of the cheapest white wine, then take the elevator to Joana’s apartment on the eleventh floor. As we drank we would practice the total theatrical art , which comprises both acting and play writing, more or less relying on the wine to sustain us, until we were quite exhausted. When we were no longer capable of performing, we would play back the recordings we had made and get high on them until well into the night, in fact until morning came. My relationship with Joana, I reflected in the wing chair, played an important part in my own development. It was Joana who brought me back to the theater, which I had abandoned after passing out of the Academy. I’d left the Academy with my certificate, I now recalled, thinking as I went down the staircase that I was now through with theater studies and that I wanted nothing more to do with the theater for the rest of my life. I actually shunned the theater for years, until Auersberger introduced me to Joana. Then the moment I met her she suggested the idea of writing playlets for her — short dramatic sketches, in other words. She had the perfect voice. It was not the wayshe looked that fascinated me, but the way she spoke . And in fact it was my acquaintance with her, which eventually developed into a friendship, that quite simply brought me back into contact with art and things artistic, after I had been averse to them for so long. For me Joana, and everything about her, represented the theater. Besides, her husband painted, and this also fascinated me, right from the beginning, I recalled in the wing chair. Under the right circumstances she could probably have become one of the greatest artists, either as a dancer or as an actress, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, had she not met her artistic husband, Fritz, the painter turned tapestry artist, and had she not given in when she came up against the first serious obstacles to her ambition. On the other hand those of her fellow students from the Reinhardt Seminar who actually went on to act at the Theater in the Josefstadt or the Burgtheater, although they are now famous, succeeded only in becoming rather ridiculous and basically futile theatrical figures, who appear in perhaps one Shakespeare play, one Nestroy play and one Grillparzer play a year and are assuredly a thousand times more stupid than Joana ever was. This evening’s gathering, though planned as an artistic dinner in honor of the actor, is in fact only a requiem for Joana, I said to myself: the smell of that afternoon’s funeral was suddenly present in the Gentzgasse, the smell of the cemetery at Kilb was here in the Auersbergers’ apartment. This so-called artistic dinner is really a funeral feast, I thought, and at once it occurred to me that to my certain knowledge the actor we were waiting for was the only supper guest who had not known Joana. The date for this artistic dinner had already been agreed, first of all with the actor from the Burgtheater, before Joana killed herself; the Auersbergers had said more than once that it was intended as a belated celebration of the premiere of The WildDuck , which had just opened at the Burgtheater. Joana’s death had intervened in their dinner arrangements; they told the guests that it was a dinner in honor of the actor, but then intimated — though not in so many words — that it was in memory of Joana. The actor’s convinced that this artistic dinner is being given for him, and that’s enough to satisfy the Auersbergers, though of course they are giving it more for Joana, since it’s taking place on the day of her funeral, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. At that moment I recalled that on the previous day I too had intended to read The Wild Duck, in order to be able to keep up with the actor, thinking that I needed only to open my bookcase and get out the text. But I was wrong: I had no copy of The WildDuck , though I had been convinced that I had one. I’m bound to have a copy of the play, I had thought as I opened my bookcase. I’ve read it several times during the course of my life, I had thought, and I can even remember what the editions look like. But I really did not have a copy, and so, like Jeannie Billroth, I decided to buy myself one in town, but was unable to find one. However, sitting in the wing chair, I remembered that one of the characters in the play was calledЧитать дальше