OldEkdal ,and that he had a son,
Young Ekdal , who was a photographer. And I remembered that the first act took place at the home of a manufacturer called Werle. Ekdal has a studio in the attic, I reminded myself; gradually it all came back, and so I no longer had to exert my memory. Can this production of
The Wild Duck be any good, I wondered, sitting in the wing chair,
if it’s being put on by actors from the Burgtheater ? And again I thought of the
IronHand ,where I had taken the woman from the general store, who was dressed all in black, after arriving at Kilb. I entered the store only for a moment, to let her know that I had arrived. She immediately put on a black coat and accompanied me to the
IronHand ,the operations room, so to speak, for Joana’s funeral. We both ordered a small goulash and waited for Joana’s companion to arrive. He arrived at about half past eleven and joined us at our table. When people are dressed in black they appear unusually pale, and this companion of Joana’s (the woman from the general store insisted on calling her
Elfriede ) was so pale that he looked as though he were about to vomit at any moment. He actually did feel like vomiting when he approached our table, as he had come straight from the mortuary chapel next to the church, where he said he had been shattered by what they had shown him: without any prior warning he had had to
endure the sight of Joana’s body in a plastic bag. It appeared that the mortician, who as usual was the local carpenter, had been given no precise instructions about how the deceased was to be buried and had simply put Joana’s body in a plastic bag pending the arrival of her companion that morning — this being the cheapest way of dealing with it — and left it on a trestle support in the mortuary chapel. He told us that on seeing the plastic bag he had felt sick and instructed the sexton to cover the body in a shroud and put it in a beech coffin; these instructions had been carried out with his assistance. While we all ate our goulash he told us that he simply could not describe what it had been like to pull Joana’s body out of the plastic bag and cover it with a shroud — it had all been so
gruesome. Finally he had chosen the most expensive coffin the carpenter had in stock. Having eaten half his goulash he went out into the corridor to wash his hands; when he returned I could see tears in his eyes. There were no relatives left, he said; they’d all
died on her long ago, as he put it, and so all the funeral arrangements
fell to him. He had expected that the woman from the general store would have seen to Joana’s body and everything arising from her suicide, but at this she shook her head and said that she could not have left her shop even for an hour and had assumed that he had all the arrangements in hand. Be that as it may, Joana’s companion ate his goulash so quickly that he had already finished it when I was only halfway through mine. He accidentally splashed some of the gravy on his white starched shirt — or rather on his white starched shirtfront, for I noticed that he was not wearing a shirt, only a shirtfront over a woolen undervest, I recalled in the wing chair. This starched shirtfront spotted with gravy more or less confirms my impression that Joana’s companion was completely down and out, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. Having finished his goulash he waited impatiently for us to finish ours, but neither of us could eat any faster. In the end I left nearly half of mine, but the woman from the general store managed to force down the rest of hers. If there’s nobody around to pay the expenses, said Joana’s companion, they simply put the body in a plastic bag. And then he said that there had been a frightful
stench in the mortuary chapel. Looking out of the window of the inn, I saw several cars go past with people I knew in them; they had clearly come to Kilb for the funeral and were making for the cemetery. What a good thing I’ve brought my English umbrella with me, I thought, when it began to rain. The street outside grew dark, and the inn parlor even darker. Jeannie Billroth, the writer, walked past with her retinue, all of them young people under twenty. It was actually
in the high-rise that I last saw Joana, I now recalled saying to myself in the
IronHand ;her face was bloated and her legs swollen. She spoke in what anybody would have described as a
drunken voice. Over the bed hung one of her husband’s tapestries, thick with dust, a reminder of the fact that she had once been happy with this man. The apartment was full of dirty laundry and stank abominably. The tape recorder by the bed, where I could see she spent virtually the whole day, was out of order. On the floor were dozens of empty white wine bottles, some standing, some knocked over. I wanted to hear a particular tape we had made four or five years before this surprise visit of mine, a tape of a sketch in which I had played a king and Joana a princess, but the tape was nowhere to be found. Even if we had found it there would have been no point, as the tape recorder was broken.
Naturally you were a naked princess ,I said to Joana as she lay in bed.
Andyou were a naked king ,she replied. She tried to laugh, but could not. There was nothing touching about this last visit of mine, nothing sentimental, I thought, sitting in the wing chair — I found it simply nauseating. There were signs of a companion about the apartment — a pack of cigarettes here, an old tie there, a dirty sock, and so on. She told me several times that I had let her down. She could hardly sit up in bed; she tried several times, but each time she fell back.
Youletme down, you letme down ,she kept on saying. For the last few years, she said, she had lived by selling off the tapestries her husband had left behind. She had not heard from Fritz. And she had not heard from the others either — she meant
the artistic crowd —she had heard
nothing from anyof them. She asked me to go down to Dittrich’s and get two two-liter bottles of white wine.
Go on! she said, just as she always had,
Go on! Go on! She ordered me down to the liquor store, and I obeyed, just as I had done twenty or twenty-five years before. When I got back I put the two bottles by the bed and took my leave. There would have been no point in having any further conversation with her, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair. At the time I thought she was finished, yet she went on living for several years, and that was what amazed me most. I can truthfully say that until I learned of her death I had assumed that she must have been dead for years. Not having seen her or heard from her for so many years, I had simply forgotten about her, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. The truth is that at times we are so close to certain people that we believe there is a lifelong bond between us, and then suddenly they vanish from our memory overnight, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. It’s the way with actors, I told myself, sitting in the Auersbergers’ wing chair, that they don’t dine much before midnight, and those who keep company with actors have to pay for this dreadful habit of theirs. If we go to a restaurant with actors the soup is never served until half past eleven at the earliest, and the coffee stage isn’t reached until about half past one.
The Wild Duck is a relatively short play, I told myself, but then it takes at least half an hour to get from the Burgtheater to the Gentzgasse, and after the performance the actors have to take their curtain calls — and since
The Wild Duck is such a great success, there’ll have been fairly prolonged applause — so it’ll be at least half an hour before the actors have taken off their makeup. So if the performance finished at ten thirty it’ll take the actor, who after all is the person for whom this
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