Thomas Bernhard: Concrete

But her husband had summoned up all his energy and actually managed to complete his course six months earlier than was required — with extraordinary success , she said. To please her he had at last agreed to open the business in Trudering, which had been her idea, since she was afraid her husband would go to seed in an office, and believed it would be better for the whole family if he were to run his own business rather than go into an office. Above all she had been fascinated by the word independence more than by any other, but she had fallen prey to the word. Her husband had not felt it degrading to be a small businessman from now on, rather than a civil servant, which is always a respected profession in the suburbs, possibly in a public office, where he would be guaranteed an income for life. On the contrary he had at once acceded to his young wife’s wishes and thought he would be able, through industry and intelligence, to work his way up from being a small, insignificant businessman to becoming one day a big and important one, provided that he had luck and was able to rely on his wife. After they had made their decision they were able to rent the premises in Trudering, do them up, and finally open the shop. But these events, which I have recorded so rapidly and which passed before me equally rapidly as I sat on the Borne on that warm evening with my eyes closed, took more than a year. According to the young woman it was a desperate year, for on top of all the terrible problems with the authorities came the birth of their son and then, no doubt as a result of all this, a strange progressive illness, not dangerous, but unpleasant, which produced small brown blotches all over her body, of a kind which the doctors said they had never seen before. But in the end the couple had managed to open their business with the help of her parents, who contributed a fairly large sum of money, the precise amount of which she did not specify. But it was only after they had opened the business that the difficulties really began, the young woman said. As I sat now in my chair on the Borne I could hear it all again quite clearly, her tone of voice, everything. The suppliers would not supply goods on credit, yet the stock had to be as large as possible and when they did supply them, they sent either the wrong goods or faulty goods, she said. Often a number of crates would arrive containing appliances which were half broken because the delivery men were so careless, and nobody today took any responsibility for anything. On the one hand she was fully occupied with the child all day, on the other she also had to help her husband all day in the shop, since he was so inept in business matters that his ineptitude almost verged on the irresponsible, unlike her, for she had at one time attended a commercial college, curiously enough in Erlangen, probably because she had relatives there. But she could not reproach her husband, since she had virtually forced him to start the business and give up his real profession, that of an electrical engineer. Perhaps it was wrong of me, perhaps it was the biggest possible mistake, she said, to persuade my husband to leave the career he was destined for and force him to go into business. They had naturally not foreseen the real difficulties that actually presented themselves, even though they had been prepared for the worst, and in any case they had plenty of good will at the time, as well as the brave hope that they would be able to cope with any difficulties they met, however great they turned out to be. But her husband, as she only discovered when it was too late, was utterly unsuited to any kind of independence. She had not known this, though she ought to have seen it, for they had been together long enough before they decided to open the business in Trudering. But perhaps, she said, I did see it all and didn’t want to see it. She had pictured it as such a pleasant life, being in business in Trudering; she demanded nothing more and would have been quite simply happy with her husband and children. Her calculations did not work out. She had deflected her husband from his proper career, and her own commitment to the business deprived the child of the care and attention necessary for its upbringing. The child sensed how we had got ourselves stuck, she said. The Cañellas girl, who had at first wanted to leave but whom I had asked to stay, now suddenly began to take an interest after all in what the young Anna Härdtl was saying. Naturally she showed no emotion, which would have been too much to expect, but she seemed at least to show some understanding. And the shop, the young woman said, was in one of the best streets in Trudering. She had great difficulty in not bursting into tears. I, however, was not going to divert her from her misfortune, the full extent of which she had not yet revealed, for I now wanted to hear what had happened next. The young woman was naturally not able to recount the events in exact chronological order, and the account I give here is far more ordered than the one she was able to give. My parents were too far away to be able to look after our child, she said. My mother didn’t get on well with my husband; like all mothers with married daughters she imagined that my husband had stolen her daughter, torn her out of her hands quite unlawfully. We were in fact abandoned by everyone. All we had were our difficulties with the business. Then, when they were at the end of their tether, as she put it, she had had the idea of flying to Mallorca for a few weeks with her husband and child. She did not book the very cheapest holiday, but almost the cheapest. Her only stipulation was that the room should have a balcony and a sea view. At the end of August, that is eighteen months earlier, they had flown from Munich to Mallorca. You know, she said, I’m only twenty-one. And then she was unable to continue for a while. It was the Hotel Paris where we stayed, she said. I’d pictured it all differently. She couldn’t say how differently, not even when I asked her how differently. She just couldn’t. When she went into the sea with the child the morning after they had arrived, she felt sick. So did the child. They hired a couple of deckchairs and sat in them in silence for several hours, directly underneath the walls of the hotel, among a thousand or two thousand other people. They were unable to talk to each other because there was a building site next to the hotel, which made any conversation impossible. They tried to get out of the hotel, but that wasn’t possible, as they couldn’t get any other accommodation. Finally, when they’d been there only two days, they thought of returning to Munich, but they couldn’t do that either, because there were no seats to be had on the plane. Day and night we had to plug our ears, she said, and we never went near the water again out of sheer disgust. We tried going inland, but we nearly died of the heat and the stench. And they couldn’t for one moment escape the noise. They could only go to sleep out of sheer exhaustion in a room whose walls were so thin that they could hear whenever somebody turned over in bed in the next room. When I opened the wardrobe door, she said, I could see daylight, because the back of the wardrobe was simply a concrete wall, not more than four inches thick, which had been cracked by the weather.

There was such a draught at night that we all caught cold. The little boy became ill too. During the day we took refuge in the bar, which was stuffy but bearable. We had full board, but we couldn’t eat the food. It happened on the fifth day, she said. She had gone to sleep, no doubt from exhaustion, about two o’clock in the morning, and did not wake up again until about five, in a state of alarm. It was still quite dark, she said. Since my husband wasn’t in bed — the boy was asleep — I got up and went out on to the balcony. But he wasn’t there either. I went back and lay down on the bed, but got up again at once and went back on to the balcony. I had such a terrible premonition, she said, and looked down from the balcony. On the concrete below the balcony there was a body covered with a blanket. I knew immediately that it was my husband, the young woman said. In the hotel lobby they told her they had found the body at three o’clock. The head was completely smashed. The manager told her that he had not wanted to wake her up and alarm her, but had waited for her to come down into the lobby, as she had now done. If it was her husband — and there was no doubt that it was — and she could identify the body satisfactorily, he would arrange everything else. The young woman was suddenly able to tell her story quite calmly, and I had the impression that she had become calm because I had got her to tell it. This is how it seemed to me now. I could hear her again as though it were yesterday. Without saying a word she had gone back to her child on the eighth floor — as is nearly always the case in cheap hotels the lift was out of order — picked him up and gone down to the lobby again. Meanwhile, she said, so many inquisitive people had gathered, even though it was then about six in the morning. A doctor turned up, and the police, and then they put her husband’s body into a hearse, which had been called from Palma, and drove it away. She then sat in the lobby for half an hour, taking no part in what was going on there, incapable of standing up, simply clinging on to her child. Then she went to her room and did not leave it for two days. When she went down into the lobby at about noon on the second day, she learned that her husband had been buried in the cemetery at Palma, and she was handed a piece of paper giving the number of the burial lot. She took a taxi to the cemetery and found the grave, she said, only after searching desperately for hours. It was terribly hot, and all she wanted to do was to die. But naturally this wish was not granted. To her horror she discovered that her husband had not been buried alone, but that his body had been deposited together with that of one Isabella Fernandez who had died a week earlier, in one of the above-ground seven-tier concrete tombs which are common in Mediterranean countries owing to shortage of space. There she stood with her child. Two days after her husband had fallen to his death — no one knew how or why — from the balcony of his room at the Hotel Paris, she was standing in front of a concrete tomb which was already sealed and did not even bear her husband’s name, only that of a seventy-two-year-old woman, a complete stranger, and her husband’s number, affixed to the yellowish marble plaque. Even this part of her story the young woman told quite calmly, having meanwhile ordered another cup of coffee. Then she suddenly got up, saying that she had actually been about to visit the cemetery, as she did every day. She had been in Palma for seven days, and every day she had been to the cemetery, where she now knew her way around quite well. She would prefer to stay here in Palma, she said: in Germany she was unhappy all the time. In the meantime she had already paid two visits to Palma because of legal matters connected with this sad affair, which it fell to her to settle. She had at first thought that she could rely on the German Consulate, but the Consulate had let her down completely, finding it unreasonable that it should be pestered by Anna Härdtl. She had given up seeking help from the Consulate, but then she had fallen into the hands of a smart Palma lawyer, who had settled everything for her, though at the cost not only of her entire fortune, but of a large credit which she had been obliged to seek from a Munich bank. The most curious feature of the whole case, however, was that Anna Härdtl had not once been questioned about it by the police; she had not spoken to anybody from the police, but had simply been sent the funeral director’s account. Much later the Cañellas girl told me that for a moment she had thought it might be a case of murder, although the idea had seemed absurd and she had put it out of her mind. The fact was, however, that the balconies of the Hotel Paris in Santa Ponsa had railings which were only eighteen inches high and therefore illegal even under Spanish law; it is therefore highly likely that the young Härdtl had stepped out on to the balcony for a moment to get a breath of air, or just to light a cigarette, and that, while still half asleep, he had plunged over the railings directly on to the concrete beneath the balcony. Meanwhile a law suit had been started, the young woman said, as she stood there about to set off to the cemetery, but she had no idea what kind of law suit. She had brought a photograph of her husband with her from Munich, she said, and would like us to see it. She showed us the photograph — he was a dark-haired young man, a mere youth like millions of others, with nothing extraordinary about him, a thin face with sad features, more a Mediterranean type, I thought, not a Bavarian type. At this point the young Cañellas girl, not I, had the idea — the monstrous idea — of asking the young woman whether she would mind our accompanying her to the cemetery. I don’t know what she hoped to achieve; probably she wanted to have evidence, direct sight as it were, of the tragedy, of which we had now heard a good deal, though recounted only in a rather helpless and fragmented manner. We walked up the Jaime III and took a taxi to the cemetery. The Palma cemetery is enormous and looks — at least to central European eyes — extremely strange and hence somewhat eerie, being more reminiscent of North Africa and the desert, and although I have always believed myself indifferent to the question of where I am buried, I thought to myself now: This is one place where I don’t want to be buried. Young Frau Härdtl no longer knew to which entrance the taxi should take us, and it dropped us in fact at quite the wrong place. As a result, the young woman hurried first in one direction, then in another, repeatedly losing us and all the time holding her dead husband’s photograph in her hand, but she was unable to find the burial site. In the end I suggested that she should ask the men who were standing in front of the mortuary cold store, from which there emanated an indescribable smell of decomposition. She was quite incapable of doing so. I therefore took the photograph from her and went up to one of the men in grey plastic coats who were standing around in front of the mortuary and gave him the number of the grave site. He pointed in a certain direction, and all three of us set off in this direction, with Anna Härdtl leading the way. The situation could not have been more embarrassing or more distasteful, but this was what we had wanted; we ourselves had created the situation, less out of sympathy, I think, than out of curiosity, probably even out of a thirst for sensation, and the Cañellas girl had in the end done more than a little to bring it about. At last we found ourselves standing in front of one of the thousands of square marble plaques enclosed in concrete. On it was to be read, freshly incised, the name Isabella Fernandez. Anna Härdtl, with tears in her eyes, tried to fasten her husband’s photograph to the marble plaque, but was at first unable to do so. By chance I had in my pocket the end of a roll of adhesive tape and used this to stick the photograph to the marble. Anna had previously written the name of her husband, Hans Peter Härdtl, in pencil under that of Isabella Fernandez, and though partly obliterated by the rain, it could still be clearly read. Poor people, she said, or those who suddenly became victims of a misfortune such as she had suffered and could not make themselves understood, were buried, when they died, the very same day in an above-ground concrete block like this, which is often meant not just for two, but for three bodies. Everywhere there were bunches of plastic flowers of different sizes hanging from the marble plaques set in concrete. The whole cemetery was pervaded by the smell from the mortuary cold store. At first I thought we ought to leave Anna alone now, but then it struck me that it would be better to take her back to town by taxi. We turned the other way in shame and embarrassment and looked down at the wilderness beyond the cemetery while she wept uncontrollably. After about five minutes she hadn’t the strength to stand there any longer and asked us to take her away from the cemetery. We went out, and since there was no taxi to be seen anywhere we got the porter of the lunatic asylum, which stands next to the cemetery in a large park full of palm trees, to order one for us. We drove back into town, but then, since Anna was looking so despondent, we decided to take her to her hotel. Again, I thought, she’s chosen to stay at the most dreadful hotel, but then I reflected that she couldn’t do anything else: since the only thing she had left in the world was her terrible misfortune, there was no choice for her but to put up at this dreadful hotel, the Hotel Oasis, the most run-down in the whole of Calamayor, whose guests were mainly German widows in their seventies, eighties and nineties, shunted off there by their children with the ulterior motive of getting rid of them for good on the cheapest possible terms. Full board for twelve weeks in such a hotel, I imagine, costs less than it does to live decently in Germany for half a week. Every Christmas, tens of thousands of German widows find under the Christmas tree a so-called winter holiday voucher for a long-term stay, hundreds of which are offered by the travel agencies in all the most ghastly hotels in Mallorca. They are sent off on their trip to Mallorca, whence their children, the donors of the vouchers, secretly hope they will never return or, if they do, then only as joschi , which in the jargon of the travel agents means roughly freeze-packed corpses. Naturally I am familiar with this aspect of Mallorca and Palma too. Living at the Oasis is the most depressing thing in the world — having breakfast in a dingy, airless, stinking basement called a dining room, furnished with dirty, torn, plastic furniture, into which aged men and women, only half alive, laboriously make their way on crutches, and enjoy the sea view through the impenetrable concrete walls of the tenement block which rises only fifteen to twenty feet away from the window. This is where you’re staying? I asked when we dropped her. I shouldn’t have said it, for my question prompted a violent fit of weeping. Since we simply couldn’t sever our contact with this young woman as she stood weeping, deserted by everything but her cruel misfortune and her despair, the Cañellas girl and I decided to accompany her next morning to th e scene — her own expression — of the tragedy. She asked us to, and we couldn’t say no, even though we knew we were getting ourselves even further into an already almost intolerable situation. Naturally I didn’t sleep all night in my hotel room; my meeting with Anna Härdtl had becpme an almost unendurable nightmare. Punctually at eleven o’clock, as arranged, the Cañellas girl and I collected Anna from the Hotel Oasis. If one wanted to describe hotels of this kind, built and run solely on greed, one would have to steel oneself to describing a cesspit for the disposal of human beings, but this is not my intention. We drove, in the Cañellas girl’s car, straight to the Hotel Paris in Santa Ponsa, which of course we didn’t know. We got out and walked up a passage between two concrete walls, which were only seven feet apart and were built, obviously by two different owners, to a height of twelve or thirteen stories. We squeezed our way through, and suddenly found ourselves at a spot where we could see the balcony from which young Härdtl had fallen. That’s the balcony, up there, Anna Härdtl said, pointing upwards. And this is where he was lying, she said. Nothing more was said. We squeezed our way back between the walls and got into the car. We drove back to Palma in silence, first dropping Anna at the Hotel Oasis. We never saw her again. It would have been impossible. And we hadn’t made any further arrangements with her. In any case she was flying back to Munich next day. I can still see her face as she said goodbye. I shall always see it. The Cañellas girl suggested driving out towards Inca for dinner that evening. As I recall, we stayed out until two in the morning and I danced with her — I hadn’t danced for over twenty years. She’s a clever girl and has meanwhile given a Chopin concert in Zaragoza and another in Madrid; she has also been invited to play at the Salzburg Festival. I woke up in my wicker chair on the Borne with these images in my head and looked across to the Cañellas’ house. The lights were on, so they were at home. But I won’t call today, I told myself, not today. Perhaps I won’t call at all. A man in my state! I’ll have to see. Dusk had fallen. I got up, paid the bill, and went back to the hotel, walking slowly, as befits an invalid. On the Molo I spoke to a few fishermen, but only briefly, and then walked on. We see so much sadness if we care to look, I said to myself on the way back to the Melia. We see the sadness and despair of others, and they see ours. She wants to move to Palma, that unhappy young woman, I thought, in order to be as close as possible to her dead husband. But how will she live in Palma? What will she live on? If, as she says, she can’t live in Germany, she certainly won’t be able to live here. Naturally I couldn’t get the thought of the young woman out of my head, and I wondered what could have been the reason for my being confronted with this affair again as soon as I had sat down in the wicker chair on the Borne, what was responsible for this confrontation? I should have been concentrating all my energies on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, but all thought of my work was suddenly driven out by the tragedy of Anna Härdtl. Yet that was over a year and a half ago, I reflected, in fact over two years ago. Perhaps it is only just coming home to me now, whereas Anna Härdtl, the victim of the tragedy, and her son have perhaps long since got over it. Yes, that might well be, I argued. She might well have forgotten it all. In fact I myself had not thought about Anna Härdtl and her misfortune since my last visit to Palma; it had never occurred to me again. Yet now, because I had sat in that wicker chair on the Borne in order to calm myself, in fact in order to rest, it was suddenly there again, gnawing away at my mind and driving me half demented. On the way back to the hotel I had at first intended to ring at the Cañellas’ door, but I managed to stop myself. Then it occurred to me that there had been three or four occasions already when I had been in Palma and intended to start work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy and never succeeded. I’ve never succeeded anywhere — in Sicily, on Lake Garda, in Warsaw, in Lisbon or in Mondsee. In all these places and many others I’d repeatedly tried to start work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy; I’d gone to these places for this purpose only and stayed as long as possible, but always in vain. The thought of this depressed me as I walked back to the hotel. A sudden oppressive stench in the air brought on an attack of breathlessness as I was walking through the little park in front of the yacht club. I had to stop and was even forced to sit down on one of the stone seats in order to calm myself. These attacks of breathlessness always come on suddenly; I never know the immediate cause. When they do I swallow two or three glycerine pills from the small phial I always have on me wherever I go. But it always takes five or ten minutes for them to work. How much worse my condition has become since my last visit, I thought. If the Cañellas see me they’ll have a fright. On the other hand, I thought, people can’t see my real condition , which can hardly get any worse, or so I imagine at least. Take everything slowly, take everything carefully, I told myself. Carefully, that was the word the specialist had stressed most of all. But I’m not giving up, I thought. Certainly not now. At first the air is wonderfully fresh and spicy and I am completely revived; then from one moment to the next it changes and has me cringing like a dog. I’m used to that. But of all the climatic conditions I know, those in Palma are the best. And the island is still the most beautiful in Europe. Even the hundreds of millions of Germans and Swedes and Dutch who come here and throw their weight about so abominably haven’t managed to destroy it. It’s more beautiful now than it’s ever been. And where in the world is there any place or any region that doesn’t have its unpleasant side? It’s a good thing I’ve left Peiskam and made a fresh start in Palma. It’s a new beginning, I thought, and I got up from the stone seat and walked on. The palm trees, which I remembered as being so tall, were now much taller, about sixty feet, and they all had a slight bend just under a quarter of the way from the top. How splendid was the sight of the gleaming lights on the cruise ships in the great harbour! I saw the sign Hotel Victoria. I’d stayed there too on one occasion, but in recent years the whole repulsive pack of so-called new rich had fallen upon it and made it unendurable. No, not the Victoria again, I told myself. Now, about fifteen minutes after my attack of breathlessness, I was suddenly walking light-footedly along the Molo and indulging in my old habit of counting the masts of the sailing boats and yachts that were anchored there in their thousands. Most of them belonged to English people wanting to sell. On almost every other boat there was a For Sale notice. England has abdicated at last, I said to myself. This remark amused me, though it might easily have made me sadder than I already was. When I reached my hotel I didn’t go straight to my room, but sat in the lobby for a while. If we see a complete stranger, I told myself, from a good vantage point in the lobby, we immediately want to know what he is and where he comes from. I can indulge this curiosity of mine best in hotel lobbies, and when I stay in an hotel it always becomes my favourite pastime. Perhaps that one’s an engineer? Or more precisely a builder of power stations? Perhaps this one’s a doctor, a consultant physician or a surgeon? Is that one an important merchant? And the other a bankrupt? Or a prince perhaps? At any rate he looks seedy. I can spend hours sitting in the hotel lobby and speculating about this or that person, and in the end about all who enter the lobby. When I’m tired I go to my room. On this evening I was completely exhausted simply by my walk to the Borne and back and above all by the tragedy of Anna Härdtl, who was on my mind all the time. At one time I had taken a glass of whisky to my room. This time it was a glass of mineral water. I thought I should sleep, but I didn’t. It was a good thing I’d put my fur coat round my shoulders, I thought. Otherwise I’d have been sure to catch cold sitting on the Borne. When we have sentences in our heads we still can’t be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea frightens us, then the sentence, then the thought that we may no longer have the idea in our heads when we want to write it down. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late ; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost. My work of Mendelssohn Bartholdy is of course a literary work, I told myself, not a musical one, yet at the same time it’s a musical work through and through. We allow ourselves to be captivated by a subject, and we remain captivated for years, even for decades, and it can happen that we let ourselves be crushed by it. This is because we have not gone to work on it early enough, or because we have gone to work on it too early. Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is. I arranged the articles and books I needed for my work on the desk, which had been specially provided by the hotel, in such a way that I could rely on the correctness of their arrangement. Perhaps the only reason why I was again and again unable to begin my work was that the books and articles were never properly arranged on my desk, I told myself. Before taking my room I had given everybody what I thought was a very generous tip; and I had the impression that they too thought it was very generous. They’ve always done everything for me and are as obliging as ever. I’ve been coming to Palma for thirty years, and for over ten years I’ve stayed at the Melia. The staff know the Austrian guest well. Each time I’ve arrived I’ve told them I’m going to write a study of my favourite composer, but I haven’t written it to this day. When I move into my room, room 734, there’s always a stack of paper on the desk. When I leave the stack of paper has gone: I’ve filled it all with writing, but gradually thrown it all away. Perhaps I’ll be lucky this year! I said to myself. I stepped out on to the balcony, but was dazzled by the glare from the floodlit cathedral, and so I withdrew to my room for the night and drew the curtains. As I have said, I thought I should be able to sleep, but of course I couldn’t. When she had flown to Palma from Munich on the first occasion after her husband’s death, she had been alarmed to discover on her return that her shop in Trudering had been robbed of all but a few worthless items. The insurance she had taken out during her husband’s lifetime did not pay out because she had not complied with the security requirements, Anna Härdtl had told us. Thereupon she was sued by an American firm from which she had acquired most of the appliances she stocked. It’s a case involving a tremendous amount of money, she had said. But a person like her just can’t be helped, I thought as I lay in bed, having been unable to get to sleep for three hours. There are actually millions of such luckless creatures who can’t be rescued from their misfortune. As long as they live they fall from one misfortune into another, and nothing can be done about it. Anna Härdtl is just such a person. I got up and moved the book by Moscheles, which had been on the right-hand side of the desk on top of the one by Schubring, to the left-hand side, placing it under the book by Nadson. Then I lay down again. I thought of Peiskam, which was probably completely snowed up and frozen solid. How could I have believed I should be able to spend even a few weeks of this winter in Peiskam. I really am quite pigheaded, I thought. I’ve completely exhausted Peiskam and everything connected with it, I thought. Don’t forget Jobann Gustav Droysen, I thought. 1874, completion of the Violin Concerto in E minor, I thought. I got up and made a note of this, and went straight back to bed. First performance of Elijah in Birmingham on 26 August 1846 occurred to me.