Thomas Bernhard: Concrete

Of course it was completely dark. I made sure that I was alone in the house. I could hear nothing except my own pulse beat. I took the four prednisolone tablets, which had been prescribed by the specialist, with a glass of water and smoothed out the sheet of paper I had put in front of me. I’ll calm down and begin work, I told myself. Again and again I said to myself, I’ll calm down and begin work. But after I had said this about a hundred times and could no longer stop saying it I gave up. My attempt had failed. It was impossible for me to begin work in the early morning light. The dawn had completely dashed my hopes. I got up and fled from my desk. I went downstairs into the hall, believing that I should be able to calm myself there, where it was cold, for by sitting for more than one whole hour at my desk I had worked myself into a state of agitation which made me almost demented, brought on not only by mental concentration, but also, as I had feared, by the prednisolone tablets. I pressed both palms against the cold wall of the hall, a well-tried method for overcoming this kind of agitation, and I actually did calm down. I was conscious of having surrendered myself to a subject which might possibly destroy me, but all the same I had believed that I could at least make a start on my work this morning. I had deluded myself. Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had. She’s been gone a long time now, and yet she is still controlling me, I thought as I pressed my hands against the cold wall of the hall. At last I had enough strength to remove them and take a few steps. I also failed in my plan to write something on Jenufa. That was in October, not long before my sister came to stay, I told myself. And now I’m failing with Mendelssohn Bartholdy, I’m failing even when my sister is no longer here. I didn’t even finish the sketch On Schönberg. She annihilated it for me: first she destroyed it, then she finally annihilated it, by coming into the room at the very moment when I thought I was going to be able to complete it. There’s no defence against a person like my sister, who is at once so strong and so anti-intellectual; she comes and annihilates whatever has taken shape in one’s mind as a result of exerting, indeed of over-exerting one’s memory for months on end, whatever it is, even the most trifling sketch on the most trifling subject. And there’s nothing so fragile as music, to which I have actually given myself up completely in recent years. At first I gave myself up to listening to music, then to studying the theory of music; first I devoted myself with the utmost intensity to the practical study of music, then to the theoretical, but my disturb me, to drive me out of my mental paradise, as I called it. If I had a book in my hands she would pursue me until I put it down. If, in fury, I threw it in her face, she was triumphant. I remember it all so well: if I had my maps spread out on the floor — which is a lifelong passion of mine — she would emerge from hiding behind my back and startle me, putting her foot on the very spot where all my attention was concentrated. I can still see her foot placed suddenly and viciously wherever I had spread out my beloved countries and continents in order to fill them full with my childish imaginings. At the age of five or six I used to withdraw into the garden with a book. On one occasion, which I can remember clearly, it was a blue-bound volume of the poems of Novalis from my grandfather’s library. In this book, which of course I didn’t properly understand, I discovered such delights as were sufficient to fill my Sunday afternoon for hour after hour, until my sister discovered where I was and, darting out from the bushes with a yell, snatched the volume of Novalis from me. Our younger sister was entirely different, but she’s been dead for thirty years, and it’s senseless to compare her now with my elder sister, to compare one who was always ailing and ill and finally died with one who is always healthy and dominates all around her. Even her husband put up with her for only two and a half years, after which he fled from her stranglehold and went to South America, to Peru, never to be heard of again. She’s always destroyed whatever she’s touched, and all her life she’s tried to destroy me. At first unconsciously, then consciously, she’s set out to annihilate me. Right up to this day I’ve had to protect myself against my elder sister’s savage desire to annihilate, and I really don’t know how so far I’ve managed to escape her. She turns up when she feels like it, she leaves when she feels like it, and she does what she feels like doing. She married her husband, who was a real estate broker, in order to drive him to Peru and get complete control of his real estate business. She’s a business woman. Even as a very small child she was that way inclined, towards the persecution of the intellect and the closely concomitant pursuit of money. That we should have had the same mother is something I’ve never been able to understand. She’d now been out of the house for almost twenty-four hours, yet she was still in control of me. I couldn’t escape her. I tried desperately but didn’t succeed. I’m horrified by the thought that to this day, when she travels by sleeper, she makes a principle of sleeping only in her own sheets. For the third time I flung open the windows and aired the whole house, until the cold air had turned it into an ice-box in which I was in danger of freezing to death. At first I’d been afraid of suffocating; now I was afraid of freezing to death. And all this because of my sister, under whose influence I’ve been in danger of either suffocating or ran to the window and shouted out this diabolical statement several times. Now I’ve ruined your essay! Now I’ve ruined your essay! I was no match for such hideous surprise attacks. At table she destroyed every conversation as it was just beginning, merely by laughing suddenly or interjecting some impossibly stupid remark which had no bearing on the incipient conversation. My father was best at keeping her under control, but my mother she victimized mercilessly. When our mother died and we were standing at the graveside, my sister said to herself, with the utmost callousness, She killed herself. She was simply too weak to live. As we were leaving the cemetery she said, Some are strong and others are weak . But I must break loose from my sister, I said, and went out into the yard. I drew a deep breath, which at once brought on a fit of coughing. I went straight back into the house and had to sit down on the chair under the mirror to stop myself fainting. It was only slowly that I recovered from the rush of cold air into my lungs. I took two glycerine tablets and four prednisolone pills in one go. Calm down, calm down, I said, and as I did so I observed the graining in the floorboards, the life-lines in the larch-wood. Observing them restored my balance. I stood up cautiously and went back upstairs. Perhaps now I shall be able to make a start on my work, I thought. But just as I was sitting down it occurred to me that I hadn’t had breakfast, so I got up and went down to freezing to death all my life. In her apartment in Vienna she actually stays in bed until half-past-ten and doesn’t go for lunch at the Imperial or the Sacher until about half-past-one. There, as she dissects her boiled fillet of beef and sips her vin rose, she does business with her effete princes and with imperial highnesses of every possible and impossible kind. I’m nauseated by the kind of life she leads. On the day of her departure she didn’t do a thing to tidy up her room before she left, so that the very sight of it made me feel embarrassed at the thought of what Frau Kienesberger would think, though she was not due to come till the following weekend. She’s been keeping the house in order for over ten years. Everything was piled up in three great heaps, and the duvet was lying on the floor. And although I’d opened all the windows, as I’ve already said, my sister’s smell was still in the room. In fact it permeated the house and made me feel sick. She has my younger sister on her conscience, I often think, for she too went in constant fear of her elder sister, towards the end probably in deadly fear. Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes into contact with, it seems to me. At one time I’d written an essay on Haydn — Michael, not Josef — when she suddenly appeared and knocked the pen out of my hand. Since I hadn’t finished the essay, it was ruined.