Thomas Bernhard: Concrete

Now I’ve ruined your essay! she cried out ecstatically, whereupon she 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 the kitchen. I got some milk and butter out of the refrigerator, put the marmalade on the table next to them and cut myself two slices of bread. I put the kettle on and then sat down at the table, having got everything ready for my breakfast. But I was depressed by having to eat the bread I’d taken out of the cupboard and the butter I’d taken out of the refrigerator. I took one gulp of tea and left the kitchen. Having been unable to stand breakfast with my sister every day, I now couldn’t stand having it alone. Breakfast with my sister had nauseated me, just as it now nauseated me to breakfast alone. You’re alone again, you’re alone again. Be happy, I said to myself. But unhappiness was not to be hoodwinked so crudely. You can’t turn unhappiness into happiness as simply as that, by such blatant tactics. I couldn’t have begun to write about Mendelssohn Bartholdy on a full stomach, I thought. If I’m to do it at all it must be on an empty stomach. My stomach must be empty if I’m to begin a work like mine on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And in fact it had only ever been on an empty stomach, never a full one, that I’d been able to start on this kind of intellectual work. How could I have thought of starting after having breakfast? I asked myself. An empty stomach is conducive to thought; a full stomach gags and strangles it from the start. I went upstairs but didn’t immediately sit down at my desk. I looked at it through the door of the thirty-foot upstairs room, standing about twenty-five to thirty feet away from it, to see whether everything on it was in order. Yes, everything on the desk is in order, I told myself, everything. I took in everything on the desk, un-moving and unmoved. I looked steadily at the desk until I could see myself sitting at it, as it were from behind. I could see myself bending forward, because of my illness, in order to write. I saw that I had an unhealthy posture. But then I’m not healthy — I’m thoroughly sick, I told myself. Sitting like that, I told myself, you’ve already written a few pages on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, perhaps ten or twelve. That’s how I sit at the desk when I’ve written ten or twelve pages. I stood motionless and observed the posture of my back. That’s the back of my maternal grandfather, I thought, about a year before his death. I have the same posture, I told myself. Without moving I compared my own back with my grandfather’s, thinking of a particular photograph that had been taken only a year before his death. The man of the intellect is suddenly forced to adopt an unhealthy posture and shortly afterwards he dies. A year afterwards, I thought. Then the image vanished. I was no longer sitting at my desk; the desk was empty, and so was the sheet of paper on it. If I go and start now I might be successful, I told myself, but I hadn’t the courage to go to the desk. The intention was there, but I hadn’t the strength, either the physical or the mental strength. I stood looking at the desk through the doorway, wondering when would be the right moment to go up to it, sit down and begin work. I listened, but I heard nothing. Although my house is surrounded by my neighbours’ houses, there was not a sound to be heard. It was as though at this moment everything was dead. I suddenly found this state of affairs pleasant and tried to make it last as long as possible. I was able to make it last for several minutes and to enjoy the idea, the certainty, that everything around me was dead. Then, suddenly, I said to myself, Go to your desk, sit down, and write the first sentence of your study. Not cautiously, but decisively! But I hadn’t the strength. I stood there, hardly daring to breathe. If I sit down, there’ll at once be some interruption, some unforeseen incident. There’ll be a knock at the door, or a neighbour will call out, or the postman will ask for my signature. You must quite simply sit down and begin. Without thinking about it, as if you were asleep, you must get the first sentence down on paper, and so on. On the previous evening, when my sister was still here, I’d felt sure that in the morning, when she’d finally left, I should be able to start work, selecting from all the opening sentences I’d considered the only possible one, hence the right one, getting it down on paper and pressing on with the work relentlessly, on and on. When my sister is out of the house I shall be able to start, I kept telling myself, and once more I felt triumphant. When once the monster is out of the house my work will take shape automatically; I’ll gather together all the ideas relating to the study into one single idea, and this will be my work. But now my sister had been out of the house for well over twenty-four hours, and I was further than ever from being able to start work. My annihilator still had me in her power. She directed my steps and at the same time darkened my brain. When our father died, three years after our mother, her ruthlessness towards me intensified. She was always aware of her own strength and my weakness. She’s exploited this weakness of mine all her life. As for the contempt we feel for each other, this has been equally matched for decades. I am nauseated by her business deals, she by my imagination. I despise her successes, she my unsuccessfulness. The unfortunate thing is that she has the right, whenever she wants, to come and live in my house. This fatal clause in my father’s will I find intolerable. Usually she doesn’t announce that she’s coming, but suddenly arrives and walks round my house as though she owned it entirely, though she only has right of domicile in it, yet this right of domicile is for life and is not restricted to specific parts of the house. And if she cares to bring any of her dingy friends with her I can’t stop her. She spreads herself in my house as if she were sole owner and takes over from me. And I haven’t the strength to resist. To do so I should have to be an entirely different character, an entirely different person. And then I never know whether she’s going to stay two days or two hours, four weeks or six weeks, or even several months, because she doesn’t like city life any longer and has prescribed herself a cure of country air. It sickens me when she addresses me as my dear little brother. My dear little brother, she says, I’m in the library now, not you , and she actually demands that I leave the library immediately, even when I’ve only just entered it or have been there for some time before her. My dear little brother, what good has it done you studying all that rubbish? It’s made you sick, almost crazy, a sad, comic figure. That’s what she said on the last evening in order to hurt me. For a year now you’ve been wittering on about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Where’s your great work? she said. You associate only with the dead. I associate with the living. That’s the difference between us. In the society I mix with there are living people, in yours there are only dead people. Because you’re afraid of the living , she said, because you’re not willing to make the least commitment, the commitment that has to be made if one wants to associate with living people. You sit here in your house, which is nothing but a morgue, and cultivate the society of the dead, of mother and father and our unfortunate sister and all your so-called great minds. It’s frightening! In fact she’s right, it now seems to me; what she says is true. Over the years I’ve got completely stuck in this morgue, which is what my house is. In the morning I get up in the morgue, all day I go to and fro in the morgue, and late at night I go to bed in the morgue. Your house! she shouted in my face, you mean your morgue! She’s right, I now told myself, everything she says is true. I don’t associate with a living soul. I’ve even given up all contact with the neighbours. Unless I have to shop for groceries I no longer leave the house at all. And I hardly get mail because I no longer write letters. When I go out for a meal I flee from the restaurant almost before I’ve entered it or eaten my nauseating food. The result is that I hardly speak to anyone any longer, and from time to time I get the feeling that I can’t speak at all, that I’ve forgotten how to. Incredulously I practise speaking, to see whether I can still produce a sound, because most of the time I don’t even talk to Frau Kienesberger. She does her work, but I don’t give her any instructions, and sometimes I don’t even notice her before she’s gone again. Why did I in fact turn down my sister’s suggestion that I should go and stay with her in Vienna for a few weeks? I reacted brusquely as if to parry a malignant insult. What sort of person have I become since my parents died? I asked myself. I had sat down on the hall chair, and suddenly I felt frozen. The house wasn’t just empty, it was dead. It’s a morgue, I thought. But I can’t stand it at all if there are other people in it apart from myself. Again I saw my sister in a bad light. She had nothing but scorn and contempt for me. She made me look ridiculous wherever she could, every moment, and, when the occasion presented itself, in front of all the others. Thus, about a week ago, on Tuesday, when we visited the Minister (so-called — he’s Minister of Culture and Agriculture combined!), who had had his villa thoroughly restored and whom I find more repellent than all the others, she said to the assembled company in the so-called blue drawing room (!), He’s been writing a book about Mendelssohn Bartboldy for the last ten years and still hasn’t even got the first sentence in his head. This evoked uproarious laughter from all these brainless people sitting in their repulsively soft armchairs, and one of them, a specialist in internal medicine from the neighbouring town of Vockla-bruck, actually asked who Mendelssohn Bartholdy was. Whereupon my sister, with a devilish laugh, blurted out the word composer ; which brought forth yet more sickening laughter from these people, who are all millionaires and all brainless, among them a number of seedy counts and senile barons who go about year in year out in leather shorts, the stench of which has been building up over decades, and occupy their pathetic days with gossip about society, illhealth and money. At that moment I wanted to leave this company , but one look from my sister was enough to stop me. I should have got up and left, I now reflected, but I remained seated and allowed myself to be subjected to this dreadful humiliation, which went on late into the night. It would after all have been impossible to leave my sister alone in this company, which suited her in every respect, since it consisted entirely of highly respected people with large, indeed vast amounts of money behind them and all kinds of breath-taking titles. Probably, I thought, she’s on to the scent of a business deal. After all, she did her biggest deals with these old counts and barons who, shortly before they died, often disposed of huge slices of their even huger estates in order to make things easier for themselves, and of course for their heirs. Naturally this kind of evening in this kind of house can bring my sister a deal running into millions, I thought. To me it means nothing, but of course I have to consider her. She crosses her legs and says something flattering and utterly insincere to some old baron and thereby earns herself a whole year’s high living. Even as a child my sister had an incredibly acute business sense. I remember how she would openly approach every visitor who turned up here and ask him for money. People found it cute in a child of seven or eight, though they ought to have been disgusted, as I was even then. Our parents naturally forbade it, but even at that time she took no notice of parental prohibitions. At the party I have just mentioned she ended up by prevailing on Baron Lederer — as he is called, though he is not a baron in fact, as I happen to know — to invite her to the Bristol on his next visit to Vienna. What must have struck everybody as a piece of impudence was in fact a superb move on her part; she’s always known just how to prepare the ground for her deals. And she’s always been successful. When she now says that after the death of our parents she was able to treble her fortune I am bound to assume that she trebled it not once, but probably three or four times, for she has always lied to me in matters of business, lest it might one day occur to me to demand something from her. She need have no fear of that. What I still have will suffice for as long as I live, because I shan’t live much longer, I told myself, getting up from my chair and going to the kitchen. Now that I’ve failed in my plan to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy early in the morning, I told myself, I can sit in the kitchen and have breakfast. As I sat in the kitchen, forcing myself to eat the bread and drink the tea, which had meanwhile gone cold — and I couldn’t be bothered to make fresh tea — I kept hearing my sister say, Do come and stay with me in Vienna, just for a few weeks. You’ll see it will do you good. It’ll get you away from everything, take you out of yourself, she emphasized more than once. The very idea of having to live with my sister in Vienna sickened me. And even if she’s one hundred per cent right, I’ll never do it. I detest Vienna. Just walking up and down the Karntner Strasse and the Graben a couple of times and having a look at the Kohlmarkt is enough to turn my stomach. For thirty years the same sights, the same people, the same imbecilities, the same baseness, meanness and mendacity. She had built a new luxury penthouse, she had told me, with a thousand square feet of floor space, on the top floor of her own house (on the Graben!). I must come and see it. I wouldn’t dream of it, I told myself as I chewed the stale bread. She came here, I told myself, not only, as she would have me believe, to look after a sick man, possibly a mortally sick man — which in fact I probably am — but to look after a madman, though she couldn’t bring herself to say it outright. She treats me just like a madman — only a madman, someone demented, is treated like that, I was forced to tell myself as I chewed my bread. In the end, however, she did say quite clearly, My visit hasn’t done any good, I see. All the same, I’ve done a few good deals with your neighbours. Those were her very words. Brazen, cold, calculating. You can’t be helped, no one can help you, she said during our last lunch together. You despise everything, she said, everything in the world. Everything that gives me pleasure you despise. And above all you despise yourself. You accuse everybody of every possible crime. That’s your misfortune. That’s what she said, and at first I didn’t appreciate the full enormity of it. Only now do I realize that she’d hit the nail on the head. I enjoy life, she said, though I have my sufferings too. Читать дальше