Thomas Bernhard - Correction

To the left of the door in the wall opposite the window is where they, the Hoellers, had pinned Roithamer’s death notice, and to the right of the door, the death notice of Roithamer’s sister. For a long time to come the mood throughout the whole valley will probably be determined by these two dead people, I thought, and most noticeably in Hoeller’s house with which these two, each in his or her own way, had such strong ties, the one by actually having lived here, in fact until his own violent death, the other as his sister, because she was always welcome in Hoeller’s house and especially popular with Hoeller’s children, with whom she had made friends. While Roithamer had been drawn to Hoeller, originally, by Hoeller having been his schoolmate, and subsequently by Hoeller’s idea of building his house in the Aurach gorge and Roithamer’s sudden clear perception, derived from this building plan, of the kinship between himself and Hoeller, whose inward and outward simplicity had always been attractive to Roithamer, Hoeller’s house as a building , in itself which had interested Roithamer so much that he often took part all day long, for weeks on end, in the building of Hoeller’s house, it was not in Altensam he spent his vacations from England but taking part in the building of Hoeller’s house, then it was, for Roithamer’s sister, Hoeller’s children for whose sake she often visited the Hoellers, at Christmas or Easter, Roithamer’s sister always brought Hoeller’s children presents particularly suited to these children, from time to time she would buy them completely new outfits and take them on trips to the lakes or even into town.

The Aurach gorge with Hoeller’s house, so perfectly, because so functionally, adapted to the Aurach gorge, had always been the destination, in their last years, of these two people whose faces I now saw pictured on those death notices on: he wall opposite me, I thought, and I couldn’t take it in that the deaths of those two should have come so quickly and, after all, so unexpectedly, plunging everything in the Aurach valley into such gloom as had certainly been prevalent here for some time now, ever since the death of those two. The Hoellers had always had a tender spot in their hearts, as I know, for the two Roithamers, as they most affectionately referred to the now dead brother and sister, who were so different from their brothers and parents, they had never looked down on the simple inhabitants of the valley and the villages below Altensam, as their birth might have entitled them to do, as the people hereabouts put it, but had rather, from earliest childhood on, felt more kinship with them than with their own family, the two Roithamers had felt closer to the Hoellers than to their own brothers, their own parents, and they had never made a mystery of it. Whenever they had a moment they’d used it, as I’ve said, to escape from Altensam and go down to the valley, to go down there was all they ever wanted, and always preferably to the Hoellers. It was owing to those two that in earlier days, when they were still children, Hoeller’s house was always filled with life, first the old house and then the new-built Hoeller house, the two young Roithamers had always seen to it that the rather overburdened and drab life of the Hoellers in the Aurach valley, which tended by nature to a certain even, depressing grayness, was brightened up and so made bearable again, every time. By their mere presence, being basically amusing people, Roithamer and his sister had often rescued the Hoellers from one of their usual states of despair, as young people almost always will. They owed much to the two Roithamers just as, conversely, the two Roithamers owed much to the Hoellers. This catastrophe, I suddenly said when we had all finished eating, need not have happened, meaning the death of the sister and the suicide of the brother, though what I had been thinking just then was that everything had led directly to this catastrophe and that actually it had to happen.

Because my remark that Roithamer had probably got the idea of building the Cone from Hoeller’s building his home in the Aurach gorge had brought no reply, whether in agreement or disagreement, for such a long time, from the Hoellers, I felt blocked about saying anything else, yet it was after all impossible to keep sitting in silence at table with the Hoellers, merely eyeing the family room, and anyway I felt that the Hoellers were waiting for me to come up with something, something to say, but I, looking at those death notices on the wall opposite, was not about to come up with another remark for them, it was still possible, I thought, that even after so long a pause Hoeller might have something to say in response to my previous remark or even that Hoeller’s wife, who’d been most attentive toward me, might say something, but what really puzzled me was that the children, who were probably not always so quiet and whom I knew to be not at all tongue-tied, hadn’t a word to say, though they had long since finished eating and drinking and were now sitting there, elbows on the table, poised as if only waiting for their father to give the signal to rise, so they could jump up and run out of the room. The darkness outside was now total, suddenly I heard the roaring of the Aurach again, fatigue couldn’t have been the only reason for Hoeller’s not talking, so I tried again to get a conversation going by making a second remark. Everything’s so very quiet now in Altensam, I said, after the death of our friend Roithamer’s sister and after his own death, nothing but closed blinds, I said, locked gates, everything makes it look like a house of death, the whole valley has been darkened even more under the impact of the two Roithamers’ deaths, wherever you go, that pervasive silence, this speechless wait-and-see attitude of all the people, which simply must be linked with the deaths of the two Roithamers, it was foreseeable, meaning from a certain point in time onward, I said, whereupon they suddenly all listened to me even more attentively than before, and I said that Roithamer’s sister had been doomed, that splendid creature, who simply couldn’t bear the fact of the Cone, that her brother had made his idea come true, to build the Cone for her, meaning for her alone and particularly in the middle of the Kobernausser forest , Roithamer himself had fully realized, when he came back to England after the Cone was finished and presented to his sister, that the perfected Cone could not actually be the greatest, in fact the supreme happiness for her, as he had believed, could have believed, but that it actually meant her death, because there can be no doubt whatsoever that Roithamer’s sister was destroyed by the creation of the perfect Cone, from the moment the Cone was finished, when it was presented to her, as I recapitulated the story for the Hoellers, she was suddenly a different person, at that moment she fell prey to a terminal disease, to this day no one knows what this terminal disease was, people like Roithamer’s sister tend to go suddenly into a decline, all at once at a certain moment in their lives, a moment naturally favorable to such a terminal disease, and they can then be seen slowly sinking deeper into sickness , developing a pathological eccentricity, little by little falling victim to this disease quite in accordance with their nature, because in reality, so I said to the Hoellers, Roithamer’s sister never believed that her brother could make his idea of building the Cone for her come true, she had always considered it a crazy, an unrealizable idea, but then she had underestimated her brother’s abilities and his toughness and his unyielding nature, though she loved her brother above all others, and so she had deceived herself about her own brother, who was closer to her than anybody. Roithamer, I told the Hoellers, was a man who wouldn’t let anything in the world deter him from whatever aim he had once set his mind on, nor was he a dreamer, because he was every inch a scientist, as well as being consistent and incorruptible in every way, he was a natural scientist and the very fact that he taught at an English university made him every inch a realist, I myself, I told the Hoellers, had never in my life met a man with a more down-to-earth head on his shoulders, no character more precise in his thinking and in making his will prevail.