Thomas Bernhard: Correction

They said that Roithamer had willed me his papers. Everything seemed to me intent upon my destruction. I escaped to my father’s shack in the mountains.

There I suddenly fell sick. Pure chance, I thought, still staring down into the Aurach from my window, that they found me up there. Most likely, I thought, suddenly conscious again that I was here in Hoeller’s garret, most likely I shall go back to England. Then I paced back and forth in Hoeller’s garret.

Suddenly the mere idea of going back to England alone and without Roithamer felt horrible. I sat down at first on the chair beside the door, then got up and sat down at the desk. I took the yellow paper rose out of the top drawer and held it up to the light that had ceased to be a light, the twilight had already darkened everything, soon it will be pitch-dark, I thought, and laid the yellow paper rose back in the drawer. Was I right in going from the hospital, not to my parents’ house, but to Hoeller’s garret, I thought, and I kept going over it in my mind how deeply my parents’ feelings would be hurt when they found that I left the hospital and went directly to the Aurach and into Hoeller’s house. Even though they like Hoeller, I thought, they probably still won’t understand my going to Hoeller instead of to them. My father visits the Hoellers often, as a child I used to go along when he visited the Hoellers in their old house, the one on the lower Aurach which Hoeller suddenly sold in order to build the new house with the proceeds, plus a hefty bank loan. He had sold the old house on condition that, though the new owners had moved in long since, he and his family could stay in it another two years, or only as long as he needed to build the new house he had designed. The whole thing had been Roithamer’s inspiration for his Cone, Roithamer had quite unconsciously, as I now know, modeled his own plans and their execution for his Cone on Hoeller’s plans for Hoeller’s house and the building and finishing of Hoeller’s house. Hoeller, given his circumstances, had needed four years to plan and build and finish his house, while Roithamer had needed six years to plan and build and finish the Cone for his sister. If Hoeller had not built his house, the idea of building would probably never have entered Roithamer’s head and so today there would be no Cone, that unique instance in Europe of a cone built as a habitation, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. But Hoeller’s procedure had been the same as Roithamer’s, I thought, the one built himself a house ideal for his purposes, the other an ideal cone, as he believed, for his sister. On the one hand I thought: what audacity for Roithamer to build that Cone, on the other hand: what audacity for Hoeller to build his house in the Aurach gorge. After all, I thought, it is right here in Hoeller’s garret that the idea of building the Cone was worked out, so the Cone unquestionably comes from Hoeller’s house, from Hoeller’s garret. I had never yet been more conscious of this fact than at this moment, when I was summoned to come down to supper with the Hoeller family, by three brief knocks on the ceiling, that is, the attic floor, from below, with a hazel stick. I put on my jacket and went down at once. Hoeller and the children were already seated at the table, on which a large stoneware bowl full of dumplings was steaming, I could sit on the window side of the table, where I had a comfortable view of everything in the room which happened to be directly under the garret, conversely I was being most attentively watched by the Hoeller children and by Hoeller and his wife, each and every one had a stoneware plate and a fork in front of him, Hoeller’s wife had served a boiled smoked ham and put a pitcher of cider on the table. She sat down opposite me. She was the daughter of a roadworker from Steinbach on the Atterlake, raised, accordingly, in the humblest circumstances, dressed according to the Aurach valley custom, about thirty-six or thirty-eight years old, no more, and quietly took care of her family along fixed guidelines that had been in effect here for hundreds of years. Who, I’d wondered, will be the first to start eating, and it was Hoeller who started and invited me to start eating, then the children helped themselves and lastly Hoeller’s wife whom I have never yet heard speaking a single word in all this time I have now been in Hoeller’s house, she was the most self-effacing woman, self-effacing like all these women rescued from the worst poverty by the men who married them, always the daughters of roadmenders and woodcutters, sawmill workers or dirt farmers, taciturn women always absorbed in caring for their own families in a daily round of always the same chores, bed-making, cooking, farmyard chores and so on, women who never argued and whose matter-of-course attachment to their husbands and children was such as has already become unimaginable in a major part of our world today, but here along the Aurach we still had the same conditions and therefore the same relationships and therefore the same circumstances as existed two hundred or four hundred years ago, nature hadn’t changed and so the people in their natural setting were still the same, with all their malevolence and frightful fecundity, we have here a breed of men, I thought, actually the same breed we had at the dawn of history, progress has passed them by, they’re bone ignorant, with only a dim intuitive sense of everything which keeps them bound in trust to nature, a bond that, dangerous and painful as it may be, nevertheless guarantees their survival, and to which they have totally surrendered themselves, like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, because they never had an alternative, once born they had to cope with their native situation, circumstances, conditions, which are already unimaginable to the modern mind, and they did cope; if ever they bucked against it, if ever the discrepancy between their world and today’s world flashed on their minds, it was only for the briefest moment, after which they submitted again to the rules that have remained the same às they were half a millennium ago, and whatever they found incomprehensible when they thought about it, the Church made comprehensible to them, as it does wherever it is still influential. This woman had always been reserve personified, never a loud word, never the first to speak, everything in and about her was oriented toward taking care of things around her, she took care of her children, her husband, and her and her husband’s and her children’s house and the garden and the riverbank and everything under her care was always in order and, depending on the season, always kept in yellow or blue or red or white colors by her special love for flowers and plants, probably always her secret and surest refuge. All of Hoeller’s house was kept clean, though not oppressively clean, by this woman who scrubbed the floor boards regularly once a week with cold water, no spiderwebs on the walls, everything white, the few sticks of furniture, part of Hoeller’s inheritance from his parents, not hers, who’d had nothing, the whole house filled with an aroma characteristic of Hoeller’s house from the foods stored here and there, apples and pears atop the wardrobe or under the beds, it was an aroma I’d suddenly find myself breathing in often, sometimes on a street in the middle of London, and identifying as the Hoeller house aroma, all of a sudden there was this aroma, no matter where I happened to be, but at such moments I was always very far away from Hoeller’s house, abroad mostly, and it would start me off thinking about my so-called homeland and the things of home, so-called, seeing the images of home, for a longer or shorter time, depending on my state of mind or emotional state or both together, which these memories made bearable again. Roithamer too once told me that the aroma of Hoeller’s house would suddenly remind him of the Aurach and Hoeller’s house and Hoeller’s family and consequently of Altensam, and that this aroma had very often brought him back to life. Hoeller’s wife looked older than her years, what with taking a major part in building their house while at the same time taking care of the children born not long before they began building, all the worry about whether the house would be any good , as Hoeller once said, plus the worries about financing the house, all these inroads on her health had caused Hoeller’s wife to age rapidly, though in an incredibly attractive way.