Thomas Bernhard

Concrete

Introduction

Few writers, and perhaps none in recent times, have staged their departure from the world with such a masterful sense of theatre as Thomas Bernhard. Success as a writer, fame and notoriety ensured that he was certain to avoid the final humiliations often inflicted on the poor and displaced. However, Bernhard, who had often been close to death since contracting pleurisy and tuberculosis at the age of eighteen, did not want his burial to be the occasion for another kind of humiliation. He was determined that there should be no hypocritical gestures of reconciliation over his dead body by an Austrian state and an Austrian literary establishment which he despised.

Thomas Bernhard died alone, of heart failure, on Sunday 12 February 1989, at his home in Gmunden, Upper Austria. By the time the municipal authority confirmed his death on Thursday the 16th the funeral was already taking place in Vienna. Apparently three people were present. The author’s testament was equally implacable. That no word of his literary remains was to be published is not a surprising demand from a writer who took such care with the ordering and correction of his texts; less common is the requirement that for the duration of legal copyright nothing he had ever written is to be performed or published:

…within the borders of the Austrian state, however that state describes itself. I categorically emphasize that I want to have nothing to do with the Austrian state and I safeguard myself concerning my person and my work not only against every interference but also against every approach by this Austrian state to my person and my work for all time to come.

This uncompromising, unforgiving statement from beyond the grave is a conclusive demonstration of the hostility between official Austria and the country’s most outstanding writers even if it can also be seen as an expression of injured love. The antagonism long preceded the chain of scandals and debacles, beginning in 1986 with the Minister of Defence’s welcoming handshake for a war criminal released from an Italian prison, which have soiled the cosy image of Austria. These events, above all the election of Kurt Waldheim as president and the allergic reaction of Austrian opinion to external and internal criticism, have seemed to confirm Thomas Bernhard’s intemperate vision of Austria as corrupt and mendacious.

In post-war West Germany, one of the roles assumed by writers was to act as a public conscience with regard to the crimes committed under the Nazis and to threats to civil and democratic liberties. On occasion, this role has brought conflicts with politicians and the state. There has nevertheless existed both a considerable degree of consensus on the legitimacy of intellectuals to speak out and a sphere of public debate in which they have participated.

One telling difference between West Germany and Austria as successor states to the Nazi-Reich was that Austria refused to regard itself as such. West Germany, of course, had no choice. Gerhard Roth, another Austrian writer, has suggested that the Austrians discovered that when they had been committing criminal acts they had been Germans. So, by becoming Austrians again after 1945, their consciences, Kurt Waldheim’s included, were clear.

Consequently, the Second Austrian Republic put considerable effort into constructing an identity which relied on ‘the Habsburg myth’ and the embalming of imperial Vienna’s cultural heritage. There was an avoidance not only of the Nazi period (and the divisive topics of exile and resistance) but of the First Republic as well, with its problematic features of civil war and clerfcal fascism. Music and literature — or rather their existence — were of fundamental importance to this identity. But since the whole edifice was fragile, and required so many subjects to remain taboo, the writers who emerged from the 1950s onwards and whose work was not safely historical or homely were viewed as disturbing threats to Austrian harmony.

A suffocating aesthetic conservatism was closely connected to other shortcomings of the Austrian scene: the lack of reputable publishers, of serious newspapers, of informed criticism. Austrian writers like Bernhard are largely published in West Germany, and frequently address their polemics on the state of affairs in Austria via the West German press. The limited possibilities for public debate have further contributed to the bitterness of the estrangement between Austrian writers and much of Austrian society.

Paradoxically, condemnation in the press and by representatives of the government helped bring writers to the attention of a reading public — often outside Austria.

Bernhard himself was not shy of making public interventions. (His revulsion at Nazism and Catholicism and what he saw as their continuing influence on Austrian attitudes was almost matched by his contempt for Social Democracy and state-subsidized writers.) Nor did he tire of varying his expressions of disgust at Austria. In Concrete, for example, which was first published in 1982, there’s a long passage, with something of the tone of a sermon — or a jeremiad — in which the narrator, while he prepares to leave Austria for a stay in Majorca, reflects that he is merely leaving a country whose lack of intellect no longer makes a man like himself despair but only vomit, and whose condition is simply that of Europe’s uncleaned latrine.

Of course, there is much more to Bernhard than a critic or satirist, however brilliant and vituperative, of Austrian and German circumstances. He and his work, in any case, elude political classification — ‘conservative anarchist’ has been one tentative description. Bernhard is a great writer for the breathless intensity with which he delineated inner geographies, the unceasing monologues inside our heads, and his marking both of the power of words — not least over the readers of his prose — and of the limits of words, their inadequacy as a means of communication.

Concrete presents a familiar Bernhardian situation. The narrator, a sickly scholar of private means, is unable to complete, in fact unable to begin even the first sentence of the definitive study of Mendelssohn which he has been preparing for more than ten years. More than three quarters of the book, itself a single almost uninterrupted monologue, advances reasons for not having begun to write, takes them back, modifies, corrects and then contradicts them. Every kind of distraction is, or may be, or may not be, responsible. ‘Probably I have only again and again been unable to begin my work, because the books and writings on my desk were not properly arranged … ‘ is in the end perhaps the narrator’s most convincing conclusion.

This calculated humour is a feature of Bernhard’s writing which is sometimes ignored by English-language critics who see only apocalyptic gloom and nihilism in his work. Bernhard is frequently and unexpectedly funny, as here in a novel whose flow of writing about the impossibility of writing is provoked and qualified by the narrator learning of the suicide of a person whom he barely knew.

But more than that, Bernhard’s whole mode of address resembles that of a comic. A stand-up comic who buttonholes the listener’s attention with a sentence, an unending sentence, draws the listener in, without the latter quite understanding where these non sequiturs, alarming exaggerations, bare-faced denials are leading until the listener (the reader) finds himself entrapped within a verbal construction with new and unfamiliar rules of logic from which there is no escaping until the narrator-comic’s telling telling telling, which is both a curse and relief, runs out of breath. Common to both Bernhard and the comic is the reliance on, and play with, reported speech, and a constant balancing between control over words and the risk of words running out of control.

The narrator in Concrete describes himself as ‘tiresome, unbearable, sick, in the truest sense of the word, impossible’, and that is how Bernhard himself has been seen. Yet, one perceptive critic concluded his obituary with the remark that Bernhard was ‘probably … the most loved author of our time’. That this was more than formal piety towards a writer who not only appeared to be ‘unbearable’ but in whose stories and novels current vernacular, dialogue, description, character-drawing, action and sexual love are largely absent is due in part to his comic aspect, his verbal clowning.

There are other reasons why the word ‘love’ is not such a misplaced characterization of the relationship between Bernhard and his readership. One is the constant reminder of physical vulnerability which his work conveys, and a sense of the oddity of the juncture of thinking head and decaying body.

Bernhard wrote against death — outran death — With such an unparalleled gusto and combativeness that it is sometimes possible to forget or miss the presence of compassion and sorrow. Perhaps the most important element of that sorrow is a note of mourning for what children lose in becoming adult.

In Concrete Anna Härdtl is a young woman from Munich whom the narrator, Rudolf, remembers meeting. She related the circumstances of her husband’s suicide while on holiday in Palma. Her life appears to be ruined because of a child-like confidence that adulthood will turn out as it is supposed to be. In an earlier novel, Gargoyles, the narrator who is accompanying his father, a country doctor, on his rounds notices a group of schoolchildren in a restaurant. ‘They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.’ The tragedy is both that children grow into gruesome adults and that those who are unable to do so are destroyed.

In Bernhard’s novels childhood is usually only present as a need, as something missing rather than fulfilled. A need which is thwarted by the indifference, if not positive antagonism of adults. (The absence can also be described as a need to belong somewhere, a need for home-ness.) However, in his autobiographical writing Bernhard was not afraid to use such words as ‘paradise’ and ‘idyll’ of his early life in the countryside and in the town of Traunstein — before school, a Nazi-Catholic education system, war and illness. And in an interview he admitted, ‘Nevertheless, it was a happy childhood, probably, certainly even.’ This respect for childhood and its investment with a degree of Utopian light brings Bernhard, in this respect at least, close to the grand old Marxist Utopian Ernst Bloch. (In the novel Corrections, the central figure, Roithamer, is described as constantly having his most important books — which always remained the same — ready to hand: ‘Montaigne, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ernst Bloch…‘)

Thomas Bernhard’s aesthetic subjectivity and its capacity for defiance, disruption and contradiction can clearly not be reduced to an individual biographical identity. The disturbance his writing produces cannot be translated into moral or social terms. Nevertheless, his work owes its power — an ability to disarm, as well as a capacity for disruption — not only to the way his prose overwhelms the reader and to his Swiftian revulsion at human motives; it draws too on his sense of the comic and an underlying intimation of a loss, a waste, of the potential for humanness.

Martin Chalmers

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From March to December, writes Rudolf, while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone, a fact which I am bound to record here, against the third acute onset of my sarcoidosis, I assembled every possible book and article written by or about Mendelssohn Bartholdy and visited every possible and impossible library in order to acquaint myself thoroughly with my favourite composer and his work, preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing — such was my pretension — a major work of impeccable scholarship. It had been my intention to devote the most careful study to all these books and articles and only then, having studied them with all the thoroughness the subject deserved, to begin writing my work, which I believed would leave far behind it and far beneath it everything else, both published and unpublished, which I had previously written in the field of what is called musicology. I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition, but now I had resolved to begin writing on the twenty-seventh of January at precisely four o’clock in the morning, after the departure of my sister, who was due to leave on the twenty-sixth, and whose presence in Peiskam had for weeks put paid to any thought of my starting work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. On the evening of the twenty-sixth my sister had finally gone, with all her dreadful faults, which are the result of her unhealthy craving to dominate and her distrust of everything, but especially of me, a distrust by which she was consumed to a higher degree than anyone else, but from which she daily drew fresh vitality. I went round the house, breathing deeply, and aired it thoroughly. Finally, since tomorrow was the twenty-seventh, I set about arranging everything I needed to carry out my plan, arranging the books and articles, the papers and the piles of notes on my desk in precise accordance with those rules which I had always observed as a precondition for starting work. We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task! These preparations occupied me for more than five hours, from half past eight in the evening until half past two in the morning, and, as was only to be expected, I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, being continually tormented above all by the thought that my sister might return for some reason and frustrate my plans. In her condition she was capable of anything: the smallest incident, the slightest upset, I told myself, would be enough to make her break her journey home and return here. It would not be the first time I had seen her to the Vienna train and parted from her, as I thought, for months, only to have her back in my house two or three hours later to stay for as long as she chose. I lay awake, constantly listening for her at the door, alternating between listening for my sister at the door and thinking about my work, and especially about bow to begin it, how the first sentence should run, for I still didn’t know how to word the first sentence, and before I know the wording of the first sentence I can’t begin any work. So all the time I was tormented by listening for my sister’s return and by thinking of how I should word my first sentence on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Again and again I listened despairingly, and again and again I thought, just as despairingly, about the first sentence of my work on Mendelssohn. I spent about two hours thinking about the first sentence of my Mendelssohn study and at the same time listening for my sister’s return, which would put an end to my study before it was even started. However, since I listened for her return with ever increasing intent-ness, reflecting that, if she did return, she would inevitably ruin my work, while at the same time thinking about the wording of my first sentence, I must finally have nodded off. When I awoke with a start it was five o’clock. I had meant to begin working at four o’clock and now it was five. I was alarmed by this negligence of mine, or rather this lack of discipline. I got up and wrapped myself in a blanket, the horse blanket I had inherited from my maternal grandfather, and tied it round me as tightly as I could with the leather belt which was also inherited from my grandfather, so tightly that I could scarcely breathe. Then I sat down at my desk.

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. 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.

Everybody suffers, my dear little brother, but you despise life. That’s your misfortune, that’s why you’re ill, that’s why you’re dying. And you soon will die if you don’t change, she said. I could hear it clearly now, more clearly than when the words were uttered in that cold, unfeeling manner of hers. My sister the clairvoyant — absurd! She’s probably right though, that it would be a good thing to get away from Peiskam for a while, but I’ve no guarantee of being able to start my work anywhere else, let alone get on with it. Several times during dinner she exclaimed, Mendelssohn Bartholdy! as if to give herself some particularly intense amusement, probably because she knew precisely that each time it was bound to cut me to the quick. The fact is that well over ten years ago I told her I was thinking of writing something -1 didn’t say a book or an article, but something — on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At that time she’d never heard of Mendelssohn Bartholdy. It now drove her mad to hear me mention the name at every end and turn. She couldn’t bear to hear it any longer, at least from me. She forbade me ever to utter the name again in her presence. If Mendelssohn Bartholdy was to be mentioned at all, then it must be by her: that gave her pleasure because she knew, after trying it out for ten years, that it was bound to make me look ridiculous. Besides, she hates Mendelssohn’s music — that’s just like her. How can one love Mendelssohn when there’s Mozart and Beethoven! she once exclaimed. There would never have been any point in my explaining why I had chosen to work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. For years the name Mendelssohn Bartholdy has carried an emotive charge for both of us, bringing us into collision and sparking off all our dreadful, unhealthy and hence agonizing conflicts. You only love Mendelssohn Bartholdy because he’s a Jew, she said scornfully. She came out with this remark for the first time on her last visit, quite out of the blue, and perhaps it was true. She had turned up, ruined my work, and in the end almost ruined me. Women turn up, get you in their toils and ruin you. But hadn’t I sent for her? Hadn’t I suggested that she should come to Peiskam, for a few days? I’d sent her a telegram inviting her to Peiskam. Only for a few days though, not for months. How far gone I must have been to wire her! What I actually hoped for from her was help, not destruction. But it’s always the same: I beg and beseech her to help me, and she ruins me! And knowing this, I wired her. For the hundredth time I invited my destroyer to my house. It’s true that I wired to her for help: she didn’t come to Peiskam uninvited. The truth is always terrible, but it’s always better to stick to the truth than to resort to lies, to lying to oneself. But I hadn’t said in my telegram that she was to stay for months, because having my sister in my house for months is hell, and I told her so. I said, When you’re here for months it’s hell, and she laughed. My dear little brother, she said, you’d have gone to pieces if I’d left you alone again so soon. You probably wouldn’t have survived. I didn’t reply, perhaps because I realised at this moment that she was right. But what good is it now to argue with myself as to whether I sent for her or not? The facts are no longer in question. But the fact is that she ought to have left, simply cleared out of Peiskam, the moment I was capable of starting my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But a person like my sister isn’t perceptive enough to see when such a moment has come. And naturally I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that it had, that I was capable of writing my study or whatever of Mendelssohn, probably about a hundred and fifty pages or even more, and that it was time for her to clear out. So suddenly I hated her — she probably didn’t know why — and cursed her, and in this way I missed my chance of starting work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But I was probably ashamed to tell her that I had made her come to Peiskam only because of this work, which I’d not yet begun, that I was capable, in other words, of exploiting her as a mere tool for my intellectual product. The so-called man of the intellect constantly walks all over others, killing them and making corpses of them for his intellectual purposes. When the moment comes, such a man of the intellect, so called, would have thought nothing of sacrificing for his intellectual product the one person who had made it possible, misusing him and doing him to death in his devilish speculation. I’d thought I could misuse my sister in this way, but my calculation didn’t work out. On the contrary, I had committed the greatest folly by wiring to my sister in Vienna, Come for a few days. As it transpired she would have come to Peiskam that very day anyway, without being invited, because she was sick of Vienna, suddenly sickened by the continual parties and all these unendurably brainless people. She deserved it, because in recent months she’d been overdoing her socializing. I clapped my hands to my head when I realised that I could have saved myself the telegram, for had I not sent it I should probably have had the courage to tell her after a few days that it was time for her to clear out. As it was, I didn’t have the courage, since I’d asked her to come. It would after all have been unparalleled impertinence to ask her to come and then to throw her out of the house. In any case I knew her too well not to realise that if I’d told her to clear out she wouldn’t have dreamt of it. She’d have laughed in my face and then taken over the house completely. On the one hand we can’t be alone, people like us; on the other we can’t stand company. We can’t stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it’s totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time. Admittedly I’d always credited my sister with the ability to rescue me from the hell of being alone, and, to be honest, she often has succeeded in dragging me out of the black, hideous, revolting, stinking bog of loneliness, but lately she has no longer had the strength, and probably not the will either; perhaps she has doubted for too long whether I am really serious, as is proved, after all, by the way she continually teases me unmercifully about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. I hadn’t written anything for years — because of my sister, I always maintain, but perhaps also because I am no longer capable of writing. We’ll try anything in order to be able to start work on a study, absolutely anything, and we don’t recoil from even the most terrible things if they’ll make it possible for us to write such a study, even if they involve the greatest inhumanity, the greatest perversity, the gravest crime. Alone in Peiskam, surrounded by all these cold walls and with only the banks of fog to look at, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I had tried the most senseless experiments: for instance I had sat on the stairs which lead from the dining room to the first floor and declaimed a few pages of Dostoyevsky, from The Gambler, in the hope that this would help me to begin my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, but naturally this absurd experiment was a failure, ending with a prolonged shivering fit and with my tossing to and fro in bed for several hours, dripping with sweat. Or I would run out into the yard, breathe in and out deeply three times and then stretch out first the right arm, then the left, as far as possible. But this method too only led to exhaustion. I tried Pascal, then Goethe, then Alban Berg — in vain. If only I had a friend! I said to myself again, but I have no friend, and I know why I have no friend. A woman friend! I exclaimed, so loudly that the hall echoed, but I have no woman friend either; I quite deliberately have no woman friend, since that would mean giving up all my intellectual ambitions. One can’t have a woman friend and at the same time have intellectual ambitions if one’s general condition is as bad as mine. There’s no question of having a woman friend and intellectual ambitions! Either I have the one or I have the other; to have both is impossible. And I decided very early in favour of intellectual ambitions and against having a woman friend. I never wanted a male friend from the time I was twenty and suddenly began to think independently. The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others. And I’d always found it hard to have any relationship with another person — I wouldn’t think of using such an unappetizing word as friendship, a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one — I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but — what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought — needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick — impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word. I always believed that I could get on with my intellectual work if only I were completely alone, with no one else around. This proved to be mistaken, but it is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. We need someone for our work, and we also need no one. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one. In the last few days I have once more become aware of this totally absurd fact: we never know at any time whether we need someone or no one, or whether we need someone and at the same time no one, and because we never ever know what we really need we are unhappy, and hence unable to Start on our intellectual work when we wish and when it seems right. I believed fervently that I needed my sister in order to be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And then, when she was there, I knew that I didn’t need her, that I could start work only if she wasn’t there. But now she’s gone and I’m really unable to start. At first it was because she was there, and now it’s because she isn’t. On the one hand we overrate other people, on the other we underrate them; and we constantly overrate and underrate ourselves; when we ought to overrate ourselves we underrate ourselves, and in the same way we underrate ourselves when we ought to overrate ourselves. And above all we always overrate whatever we plan to do, for, if the truth were known, every intellectual work, like every other work, is grossly overrated, and there is no intellectual work in this generally overrated world which could not be dispensed with, just as there is no person, and hence no intellect, which cannot be dispensed with in this world: everything could be dispensed with if only we had the strength and the courage. Probably I lack extreme concentration, I thought, and I went and sat in the ground floor room which my sister, for as long as I can remember, has always called the salon — which is dreadfully tasteless, for there’s no place for a salon in an old country house like this. But it’s just like her to use this designation for the ground floor room. She uses the word salon all too readily, but of course in Vienna she really has a salon — she actually runs a salon, though the way she runs it would be a subject for a large dissertation if I cared to write one. So I stretched out my legs in the downstairs room which my sister calls the salon — every time I hear the word it makes me want to vomit. I stretched them out as far as possible and tried to concentrate on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But naturally it’s quite wrong to begin a work of this sort with On the third of February 1809 … I hate books and articles which begin with a date of birth. Altogether I hate books and articles which adopt a biographical and chronological approach; that strikes me as the most tasteless and at the same time the most unintellectual procedure. How shall I begin? It’s the simplest thing in the world, I told myself, and I can’t understand why this simplest thing in the world eludes me. Perhaps I’ve made too many notes, written down too much about Mendelssohn Bartholdy on these hundreds and thousands of bits of paper that are piled up on my desk? Perhaps I’ve done too much work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, my favourite composer? I’d often wondered whether I hadn’t overdone my research on Mendelssohn Bartholdy and whether this was the reason why I was now incapable of starting my work on him. A subject that has been overworked can no longer be realised on paper, I told myself. I had masses of evidence to prove this. I won’t list all the projects I didn’t succeed with because I’d overworked them in my head. On the other hand, Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a subject requiring years, if not decades, of research. If I say I’ve got the whole article, essay, book, or whatever in my head, then it follows that I can’t realise it on paper. That’s how it is. Is this the case with Mendelssohn Bartholdy? It almost drives me crazy, indeed demented, to think that I might have overworked the subject, and that it was therefore pointless, on the one hand, to telegraph my sister, as a rescuing angel so to speak, and, on the other, to throw her out of the house, and so on. I’d spent two weeks in Hamburg and two in London. It was in Venice, curiously enough, that I’d found the most interesting documents relating to Mendelssohn Bartholdy. To ensure myself the best possible protection I had at once withdrawn to the Bauer-Griinwald, to a room which had a view of the church of San Marco across the red-tiled roofs, and studied these documents, which I had borrowed from the archbishop’s palace. In Turin I had found a number of Mendelssohn autographs on Carl Friedrich Zelter, and in Florence a whole pile of letters written to his Cecile. I made my own copies of all these texts or had them copied and brought the copies back to Peiskam. But these journeys in pursuit of Mendelssohn took place years ago, some of them more than ten years ago. I set aside a room to house this Mendelssohn material and finally managed to catalogue it all, often spending whole weeks in this room (which is above the green room on the first floor!). It was not long before my sister christened it the Mendelssohn Room. At first, I believe, she actually spoke of the Mendelssohn Room with genuine respect, but in the end only with scorn and contempt, in order to hurt me. Only after some years did I begin moving various items which seemed important from the Mendelssohn Room to my desk, always hoping and believing that the moment was not far away when I could begin my work. But I was wrong. My preparations have now been going on for years, for more than a decade, as I have said. Perhaps, it occurs to me, I ought not to have interrupted them by doing other things, perhaps I shouldn’t have begun anything on Schönberg or Reger, or even contemplated the Nietzsche sketch: all these diversions, instead of preparing me for Mendelssohn, simply took me further and further away from him. And if only these subjects, of which I can no longer give a complete list, had at least led to something! But they only proved to me again and again how hard it is to produce any intellectual work at all, even of the briefest and apparently most peripheral kind — though obviously there can’t be any such thing as a peripheral intellectual work, not to my mind at least. All these attempts to write on Schönberg, Reger and so on had basically been merely distractions from my main subject; moreover, they had all been failures, a fact which could only weaken my morale. It’s a good thing I destroyed them all, all these attempts which eventually got stuck in the initial stages and would now cause me profound embarrassment had they ever been published. But I’ve always had a sound instinct about what should be published and what should not, having always believed that publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. We publish only to satisfy our craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money, which in my case, thank God, is ruled out by the circumstances of my birth. Had I published my essay on Schönberg I shouldn’t dare to be seen in the street any longer; the same would be true if I’d published my work on Nietzsche, although that was not a complete failure. To publish anything is folly and evidence of a certain defect of character. To publish the intellect is the most heinous of all crimes, and on a number of occasions I have not recoiled from committing this most heinous of crimes. It wasn’t even done out of a crude urge to communicate, because I’ve never wanted to communicate my ideas to anybody. That has never attracted me. It was a craving for fame pure and simple. What a good thing I didn’t publish my work on Nietzsche and Schönberg, not to speak of Reger! If I am nauseated by all the thousands and hundreds of thousands of publications by ofher people, I should be unutterably nauseated by my own. But we can’t escape vanity and the craving for fame. If necessary, we are prepared to yield to it with our heads held high, even though we know that we are acting in an unpardonable and perverse manner. And what about my work on Mendelssohn Bar-tholdy? I’m not going to write it just for my own satisfaction, after all, and then leave it lying around when it’s finished. Naturally I intend to publish it, whatever the consequences. For I actually believe that this work will be my most successful, or rather my least unsuccessful. I certainly am thinking of publishing it! But before I can publish it I have to write it, I thought, and at this thought I burst into a fit of laughter, of what I call self-laughter, to which I have become prone over the years through being constantly alone. Yes, you’ve first got to write the work in order to be able to publish it! I exclaimed to my own amusement. By suddenly laughing at myself like this I had actually released all my tension; I got up and went to the window. But I couldn’t see a thing. Thick fog clung to the windowpanes. I leant against the sill and tried, by continuous concentration, to descry the wall on the other side of the yard, but despite the most intense concentration I couldn’t make it out. Only twenty yards away and I can’t see the wall. To exist alone in such fog is madness! In a climate like this, which makes anything and everything a thousand times more difficult! It oppressed me, as it always did at this time of the year. I knocked on the windowpane with my index finger to see whether I could scare some bird outside, but nothing stirred. In the same way as I had tapped the pane I now tapped my head and dropped back into the chair. Ten years and not one successful piece of work! I thought. Naturally that has robbed me of all credibility. My sister spreads it around in Vienna that I am a failure, especially in those quarters where the effect is most devastating for me. I’m continually hearing her say to all and sundry My little brother and his Mendelssohn Bartholdy. She’s not embarrassed to call me a madman in everybody’s hearing. Someone who’s no longer quite right in the head. I know she talks like this about me and gets me an exceedingly damaging reputation everywhere. She recoils from nothing in order to get money, that is to do business, and rather than ruin a party she’d call me anything. She has no scruples, and she can behave abominably. On the other hand I’ve always loved her, with all her dreadful faults — loved her and hated her. Sometimes I’ve loved her more than I’ve hated her, and vice versa, but most of the time I’ve hated her because she’s always acted against me, quite consciously, by which I mean clear-mindedly, for her clear-mindedness has always been beyond question. She’s always been the realistic one, just as I’ve always been the imaginative one. I love you because you’re so imaginative, she often says, but there’s more disdain than admiration in this remark. When someone like her says I love you it’s mere hypocrisy. Or am I being grossly unjust? She always said I love you to her husband, until he could no longer endure it and cleared off to Peru, which to us seems like the end of the world, never to return. Husbands who have been deceived and lied to and made to look fools have for centuries fled to South America, never to return. It’s a tradition that goes back a long way. I’m one for lovers, she once said. I’ve always been unsuited to marriage. The very idea of having a husband round my neck for life has always been distasteful to me. I don’t know why I did marry in the end. Was it perhaps to please our parents? The business she was left with when her marriage broke up involved — and still involves — nothing but the biggest and most desirable properties in Austria, the value of which runs into millions. When her husband left her she turned the business into one which some people — the serious ones — would call disgusting and others would call incredibly successful. I am on the side of the serious ones, rightly or wrongly. To me the life my sister leads now is something to be ashamed of, being built solely on profit. Donating a million to charity at the end of the year, then gleefully reading about it in the newspapers and laughing herself silly for weeks, as she herself says she does — I find that revolting. On one occasion she made over to the church a palace near Siena — admittedly over-run by rats — to be used as an old people’s home, at the same time contributing two million schillings for extensions to the building. She had inherited it from a certain old Prince Ruspoli, who died of kidney failure. She had met him in Rome and had corresponded and gone to parties with him for years, maintaining that she was a relative of his. When I asked her whether she was going to Italy to see the palace when the restoration was finished she said quite baldly no, she wasn’t interested. She really had no time for old buildings — for old people yes, she said contemptuously, but not for old buildings. I have to put myself in good standing with the church, my little brother, she said. I found this whole procedure and what she had to say about it highly distasteful. But she’s like that. She’s always turning up with some twit or other who wears shoes made by Nagy, what is more with metal tips which give them a revolting, unnatural gait, claiming that these people are relatives of hers, and consequently of mine. I have no relatives, I always tell her. I have only intellectual kin. The dead philosophers are my relatives. She always responds to this with her sly smile. But you can’t go to bed with philosophy, my little brother, she would often say, to which I would reply, just as often, Of course I can, and at least I don’t defile myself by doing so. This remark of mine once led her to announce, at a party in Miirzzuschlag to which she had dragged me after hours of nonstop nagging, My little brother sleeps with Schopenhauer. He alternates between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. With this she scored the expected success, as always at my expense. All my life I have admired the ease with which my sister is able to conduct a conversation. Even now — in fact to an even greater extent now — she surmounts the most difficult social obstacles with supreme ease — if indeed such social obstacles exist for her at all.

Where she gets this talent from I don’t know, since our father had no interest whatever in society, and our mother disliked all the social to-do, as she called it. My sister’s business sense, which is her most distinctive trait, though no one would suspect it without knowing her as well as I do, comes from our paternal grandfather. It was he who made the family fortune, in the most curious circumstances, but at all events, however he did it, he made so much money that my sister and I, the third generation, still have enough for our existence, and all in all neither of us leads the most modest existence. For even though I live alone in Peiskam, I spend more money each month than other people who have large families. Who, for instance, heats more than nine rooms — not small rooms either — all through the winter just for himself? In fact, even though I am the most incompetent person in all so-called money matters, I could live for another twenty years without having to earn a penny, and then I could still sell off one parcel of land after another without seriously impairing the estate and thus lowering its value, but that won’t be necessary, and it’s absurd to contemplate it in view of the fact that I have only a very short time left to live, thanks to the incessant and inexorable progress of my.illness. I give myself one or two years at the most, by which time my need for life or existence or anything else this world has to offer will probably be exhausted. If I wished, I might describe myself as affluent, unlike my sister, who is really rich, for what one sees of her wealth is far from being the whole. In one point, however, which I have already mentioned, I differ markedly from her: she donates millions to the church and other such dubious institutions for the good of her soul and for her own private amusement, whereas I donate nothing and would never dream of donating anything in a world which is choking on its billions, yet prates about charity at the drop of a hat. I haven’t the least desire to amuse myself for weeks on end by giving to charity, nor have I the capacity to derive pleasure from newspaper accounts of my generosity and love of my neighbour, because I believe neither in generosity nor in love of one’s neighbour. The world of do-gooders is steeped in hypocrisy, and anyone who proclaims the contrary, or even asserts it, is either a subtle exploiter of humanity or an unpardonable idiot. Ninety per cent of the time today we are up against subtle exploiters, ten per cent of the time against unpardonable idiots. Neither can be helped. The church — since this suits my argument — exploits both, no matter what church it is, and the Catholic Church I know far too well to leave it a thing. It is the subtlest of them all, taking advantage wherever it can and getting most of its money from the poorest of the poor. But the poorest of the poor can’t be helped. The idea that they can is the most widespread of lies, propagated above all by the politicians. Poverty can’t be eradicated, and anyone who thinks of eradicating it is set on nothing short of the eradication of the human race itself, and hence of nature itself. The greater the sums my sister gives to charity, the louder and more devilishly she laughs about them. No one who has heard her laughing about one of her donations can be in any doubt about what makes the world go around. I’ve heard this laughter so often that I never want to hear it again. People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men — to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment — when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves. Let each first find his way to himself! And since hardly anyone has yet found his way to himself, it is inconceivable that any of these unfortunate millions has ever found his way to another human being — or to his neighbour, as they say, dripping with self-deception. The world is so rich that in fact it can afford anything, but this is prevented by the politicians who rule it. They cry out for aid, yet daily squander billions on arms alone. No, I positively refuse to give this world a single penny, for, unlike my sister, I don’t suffer from this devious craving for gratitude. Those people who are everlastingly saying that they are prepared for any sacrifice, that they would sacrifice everything non-stop, ultimately their lives, and so forth, those saints who are as greedy for sacrifice as pigs for the trough and who are to be found in every country and every continent under every possible and impossible name, I find utterly revolting. Such people have no other aim in mind than to be inundated with praise and showered with honours. These dangerous people, who are more self-seeking and self-satisfied than any others, whose numbers run into millions from St. Francis of Assisi onwards and who disport themselves day in day out in countless religious and political organisations the world over merely to satisfy their craving for fame, I find utterly abhorrent. The so-called social element, which has been talked about ad nauseam for centuries, is nothing but the basest of lies. I refuse to have any part in it, even at the risk of being misunderstood, though to be honest that is a risk to which I have always been indifferent. My sister, together with a number of so-called ladies from the so-called higher and highest reaches of society, once arranged a bazaar at which the Christ Child was made to croak nonstop through some dreadful loudspeaker, and my sister contributed five hundred thousand schillings to the proceeds. She then had the gall to explain to me that she cared about the poorest of the poor, but she soon realised, even though — or perhaps precisely because — I said nothing about this hypocritical enterprise of hers, that I had seen through her. In return for it she had the pleasure of being gallantly kissed on the hand by the Monsignor, the president of one of our biggest charities, who is nothing but a wily old socialite. I should be horrified at having my hand shaken by this particular gentleman. Fifteen or sixteen years ago, when I had some connection with him, admittedly only slight, he asked my sister whether, in return for eight hundred thousand schillings in cash, she would furnish an apartment for him. My sister agreed and furnished the Monsignor’s apartment exclusively with renaissance furniture from Florence and late eighteenth century Austrian pieces from two Marchfeld castles that had come her way. When the commission was completed she threw a party for him which was attended by fifty hand-picked guests, the lowliest among them being an Irish earl. He had been chosen as a guest for the evening by the Monsignor and her just because he owned a cotton mill on the border between Lower Austria and the Burgenland which she wanted to acquire at all costs. In this I know she was successful; my sister is always successful in such matters. For eight hundred thousand schillings, no doubt from church funds, she furnished the Monsignor’s apartment, and I actually told her to her face that she had done it with church funds — at a cost of eight hundred thousand schillings, which in present-day terms is more like six or seven million. Just imagine: the Monsignor furnishes an apartment for himself at a cost of eight hundred thousand schillings and at the same time goes on the air to beg on behalf of his charity in a whining appeal addressed to the poorest of the poor, and couched in terms that are mendacious in every detail. I asked my sister whether she didn’t feel ashamed, but she didn’t: she was too intelligent for that, as she herself would put it, and simply said, Four hundred thousand came from me — the Monsignor only paid four hundred thousand. Such goings-on revolt me. But they are typical of the so-called upper crust, to which it has been my sister’s life-long endeavour to belong. A mere count had to have great charm and infinite wealth for my sister to converse with him for any length of time; her normal behaviour she reserved for nothing less than princes. I don’t know where she gets this dreadful madness from. I’ve often wondered whether there’s anything the least bit natural about a person like her. On the other hand there are times when suddenly, from one moment to the next, my attitude to her becomes one of admiration. The little brother is powerless in the face of such a radiant person, which is what she often calls herself. Every room is transformed when she enters it; wherever and whenever she appears, everything changes and becomes subordinated to her alone. And yet she’s not really beautiful. I’ve often asked myself whether she’s beautiful or not, but I can’t say. She is and she isn’t. She’s different from all the others and has the ability, if not to extinguish everybody around her, at least to relegate them to the background, to put them in the shade. This makes her the exact opposite of myself: all my life I have been inconspicuous, not modest — that would be quite the wrong word — but inconspicuous and essentially retiring. The result of my being so inconspicuous and retiring has been that in the course of time I have liquidated myself, as I might say — as I do say, since it’s the truth. Your tragedy, my little brother, is that you always stay in the background, she often says. Her tragedy, however, she once said, was that she must always be in the foreground, whether she wanted to or not, that she was always forced into the foreground wherever she was and whatever the situation. What she says is never stupid, because it’s always cleverer than what other people say, but much of what she says is wrong. At times — not just at times, in fact, but all the time — I could scream at the nonsense which evidently earns her the highest admiration in all quarters. Naturally she goes to the opera, and she never misses a Wagner opera, with one exception: she never goes to see The Flying Dutchman, because — in her own words — The Flying Dutchman is not a Wagner opera. And she thinks she’s right, as so many do. The clothes she wears on such occasions are of the simplest, much simpler even than the simplest, and yet this simplicity is what attracts the greatest attention. You know, the opera is supremely important for my business, she always says. People are quite crazy about music, which they don’t understand, and take my remaindered goods off my hands. By remaindered goods she means plots of not less than a thousand acres, or what she calls city centre lots, which bring in the highest returns in the shortest time. And it’s really a delight to watch her at table. The way she takes her soup or eats her salad, and so on, makes everyone around her appear, if not positively common, then at least of an inferior stamp. The only possible match for her would be an ancient dowager from the best stable, as they say. But how dreadful to be constantly the centre of attention and never out of the limelight! I can only guess what it must be like, but it must be much more dreadful than I can possibly imagine. I’ve always had the gift of going more or less unnoticed, of keeping myself to myself, even at the largest gathering, and so I’ve always had the advantage of being able to pursue my own inclinations, my own thoughts and fancies, as I wish. Hence the way I conduct myself in company has always stood me in better stead; it’s the one best suited to me, quite the opposite of the one best suited to my sister. No matter where or when she makes her entrance and becomes the focus of all eyes, she always appears utterly natural. Absolutely everything about her is natural — everything she does, everything she says, as well as everything she doesn’t say, everything she keeps to herself. One might think there was no more natural person in the world. It’s as though she didn’t have to give a single thought to anything. But equally naturally that is mistaken. I know how much calculation goes into everything she undertakes, how carefully everything is concocted before she finally dishes it up in front of all these people. In the most natural way in the world she constantly gives them to understand — though of course it isn’t true for a moment — that she has read, if not everything, then at any rate most things, that she has seen, if not everything, then at any rate most things, that she has met and is well acquainted, if not with all, then at any rate with most of the important and famous people who matter. And all this she gives them to understand without actually saying anything of the sort. Although she knows nothing about music and hasn’t even a superficial understanding of it, everybody believes she knows a great deal about music. And the same goes for literature, even philosophy. Where others have to make a continual effort to keep up, she doesn’t need to worry about a thing: everything comes to her at will, quite automatically. Naturally she is educated, in a manner of speaking, but only superficially. Naturally she knows a lot, more than most of the people she associates with, but her knowledge is of the most superficial kind, and yet nobody notices this. Where others constantly have to convince you in order not to be defeated and collapse and make themselves ridiculous, she remains silent and invariably scores a triumph, or else she makes some perfectly timed remark, from which it follows that she is in control of the whole scene. I have never seen my sister worsted. She, on the other hand, has often seen me come to grief over some quite ludicrous point. Two more different, more contrasting characters it would be impossible to imagine. This is probably the source of the tension between us. I have money and never talk about it, she once said, you have philosophy and never talk about it. This observation demonstrates where we both stand, and possibly also, I fear, where we have come to a standstill. Everywhere in the house there are traces of my sister. Wherever my glance falls, she was there. She’s moved this, she’s left that lying around, she’s not closed this window properly, she’s left all those half-empty glasses around. And I’ve no intention of tidying up the mess she’s made. On her bed I found Proust’s Combray, as if it had been thrown down in a fit of rage. I’m sure she didn’t get very far. But I can’t say either that she reads only inferior things. In her choice of reading matter she continually reaches a remarkable standard for a woman of her age and social position, and altogether for one with her background and leanings. If anyone should ever read these notes, he’ll wonder what is the point of my going on and on about my sister in this way. It is this: my sister has dominated me ever since childhood, and whenever she leaves it takes me several days to get over her. She may have left physically, but she is still present everywhere in the clearest and for me most terrible way. Above all she was present on this last evening, as I was most painfully aware, and precisely because she had left, this continuing monstrous presence of hers made me increasingly certain that it was impossible to force her out of the house only hours after her physical departure. She can’t be forced out, she stays as long as she wishes, and on this particular evening her wish to stay was enormously intense because I wanted her out of the house, because I wanted to start work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy the following morning. Only a fool would have believed that he could actually begin work just a few hours after she’d left, just like that, and it was I who was the fool. It’s always taken me several days to free myself from my sister after her departure. On this one occasion I’d hoped for exceptional luck. But I didn’t get it. I’ve never had this sort of luck. And isn’t she right, perhaps, to say that my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy is just a pretence to justify my absurd way of life, which is entirely without any justification unless it produces something written, something completed? I fall upon Schönberg in order to justify myself, upon Reger, upon Joachim, even upon Bach, simply to justify myself, just as I am now, for the very same reason, falling upon Mendelssohn. Basically I have no right whatever to lead the life I do, which is as unparalleled — and as terrible — as it is expensive.

Yet to whom am I accountable apart from myself? If only I could succeed, at least in the next few days, in starting my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy! Have I got the best conditions? I have and I haven’t. On the one hand I’ve got them, on the other I haven’t, I told myself. I should have them if my sister hadn’t come to Peiskam, but I haven’t because she did. We must commit ourselves one hundred per cent to everything we do, my father always said. He said it to everybody — to my mother, to my sisters, to me. If we don’t commit ourselves one hundred per cent we fail even before we’ve begun. But what is one hundred per cent in this case? Haven’t I prepared for this work one hundred per cent? Perhaps I’ve prepared for it two hundred per cent, or even three hundred. That would be calamitous. The idea was of course absurd. Your mistake, my sister had said, is to isolate yourself completely in your house. You don’t go and visit friends any longer, though we have so many. What she said was true. But what does one mean by friends? We know a number of people, perhaps even a lot of people; there are a few whom we’ve known since we were children and who have not yet died or moved away for good. Every year we used to visit them frequently and they used to come to our house. But that doesn’t make them friends, not by a long chalk. My sister is quick to call somebody a friend, even somebody she hardly knows, if it suits her book. Come to think of it, I haven’t any friends at all. Since I grew up I haven’t had a single friend. Friendship — what a leprous word! People use it every day ad nauseam, so that it’s become utterly devalued, at least as much so as the word Love, which has been trampled to death. Your biggest mistake is that you no longer go for walks. You used to leave the house for hours and go for walks through the woods, across the fields and down to the lake. At least you used to get pleasure from your own estates. Now you never leave the house. That’s the worst thing possible for you, she said — she of all people, who never walks if she can help it, as everybody knows, and who never once went for a walk in the three weeks she was here. But of course, I reflect, she hasn’t got the illness I have. I ought to go for walks. But nothing bores me more, there’s nothing I find drearier than walking, nothing is a greater torment to my heart and lungs. I’m not a nature-lover, I never was, and I never let myself be forced into being one. Then your lungs will dilate, she said scornfully, whereupon she finished off a whole glass of sherry — Agustin Blasquez of course, the only one expensive enough for her. For decades she’s got her lovers to bring it for her from Spain — one can’t get it in Vienna, let alone in this god-forsaken place. Not being a Catholic, she said with a laugh, you don’t go to church any longer. So you never get into the fresh air at all. If you go on like this you’ll go to pieces and die. She had recently taken a liking to saying to me over and over again, You’ll die. It went through me every time, although I tell myself, or at least try to tell myself, that I’ve nothing against dying. I’ve often told her too; but she says it’s just a childish way of showing off. Of course it would be sensible to breathe some fresh air, but there is none here now, only loathsome thick stinking air, which in addition is poisoned by the chemicals from the local paper factory. I sometimes wonder whether the air isn’t so poisoned by the paper factory as to prove lethal to me in the long run. Sometimes the fact that I’ve been breathing this poisoned air for decades suddenly gives me pause for thought, as it did on this evening after my sister’s departure. I began to wonder whether my inability to start work, and more generally my illness and imminent death, were not perhaps due to the poisoned air from the paper factory. Someone inherits a property from his parents and then thinks he has to stay put in it until he dies, never realising that he is dying so soon because day and night the local paper factory is poisoning the air he breathes. But I didn’t pursue these speculations and went out into the hall again. At the sight of the corner where we used to keep a dog when we were children, I couldn’t help thinking, If only I kept a dog at least! But since I grew up I’ve always hated dogs. And who would look after the dog, and what should it look like, what kind of dog should it be? I’d have to get somebody in to look after the dog, and I can’t put up with anybody in the house. I can’t put up either with a dog or another person. I’d have had somebody in the house long ago if I could have stood it, but I can’t stand anybody, and naturally I can’t stand a dog. I haven’t gone to the dogs, I told myself, and I won’t. I shall die like a dog, but I won’t go to the dogs. The dog used to sit in this corner just next to the door leading into the yard. We loved the dog, but now I’d be bound to hate such an animal, always lying in wait. The fact of the matter is that I love being alone. I’m not lonely and I don’t suffer from loneliness. I’m happy when I’m alone. I know how fortunate I am to be alone when I observe other people who aren’t alone like me and can’t afford to be, who spend all their lives wishing they were but can’t be. People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other. Fundamentally it was not Schopenhauer’s head that determined his thought, but Schopenhauer’s dog. It was not the head that hated Schopenhauer’s world, but Schopenhauer’s dog. I don’t have to be demented to assert that Schopenhauer had a dog on his shoulders and not a head. People love animals because they are incapable even of loving themselves. Those with the very basest of souls keep dogs, allowing themselves to be tyrannized and finally ruined by their dogs. They give the dog pride of place in their hypocrisy, which in the end becomes a public menace. They would rather save their dog from the guillotine than Voltaire. The masses are in favour of dogs because in their heart of hearts they are not prepared to incur the strenuous effort of being alone with themselves, an effort which in fact calls for greatness of soul. I don’t belong to the masses, I’ve been against the masses all my life, and I’m not in favour of dogs. What we call our love of animals has already wrought such havoc that if we were to think really hard about it we should be positively frightened to death. It isn’t as absurd as it may at first appear when I say that the world owes its most terrible wars to its rulers’ love of animals. It’s all documented, and one ought to be clear about it for once. These people — politicians, dictators — are ruled by a dog, and as a result they plunge millions of human beings into misery and ruin. They love a dog and foment a world war in which, because of this one dog, millions of people are killed. Just consider for a moment what the world would be like if this so-called love of animals were at least reduced by a few paltry per cent in favour of love of humanity — which of course is also only a phrase. There can be no question of whether or not I should keep a dog. I am mentally opposed to keeping a dog, which I know would have to be given more care and attention than any human being, more than I demand for myself. But humanity sees nothing wrong in the fact that all over the world dogs get more care and attention than human beings, that in fact it gives more care and attention to all these billions of dogs than it gives to itself. I take leave to describe such a world as perverse, grossly inhumane and totally mad. If I’m here, the dog’s here, if I’m there the dog’s there too. If the dog has to go out, I have to go out too, and so on. I won’t tolerate this dog comedy, which we can see enacted every day if we only open our eyes and haven’t become blinded to it by daily familiarity. In this comedy a dog comes on the stage and makes life a misery for some human being, exploiting him and, in the course of several acts, or just one or two, driving out of him all his harmless humanity. It is said that the tallest, most expensive and most precious tombstone ever set up in the history of the world is one to the memory of a dog. No, not in America, as one inevitably assumes, but in London. Once we get it clear, this fact is enough to show how dog-like humanity really is. In this world the real question to ask about a person has long been, not how humane he is, but how dog-like, yet up to now, instead of asking how dog-like a person is — which is what they really ought to ask out of respect for the truth — people have always asked how humane he is. And that I find disgusting. There is no question of my keeping a dog. If you kept a dog at least! my sister said just before she left. It wasn’t the first time. She’s been saying it for years just to enrage me. A dog at least! I don’t need one of course — I have my lovers, she said. At one time — just to assert herself, I think — she gave up having lovers and got herself a dog. It was so small that — in my imagination at least — it could have crawled underneath her high-heeled shoes. It was the grotesqueness of it that appealed to her; she had a little velvet waistcoat with a gold hem made for this creature, which didn’t even deserve to be called a dog. People stared at it in amazement at the Sacher, and this she found so distasteful that she gave the animal to her housekeeper, who naturally passed it on to somebody else. My sister is always fascinated by anything out of the ordinary, but then, for good reasons and because of her superior intelligence, she never carries it too far, to the point where it might be open to ridicule. Or a holiday, she said. You ought to go away. If you don’t get away soon, you’ll go to pieces and die. I can already see you in one of the corners of your house, first going off your head and then suffering a complete collapse. Travel! It had once been my greatest enjoyment, my only passion. But now I’m too weak to travel anywhere, I told myself, I couldn’t even think of going away. And if I did, where should I go? Possibly, I thought, the sea will be the saving of me. This idea took root in my mind and I couldn’t escape it. I clapped my hands to my head and said, The sea! I’d found the magic formula. However dead we are, we come alive when we travel. But am I in a fit state to travel, never mind where? All the journeys I had ever made had worked miracles. Our parents had taken us with them on journeys at a very early age, so that by the time we were twelve or thirteen we had already seen a great deal of the world. We had been to Italy and France, we had been to England and Holland, we had seen Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, and by the time we were thirteen had actually spent some time in North America. Later I travelled extensively on my own account, visiting Persia, Egypt, Israel and the Lebanon. I had toured Sicily with my sister and spent weeks in Taormina, in the famous Hotel Timeo below the Greek theatre. I had lived in Palermo for a time, and in Agrigento, not far from the house in which Pirandello lived and worked. I had been to Calabria several times, and of course every time I went to Italy I visited Rome and Naples, and every spring I went with my parents and my sister to Trieste and Abbazia. We had relatives everywhere, though of course we only ever paid them the shortest of visits, for, like me, my parents infinitely preferred staying in hotels. My mother had a passion for hotels equal to my father’s: they felt more at home, just as I did, in the best and finest hotels than they did in our own house. I mustn’t think about all these splendid palaces we stayed in. Not even the war prevented us from travelling and putting up in the best houses, as my father often used to say. Of all these hotels, those I recall with the greatest pleasure are the Setteais in Sintra and of course the Timeo. Not long ago I had asked the specialist if I could contemplate travelling. Naturally, anytime, he had said, but the way he said naturally struck me as sinister. On the other hand, whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it’s the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we’re finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it’s better to die having made the journey we’ve been longing for than to be stifled by our longing. It was eighteen months since I’d been away anywhere. The last time had been to Palma, because I always regarded it as the most perfect place. In November, when the fog so cruelly oppresses and depresses us in Austria, I had run through the streets of Palma with an open-necked shirt and drunk my coffee every day in the shade of the plane trees on the famous Borne. And in Palma I’d been able to make my definitive notes on Reger. True, I later lost them, to this day I don’t know where, thus managing to destroy the fruits of two months’ intellectual effort through a piece of gross carelessness. Quite unforgivable! Just to think that I might now be sitting on the terrace of the Nixe Palace, eating my olives and drinking my glass of water, not just absorbed, but utterly captivated by the sight of the others on the terrace, who would be just as taken up with their own fancies and fantasies as I was with mine! We often fail to realise that if we want to go on existing we need to summon up all our strength in order to wrench ourselves off the spot where we’re stuck. My sister’s right to keep on using the word travel in my presence, wielding it over me like a whip all the time, I tell myself. She doesn’t just use the word casually every moment, but with a definite aim in mind, the preservation of my very existence. Naturally the observer can see through the person he is observing more ruthlessly and realistically than the person observed, I said. There are so many wonderful towns in the world, so many landscapes and coastlines I’ve seen in my life, but for me none has ever been as perfect as Palma. But what if one of my dreaded attacks comes on when I’m in Palma and I’m lying in bed in my hotel room with no proper medical attention and in a state of mortal fear? We have to envisage the most terrible eventualities and make the journey nonetheless, I told myself, yet at the same time I said, I can’t take all my piles of notes with me; they’ll hardly go into two suitcases, and to take more than two suitcases to Palma is madness. I was driven almost to distraction by the thought of having to go to the station, get on the train, go from the train to the airport, board the plane and all the rest with two or even three suitcases. But I didn’t abandon the idea of Palma or the Melia — the Mediterraneo having closed for good years ago. I had taken a firm hold on the idea, and it had taken a firm hold on me. I walked about the house, to and fro, backwards and forwards, upstairs and downstairs, unable to rid myself of the thought of leaving Peiskam behind me; in fact I made not the slightest attempt to rid myself of the thought of Palma, but went on fuelling it, until in the end I got so far as to take my two large suitcases out of the hall chest and place them beside it on the floor as though I really was going to leave. On the other hand, I said to myself, we mustn’t give way at once to a sudden whim. Where would that land us? But the idea was there. I placed the suitcases between the chest and the door and contemplated them from a favourable angle. How long it is since I last took these cases out of the chest! I said to myself. Far too long. In fact the cases were dusty, even though they had been in the chest ever since my last trip, that is my last trip to Palma. I got a duster and wiped them. At once I felt very sick. I hadn’t even finished dusting one case when I was obliged to support myself on the chest, overcome by a sudden fit of breathlessness. And in this condition you’re thinking of flying to Palma — in the midst of all the dreadful difficulties that are inevitably attendant upon such a journey, a journey which would be nothing to a healthy person, but which is far too much for a sick man and could even lead to his death? After a while, however, I dusted the second case, proceeding more cautiously this time, and then I sat down in the iron chair in the hall, my favourite chair. The articles about Mendelssohn Bartholdy can go in one of the cases, I told myself, my clothes and underclothes and so on in the other — the Mendelssohn papers in the larger one, the clothes and underclothes in the smaller one. What’s the point of having such elegant luggage, I said to myself, at least sixty years old and going back to the latter years of my maternal grandmother? She had good taste, as these suitcases of hers testify. The Tuscans have good taste, I told myself, as is borne out time and again. If I go away, I said to myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall simply be leaving a country whose absolute futility utterly depresses me every single day, whose imbecilities daily threaten to stifle me, and whose idiocies will sooner or later be the end of me, even without my illnesses. Whose political and cultural conditions have of late become so chaotic that they tuqi my stomach when I wake up every morning, even before I am out of bed. Whose indifference to the intellect has long since ceased to cause the likes of me to despair, but if I am to be truthful only to vomit. I shall be going away from a country, I told myself, sitting in my iron chair, in which everything that once gave pleasure to so-called thinking people, or at least made it possible for them to go on existing, has been expelled, expunged and extinguished, in which only the most primitive instinct for survival prevails and the slightest pretension to thought is stifled at birth. In which a corrupt state and a corrupt church join forces to pull at the endless rope which, with the utmost ruthlessness and callousness, they have for centuries wound round the neck of a blind and stupid people, a people imprisoned in its stupidity by its rulers. In which truth is trodden underfoot, and lies are sanctified by all official organs as the only means to any end. I shall be leaving a country, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, in which truth is not understood or quite simply not accepted, and falsehood is the only legal tender in all transactions. I shall be leaving a country in which the church practises hypocrisy and in which socialism, having come to power, practises exploitation, and in which art says whatever is acceptable to these two. I shall be leaving a country in which a people educated to stupidity allows its ears to be stopped by the church and its mouth by the state, and in which everything I hold sacred has for centuries ended up in the slop pails of the rulers. If I go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall only be going away from a country in which I no longer have any place and in which I have never found happiness. If I go away, I shall be going away from a country in which the towns stink and the inhabitants of the towns have become coarsened. I shall be going away from a country in which the language has become vulgar and the minds of those who speak this vulgar language have for the most part become deranged. I shall be going away from a country, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, in which the only model of behaviour is set by the so-called wild animals. I shall be going away from a country in which darkest night prevails at noonday, and in which virtually the only people in power are blustering illiterates. If I go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall be leaving the disgusting, depressing and unconscionably filthy public lavatory of Europe. To go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, means leaving behind me a country which for years has done nothing but afflict me with the most damaging depression and has taken every opportunity, no matter where or when, of insidiously and malignantly urinating on my head. But isn’t it madness to think of going to Palma when I’m in such a state, and when my general physical condition doesn’t even permit me to walk two hundred yards out of the door? I asked myself as I sat in the iron chain As I sat there I thought first about Taormina and the Timeo, with Christina and her Fiat, then about Palma and the Melia, with the Cañellas, their three-storey palace and their Mercedes. And suddenly, as I sat in the iron chair, I saw myself running through the narrow streets of Palma. Running through the streets! I cried out, sitting in the iron chair and clapping my hands to my head, when I’m not capable even of walking round the outside of my own house, let alone of running through the streets of Palma. For a sick man like me to entertain such an idea isn’t just bordering on megalomania: such an idea is well beyond the border, it’s sheer madness. And I couldn’t get this madness out of my head. As I sat in the iron chair I couldn’t call a halt to the madness and didn’t even try. On the contrary, I indulged it to such an extent that I couldn’t help shouting out the word mad. The Melia or the Timeo, Christina or the Cañellas, the Fiat or the Mercedes, I speculated, unable to stop myself, as I sat in the iron chair, drawing refreshment from these ridiculous speculations — the Melia with all the hundreds and thousands of yachts outside the window, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Palma — the Timeo with its bougainvillaeas flowering at the window — the Melia and the incredible sea breeze — the ancient bathroom at the Timeo — Christina or the Cañellas — the bougainvillaeas or the sea breeze — the Cathedral or the Greek theatre, I thought, sitting in the iron chair, the Mallorcans or the Sicilians — Etna or Pollensa — Ramon Llull and Ruben Dario or Pirandello. At present, I finally told myself, since I want to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, I need a cosmopolitan atmosphere — more people, more activity, more excitement, I thought as I sat in the iron chair, not a place with just one street — and on a hill at that, hence requiring exertion — and just one café, but a place with many busy streets — and squares! — and many cafés, and as many people around me as possible, for at present I need nothing so much as to have people around me — not that I want any dealings with them: I don’t even want to speak to them, I thought, sitting in the iron chair, but I must have them around me. And so for all these obvious reasons I decided on Palma and against Taormina, in favour of the Cañellas and against Christina, and generally in favour of a climate which would be positively beneficial to me in my condition, a summery climate such as I might expect in Palma even in February, but not in Taormina, where in February it is still wintery and rains nearly all the time. And in February, I thought, sitting in the iron chair, Etna is seldom to be seen, and even then it’s covered in snow from top to bottom, a constant and harmful reminder of the Alps, and therefore of Austria and home, which could only sicken me again and again. But suddenly this all appeared to me as senseless fantasizing, indulged in by an overwrought invalid sitting in his iron chair; it did little more than make me sadder than I already was, and ended in dejection. Yet there was no longer any way of escaping it, even though I tried to convince myself, still sitting in the iron chair, that perhaps all I needed to do was to go and call on some neighbour or other. So I got up, put on some clothes, and walked to Nie-derkreut, which is close enough even to be reached by one in my pitiful condition. Niederkreut is a four-hundred-year-old pile, damp and unprepossessing, occupied by a former cavalry officer from the First World War, who, like all such people, calls himself a baron — an old eccentric in other words. I went to call on him, not because I found him particularly interesting, but because he was of all people the one who could be reached most quickly and easily from where I lived. He is something of a curiosity. Whenever I visit him I have a cup of tea and listen to his stories about the First World War — about how he was wounded on Monte Cimone, how he spent three months in hospital in Trieste and then got the gold medal for bravery. In fact he always tells the same story, and he tells it to everybody who goes to see him on whatever occasion. The old man has the merit of being able to make excellent tea and also of not having bad breath, even though he is so old — getting on for eighty-five — for there is nothing that makes me dread visiting old men so much as the smell of their breath. The old man hasn’t let himself go, even though, as I say, he’s getting on for eighty-five, and he’s not in the least unappetising. He has a housekeeper who looks after him and whom he calls Muxi — nobody knows what that stands for — and who withdraws to the kitchen when he has visitors. Every half hour or so she puts her head round the door and asks the old man if there is anything he wants. No Muxi, he always says, and when she’s closed the door again he leans forward and says, She’s as stupid as they come! It’s always the same. I have to admit that I went to see the old man at Niederkreut out of sheer desperation, simply to free myself from the absurd idea of going away, of going away to Palma moreover, which was probably altogether the absurdest idea possible in my situation. I was simply exploiting him, to be quite honest, in my dreadful situation. He just happened to be the person I needed to put me off the idea of going to Palma. When I pulled the bell I heard the housekeeper coming to open the door to me. The gentleman is here, she said. I went in. I hope I’m not disturbing you, I said on entering the old man’s room, which the housekeeper had made cosy and warm for him, and as I uttered these words I was annoyed to think that they were precisely the words which are continually being used by my sister and never fail to make me angry because they are the most hypocritical in the language. The old gentleman got up and shook hands with me. Then we both sat down. I was just going to make myself some tea, he said. He was holding a book. It’s my reading time, he said. A silly book, something about Marie-Louise. My sister sent it me, but I must say I find it very dull. What things people write, without caring one jot about the facts! What are their qualifications for writing anyway? I had no wish to engage in a conversation with the old man on this subject, but as soon as I sat down, in expectation of a cup of tea, I was aware of my travel plans receding. Life’s not all that impossible here, I said to myself, and I looked at the pictures on the wall. That’s my grandfather, who was a Field-marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the whole of the southern Adriatic front, the old man said. But you’ve heard that hundreds of times, he added as the housekeeper brought in the water and disappeared again. Wars are waged very differently today, he said, quite differently. Everything is different today. He lifted the lid of the teapot and stirred the tea. As he did this he said, Everything has turned through a hundred and eighty degrees. This is an expression he uses constantly: no sooner is one with him than he finds an occasion for saying, Everything has turned through a hundred and eighty degrees. There are only thirteen people still alive who received the gold medal for bravery from the Emperor himself. Only thirteen, just imagine! At first he had considered leaving his property to his daughter, who lived in England, he said, but then he realised that this was nonsense. Then he had thought of leaving it to the church. But the church had disappointed him, so then he wanted to leave it to the state welfare service. But the state welfare service also stinks, he now said. There isn’t a single institution I would leave anything to. Or a single person I know either. And so I decided to send for a London telephone directory. What do you think I did that for? He paused, poured a cup of tea for me and one for himself, and said, I opened it at random — at page two hundred and three, as I later discovered — and, with my eyes closed, I put the index finger of my right hand on a certain spot. When I opened my eyes I found that the tip of my finger was resting on the name Sarah Slother. I don’t care who this Sarah Slother is — her address is 128 Knightsbridge. I’m going to leave everything I have to this address, no matter who or what is concealed behind it. My dear friend, that gives me the greatest satisfaction. As a matter of fact, I’ve already settled the legal side of this curious affair. When you come to think about it carefully, we just can’t leave anything to a single person we know, he said. At least I can’t. I was quite fascinated by the old man: I’d never have believed him capable of a thing like this. But what he said was true. The rest of the afternoon and evening was occupied with the usual old men’s gossip, but it was all nothing compared with this revelation of his. But keep quiet about it, he told me; I haven’t told anybody about it. And it isn’t a joke. You’re the only person who I know will keep it to himself. It’s quite a relief to me. Anyhow, he said, you now know what’s coming to this Slother woman. My God, he added, how devious I am! And he quite clearly enjoyed his deviousness. When I went home, not only was I not deflected from my travelling plans but suddenly they no longer seemed absurd. On the contrary, I suddenly felt that I could do myself no better service than to leave as quickly as possible — for Palma of course. I suddenly had the refreshing idea of catapulting myself out of my morgue at the last moment, the very last moment, and I thought to myself, However much I may curse her, my sister’s had the right idea yet again. I was suddenly quite obsessed with my travel plans. Even the old man at Niederkreut had suddenly opened my eyes, which had for so long been closed. Though I had gone to see him to be deflected from my travel plans, he had on the contrary made me half crazy about them. You’ve got to clear out of this place; you mustn’t think of ways of being diverted from your plans by every possible and impossible person in the neighbourhood. You must leave, go away, as soon as possible. My sister, my confounded sister, had once again been on the right scent. But all the same I also had the choice of going to Vienna for a while. I don’t have to stay in my sister’s apartment, I told myself. I can go to the Elisabeth or the Konig von Ungarn. But much as I thought about Vienna, I was still completely dominated by the idea of Palma. What have I got in Vienna? I asked myself, and the very act of recalling the names of all the people I knew in Vienna horrified me — with very few exceptions, and these exceptions could be ruled out either because of illness or because they had died long ago. For years I had had Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of the philosopher, as my friend, but I’m bound to say that his death, after a long and painful illness, came at exactly the right time, when Vienna had ceased to mean anything to him. He had walked the streets of Vienna for decades, and it no longer had anything to do with him. There was nobody as clever as he was, nobody as poetic and as incorruptible in all things. Now that I’ve lost him there’s nothing more for me to lose in Vienna. I lived in Vienna for twenty years without a break. It was probably the best and most enjoyable time of my life, but it can’t be repeated: by comparison everything today is a pathetic rehash which I should be ashamed to be involved in. Vienna has become a proletarian city through and through, for which no decent person can have anything but scorn and derision and the profoundest contempt. Whatever was once great or simply remarkable about it, compared with the rest of the world, has long been dead. The scene today is dominated by baseness and stupidity and by the charlatanry which makes common cause with them. My Vienna has been totally ruined by tasteless, money-grubbing politicians and become unrecognizable. There are still some days when one gets a breath of the old air, but not for long; then once more everything is engulfed by the scum that has taken over the city in recent years. In Vienna today art is nothing but a sickening farce, music a worn-out barrel organ, and literature a nightmare. I won’t speak of philosophy, for even I can’t find words to describe it, and I’m not one of the least imaginative people. For a long time I used to think of Vienna as my city, as my home in fact, but now I am bound to say that I don’t feel at home in a cesspit which has been filled brimful with filth by pseudo-socialists. And I am no longer as interested as I once was in hearing music performed: I prefer reading the scores by myself, though this is a vastly more expensive pleasure. But what is one offered today at these concerts in the Musikverein or the concert hall? The marvellous conductors of the past have turned into crude, sensation-seeking animal tamers, and the orchestras have become feebleminded under these tamers. I’ve seen all the museums, and the Viennese theatre is the shabbiest in the whole of Europe. The Burgtheater today is nothing but a witless, though unwitting parody of the theatre in general, in which anything to do with the intellect is totally lacking — nothing but provincialism and farce. To say nothing of the other theatres, whose daily diet of dilettantism is perfectly in tune with the utterly tedious society of today. And naturally I should find it intolerable to live under the same roof as my sister: that became clear to me when she was in Peiskam just now. She’d make life hell for me and I’d make life hell for her, and before very long one of us would kill the other. We’ve never been able to live together under one roof. However, it’s quite possible that my sister was genuinely concerned about me and my future when she invited me to stay with her in her Vienna apartment — though ultimately I find myself unable to believe this, since I know her. On the other hand, I told myself, I’m not sufficiently curious to go to Vienna just to inspect her new apartment, which probably contains any number of precious objects — and by no means tastelessly arranged either. Quite the contrary — that’s just what would make me white-hot with rage. Look, my little brother, this vase is from Upper Egypt. I can just hear her saying it and then waiting to see what I have to say about it, although she knows what I’m going to say. We’re an intelligent pair, and in four and a half decades we’ve been able to develop our intelligence to a high degree in our different ways, our different directions — I in mine and she in hers — up to today. If I were to go to Vienna, I should only need to take my travelling bag with me, since there would be no question of working in Vienna. Not at my sister’s anyway. And not if I stayed in a hotel either, for Vienna has always been inimical to my work: I’ve never succeeded with any work in Vienna — I’ve started a number of projects there, but I’ve never completed a single one, and this has always resulted in a terrible feeling of shame. Once, twenty-five years ago, I managed to complete something on Webern in Vienna, but as soon as I’d completed it I burned it, because it hadn’t turned out properly. Vienna has always had a paralysing effect on me, even though I would never admit it. It paralysed me in every way. The people I met in Vienna paralysed me too, with one or two exceptions. But my dear friend Paul Wittgenstein died — of his madness, I must emphasize — and my painter friend Joanna hanged herself. Anyone who goes to Vienna to stay and fails to recognize the moment when it is time to clear out becomes a senseless victim of a city which takes everything away from everybody and gives absolutely nothing in return. There are cities, for instance London or Madrid, which admittedly take something, though not much, but give almost everything. Vienna takes everything and gives nothing. That’s the difference. The city has a way of sucking dry all who get caught in its trap, and it goes on sucking until they fall down dead. I recognized this at an early stage and kept away from Vienna as far as possible. After the years when I lived almost continuously in Vienna I’ve only ever been back occasionally to visit a few people I was deeply fond of. Only a few people have the strength’to turn their backs on Vienna soon enough, before it is too late; they remain stuck to this dangerous and poisonous city until, finally, they become tired and let themselves be crushed to death by it, as by a glistening snake. And how many geniuses have been crushed to death in this city? They simply can’t be counted. But those who did manage to turn their backs on it at the right moment succeeded in everything they did, or almost everything. This is proved by history, and there is no need to insist on it. If I were to go to Vienna now, I thought, I’d make myself sick with boredom. In no time I’d destroy what little I still have left to me. So Vienna was ruled out. For a brief moment I considered Venice, but I shuddered at the thought of having to spend months sitting in this splendid but thoroughly perverse heap of masonry, even in the most perfect place. Venice is a city to be visited for only a few days, never for longer, like an elegant old lady whom one always goes to see for the last time. My mind was now set exclusively on Palma, and on the very evening that I got back from Niederkreut, where the old man had told me of his last wish, which continued to fascinate me and to occupy my mind most of the time — on that very evening I began to think about what I should pack in my two cases, which I had meanwhile taken upstairs and left open on the chest of drawers in my bedroom. At first I packed some clothes, underclothes and shoes, bearing in mind my old principle of taking only what was essential. Only two jackets, two pairs of trousers and two pairs of shoes, I said to myself, and I got together the right ones, remembering all the time that they must be summer jackets, summer trousers and summer shoes, for in Palma it is already summer in January — or more or less summery, I said, correcting myself. People always make the mistake of taking too many clothes on a journey, half killing themselves with the weight of their luggage, and then, if they have any sense, always wearing the same things when they get there. Now I’ve been travelling on my own account for over thirty years, I told myself, yet I still always take too much at the last moment. But on this journey, which will possibly — indeed almost certainly — be my last, I thought, I won’t take too much. That at least was my intention. But I was already in two minds when it came to deciding whether to take a pair of dark brown or a pair of black trousers with the dark grey ones. In the end I put a dark grey pair, a dark brown pair and a black pair in the case. However, when it came to jackets I was in no doubt: it had to be just a grey jacket and a brown one. If it turns out that I need a so-called dark jacket in Palma I can buy one, an elegant one so to speak, although I was sure that I should have no occasion to wear a so-called elegant jacket. I shan’t be going anywhere where a so-called elegant jacket is called for. And who knows whether I shall visit the Cañellas at all in my condition? I thought. I know what is socially possible and what is socially impossible in Palma and the surrounding parts of the island. Probably the reason why I love the island is that it is full of people who are old and sick. I shall probably spend most of my time in the hotel writing my work. It was naturally not as easy to pack the second case as it had been to pack the first, for I should have needed one twice the size to get in all the things that seemed to me to be absolutely necessary for my work. In the end I stacked the books and articles about Mendelssohn Bartholdy in front of me on the table by the window in two piles; one was made up of those books and articles and other papers which were absolutely necessary, the other of those which were not absolutely necessary. At least I thought I knew which of these books and articles and other papers would be more necessary for my work than others, and in the end I actually had two equal piles side by side on the table in front of me. I packed the absolutely necessary items in the second case and still had room for some of those which were not absolutely necessary; with these I packed the case so full that it would hardly close. After I had packed my toilet articles in it too, I was able to get three books on Mendelssohn Bartholdy in the case containing my clothes. All this was done on the very next day after my sister had departed and had actually not returned. After packing the suitcases I was utterly exhausted. In the meantime I had had a telephone call from the travel agent, whom I had telephoned a few hours earlier to ask if there was still a seat on the plane. He had told me that everything was fixed. He would be sending my travel documents out to Peiskam after the office closed, he had said. My flight from Munich to Palma was scheduled for the evening of the next day, and so I had reason to hope that the journey would go relatively smoothly. As always, I had decided on the journey on the spur of the moment. I had sent for Frau Kienesberger to come early next morning so that I could discuss with her what had to be done in my absence. After that I wanted to pay a visit to my specialist in Wels. Whatever his opinion is now, I’m leaving anyway, I told myself. Now that I had decided to travel I was not in such a poor state as I had been the day before or even that morning. However, in the evening, just as I was sitting in my armchair, feeling fairly reassured by the sight of my two firmly locked suitcases and with the contours of Palma before my mind’s eye, a call came from the travel agency to say that, as it turned out, I couldn’t leave for another two days. At the moment I didn’t mind. I pretended to be disappointed, but in fact I was glad of the delay. A damper has been put on your murderous impetuosity — that’s a good thing, I thought. But at the same time I thought, I only hope that in the next two days I shan’t go off the plan which I’m now so fervently attached to. I hope I shall stick to it. I know myself too well not to realise how vacillating I can be; in two days everything could have changed completely, everything could have turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, possibly more than once. However, I was certain that Palma was the right choice. Now you can take your time seeing the specialist, going to the bank, and winding up everything here. It was like the end of a nightmare. When I rang up my sister and told her,

The day after tomorrow I’ll be in Palma, I’ve suddenly decided to go, she said, There you are, you see, my little brother. Going to Palma is the most sensible thing you could do. These last words immediately riled me because they were said teasingly, but I didn’t respond to them, and said goodbye to my sister fairly briefly, though not without telling her that I would call her as soon as I had arrived in Palma and was in my hotel. I’m curious to know how your Mendelssohn Bartholdy will come along, she added, though naturally she couldn’t have expected me to reply. On the other hand I was touched by her last words, which were a simple injunction to look after myself. However, I didn’t want to give way to sentimentality and suppressed a sudden urge to cry as I put down the receiver. How fragile we are! I thought. We’re full of such brave words and constantly go on every day about how hard and sensible we are, and then from one moment to the next we cave in and have to choke back our tears. Naturally I’ll call my sister every week, as I’ve always done from abroad, and I’m sure she’ll call me every week. That’s what we’ve always done. When you’re in the Melia — you know it of course, she had added. Naturally, I had replied. However marvellous the prospect was of being in Palma in two days’ time, I was still extremely fearful about what was actually in store for me there — which of course I couldn’t know. No, no one who travels, even if he keeps returning to a place where he thinks everything is thoroughly familiar, can ever be completely sure. If I’m lucky, I thought, I’ll get my usual room. If I’m lucky I’ll get over the first few days, which will be dangerous as far as my health is concerned. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to start work in a few days. Every time when I’m about to make a journey, when I’ve packed my bags and everything is settled and there’s no turning back, I have this fear of all the dreadful consequences attendant upon the journey. At such times I would dearly love to cancel everything. Then I realise that Peiskam is by no means as frightful as I’ve been making it out to be for months, that it really is a marvellous, comfortable house which has everything to be said for it, and that it is not in the least like a morgue. At such times I feel a specially keen affection for all the rooms, all the furniture, and I walk all round the house, putting my hand lovingly on the individual pieces of furniture. Then I sit in my armchair in the bedroom and wonder whether it’s worthwhile going away and incurring such a tremendous effort. But I must get away, I told myself. Just because it may be the last time, I’ve got to get away. I mustn’t give way now and make myself look ridiculous, especially not in front of myself. I mustn’t appear a fool to myself. You must discuss everything with Frau Kienesberger, go and see the specialist, get all the necessary medicaments, pack them in your case, and then clear out. You must turn your back on this house and everything in it, since you know full well that everything in it has been threatening to crush you and stifle you in recent months. You must leave behind you everything that has pushed you so ruthlessly to the very extremity of existence, and you must do it without emotion. At that moment I was ashamed of the feelings which I had just had for my house and which seconds later I could only regard as diabolical. This private sentimentality at once disgusted me. Were it not for the fact that I have all my life, as I know, been a man of quick decisions, I would have stayed put from the start in one place as if paralysed — I know this too. As it is, I’ve always had the knack of taking myself by surprise, with regard to travelling or work or whatever else. I’ve always had to employ this technique of surprise. When I visited the old man at Niederkreut, I was still thinking of not making the journey to Palma, believing it might be possible to discipline myself by means of regular visits, at intervals of a few days, to the old man at Niederkreut and other old people — and young people too — and that I should be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy without going away. But after the old man had told me the story about the London telephone directory and its connection with his will, it was clear to me that I had to go away. Sarah Slother — that certainly makes an impressive story. But it would have been absolutely the high point in this endless Austrian winter, and all subsequent visits would have been profoundly disappointing. And what the other neighbours have to offer is, I know, insufficient to help me on to my feet and so help me get on with my work. The old man’s story about his Sarah Slother had simply triggered off my sudden decision to make the trip to Palma which, as I now reflected, had probably been planned long before by my sister. She actually came to Peiskam, first to suggest to me the idea of going to Palma and then to make me actually go — certainly not, as I now had to admit, simply in order to amuse herself and to tyrannize me, as I had believed all along, but to rescue me. My big caring sister! At that moment I despised myself. Once more I was the weak one. Again and again I played my accustomed role, however much I rebelled against it. And she played hers. While she had long since made her entrance in Vienna, I was waiting to go on in Palma. Everything about us, in fact, was theatrical — terribly real, yet theatrical. As I sat in my armchair, contemplating the relentless decay to which the furniture and everything else in the room bore witness, I thought with a shudder of having to spend the whole winter here in Peiskam, a winter that drags on interminably into May, and of having to rely on what I call neighbourhood help, on the old man at Niederkreut, for instance, and on the minister and suchlike folk. Having to scrape along, as we say, through the wet, cold, foggy months, meeting all these people who over the years had become stale and lack-lustre and whose society had long since become unendurable. This thought wrapped itself round my head like a winding sheet. To have to give myself up to all these people, yet at the same time to be all alone in Peiskam, where suddenly treachery lurked once more in every corner. Making my own breakfast and my own supper and having to endure constant nausea from one breakfast to the next, from one supper to the next, from one disappointment in the weather to the next. Having to read the newspapers every day with their diet of local political dirt and all the garbage they carried on their political, economic and cultural pages. Yet not being able to escape from the newspapers because, despite everything, I have a compulsion to devour this journalistic dirt every day, as if I were afflicted by a perverse and gluttonous appetite for the newspapers. Not being able to escape from all this public and published dirt, in spite of having the will to do so, the will to survive in fact, because I can’t escape from this gluttonous appetite of mine — for all the horror stories emanating from the Ballhausplatz, where a half-crazed Chancellor is at large, issuing half-crazed orders to his idiotic ministers, for all the horrendous parliamentary news which daily jangles in my ears and pollutes my brain and which all comes packaged in Christian hypocrisy. I must pack up as soon as possible and leave this chaos behind, I said to myself, and I looked at the cracks in the walls and in the furniture and noted that the windows were so dirty that it was not even possible to see through them any longer. How does Frau Kienesberger spend her time? I asked myself. At the same time I had to tell myself that we invariably made excessive demands of everything and everybody: nothing is done thoroughly enough, everything is imperfect, everything has been merely attempted, nothing completed. My unhealthy craving for perfection had come to the surface again. It actually makes us ill if we always demand the highest standards, the most thorough, the most fundamental, the most extraordinary, when all we find are the lowest, the most superficial, the most ordinary. It doesn’t get us anywhere, except into the grave. We see decline where we expect improvement, we see hopelessness where we still have hope: that’s our mistake, our misfortune. We always demand everything, when in the nature of things we should demand little, and that depresses us. We see somebody on the heights, and he comes to grief while he is still on the low ground. We want to achieve everything, and we achieve nothing. And naturally we make the highest, the very highest demands of ourselves, completely leaving out of account human nature, which is after all not made to meet the highest demands. The world spirit, as it were, overestimates the human spirit. We are always bound to fail because we set our sights a few hundred per cent higher than is appropriate. And if we look, wherever we look, we see only people who have failed because they set their sights too high. But on the other hand, I reflect, where should we be if we constantly set our sights too low? I looked at my suitcases, the intellectual one and the unintellectual one, so to speak, from my armchair, and if at that moment I’d had the strength I could have burst into uproarious laughter at myself, or else into tears. I was caught up once more in my own personal comedy. I’d changed course, and once again it was simply a laughing matter or a crying matter, depending on how I felt, but, since I wanted neither to laugh nor to cry, I got up and checked whether I had packed the right medicaments. I had put them in my red-spotted medicine bag. Had I packed enough prednisolone, spironolactone and potassium chloride? I opened the medicine bag, looked inside, and tipped out the contents on the table by the window. I reckon I can manage for about four months, I told myself and put the medicaments back in the bag. We are disgusted by chemicals, I said to myself, half aloud, as I had become accustomed to doing through being alone so much, but to these chemicals, which we despise more than anything else in the world, we nevertheless owe our lives, our existence. Were it not for these chemicals we’re so ready to curse we should have been in the graveyard — or dumped somewhere else — many years ago; at least we shouldn’t be on this earth any longer. Now that there’s no longer anything in me for the surgeons to cut out I’m entirely reliant on these medicaments. Every day I thank Switzerland and her industries on Lake Geneva for the fact that they exist and that consequently I exist, just as no doubt millions of people daily owe their existence, however wretched, to these people in their glass boxes near Vevey and Montreux, who are more denigrated than anyone else today. Since virtually the whole of humanity today is sick and dependent on medicaments, it’s hardly too much to ask that it should reflect that it owes its existence, in the largest possible measure, to these chemicals which it so often curses. I shouldn’t have been around for the last thirty years at least; I should have missed all the things I’ve seen and experienced in these thirty years, all the sights and experiences to which my heart and soul are so fervently attached. But man is so constituted that he reserves his strongest curses for the very things that keep him together and keep him alive. People gulp down the tablets that save their lives, yet they are constantly marching through the streets of today’s run-down cities in their brainless urge to condemn and to demonstrate against these life-saving tablets. Man is so abysmally stupid that he continually attacks his saviours in the most loudmouthed and utterly unthinking manner, encouraged of course by the politicians and the politically controlled press. I myself owe everything to chemicals — to put it briefly — and have done for the last thirty years. With this thought I packed my medicine bag again — in the so-called intellectual case, not in the one with the clothes. Three days ago, I thought, sitting down again in my armchair, I hadn’t the slightest thought of leaving Peiskam. I hated it, it was threatening to crush me and stifle me, but the thought of simply leaving it never occurred to me, probably precisely because my sister was constantly hinting that I should leave Peiskam as soon as possible. She was continually mentioning place names; now I realise it was just to get me to react. She mentioned the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, often Rome, Sicily and finally Palma a number of times. But it all made me the more intent on starting my work in Peiskam. She goes on and on, I thought, and won’t go away. She should go somewhere else, God knows where. I don’t care if she goes to the south seas, so long as she goes away and stays away — she had got on my nerves to such an extent. And I wondered what she wanted in Peiskam, which she ran down all the time, continually calling it the morgue and the bane of both our lives, which she would dearly love to get rid of if only I would agree. Family homes are fatal, she said, everything one inherits from one’s parents is fatal. Anyone who has the strength should get rid of these inherited family homes and inherited property as quickly as he can and free himself from them, because they only strangle him and invariably stand in the way of his development. That would suit you down to the ground, I said — to make a profit out of Peiskam as well, and I was surprised to notice that this didn’t even hurt her. Now it occurs to me that she was concerned only about me and about coming to my aid, dreadful woman though I called her privately whenever I had the opportunity. It’s eighteen months since you last left Peiskam, she said a number of times. I was furious because she never let up in her attempt to get me away from Peiskam. No one is as fond of travelling as you, yet you’ve been sitting around here for eighteen months and are dying. She said this quite calmly, like a doctor, as it now strikes me. If you stay here you’ll never be able to start on your Mendelssohn Bartholdy, that I’ll guarantee. You’re determined to remain unproductive. For one thing Peiskam is a morgue, for another it’s a dungeon in which your life is in constant danger, she said. Whereupon she went on for a long time enthusing about the Timeo, which she had once visited with me fifteen years earlier. Can’t you just see the bougainvillaeas? she said. But everything she said annoyed me. She went on and on at me with no thought of leaving. Until in the end she got fed up because she had to recognise that I was not to be persuaded to leave Peiskam again in order to save myself. And so she left. But now she had her triumph.

Now I was following her suggestion and suddenly taking decisive action. I’m actually leaving, I thought. But for me to arrive at this decision, and finally get myself to Palma, it was necessary for her to have left first. I was now pretending to her that it was my idea, my brainwave, my decision, to go to Palma. In doing so I was lying not only to her — which of course was impossible, because she could see through me — but most of all to myself. You’re mad and always will be, I thought. On the day of my departure there were still twelve degrees of frost at eight in the morning. On the previous day Frau Kienesberger had been, and I had discussed all that was necessary with her, telling her above all that she mustn’t let the house get cold. She was to put the heating on three times a week, though not too high, I told her, for there was nothing so dreadful as returning to an old house that was completely cold. I didn’t know when I should be back, I said. I thought I should be back in three months, two months, four months, but I told Frau Kienesberger three or four weeks. I gave her instructions to clean the windows at last when the cold had become less severe, to polish the furniture, do the washing and so on. I particularly asked her to tidy up the yard and to clear away any snow that fell as quickly as possible so that people would think I was at home and not away. For this purpose I had fitted a so-called timeclock to a lamp in the top room on the west side so that it would be on for several hours in the morning and evening. This is always my practice when I go away. I had been lecturing Frau Kienesberger to such an extent that I was suddenly horrified by myself, for although I had actually broken off my dreadful torrent of words I could still hear myself telling her how my shirts were to be ironed and placed one on top of the other, how she was to stack the mail, which the postman always throws in through the open window on the east side, in the small room next to the right of the entrance, how the stairs were to be polished and the carpets beaten, and how she was to remove all the cobwebs behind the curtains and in the folds of the curtains and so on. She was not to tell the neighbours where I had gone, as that was nobody’s business. I told her I should possibly return the next day, and in any case I might return at any time. She was to strip the beds and air the mattresses and put fresh linen on them all and so on. And she must never under any circumstances touch anything on my desk, but I had said that thousands of times and she had always obeyed this instruction. Frau Kienesberger is really the only person I’ve spoken to for years, I tell myself, even though that’s a gross exaggeration which can be immediately disproved, but I feel that she is the only one with whom I have any extensive verbal contact over long periods, indeed very long periods, often months on end. She lives with her husband, a deaf mute (!), in a little one-storey house at the edge of the wood, not far from the village, and she only has a ten-minute walk when she comes to me. She herself has a speech impediment, which ensures that she doesn’t gossip, but she’s not a gossip by nature. She’s been coming to me for fourteen years, and in these fourteen years there has never been any disagreement between us. Everybody knows how important that is. And I often think she’s the one reliable person I have — there’s nobody else. And perhaps she senses this or even knows it. Not that I am continually giving her orders or telling her how to conduct herself: on the contrary I seldom have any particular wishes; most of the time I leave her entirely alone, and if she makes a noise while she’s working, because she can’t help making some noise, I leave the house for hours, or simply withdraw to the huntsman’s lodge. It would be a calamity, I reflect, if Frau Kienesberger failed to turn up one day for whatever reason, and at any moment a reason might suddenly crop up; but she probably knows as well as I do what I am to her and what she is to me, and so we have the most favourable relationship, in which we can both say we benefit equally from each other. She has three children and sometimes tells the story of their lives as she stands in the hall — how they are developing, what illnesses they have, what torments they have to endure at school, what they wore when they went sledging, when they go to sleep and when they wake up, what they get to eat on Tuesday and on Saturday, and how they react to everything. On such occasions 1 can’t help reflecting that mothers observe their children intensely if they are mothers like Frau Kienesberger, and they cosset them neither too much nor too little. She brings her children up by never thinking about their upbringing; she practises to perfection what others have to work out in their passion for theorizing, and where they are bound to fail she never does. By contrast with all my earlier domestic helps, who without exception were nothing but clumsy sluts, she has the gentlest manner. Where is that still to be found, I wonder? Looking out of the window, I am forced to conclude that I must wear my fur coat on the journey, together with warm underclothing and long woollen socks, for nobody catches cold and immediately becomes ill as easily as I do. Since my sarcoidosis developed I can’t afford to catch a cold, although I get a heavy cold three or four times a year, and so my life is always in danger. As a result of the prednisolone my resistance is virtually nil. When once I’ve caught a cold it takes me weeks to throw it off. And so there’s nothing I dread so much as catching cold. Even a slight draught is enough to make me take to my bed for weeks, and so at Peiskam I live most of the time in fear of catching cold. This fear almost verges on madness and is probably one of the reasons why I find it so hard to begin any protracted intellectual work; when so many fears are concentrated in one person, everything about him constantly breaks down. I’ll wear my fur coat and the warmest underclothes and the warmest socks, because I have to get to the station, and in Munich I have to get from the station to the airport, and who knows, I said to myself, what it will be like in Palma? When I had left Palma eighteen months before, in November, there had been driving snow, and I had been frozen through and through. When I got back to Peiskam I spent two months in bed, and the effect of going to Palma to recuperate was cancelled out at a stroke by my catching cold. Instead of coming back to Peiskam refreshed and fortified as I had hoped and expected, I came back looking like death. The people who saw me at the time didn’t know me, in the worst sense of the phrase, not in the sense that I looked much better and more normal than when I had left for Palma. The fur coat and the fur cap and the warm English scarf, I said to myself. Twelve degrees of frost! I was alarmed. But if there is the right contrast, I told myself, if it’s twelve degrees above zero in Palma and not twelve degrees below as it is here — perhaps even eighteen or twenty degrees, as is quite possible in Palma at this time of the year, late January — I shall profit from the change all the more. I deliberately said profit from and not enjoy, as would have been normal, in order to keep the extravagance of my desires under some measure of control. If it’s eighteen or twenty degrees in Palma, it will be to my profit, I said, adopting precisely the intonation used by my sister, whose pronunciation of the word profit is quite incomparable. In saying the word I almost reproduced the intonation she uses when speaking of her business deals. Oh, that’ll bring in another tidy profit! she often says, without of course going into the actual amount of the profit, let alone the method by which she makes it. And if it suddenly gets too warm in Palma, I told myself, I’ll carry my fur coat on my arm. It was now out of the question for me to leave simply wearing a greatcoat, as I had at first intended. And so I put the greatcoat back in the wardrobe, having got it out the day before, and took out my fur coat. As I did so I thought, How many fur coats I used to have! But I’ve gradually given them all away, forcibly got rid of them, as I tell myself, because each of them was associated with some town I’d visited. One was bought in Warsaw, another in Cracow, a third in Split, a fourth in Trieste — on each occasion it was when the weather had become unexpectedly cold and I’d thought I should become ill or even freeze to death without a fur coat. I gave a lot of these fur coats to Frau Kienesberger. The only one I’d kept was one that I’d bought twenty-two years ago in Fiume. This one was my favourite. I shook it out and laid it on the chest of drawers. What a long time it is since I wore this coat! I thought. It wasn’t as valuable as the others I’d given away. It’s heavy, but it’s my favourite. It’s been in the wardrobe for years, and it smells as though it had, I said to myself. We are attached to certain garments and reluctant to part with them, even when they almost fall off us because they’re so threadbare and shabby, just because they bring to mind some journey, some particularly enjoyable journey, some particularly enjoyable experience. In fact I could tell a pleasant story about every one of the garments I still possess; most of them I’ve got rid of — given them away or burnt them. I haven’t kept any which were associated with some sad or dreadful experience; I parted with them as quickly as possible, because I couldn’t bear to open the wardrobe and be reminded of something dreadful, by a scarf, for instance, even if it was an expensive one. For a long time I’ve kept only garments which remind me of enjoyable, or at least of pleasant occasions, but among those I still have are a number which bring back feelings of great happiness, the sight of which, I have to admit, can still make me feel supremely happy years later, even decades later. But I could write a whole book on the subject. If we lose someone we love, we always keep some garment that belonged to them, at least as long as it retains their smell, in fact as long as we live, because we go on believing that the garment brings back their smell, even when this has ceased to be anything but pure imagination. For this reason I still have one of my mother’s coats, though this is a secret I’ve never divulged to anyone, not even to my sister. She would have simply made fun of it. My mother’s coat hangs in a wardrobe which is otherwise empty and which I keep firmly locked. However, never a week goes by but I open the wardrobe and smell the coat. I slipped my fur coat on and found that it fitted me —still fitted me, I had to say after looking at myself in the mirror, for in the last few years, so it seemed to me, I’d gone down to about half my previous weight, if not less. There had been the fresh attack of sarcoidosis, the repeated colds I caught every year, the general chronic debility resulting from them, and then the constant alternation between being bloated by too much prednisolone and losing weight through having to cut down or discontinue the medication. At the moment my weight was reduced, and I was waiting to become bloated again, for I had started taking large doses of prednisolone two weeks earlier. I was now taking eight tablets a day. I realised that this method of survival couldn’t be kept up for much longer. But I suppressed the thought — suppressed it although it was there all the time, suppressed it because it was there all the time. I’ve got used to it. Naturally the fur coat is unfashionable, I thought, standing in front of the mirror, but the very fact that it was unfashionable pleased me. In fact I’ve never worn fashionable clothes; I’ve always detested them and still do. The important thing is that it keeps me warm, I told myself; how it looks is really of no importance. It has to serve its purpose; nothing else matters. No, I’ve never had anything fashionable on my person, just as I’ve never had anything fashionable in my head. People were more inclined to say of me, he’s old-fashioned than he’s fashionable or even he’s modern — such a repulsive word. I’d always cared extremely little for public opinion because I was always obsessed with my own opinion and hence had no time at all for the public’s. I’ve never gone along with it, I don’t go along with it today, and I never shall. I’m interested in what people say, but obviously it mustn’t be taken in any way seriously. As far as I am concerned this is the best way forward. I can already see myself getting off the plane in Palma, with the warm African wind in my face, I said to myself. I shall drape the fur coat round my shoulders, and suddenly my feet will be light and my mind clear, and so on — I shall no longer feel this hopelessness which gnaws away at both mind and body. Of course it’s possible that everything will turn out to be a cruel deception. How often that has happened to me! I’ve gone away for months and returned after two days. The more luggage I’ve taken, the sooner I’ve been back home again. Having taken enough luggage for two months, I’ve been back in two days, and so on. And I’ve made myself look ridiculous, especially in front of Frau Kienesberger — having told her I’d be away for months when in fact it was only for two days, having told her it would be for six months when it proved to be only for three weeks. On such occasions I felt ashamed of myself and went about Peiskam with my head low, but I was ashamed only in front of Frau Kienesberger, nobody else, because in the meantime I had become supremely indifferent to everyone else. I had no explanation to offer, for the word despair would have been just as ludicrous as the word mad. I couldn’t expect somebody like Frau Kienesberger to take it seriously. It’s hard enough to convince oneself by using such words, let alone a difficult person like Frau Kienesberger, who is anything but simple; people are always talking about simple folk, yet nobody is more difficult, more complicated indeed, than these so-called simple folk. One can’t expect them to take words like despair and mad seriously. So-called simple people are in reality the most complicated people, and I find it increasingly difficult to get on with them. I have of late almost ceased having any dealings with them. It’s beyond my capacity: I can’t expect simple people to take me seriously any longer. In fact I’ve entirely given up all dealings with simple people, who, as I’ve already said, are the most difficult people of all, because such dealings require too great an effort, and I’m not prepared to lie to them in order to gain their understanding. It’s become clear to me also that it’s the simplest people who make the highest demands, and I’ve now reached the stage where I can no longer afford them. I can hardly afford myself any longer. I accuse my sister of going away for several weeks or for months and then perhaps turning up again a few hours later, and yet I’m no different — I intend to be away for ages, and two days later I’m back again. With all the devastating consequences that this entails. We’re both like this: for decades we’ve been accusing each other of being impossible, and yet we can’t give up being impossible, erratic, capricious and vacillating. This is what makes up our existence, my sister’s and mine, and always has; this is what has always got on other people’s nerves and yet has never ceased to fascinate them and make them seek our company — fundamentally because we’re capricious, erratic, vacillating and unreliable. This is what has always attracted others. People seek the society of others who are exciting, disconcerting and volatile, who are never the same from one moment to the next and usually change complexion completely. And all our lives my sister and I have been asking ourselves what it is we really want, without ever being able to find the answer. All our lives we’ve been looking for something, in the end for everything imaginable, and never finding it, always wanting to achieve everything and not succeeding, or else achieving it and losing it the selfsame moment. It’s an age-old inheritance, it seems to me, coming neither from our father nor from our mother, but from generations back. But Frau Kienesberger is not even surprised now if she finds me back home unpacking my bags two days after I’ve gone away for three or four months. She’s no longer surprised by anything to do with me. What a simple person and yet what an infinitely vigilant seismograph! I reflect. But suddenly everything is in favour of Palma and my work: I’ve got to get out, away from Peiskam, in fact until — I hardly dare say it, though I do dare to think it — until I’ve finished, perhaps even perfected, this work of mine. Leaving Peiskam is what I hate most. I walk from one room to another, I go downstairs and back upstairs, I cross the yard, I rattle the different doors and gates, I check the bolts on the windows and everything else that has to be checked when one goes away, and when I’ve checked the windows I no longer know whether the locks on the doors are in order, and when I’ve checked these I no longer know whether the windows are locked. Such an abrupt departure from Peiskam — and for many years all my departures have been abrupt — drives me to distraction and I am glad no one can see me, I’m glad there are no witnesses to my outward and inward disarray. How ideal it would be if I could sit at my desk now and begin my work! I thought, how ideal just to sit down and write the first sentence which would free the way for all the rest, to be able to concentrate on this study of Mendelssohn Bartholdy, press on with it and complete it! How ideal, how ideal, how ideal! But the desk has been cleared, and by clearing it I’ve forfeited any chance of beginning work immediately. By making these abrupt travel arrangements and bookings and so on I’ve possibly forfeited everything, possibly not just my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, but literally everything, perhaps my very last chance of survival! I held on to the door-post of my study in order to calm myself. I tried to check my pulse, but I couldn’t feel any. I felt as though I’d momentarily lost my hearing, and I pressed my head and my body so hard against the door-post that I could have cried out with pain. In the end, I told myself, though my head was far from clear, when I think I’ve checked everything, especially the plumbing and the electric wiring, I shall drop into my armchair, only to jump up again because I’ve forgotten to turn down the hot water system, which is something I can’t expect Frau Kienesberger to do. And then I shall go and clear out the big dirty linen basket, throwing out all the dirty washing, great heaps of it which have accumulated over many weeks, as may be imagined in view of my condition, which causes me to sweat profusely several times a day. All this washing, moreover, smells foul because of the large quantities of diuretics I have to take in order to lose water and so relieve the strain on my heart. I felt sick as I got all these pieces of dirty linen out of the basket and threw them on the washroom table, even though they were all mine — or perhaps because they were mine. I began to count them all, without realising that this was a sign of madness, and of course it was completely mad, but by the time I realised how mad it was I had become utterly exhausted, and it was as much as I could do to get back upstairs and sit down again in my armchair. It is our misfortune that we always decide in favour of something that turns out to be contrary to our wishes, and when I thought about it more closely, sitting in my armchair, I realised that my sudden decision to quit Peiskam and fly to Palma, where admittedly I had the Cañellas with their palace on the Borne, was all of a sudden directed entirely against myself. I couldn’t understand why I’d made it, but now, in view of all the circumstances it had conjured up, I saw that it simply couldn’t be reversed. I had to go away and at least try to start work in Palma. At least try, I kept on repeating to myself, at least try, at least try! Why did I have the armchair covered with french velvet only a few weeks ago if I’m not going to sit in it and enjoy it? I asked myself. What good will the new desk-lamp or the new blinds be to me now if I go away, possibly to some new hell? I tried to calm myself while making sure that I had packed everything that was necessary, or at any rate everything that was absolutely necessary, in my suitcases and my grandfather’s little travelling bag, which I always take with me when I go away. At the same time, however, I wondered how I could possibly think of calming myself in my present state; it was absurd for me to have such an idea as I sat slumped in the armchair, actually feeling that I should be incapable of getting up again. And somebody like you, somebody who’s already half dead, is about to fly to Palma, I repeated to myself several times, again half aloud, as has become a habit with me, a habit that can no longer be cured, as old people do who have been alone for years and are only waiting to be able to die. I was just such an old person already as I sat there in the armchair, an old man who was already more dead than alive. I must have made a pitiful, indeed pitiable impression on an observer, though there was none — unless I’m going to say that I am an observer of myself, which is stupid, since I am my own observer anyway: I’ve actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself. But all the time I ask myself what I have to save myself from. Is what I constantly wish to save myself from really as bad as all that? No, it isn’t, I told myself, and immediately resumed my self-observation, self-calumniation and self-mockery. All I want to do is to prolong my present state, which leads directly out of the world, I thought, though I dared not actually say it to myself. I’m playing with this state, and I’ll go on playing with it as long as I please. As long as I please, I now said to myself, and I listened, but couldn’t hear anything. The neighbours, I thought, have for years looked upon me as a madman. This role — for that’s what it is in the whole of this more or less unbearable farce — suits me down to the ground. As long as I please, I said to myself again, and this time I suddenly enjoyed hearing myself speak, which was something new, for I’d hated my own voice for years. How can I even for a moment think of calming myself, I thought, when I am so full of agitation? And I tried playing a record. My house has the best acoustics imaginable, and I filled it with the sound of the Haffner Symphony. I sat down and closed my eyes. What would the world be like without music, without Mozart! I said to myself. It’s always music that saves me. I actually calmed myself by repeatedly solving the mathematical puzzle of the Haffner Symphony with my eyes closed, an activity which always affords me the greatest possible pleasure. Mozart is supremely important for my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, I reflect, Mozart gives me the key to everything; I must start from Mozart. Have I given Frau Kienesberger the money I owe her? Yes. Have I packed all my medicaments? Yes. Have I packed all the necessary books and articles? Yes. Have I inspected the huntsman’s lodge? Yes. Have I told my sister she needn’t pay for the papering of her room at Peiskam as I originally demanded? Yes. Have I told the gardener how I want the trees pruned in January? Yes. Have I told the specialist that at night I now get pains on the right-hand side of my chest, not just on the left? Yes. Have I told Frau Kienesberger not to open the blinds on the east side? Yes. Have I told her to put the heating on during my absence, but not to overheat everything? Yes. Have I removed the key to the huntsman’s lodge? Yes. Have I paid the bill for the papering? Yes. I asked myself questions and gave myself answers. But the time wouldn’t pass. I got up and went down into the hall and checked my suitcases. I wanted to be sure they were locked firmly enough, and so I inspected the locks. Why am I doing all this to myself? I wondered. I went and sat in the east room on the ground floor and looked at the picture of my uncle, who had once been Ambassador in Moscow, as was evident from the picture. It was painted by Lampi and is of more artistic value than I originally assumed. I love this picture; my uncle reminds me of myself. But he lived longer than I shall, I thought. I was already wearing my travelling shoes. Everything I had on was too much for me, too tight and too heavy. And then there’ll be the fur coat, I thought. Wouldn’t it be better to get down to reading Voltaire as I intended, and my beloved Diderot, rather than go away suddenly, leaving behind everything that is so dear to me? I’m not at all the kind of unfeeling person that some people take me to be because they want to see me like that and because that’s how I very often make myself appear, not daring to show myself as I really am. But what am I really like? Once more I was caught up in speculations about myself. I don’t know why, but suddenly I recalled that twenty-five years ago, when I was just over twenty, I’d been a member of the Socialist Party. What a joke! I wasn’t a member for long. As with everything else, I resigned my membership after a few months. And to think that I once wanted to become a monk! That I once thought of becoming a Catholic priest! And that I once donated eight hundred thousand schillings for the starving in Africa! To think that that’s all true! At the time it all seemed logical and natural enough. But now I’ve completely changed. To think that I once believed I would marry! And have children! I even thought at one time of going into the army, of becoming a general or a field-marshal like one of my ancestors! Absurd. There’s nothing I wouldn’t once have given everything for, I told myself. But all these speculations added up, if not to nothing, then to ludicrously little. Poverty, wealth, the church, the army, parties, welfare institutions — all ludicrous. All I have left in the end is my present pathetic existence, which no longer has very much to offer. But that’s how it should be. No doctrine holds water any longer; everything that is said and preached is destined to become ludicrous. It doesn’t even call for my scorn any longer. It doesn’t call for anything, anything at all. When we really know the world, we see that it is just a world full of errors. But we are reluctant to part from it, because in spite of everything we’ve remained fairly naive and childlike, I thought. What a good thing that I had my eye-pressure measured. Thirty-eight! We mustn’t pretend to ourselves. We may keel over at any moment. I have more and more dreams in which people fly, in and out of the window* beautiful people, plants I’ve never seen before, with gigantic leaves as big as umbrellas. We take all the necessary precautions, but not for living, for dying. It was a sudden decision on my part to give my nephew nine hundred thousand schillings, a fact which I must now admit, so that he could set up a practice appropriate to today’s conditions, as he put it. What is appropriate to today’s conditions? On the one hand it was stupid to give him what is after all quite a large sum for nothing, but on the other, what are we to do with our money? When my sister gets to hear that I’ve sold the property in Ruhsam I shan’t be around any longer. This thought reassures me. I’ve packed my Voltaire, I thought, and my Dostoyevsky — a wise decision. At one time I got on well with simple people, those whom I have for a long time called the so-called simple people. I used to visit them every day, but my illness has changed all that: I no longer visit them, I avoid them wherever possible, I hide from them. Going away makes one sad, I said in passing. The so-called simple people, the woodcutters for instance, had my trust, and I had theirs. I used to spend half the night with the woodcutters. For decades they were the only people for whom I could feel any sympathy! They never see me now. And in fact, having been spoilt for anything simple, we only impose on such people and take up their time when we are with them; we do them no good, only harm. If I were to see them now I’d only try to destroy their faith in everything they hold dear, the Socialist Party or the Catholic Church for instance, both of which are now, as ever, unscrupulous organisations for the exploitation of humanity. But it is a basic error to say that only the weak-minded are exploited: everybody is exploited. On the other hand this is reassuring. This is how things balance out; perhaps it is the only way things can continue. If only I didn’t have to read the sickening newspapers that are published here, which are not newspapers at all, but simply dirt-sheets edited by greedy upstarts! If only I didn’t have to see what surrounds me here, I said. One delusion succeeded the other, I now realise, as I sat in my armchair waiting to leave. I’m leaving a country that is totally ruined, a repulsive state that fills one with horror every morning. At first it was exploited and then discarded by the so-called conservatives; now it’s the turn of the so-called socialists. An obstinate old idiot who, having become chancellor, is now quite unpredictable, a megalomaniac and a public menace. If someone says the days are numbered he makes himself look ridiculous. Why have I stopped writing to people, why have I given up my correspondence? At one time I used to write letters regularly, even if I didn’t particularly enjoy writing. Quite unconsciously we give up everything, and then it’s gone. Was it my steadily worsening condition that kept my sister in Peiskam for so long and not, as I thought, a sudden onset of boredom with Vienna? If I were to ask her she’d reply with one of her charming lies. Pred-ni-so-lone. I said the word a few times quite slowly to myself, just as I’ve written it down here. Doctors don’t get much below the surface. They always neglect everything, and that’s what they constantly reproach their patients with — negligence. Doctors have no conscience: they simply answer the medical call of nature. But we repeatedly run to them because we can’t believe that this is so. If I carry these suitcases for even the shortest distance it may finish me off, I told myself. We call out the word porter as we used to, but there no longer are any porters. Porters have become extinct. Everybody has to hump their things as best they can. The world has become colder by a few degrees — I don’t wish to calculate by how many — and people are that bit crueller and more inconsiderate. But this is a perfectly normal course of events which we were bound to reckon with and which we could predict, because we’re not stupid. But the sick don’t like allying themselves with the sick, or the old with the old. They run away from one another. To their destruction. Everyone wants to be alive, nobody wants to be dead. Everything else is a lie. In the end they sit in an armchair or in some wing-chair and dream dreams of the past which bear not the slightest relation to reality. There ought to be only happy people — all the necessary conditions are present — but there are only unhappy people. We understand this only late in life. While we are young and without pain we not only believe in eternal life, but have it. Then comes the break, then the breakdown, then the lamentation over it, and the end. It’s always the same. At one time I enjoyed cheating the inland revenue; now I don’t even want to do that, I told myself. Everybody is welcome to see my hand. This is how I feel at the moment. At this moment. The question is really only how we are to survive the winter as painlessly as possible. And the much crueller spring. And summer we’ve always hated. Then autumn takes everything away from us again. Then she displayed the most ravishing bosom the world had ever seen: Zadig. I don’t know why this sentence occurred to me just now and made me laugh. It doesn’t matter either: what matters is that the laughter was entirely unforeseen. About something that needn’t make me feel ashamed. We go through periods of agitation which can sometimes last for weeks and can’t be switched off. Then suddenly they’re gone, and we experience a fairly long period of calm. But we can’t say for certain when the calm began. For years it sufficed for me to go and see the woodcutters and talk to them about their work. Why didn’t it suffice for longer? Two hours’ walk straight there and back again in winter, every day — that was nothing. But all that is impossible today, I thought. The easy methods have all become ineffective — visiting people, reading the newspapers, etc. Even the reading of so-called serious literature no longer has the effect it once had. Suddenly we were afraid of gossip, particularly the gossip which is indulged in non-stop by the so-called celebrated journalists of the cultural papers, who are all the more repellent for being well-known. For years, for decades, we let ourselves be smothered by this repellent gossip. Admittedly I was never in the position of having to pawn my trousers in order to send a telegram, as Dostoyevsky was, and perhaps this was an advantage after all. I might call myself relatively independent. But shackled and imprisoned like everybody else. Impelled by disgust rather than possessed by curiosity. We always spoke of clarity of mind, but never had it. I don’t know where I got this sentence from, perhaps from myself, but I’ve read it somewhere. Perhaps it will turn up among my notes sometime. We say notes to avoid embarrassment, although we secretly believe that these sentences which we blushingly call notes are really more than that. But we believe the same of everything to do with ourselves. This is how we swing ourselves over the abyss, not knowing how deep it is. And in fact the depth does not matter if everybody falls to his death, which we know to be the case. At one time, as far back as I can remember, I used to ask other people questions — the first person was quite certainly my mother — until I finally drove my parents to the verge of madness with my questions. Then suddenly I only asked myself questions, but only when I was sure of being ready with an answer to my question. Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable caco-phany. The word cacophony was incidentally a favourite of my maternal grandfather’s. And the phrase he hated more than any other was thought process. Another of his favourite words was character. During these reflections it suddenly struck me for the first time how extraordinarily comfortable my armchair is. Three weeks ago it was a piece of junk, but now that it has been re-upholstered it is quite luxurious. But what good is that to me if I am going away? I was putting up a tremendous inward resistance to going away. But I really couldn’t cancel my plans. And then again I didn’t want to yield to my momentary feeling of attachment to Peiskam, beside which all else seemed tiresome, burdensome, futile. A pair of black shoes and a pair of brown, I told myself, and another pair for really bad weather. For running along the Molo, which was what I always enjoyed doing. But naturally there would be no question of my running. You’ll walk down to the Molo, very slowly, and take stock and see how far you get. After such a radical change of climate the first few days are the most dangerous. People arrive at nine in the morning, take a shower and rush out for a game of tennis; then they collapse and die, and by two o’clock in the afternoon they end up in the cemetery, as I know from the most dreadful firsthand experience. The dead are disposed of immediately in the south. Take everything slowly — get up slowly, have breakfast slowly, go into town slowly, but on the first day it’s better not to go straight into town — just down to the Molo. I drew a deep breath and sat up as straight as I could, then sank back exhausted in the armchair. However old we are, we go on expecting things to change, I told myself, we’re always waiting for a decisive change, because our minds are anything but clear. All the decisive changes took place many years ago, but at the time we didn’t recognize them as decisive. Those who were once our friends are either dead or have had unhappy lives, going mad before they died, or else they are still alive somewhere and no longer concern me. They’ve all got stuck in their outlook and become old; they’ve all basically given up, though some of them, to my certain knowledge, are still flailing about here and there. When we meet them they talk as though no time at all had elapsed in the last few decades — in other words they talk into the void. There was a time when I actually cultivated my friendships, as the saying goes. But at some point in the past all that suddenly ceased, and apart from the odd bit of information gleaned from newspapers — usually something silly or tasteless — I hear nothing about this or that person whom I once thought I couldn’t be without. Most of them have founded a family, as they say, made a living and built themselves a house; they’ve tried to secure themselves on all sides and in the course of time they’ve become uninteresting. I no longer see them, or if I do we’ve nothing to say to each other. One of them boasts non-stop about being an artist, another about being a scientist, a third about being a successful salesman. It makes me feel sick just to see them, long before they’ve opened their mouths, which utter only banalities and second-hand ideas, never anything original. It’s quite incredible that this house was once full of people whom I had invited and who spent the whole night drinking and eating and laughing. To think that I once not only loved parties, but actually gave them and was capable of enjoying them! But that was all so long ago that very few traces are left. This house is crying out for society, my sister exclaimed only recently. You’ve turned it into a morgue. I just don’t understand how you could have turned out the way you have. Although this was said theatrically it was meant seriously and affected me profoundly. Today all these people would simply get on my nerves. And I was actually the one who entertained all these people for years and even tried to put them right, but in vain. In the end they regard you as a fool. I don’t know which came first — my illness or my sudden distaste for society. I don’t know whether the distaste was there first and gave rise to the illness, or whether the illness was there first and gave rise to the distaste for this particular society, for social gatherings of this kind and for society in general. I don’t know. Did I drive them away, all these people, or did they withdraw from me? I don’t know. Did I cease having dealings with them or they with me? I don’t know. I once conceived the idea of writing about all these people, but then I gave it up: it was too silly. There comes a time when we actually think about these people, and then suddenly we hate them, and so we get rid of them, or they get rid of us; because we see them clearly all at once, we have to withdraw from their company or they from ours. For years I believed that I couldn’t be alone, that I needed all these people, but in fact I don’t: I’ve got on perfectly well without them. They only come to unburden themselves and to unload all their misery on to me, together with all the dirt that goes with it. We invite them thinking they’ll bring us something, something pleasant or refreshing of course, but all they do is deprive us of whatever we have. They come into our houses and force us into some corner where we can’t escape and suck us dry in the most ruthless fashion, until there’s nothing left inside us but the disgust they inspire; then they leave us standing, alone once more with all our private horrors. By bringing them into our house we are quite simply bringing in our tormentors, yet we have no choice but to let in, again and again, the very people who strip us of all our clothes and jeer at us when we stand naked in front of them. No one who thinks this way should be surprised if he gradually becomes isolated in the course of time and finds himself one day entirely alone, with everything that this ultimately and inevitably implies. Throughout our lives we repeatedly rule off the account, although we know that we are in no position to do so. When we suffer from this disease we are struck by the fact that everybody makes too much noise — and doesn’t notice it! People brutalise everything. They get up noisily, go about noisily all day, and go to bed noisily. And they constantly talk far too noisily. They are so taken up with themselves that they don’t notice the distress they constantly cause to others, to those who are sick. Everything they do, everything they say causes distress to people like us. And in this way they force anyone who is sick more and more into the background until he’s no longer noticed. And the sick person withdraws into his background. But every life, every existence, belongs to one person and one person only, and no one else has the right to force this life and this existence to one side, to force it out of the way, to force it out of existence. We’ll go by ourselves, as we have the right to do. That’s part of the natural course. At the one moment when I had the chance, namely when both my parents had died, I failed to see that I ought to turn my back on Peiskam as my sister had done; I really ought to have sold it and thus come to my own rescue, but I hadn’t the strength. Years of depression followed my parents’ death and made it impossible for me to take any initiative. I couldn’t even begin to study. I actually started on several courses of study simultaneously, but failed at them all, as I might have foreseen. I talked myself into studying mathematics, then philosophy, but it wasn’t long before I conceived a distaste for mathematics and philosophy, at least for the mathematics taught at the university, as well as for the philosophy that is taught there but in fact can’t be taught at all. Then suddenly I developed an enthusiasm, a true enthusiasm, for music and surrendered myself to it heart and soul. I got up from my armchair and looked at the clock; then I sat down again. I was incapable of doing anything before my departure, and so I at once relapsed into my fantasies. I found the universities repellent. I enrolled at a number of them. This had been the obvious thing for my father to do, but I attended them all only for the briefest spell. I went to Vienna, Innsbruck and finally Graz, a place I’ve loathed all my life, fully intending to begin and to complete a course of study there, but I failed right from the start. The reason was, on the one hand, that the stale intellectual mush that had been served up in universities for centuries at once turned my stomach and sickened my mind, and, on the other, that I found all the towns unendurable — Innsbruck, Graz and — in the end — even Vienna. All these towns, which of course I knew already, though not thoroughly, induced in me the most crushing depression, and in fact they are all, especially Graz, repulsive little provincial towns. Each one regards itself as the navel of the world and thinks it has taken a lease on the intellect. True, but it’s only the absolutely primitive intellect of the petty bourgeoisie; in these towns I became acquainted with the total insipidity of allot-ment-holders who taught philosophy and professed literature, with nothing else, and the stench of crass pedestrianism pervading these Austrian cesspits spoilt my appetite from the very beginning for anything but the briefest possible stay. And I didn’t want to stay in Vienna either for longer than was absolutely necessary. But to be truthful I owe it to Vienna that I learned about music, and in the most perfect way possible, I must add. Much as I despise and condemn the city, and repellent though I find it most of the time, I nevertheless owe to it my access to our composers, to Beethoven, to Mozart, even to Wagner, and naturally to Schubert, whom I admittedly find it difficult to link with the others, and above all I naturally owe the music of modern and recent times to Vienna, which my father always referred to as the most outrageous of cities — Schönberg, Berg, Webern and so on. And my years in Vienna — nearly twenty in all, during which I became thoroughly attuned to city life — finally spoilt me for Peiskam. During these years I lived at first with my sister, then by myself, at first in the inner city, where I occupied a whole house in the Hasenauerstrasse belonging to my uncle who lived in Dobling. These years in Vienna made Peiskam impossible for me. I was never a nature-lover, which one has to be to live at Peiskam. But in the end illhealth forced me out of the concert-halls and back to Peiskam. Because of my lungs I had to part from Vienna, which meant parting from everything that had any value for me at the time. I’ve never got over this parting. But if I’d stayed in Vienna I should have lived only for a very short time longer. Peiskam had been standing empty for almost twenty years since the death of our parents; it had been given over to nature. No one believed anybody could ever move in again. But one day I moved back. I threw open all the windows, letting in fresh air for the first time in years, and in time I made it habitable. But it’s remained an alien place to me, if I’m to be honest, right to the present day, I reflected. I’d had to give up Vienna and all it meant to me — which was literally everything — at the very moment when I believed I was inseparably linked with the city for ever, a city which admittedly I already hated and which I knew I’d always hated, but which I also loved like no other. Today I envy my sister only one thing: that she can live in Vienna. That’s what constantly rouses me to anger against Vienna — envy. It’s envy that prompts me to be so monstrously unjust and even contemptible in my behaviour towards my sister — envy because she can live in Vienna and because I know she leads an extremely pleasant and happy life there, and I don’t. I always think that if there is one place in the world where I would like to live, then that place is Vienna — there’s no other. But.I’ve put up a barrier between myself and Vienna, thus making it impossible for me to live there. I no longer deserve Vienna, I thought. And it was in Vienna that I first heard a piece by Mendelssohn Bartholdy, The Travelling Players, in the concert hall of the Musik-verein. Both the work and the performance had an elemental effect on me. At the time I didn’t know why the work impressed me so deeply, but I do now. It was because of its brilliant imperfection. But at one time I even hit upon the idea of attending the mining college in Leoben, not because I had suddenly developed an interest in minerals, but because Leoben, being situated in the Styrian mountains, was well-known still for the purity of its air — which of course is now just as polluted as the air anywhere else. For even before I was twenty I had been seriously advised by doctors to lead a country life and not an urban life, but at that time I’d rather have died immediately in the town, no matter of what, than gone to live in the country. The idea of studying in Leoben only cropped up once. However, I paid a visit to the town to learn a bit more than I knew already about the possibilities of the study of mining, but I was put off by the place as soon as I got off the train. In a place like this you can only die, but not exist for a day longer than necessary, I told myself at the time, and in fact I didn’t need to spend even one day in Leoben, but went back the same day to Vienna, from where I’d set out to look at Leoben. Even as the train was crossing the Semmering I was seized by an oppressive sensation in my head and in my whole body. How can there be people who find it possible to exist in little towns like Leoben, I wondered at the time; and after all there are a few hundred thousand people in our country alone who exist in little places like Leoben without raising any objection. But the idea of starting a course of study in Leoben in the first place was not mine, but my maternal grandfather’s. He had once studied mining himself, admittedly not in Leoben, but in Padua, which is certainly an immense difference. And I’d considered going to England, possibly Oxford or Cambridge, I’d thought, thus at once associating myself with a number of our most brilliant minds, some of the most illustrious of whom had indeed studied in England, that is in Oxford and Cambridge, and gone on to teach there. And since I had no difficulty whatever with the English language, I thought that the way to England was the right way for me. But I hadn’t bargained with the English climate, at least not with the climate in Oxford and Cambridge, which is even more disastrous in its effect on sick people like me and frustrates any effort they make in any direction. I spent only ten days in England, having parted from my parents for at least six months, and even today I can recall the full weight of the despondency I suffered on my return to Peiskam, only ten days after leaving for England. I’d really made myself look ridiculous, but even then my sickness was to blame; it was already building up in me, though it had not yet broken out. After this reverse, which had left me with a somewhat mistaken view of England and London, I gave up all possibilities of studying abroad and concentrated on those which remained open to me at home, but these possibilities — with the alternatives of Vienna on the one hand and Innsbruck on the other — were entirely unacceptable. Since I didn’t fancy myself in the role of a seedy student, a role to which people like me and with my background are often attracted, I decided in favour of what seemed to me the best possibility open to me, that is not to study at all, at any rate not at a place of learning, believing myself to have enough strength and enough character to develop myself intellectually on my own. Moreover I had suddenly realised that the only thing in the world that fascinated me was music, and that apart from music everything else was worthless. This explains my years spent in Vienna. And where music is concerned, from the moment when I discovered it for myself I was the most receptive student. At one time I could have joined the editorial staff of the Presse, thanks to my acquaintance with an editor who was a friend of my father, but I had quite a sound instinct which prevented me from doing anything so perverse. While I lived with my sister on the Stubenring I used to spend my days visiting every possible library and meeting those people who would be useful to me in my studies and hence musically educated. I soon had little difficulty in making contact with such people, who gradually became indispensable for my research. In this way I became acquainted not only with the most important books and articles on musical theory, but also with a number of the authors who had written them, and from all this I derived the greatest possible advantage. At the same time I took an interest in the artistic productions of the Viennese in general, going to concerts or operas nearly every day. I had soon attained such a high degree of musical self-sufficiency that I was able to cut down on my visits first to the opera and then to concerts. The programmes always contained too many repeats of the same works: that has always been a characteristic of Vienna — that it very soon has nothing more to offer to anyone in search of what is new and therefore really interesting. It was also no longer the case in my time, as it had been earlier, that many different orchestras from all over the world could be heard every day. It was always the same orchestras, and good though they were — and are — I always had the impression — and still have — that the same orchestras always play the same things, even though in fact they always played different things — and still do. But of course a person who has opted for music still has his place in Vienna even today. The trouble is that the atmosphere of the city can’t be endured for any length of time, and quite apart from this the doctors had told me early on that for me Vienna had the most harmful climate of all. All in all I spent over twenty years in Vienna, and my only company was music. Suddenly I’d had enough and returned to Peiskam. Naturally this was a step which led me into the impasse to which these notes bear witness. At two o’clock in the afternoon, when the car came to collect me, it was still eleven degrees below zero in Peiskam, but on my arrival in

Palma, where I am writing these notes, the thermometer showed eighteen degrees above. However, this naturally did not improve my condition — quite the contrary. I was afraid I shouldn’t survive the first night in the hotel. Anyone familiar with this disease will know what I am talking about. I did well after my arrival to spend the whole day in bed with the curtains drawn. There was no question of my unpacking my suitcases. Naturally I knew in advance what such an abrupt change of climate entailed, but I hadn’t expected to be in such a parlous state. I confined myself to staying all day in bed and drinking a glass of water on two occasions, but I only drank the water because I had to take my tablets. They probably saw immediately at the reception desk how ill I was and gave me the room I asked for without any fuss. I’ll unpack my cases very slowly, I told myself as I lay flat out on the bed, gazing at the ceiling and able to resume my fantasies where I’d broken them off in Peiskam. The flight, like’all previous ones I’d survived, had been absolutely terrible. However, at about three o’clock on the second night, rather as though I were doing something I shouldn’t, I got up and began unpacking my cases. As I did so I discovered that I wasn’t as weak as I’d thought. I love these large rooms, which are normally intended for two people and have a large bathroom and an anteroom equally large, and from which one has a view not only of the old town, but also of the sea. And which are absolutely quiet. In the morning all I hear are the cocks crowing, a few dull thuds coming from the wharf, dogs barking, and perhaps a mother scolding a naughty child. I don’t have the impression here of being isolated from the local people, although in fact almost everything separates me from them, since I am living in luxury in a spacious room, while the people in the old town beneath me live in anything but luxury. Yet this luxury, I reflect, is excused by my sickness. But in fact I no longer have any scruples, I tell myself. To have scruples at the end of one’s life is quite ludicrous. After my first breakfast I began unpacking my cases. First the one with the clothes and underclothes in it. I’d hardly taken out one or two things and put them in the wardrobe when I was once more prostrate on the bed. An attack of breathlessness more severe than any I’d had for a long time caused me extreme distress. I put this down to the abrupt change of climate, which at first has a devastating effect even on a healthy person, let alone someone like me. However, having finally unpacked the first case, I set about unpacking the second, the one containing all the books and articles I’d brought with me for my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At first I didn’t know where to put them, and I considered various places; finally I decided to put some of them on the table and others in the wardrobe, and this was the procedure I followed while unpacking. I wondered meanwhile whether it still made any sense to begin a project like this one on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. On the one hand I told myself it was senseless, on the other I told myself, You must begin this project, whatever the cost. But do ten years of preparation — for I really had been preparing for it for so long — justify one in embarking on a task like this when one is totally worn out, as I am now? I said alternately nothing justifies it and everything justifies it. It was best to give up questioning the wisdom or unwisdom of such a task, and so I gave it up and pretended that I was in fact determined to embark upon the task as soon as possible. Was I now, when I was so close to my goal, to throw everything away, to destroy everything on which ultimately my whole existence hung, the tenuous hope that I might yet bring my work to fruition? I’ll write my study, even if I can’t start it straight away. After all, I had foreseen this and I had never believed that I should be able to start at once: I’m not so mad as to fall for what is patently absurd. If not today, then tomorrow; if not tomorrow, then the day after, and so on. It was only because of my work that I made this journey, I told myself. I took myself to task and arranged everything on the desk so that I could start work at any time. Then I went and sat on the balcony, in the white-painted metal chair, only to return to the bed and lie down again. For several hours I alternated between sitting on the balcony and lying on the bed until the day had come to an end. Towards evening I went into the town. Though I had originally intended to walk only as far as the Molo, or perhaps as far as the fish restaurant on the Molo, which was known to me from earlier visits and where I had always eaten exceptionally well, I nevertheless went past the Lonja as far as the so-called Borne, which during Franco’s lifetime — from the victory of the Fascists until their overthrow — was called the Paseo del Generalissimo. There, because it was so warm, I went and sat — most incautiously, as I had to admit — on the terrace of the café facing the Cañellas’ palace. It was here that I had for years, indeed almost for decades, taken my lunch, consisting invariably of ham, cheese, olives and a glass of water. Sitting with my eyes closed in one of those ancient, white-painted wicker chairs and drinking a large espresso, while the sun glinted through the still leafless plane trees, I suddenly found myself thinking about the name of the young woman from Munich whom I had spoken to here on the Borne on my last visit to Palma and who had told me her terrible story after I had invited her to have coffee on this very terrace where I now sat with my eyes closed. The young woman’s name was Anna Härdtl. And it was not I who had spoken to her on the Borne, but she who had spoken to me. Be that as it may. I had been walking with one of the Cañellas’ daughters, whom I knew from Vienna (she had studied the piano there under the celebrated Wührer) and who ran a parfumerie with her sister opposite the café. Walking along under the plane trees we had been laughing about something, I can’t remember what, when suddenly I uttered, rather loudly, the name Anna, which happened to be the name of a girl we had met on a visit to Andraitx, one of the many excursions which I had made in recent years with the Cañellas girls and which we always recalled with pleasure. When I called out the name Anna — I no longer know why I was speaking so loudly, ruiso! — my voice carried and a young woman walking in front of us turned round abruptly and said, Yes? Then, extremely embarrassed, she added, My name is Anna. She had turned round spontaneously because she thought somebody was calling to her. The sudden sight of the young woman completely changed my mood and that of my companion. I was appalled by her appearance. She was obviously in mourning and seemed distracted and wretched. It is not my way to begin conversations with strangers from one moment to the next — I lack the necessary temperament — but when I saw the young woman’s face I at once asked her if she would like to join us, the Cañellas girl and me, for a cup of coffee on the terrace. I acted from a momentary feeling, not so much of sympathy as of sudden alarm at the sight of a face so full of despair, but no sooner had I extended my invitation than I began to accuse myself of having addressed her in a tone which she might have felt more hurtful than protective, and I regretted having invited her at all. However, I couldn’t wish her away or take back what I had said, and so I repeated it in a different tone, which at first seemed to me more appropriate, but turned out to be equally inept, as I at once recognized. To my surprise the young woman immediately accepted my invitation and introduced herself as Anna Härdtl. It was nice, she said, to talk to people again after several days, and everything she said subsequently seemed as if it were spoken by one who was inwardly utterly distracted, utterly destroyed. She was staying, she said, in Santa Ponsa, and then she said something about a death, then something about a consulate being closed, then something about an expensive meal and a cold room. Everything she said, as we walked towards the café, sounded as though it was spoken by someone on the verge of madness. Hardly had we sat down on the terrace than I became aware of how embarrassing the situation was, and I no longer knew how to react. The little Cañellas girl was no help at all: she had understood nothing of what had just taken place and simply gazed out of the window. I didn’t understand her behaviour, since it was obvious what kind of person was sitting with us at the table, someone in the grip of the most terrible despair. But to the young Cañellas girl, who, like all Spanish women, was unused to finding herself suddenly sitting at a table with a stranger, the whole situation was embarrassing. I felt ashamed, unable to say a word, searching for words but not finding a single one, and reproaching myself for having perhaps forced someone, in a positively brutal manner, into doing something she didn’t want to do: the young woman perhaps didn’t want to sit drinking coffee at the same table with either me or the Cañellas girl, neither of whom could in the least concern her, just because she had been compelled to do so by my invitation, delivered in a tone which, if not callous, had at least been far from sensitive. I was ashamed and unable to start a conversation, even to utter a single word, let alone to take up anything the young woman had already said in her extreme despair and confusion. That’s just how somebody sits who has been compelled to do so, I thought. The young Cañellas girl must have felt as I did, because for a while she didn’t look once in my direction. But my sense of shame gave me no chance of escaping from the situation I had created. Suddenly, out of sheer nervousness, I asked the young woman her name, although she had told me it as soon as I had invited her for coffee. But she willingly repeated it: Anna Härdtl. I was not up to coping with the situation. And so we all remained silent, each of us secretly knowing why; we could not possibly fail to appreciate the embarrassment of it all. Suddenly the young woman began to tell us the following story. At the end of August she and her husband and their three-year-old son had come to Santa Ponsa for two weeks. They had been completely exhausted — and so had the child — after starting up an electrical business in Trudering, an eastern suburb of Munich, especially as a result of the continual persecution to which they had been subjected by the local authorities, who had not given them a moment’s peace over the opening of the shop. I couldn’t imagine, she said, what she had had to go through during the year before and up to the opening of the shop. It was the most terrible thing, wanting to set up on your own account, the most impossible thing in the world, far worse today than ever before. And my husband, she had said right at the beginning, was the most difficult man. Hearing her say was, I suddenly knew that she was in mourning for her husband, a fact which at first I hadn’t grasped. Her husband had been only twenty-three, she said, and came from Niirnberg, from a poor family, whereas she was born near Rosenheim and came from a better-off family, as she put it. Her husband had attended an engineering school in Niirnberg and completed his course there, although they knew each other already, and that had made it very difficult for him to carry on with his course. But he had finally completed it successfully, for if he had given up his studies at the engineering school her father would have immediately stopped the monthly allowance he paid him — naturally a meagre allowance, she said.

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 the 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.

Again I got up, went to the desk and made an appropriate note. When we meet somebody like Anna Härdtl, I thought, who is so unfortunate, we tell ourselves at once that we are by no means as unfortunate as we think we are: after all, we have our intellectual work. But what does this young woman have apart from a child by a husband who died on her at the age of twenty-three, in whatever circumstances? The fact is that we immediately use someone who is still more unfortunate than we are in order to get ourselves back on our feet. And our illness, even though it may be deadly, is of almost no consequence. Instead of writing about Mendelssohn, I reflect, I’m writing these notes. And it occurs to me that I must ring up Elisabeth, my sister in Vienna. At half past two in the morning I am still awake, thinking about my work, which had been put off and delayed for ten years, about how I was going to start on it next morning and what the opening sentence would be. And suddenly I had a number of opening sentences in mind. At the same time I thought about Anna Härdtl. Her misfortune, I told myself, is that she forced her husband to give up his career as an engineer and go into a business for which he was quite unsuited, and then persuaded him, for whatever reason, to go on holiday to Mallorca. What a dreadful idea, I thought, to go to Palma in late August! The town and the island are beautiful only in winter, but then they are more beautiful than anything else in the world. I slept for only two hours, waking up at half past five with the thought: I’m now forty-eight years old and I’ve had enough. In the end we don’t have to justify ourselves or anything else. We didn’t make ourselves. And instead of starting work on Mendelssohn, as I had been fully determined to do, having believed at half past three that I had in fact suddenly got the ideal conditions, all I could think of when I woke was Anna Härdtl. The case of this young woman gave me no peace, and at a quarter to six, not wanting to lay myself open to the depression that was bound to assail me between lying in bed and getting up, I got up with a headache which possibly had something to do with an impending change in the weather. Anna Härdtl gave me no peace, and so naturally I was quite incapable of starting to write my Mendelssohn study that morning. I must go to the cemetery as quickly as possible, I told myself with a sudden and terrible resolve which I cannot explain. Before seven o’clock I ordered a taxi and went to the cemetery. I had no difficulty in finding the last resting place of the young Härdtl. It took me only a few minutes. But to my astonishment I found that the marble plaque set in the concrete no longer bore the names Isabella Fernandez and Hanspeter Härdtl: instead it bore, already engraved in the marble, the names Anna and Hanspeter Härdtl. I turned at once and quickly went to the porter on duty in his lodge next to the mortuary cold store. In answer to my question, which I put quite clearly and, as I could see, comprehensibly, even though I put it in Spanish, he simply repeated several times the word suicido. I ran over to the lunatic asylum to order a taxi, since this could not be done from the cemetery, and drove straight back to the hotel. I drew the curtains in my room, writes Rudolf, took several sleeping tablets, and woke up twenty-six hours later in a state of extreme anxiety.

Content

Thomas Bernhard
Concrete

Introduction

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