Concrete
THOMAS BERNHARD
Concrete
Translated from the German by
DAVID McLINTOCK
With an Introduction by MARTIN CHALMERS
QUARTET ENCOUNTERS
Quartet Books London New York
Published in Great Britain
by Quartet Books Limited 1989
A member of the Namara Group
27/29 Goodge Street, London W1P 1FD
Originally published in German as Beton
Copyright © by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1982
This translation first published in Great Britain by
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1984
Translation copyright © by David McLintock 1984
Introduction copyright © by Martin Chalmers 1989
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bernhard, Thomas, 1931-1989 Concrete
I. Title II. Beton. English 833’.914 [F]
ISBN 0-7043-0107-5
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 lis
tener 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
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 ess
ay! 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. I
n 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.