Gargoyles

First page

ON the twenty-sixth my father drove off to Salla at two o’clock in the morning to see to a schoolteacher whom he found dying and left dead. From there he set out toward Hüllberg to treat a child who had fallen into a hog tub full of boiling water that spring. Discharged from the hospital weeks ago, it was now back with its parents.

He liked seeing the child, and dropped by there whenever he could. The parents were simple people, the father a miner in Köflach, the mother a servant in a butcher’s household in Voitsberg. But the child was not left alone all day; it was in the care of one of the mother’s sisters. On this day my father described the child to me in greater detail than ever before, adding that he was afraid it had only a short time to live. “I can say for a certainty that it won’t last through the winter, so I am going to see it as often as possible now,” he said. It struck me that he spoke of the child as a beloved person, very quietly and without having to consider his words. He let himself express a natural affection for the child as he hinted at the surroundings in which the child had grown up, not so much reared as guarded by its parents, and explained his speculations about these parents and their relationship to the child by filling out the details of the environment. While he spoke, he paced back and forth in his room, and soon no longer had the slightest need to lie down again.

My father was the only doctor in a relatively large and “difficult” district, now that the other doctor had moved to Graz, where he had accepted a teaching post at the university. “The chance of a replacement,” my father said, “is practically nil. A man would be mad to want to start a practice here.” For his own part, he said, he was used to sacrificing himself to a sick populace given to violence as well as insanity. My being home for the weekend was a tranquilizer for him, he said, and one that was more and more necessary. He seemed tired. But when I threw open the shutters and the light from the Ache river dazzled us, he said he would take a walk. “Come,” he said, “come along.” While I was dressing, he talked about a “phenomenon of nature,” a chestnut tree that had burst into blossom now, at the end of September. He had discovered it by the riverside beyond the village. This would be a good opportunity, he said, for us to discuss something he had long wanted to talk about. Probably, I thought, something connected with my studies in Leoben, something to do with mining. This was the right time for it, he said, before he was taken up with the day’s quota of patients. “You know,” he said, “often it’s all too much for me.”

We did not want to wake my sister, and went out to the vestibule for our coats as quietly as possible. But as we were about to leave the house, the bell rang. At the door stood someone I did not know, who turned out to be an innkeeper from Gradenberg. He asked my father to come with him at once.

And so we rode to Gradenberg in the innkeeper’s wagon instead of strolling along the Ache and having our discussion. There was no more talk about the flowering chestnut tree. Instead we heard a most unsettling tale about the innkeeper’s wife.

She had been busy until two o’clock in the morning, her husband said, serving miners who had already been drunk for several hours and had divided into two hostile groups. Suddenly one of the miners without the slightest provocation struck her on the head, and she had dropped unconscious to the floor. The horrified miners carried her up to the bedroom on the second floor of the inn, her head bumping several times against the banister, and deposited her on her bed. Her husband woke up when the miners opened the bedroom door, and listened, dazed from sleep, to an account of the incident. The suddenly sobered miners wanted him to go to the police and lodge a complaint at once, that very night, against the assailant, a man named Grössl, who had run off but whom they all could identify. The police, including the constable supposedly on duty, had all been asleep, the innkeeper said. But by showering the police station windows with pebbles he had finally roused someone and been admitted. At first the police had advised him to come back in the forenoon to make a statement for the record, but he had insisted that the statement be recorded right then and there, and demanded that some of the constables at least come to the inn with him because his wife was lying there unconscious, the miners were still waiting, and he felt that they, too, should present their statements without delay. But the whole thing had taken too long; by the time he returned to the inn with two of the constables, all the miners except one were gone. His first thought was that he should not have left his wife alone for a moment, for as he entered the bedroom and saw the miner Kolig, who had been there all this time, the most horrible suspicions and imaginings ran through his mind. He did not know the man at all well, was acquainted with him merely from his occasional visits to the inn, and did not regard him as a neighbor in the sense of his being trustworthy. Moreover the miner spoke a Styrian dialect unpleasantly different from the dialect of the vicinity.

Albert Kolig was so drunk that though still on his feet he could not speak even the shortest sentence. The younger of the constables promptly told him to sit down in the armchair in the corner and began questioning him, while the other constable took pictures of the woman lying on the bed as motionless as if she were a corpse. The answers Kolig gave for the record were in fact useless. He could not sit up and was on the point of keeling over when the constable, losing patience, pulled him up and yanked and shoved him out into the hall.

The culprit, Grössl, was reputed to be the kind of man who the moment he entered a tavern was bound to stay until he had made some kind of ruckus. The constables said that it would not be difficult to find him and in view of his previous convictions the chances were that he would be in for a sentence of several years, since the facts of the case were plain enough: The blow on the woman’s head had evidently caused a severe injury, for otherwise she would not be still unconscious. As soon as the older constable spoke the words “severe injury,” everyone realized that a doctor would have to be called. “Meanwhile several hours have passed,” the innkeeper said.

It was already half past four when we arrived in Gradenberg. The innkeeper led us up to the bedroom, where the two constables were standing. My father had all of us go out into the hall. While he was examining the woman — in my brief glimpse of her I had the impression that she had given up the ghost — the two constables in the corridor discussed Kolig, who lay in a drunken stupor on the floor. They said he was dimwitted and was treating his family of six more and more vilely. They did not know what to do with him. When my father emerged from the bedroom, they dragged Kolig away from the stairs, which he had half blocked with his legs. Then they paid no more attention to him.

The woman was in fact seriously injured and had to be taken to the Köflach hospital at once, my father said. He asked the constables to carry her carefully downstairs and place her in the rack wagon.

The constables carried the innkeeper’s wife out of the damp room with its green and brown wallpaper and cheap pine furniture, a room that must have been gloomy even on the brightest day. As the constables cautiously descended the steps with their charge, my father looked at me and then past me, and I thought that his look boded very ill for the innkeeper’s wife.

While I took my seat in the wagon beside the innkeeper, who drove, my father sat behind us next to the patient.

During the whole ride, which we shortened by cutting across Krennhof, the innkeeper and I did not exchange a word. Because of the early hour the drive went quickly and easily. I had not been in this vicinity for a long time, I realized. I had to think far back to my earliest childhood to catch a glimpse of myself here and there playing by Gradner Brook. It struck me how seldom I had accompanied my father on his rounds, and that ever since my mother’s death I had been left entirely to myself. It is the same for my sister, who must be feeling it even more painfully than I.

In keeping with our mood, I imagine, the innkeeper, who had talked so much on the way to Gradenberg, did not say a word on the way to Köflach. It would hardly have been fitting for me to strike up any conversation with him. If I had understood my father right, there was little hope that the woman would survive the ride to Köflach. But when the hospital attendants lifted her out of the wagon, she was not yet dead. She died, however, while we were still in the hospital, before she could be brought into the only operating room, and her husband sensed the moment of her passing. While the attendants were wheeling her down the corridor, he had held her hand and wept. They did not let him stay with the body, but led him down to the courtyard where, left entirely to himself, he had to wait half an hour for my father. I let him alone, but unobtrusively kept watch over him. Then my father came down and walked about the yard with him, trying to calm him. He spoke to the innkeeper of the things that had to be done now, about arranging the funeral, the inquest, filing a charge against Grössl for manslaughter. It would be wise for him to stay around people now, my father said, not to isolate himself in his anguish, withdraw into his pain. My father said he would take care of certain necessary errands, like going to court, and would accompany him on others to ease his grief, first of all to see his wife who was being moved to the autopsy room.

My father said that he had diagnosed a cerebral hemorrhage, which would have been fatal in any case. He would be receiving the exact details of the autopsy from the district coroner later in the morning. It was of no importance that the innkeeper had not notified him of the fatal blow until three hours after the incident, my father said. The woman could not have been saved. The deceased woman was thirty-three, and my father had known her for years. It had always seemed to him that innkeepers treated their wives with extreme callousness, he said. They themselves usually went to bed early, having overworked themselves all day on their slaughtering, their cattle dealing, their farms. But because they thought of nothing but the business, they left their wives to take care of the taverns until the early morning hours, exposed to the male clients who drank steadily so that as the night wore on their natural brutality became less and less restrained. My father said this to me in an interval when we fell a bit behind the innkeeper, who was walking with us but seemed in a total daze. “All these long drinking bouts end badly,” my father said. “And in this region a high percentage of them end in a fatality. The innkeepers’ own wives are often the victims; the innkeepers set these helpless women to tending the public rooms so they can extract every penny from their drunken patrons by pouring the cheapest brandy into their unresisting guts.”

When we had caught up to the innkeeper again, my father assured him that it would be easy to find Grössl now that the police were informed of it all. No matter where he was holed up, Grössl would not be able to stay hidden long. The innkeeper’s tears and distraught air were affecting precisely because his dealings with cattle and the tavern world had made him the embodiment of the district’s characteristic brutality. But the more my father tried to talk to him, the more pointless the effort seemed. Finally my father contented himself with giving the man the necessary instructions in what I thought a very simple and easily understood way. Then we left him to himself again.

My father went to the autopsy room and talked with the coroner and his assistants. Meanwhile I kept an eye on the innkeeper as he sat on the single bench in the hospital yard. I guessed that his wife’s body was in the two-wheeled morgue cart that a young attendant pushed past me. The sight of the morgue cart was nothing new to me, for my way to school had led past the hospital and I often used to pause at the spot where the morgue could be seen between two elderberry bushes so I could look at the cart that stood by the entrance to the morgue day and night when it was not in use. It was housed in an open shed on the side of the building visible to me. This sheet-metal morgue cart had always had a macabre fascination for me, and often appeared as a major, horrible prop on the stage of my childhood dreams. The young attendant, barely past school age, pushed the cart to the entrance of the morgue, and I heard my father coming from that direction. We went out of the hospital yard, moving quickly along the walls so as to keep out of sight of the innkeeper, who was still sitting on the bench. My father, I thought, wherever he feels at home, which is with patients and in hospitals, doesn’t act as if he were part of a vast, opaque business organization, though that’s what people accuse doctors of nowadays, but rather as I’ve seen him act today, as if he were part of a more and more crystal-clear science. I suppose there are many doctors like some I have met who are nothing but businessmen, and talk and act like businessmen even when they have keen scientific minds. But my father isn’t one of them.

“You see nothing but sad sights when you come along with me,” my father said. “That’s why I hesitate most of the time to have you come along on my calls, because it turns out that everyone I have to visit and touch and treat proves to be sick and sad.” No matter what the trouble was, he went on, he was continually moving about in a sick world among sick people, sick individuals; and even though this world might claim, might even pretend, to be healthy, it was still sick and the people, the individuals, were always sick, even the so-called healthy ones. “I’m accustomed to that, but it might possibly upset you, might give you harmful thoughts. I’ve noticed you tend to be upset by everything and everyone, to think about everything and everyone in a harmful way.” And my sister did the same, to an even more dangerous extent, he went on. “But it would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad”—those were his very words — and for that reason he was now and again “tempted” to take me or my sister along on his sick-calls. “It’s always a risk,” he said. Most of all, he added, he was afraid that one of us, my sister or I, could be harmed for life by seeing a patient and his illness, whereas he meant it to have just the opposite effect.

We went on into Köflach. He wanted to go to the bank and the post office, but they were still closed, and so he took me along to a lawyer friend of his who had been a fellow student at the university in Graz. I knew the man from his summer visits to us. He was a successful lawyer specializing in real estate. My father was hoping his friend would provide us with breakfast.

We rang. The door was opened, and we entered an apartment that was furnished opulently by the standards of a small town and at first glance had a very cosy look about it, although the individual pieces were not especially tasteful. The first thing you noticed was the many chairs and couches. The lawyer’s young wife received us and at once ushered us into the dining room. Before long the lawyer himself appeared. My father said he had only a little time; he had to return home with me. During the breakfast, for which we had arrived just in time and which was more lavish than any I have ever eaten, I sat where I could look down into the street and watch what was going on there as we talked about Grössl’s murder of the innkeeper’s wife. My father remarked that it was horrible how people went at each other without knowing why, especially in the taverns, as soon as they lost their ordinary inhibitions. He was sure, he said, that this fellow Grössl did not know why he had knocked down the innkeeper’s wife. “It may be,” my father said, “that he doesn’t even know that he killed her.” Nowadays, he went on, the country people who first degenerate into brutality and then into total helplessness about their brutality, who degenerate in all respects and cannot help themselves, are alarmingly in the majority.

The fact was, he continued, that there are more brutal and criminal types in the country than in the city. “Brutality, like violence, is the very fundament of life in the country. Brutality in the city is nothing compared to the brutality in the country, and the violence in the city is nothing compared to the violence of the country. Crime in the city, urban crime, is nothing compared to crime in the country, rural crime. In fact urban crimes are ridiculous compared to the country kind.”

The innkeeper, he declared, was a born criminal, born to violence. He remained a cattle dealer every moment and in all life situations. “Even though he’s crying now,” my father said, “it’s livestock he’s really crying over. For an innkeeper his wife is nothing but livestock. One day he claps a brutish hand on her and draws her out of the undifferentiated herd of unwed girls and breaks her to his use. An inn like that, like every butcher’s or cattle dealer’s or peasant’s house in this area, is a brutal prison for women. If you keep your ears open, whenever you go about the countryside you hear the women inside their houses crying because their men have beaten them. As I go about, there is hardly a man I see who isn’t repulsive. When I enter one of these houses, I enter an atmosphere of brutality, of violence; I am forever carrying my doctor’s bag into a world of criminals. The people who live under the Glein Alp and under the Kor Alp and in the Kainach and Gröbnitz valleys are perfect specimens of a Styria that for thousands and millions of years has been built on the basest kind of physical abuse.”

But then my father recalled his early visits to the miner’s child in Hüllberg. He described how he was received cordially and bidden good-by just as graciously after he had spent a quarter of an hour there, calmed and reassured. But this did not mean that what he had said about people like the innkeeper applied solely to the more prosperous natives. The Hüllberg parents and their child were exceptional. On the whole “the poor are twice as brutal, base and criminal as anyone else, and the pressures on them to make them so are far greater.”

My father did not speak about the schoolteacher who had been the object of his first call that day — did not speak of him, I thought, because the man had died too soon under his hands, before he could have any idea of him. I thought that the teacher had already been forgotten, for after my father talked about the child and its burns once more, and gave a description of the child’s manner of speech, he reverted to the subject of the innkeeper. The innkeeper was waiting for us in the hospital, my father said, and would have to drive us back to Gradenberg in his wagon before going home. Now he was probably in the morgue. My father had meant to go in with him, but it must have slipped his mind. I imagined that right now the attendants in the morgue were giving the innkeeper his dead wife’s clothing, and sure enough the innkeeper was actually waiting for us, with the woman’s clothes bundled under his arm, at the hospital entrance after we had left the lawyer’s and quickly been to the post office and the bank.

On the way back to Gradenberg my father went over the patients he still had to visit in the course of the day. He mentioned the names Saurau, Ebenhöh, Fochler, and Krainer. Whereas I had already been strongly affected by the things I had experienced in connection with the death of the innkeeper’s wife, my father now no longer showed the slightest fatigue. Sitting beside the innkeeper, who drove the wagon as calmly as if nothing had happened, the two of us pictured, each for himself, the patients still to be visited. Outside Krennhof the innkeeper stopped at a butcher’s and, apologizing, got out to arrange some business matter. While he was gone for a few minutes, my father commented that he had known this fellow from childhood, that only ten years ago he had been still a young man, but now was steadily putting on fat, walked in a disgustingly bowlegged manner of increasing sexual clumsiness, and had become altogether obnoxious. As for the innkeeper’s wife, my father said, each time he visited Gradenberg he had found the woman equally repulsive. When such people had no children, the meaning gradually drained out of their marriage so that it degenerated into something perverse and vicious that was destined to end in abject misery unless some accident, such as this man Grössl’s running amuck, put a stop to it.

Along the last stretch of the road we had to turn to avoid a herd of cattle. At this point the innkeeper spoke up, saying several times that he had not yet grasped what had happened; it was still unreal to him.

When we reached Gradenberg, we saw a crowd gathered in front of the inn. The judicial commission had just arrived on the scene. As I got down from the wagon, I noticed curiosity-seekers all over the place, some standing nearby, some at a remove.

My father told me to wait in front of the inn. He strode rapidly inside to confer with the judicial commission, whose members were assembled in the public room. The inn was filled from top to bottom with officials who were murmuring steadily among themselves. In an open window on the second floor, the bedroom window, I noticed the heads of two constables. I paced back and forth in front of the inn until my father came out with the innkeeper, who was to drive us home. All the miners who had witnessed the killing had been summoned to testify. It was Saturday; the mine was closed. Most of them could no longer reconstruct the incident; they made contradictory statements; but two of them had seen Grössl when he knocked the innkeeper’s wife down. That was enough for them. Despite my father’s prediction, Grössl was still at large. Probably, my father said, he was hiding somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Everyone thought it unlikely that he could escape to any great distance, even though he had enough money to have even fled the country.

Back home, we got into our car at once. “We’re driving to Stiwoll,” my father said.

The road from Graden to Kainach was blocked, partly on account of Grössl. But since we were recognized, we were allowed to pass. A case like Grössl’s was naturally a sensation, and the whole region was agog. Everyone was excited by the death of the innkeeper’s wife. The news had spread rapidly through the constabulary headquarters, as we noticed especially in Afling, where we stopped at my uncle’s. My father had brought medicines for my uncle’s wife. We entered the house and called, went down to the lower rooms and into the kitchen, and found that there was not a soul in the unlocked house. My father deposited the medicines on the kitchen cupboard, left a note, and we took our leave.

A year before my mother’s death, my father said, he had been in Afling with her, at the funeral of one of his old classmates, and she had talked constantly about her own impending death. Whereas he had as yet discovered no signs of her fatal disease, she was already permeated by it; that was something he realized only much later. After that visit in Afling he had observed a mysterious and total transformation in her, which baffled him as a physician. There was an increasing melancholia that gradually infected all of us. He recalled every one of the things she had said, could see the road they had walked on before and after the funeral. It had been this time of year, the end of September. Everything connected with that funeral in Afling was still remarkably distinct to him. Especially on fair days, when the air has a particular transparency and nature is lovely for its tranquility alone, one sorrows for the dead with redoubled force.

The essential elements of a person, my father said, come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible.

All through the drive through the Söding Valley my father talked about my mother. His reveries centered on her, he said, rather than his dreams. Her presence often steadied and encouraged him during periods that seemed outwardly to be fully taken up by his medical work. As a result he had been able to reach a clear view of death as a fact of nature. Now he understood her, who had lived beside him so many years and been loved but never understood. You were never truly together with one you loved until the person in question was dead and actually inside you.

From the day of the funeral in Afling, my father continued, she had often asked him to take her along on his calls. Nowadays this desire on her part no longer seemed so incomprehensible. In the nature of things it had not been possible for her to study the suffering and torment of the world, but from the day of the funeral in Afling on, this subject was constantly on her mind. During this period he had often spoken with her about us children, above all about the difficulty of channeling parental affection into educational lines. But she used often to say to him that we seemed to her more the children of the landscape around us than of our parents. Holding this view, she had felt us, my sister to an even greater degree than myself, to be creatures sprung entirely from nature, for which reason we had always remained alien to her. Because the three of us were completely helpless after her death, my father said, and my sister and I were in the most dangerous phase of development, she twelve and I sixteen years old, he had thought of remarrying. “In fact the thought came to me during the funeral itself,” my father said when we were already in sight of Stiwoll. But the idea had been more and more repressed by our mother inside him.

As he said this, I remembered the letter I had written to him a few days ago, in which I had tried to sketch the uneasy relationship among us three, between him and me and between him and my sister and between me and my sister. I had written to him fancying that I would receive an answer, and now I realized that no such answer would ever be forthcoming.

My father will never be able to answer the questions I asked him in that letter.

Our relationship is difficult through and through, in fact chaotic, and the relationship between him and my sister and between me and my sister is the most difficult, the most chaotic of all.

In the letter I had tried to define certain things about our relationship by citing seemingly simple but to me extremely important details. In the writing I had taken the greatest pains not to offend my father. Nor to offend anybody. From my years of observation I found it fairly easy to sketch a picture of us that could be considered truthful from all three sides. My letter had been composed very calmly; I did not allow myself to show any excitement, although I did not evade the central matters that concerned me, such central matters, posed as indirect or direct questions, as for example who was to blame for my sister’s most recent attempt at suicide, or for my mother’s early death. I had long wanted to write such a letter and had started on it repeatedly, but had each time been overcome by doubts about the usefulness of this sort of accounting. It had always been impossible for me to write to him. Each time I would immediately become aware of the awkwardness of suddenly expressing in black and white things that for years had only been private thoughts, speculations. Then too I was checked by a reluctance to bring up possibly long-forgotten matters as essential evidence for my view of us. For I would have had to proceed with sincerity and therefore ruthlessness, and yet show consideration for all concerned. That, too, made such a letter impossible for such a long time.

But on the previous Monday it had suddenly become easy for me to write the letter. In a single draft of only eight pages I set forth my analysis of the whole complex, which culminated in questions of whether there was any way to clarify the condition we were all in, and whether our relations could be improved. When I was done, I looked the text over several times and found nothing that should dissuade me from mailing it. My father must surely have received the letter by Tuesday moining. But up to now he had not so much as mentioned the matter, although it was apparent from his whole manner that he had not only received the letter punctually, but had also read and studied it with the greatest attention and had not forgotten it.

In Stiwoll, too, as I saw the moment we drove into town, my father was very well known.

Thanks to his excellent memory, he could address everybody he met by name. He also knew the situation of every individual.

Whenever he felt that I needed some pertinent information about someone with whom he had exchanged a greeting or a few words, he gave me a brief characterization.

We walked rapidly through the town to visit a certain Bloch, a dealer in real estate. He liked the man, my father said. Married to a woman of fifty, his own age, the realtor voluntarily stayed on in this dull mountain community, whose natives were by nature hostile to him, and found his consolation in the pleasures of his business.

There was another doctor in Stiwoll, my father said. But Bloch had relieved this doctor of the lasting shame of having to treat a Jew, which Bloch was, by consulting my father. Bloch’s father had also lived in Stiwoll.

Between Bloch and my father, despite the distance of fifteen miles and the intervening high mountains, there had developed a friendship that had, as my father put it, “something philosophical about it.” Bloch, he said, occupied the house that had been his father’s, who had been killed by the Germans.

As I saw at once, this was one of the finest houses in Stiwoll, on the right side of the street that led from the main square. The façade itself pleased me precisely because it looked so neglected, gray in keeping with its actual age, and also rather battered from the last war. As we entered the freshly plastered vaulted hall, I instantly decided that Bloch had good taste.

He would visit Bloch at least once a week for a longish talk, my father said, a discussion that he or Bloch took turns at leading. I might find it hard to believe, my father said, considering the general tenor of things in Stiwoll, but the two of them conducted “autopsies on the body of nature” as well as “on the body of the world and its history.” They discussed “comparative political science, applied natural history, literary criticism,” and dealt “unsparingly with society and the state.” But in general the main theme in Bloch’s house was politics, and they tended to talk about people more in regard to their political than their private beings. Meeting in a first-floor study, they conducted an analysis of the world on the most stringent intellectual principles, and left no margin for any illusions whatsoever. Most of the time the arts were rather scanted, my father said, but occasionally they would turn to them out of courtesy to Bloch’s wife.

Bloch was sitting in an office to the right of the vestibule, separated from it only by a glass partition, and dictating with obvious excitement to his secretary. As he later mentioned, he was addressing a letter to the Voitsberg surveyor, whom I also knew. My father tapped on the office window, and Bloch came out. He greeted us pleasantly and led us at once into the study on the second floor. The fact is that nowhere in a rural area have I ever seen so many books all together as in Bloch’s library. Moreover, as I observed, they were all well used, and were not here for their so-called bibliophilic value, which people in German-speaking countries set such ridiculous store by — aside from a Latin edition of the Nuremberg physician Schedel’s world history, of which there are only a few copies in the whole world.

Bloch asked what had brought my father to Stiwoll at this unusual morning hour. My father said he wanted to return Kant’s Prolegomena and Marx’s Dissertation, both of which he had finished. He took the two volumes out of his medical bag and put them down on the table. Then he mentioned the books he would like to borrow: Nietzsche’s lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a French edition of Pascal’s Pensées, and Diderot’s Mystification. He had to call on a woman named Ebenhöh on Piberweg, he said. Bloch did not know her.

Since he had nothing else in the house, Bloch poured us glasses of white wine, Klöscher. Early that morning, he said, he had again suffered from one of his “frightful” headaches, but it had vanished after he began working intensively on his business correspondence. He was taking more and more of the headache remedy my father had prescribed for him, he said. And he had not slept the past four or five days. My father warned him against overdoing it with the medicine, which was dangerous to the kidneys.

Recently, Bloch said, he had managed to buy a sizable property in the vicinity of Semriach. “It took me two years to put over the deal,” he said. A week earlier it had been plow-land, but he saw it as a prime building parcel that could be divided into more than a hundred lots. That way he would be able to dispose of the property quickly. “You have to be able to wait it out,” he said. This was his biggest deal of the year, he added. He asked for a better sedative; my father wrote a prescription. “Naturally I’m not liked,” Bloch said, and my father stood up. They arranged to meet the next Wednesday. For the past two years my father had been seeing Bloch every Wednesday.

We went to Frau Ebenhöh on foot.

“Bloch has the art of seeing his life as an easily understood mechanism that he can keep regulated, speed up or slow down, according to his needs,” my father said. “However he uses his powers, the result is always practically useful, which makes the whole thing bearable. He finds pleasure in this art and is always trying to teach it to his family.” Basically, my father said, Bloch was the only person he could talk with in a manner that was never awkward, and also the only person whom he wholly trusted. Bloch had become a friend who meant more than other lost friends, all those others scattered throughout the countryside pretending to be its intelligentsia, exiled in deep, sunless valleys, in small towns and dull marketplaces and villages, accepting their monotonous fate as country doctors in a way that used to pain him when he himself was still a student, but now only repelled him. For all these people, the high point had been their university years, he said. Once discharged into a world disastrously trustful of them, they fell into a horrible familial and consulting-room apathy, irrespective of whether they worked in hospitals or in private practice. He was shocked, my father said, by the total submergence of these former classmates, as he discovered whenever he wrote to one or another of them, letters he felt to be increasingly pointless. Lifelong dilettantes, they married much too soon or much too late and were destroyed by their increasing lack of ideas, lack of imagination, lack of strength, and finally by their wives. “I met Bloch just at the moment when I had no friends left, nothing but correspondents connected with me by a shared youth and the shared trustfulness of the world toward us.”

Now and then, my father said, he would see one or another of them who in the meantime had become totally absorbed in the sexual pecking-order. Such a colleague would sentimentalize about friendship. But these encounters took place nowadays only by chance, at railroad stations or conventions, and he would feel nauseated, my father said, and have to keep a tight grip on himself so as not to show his feelings. At the university and in their period of internship, they used to talk a great deal about research, about the overwhelming sickness of humanity, about discoveries, about making maximal intellectual efforts, about medical science, the pitiable condition of man and the necessity for taking an uncompromising stand. But all that was left of them were well-dressed quacks who traveled much, hurriedly said hello when they ran into each other, and talked about their family problems, about the houses they were building, and obsessively about their cars. Bloch, on the other hand, was a man who did not lose his grip in spite of the wild way history was accelerating its pace, by the hundredfold or thousandfold from year to year.

From Stiwoll, in the midst of a rooted, by now grotesque anti-Semitism, among the coarse mountaineers who despised him and did business with him, Bloch had a better view of the world than men in metropolitan centers. Stiwoll was for him a kind of “gruesome private hell in the mountains” that he had created for himself ten years ago. He had many friends here and there throughout the world, though few relations, who shook their heads over him in astonishment or disapproval. From time to time he declared that he stayed on in Stiwoll to engage in open-ended studies for the benefit of his own people.

My father said that he was looking forward to Diderot’s Mystification, that belatedly discovered essay Bloch had recommended to him. He was more and more turning to the French writers nowadays, he said, and away from the Germans. “Basically I’ve never really had much need for pure literature, and this tendency of mine seems to be growing stronger. The closer I come to clarity and logic, the less receptive I find myself to so-called belles-lettres.” He regarded writing of that kind, he said, as an annoying and on the whole ridiculous falsification of nature. Writers were always soiling nature, whether they were more or less unknowns or more or less celebrated, and whether they put current events in the foreground or background.

“You could not have noticed in the short time we were there,” my father said, “but except for the most extraordinary works Bloch has no entertainment literature in his library.” He had the impulse to visit Bloch in Stiwoll more often than once a week, he said, but recognized that he must not strain the relationship.

I was struck by the strength of the affection, otherwise rare in him, that my father showed for this real estate man Bloch. Perhaps he was carrying it too far, without Bloch’s himself being aware of this feeling on my father’s part. But I also suddenly realized how alone my father is and how meagerly he opens his heart to us, his children.

He’s almost never at home, I thought. My sister is always alone and he is always alone too.

Actually my father meets more and more people in order to be more and more alone.

But he must have sensed that I was giving thought to his almost total isolation. He hated to be an object of pity, and said: “I am exaggerating. It’s very different from what you think. Everything is always very different. Communication is impossible.”

Our path to Frau Ebenhöh’s led through an unfenced orchard whose fallen apples and pears had not been gathered, as I at once noticed. The irregularities in the orchard and garden were suspect, suggesting a person whose inner rhythms were disturbed; the quietude of the garden was of a feverish, morbid kind. All the windows of the one-story house were open. It was sultry. Behind one of those windows lies Frau Ebenhöh, I thought.

I imagined her lying awake and listening for footsteps in the garden, deciding who it was by the sound of the footsteps. The sickroom proved to be exactly as I had imagined it, only gloomier. Her linens lay about everywhere, smelling of the fatal illness to which she was submitting without resistance.

I could see that someone had just been sitting in the large gray-green velvet upholstered easy chair near the sickbed. A neighbor woman? A relative? Whoever it was had been reading to her and had probably gone to the village to do some errand.

These houses are occupied by solitary old women who have been abandoned by their children and have restricted themselves to a minimal life. Entering such houses, I always feel close to suffocation. Flowers by the window in a long-necked glass vase; canary in a cage, eating and chirping heedlessly.

Underwear is no longer hidden, pain is no longer hidden, the sense of smell is dulled, there is no longer any reason to conceal frailties one is alone with.

My father simply walked into the bedroom. He woke the sleeping woman by rattling the birdcage with his stethoscope so that the flustered bird chirruped in alarm.

The smiles of such women who know they are done for and who wake from sleep to find that they are still in this painful world — these smiles are nothing but horror.

Now lying words are exchanged. My father speaks of the summery weather spreading over the entire countryside, of the colors everywhere. He has brought his son along, he says.

I approach the woman, moving into the gloom, then return to the easy chair. I pick up the book and sit down. The Princess of Cleves, I think, The Princess of Cleves in Stiwoll. I leaf through the book thinking: What kind of person is this patient lying here? Who was her husband?

All about the walls I notice large photographs of a bearded man, surely a schoolteacher; all the photographs show the same schoolteacher’s face emerging from a huge beard.

Then my father alludes to her husband the schoolteacher, and talks about the change in weather and what a pity that people cannot make use of this change in weather, because it has come too late.

He talks about common acquaintances in Gratwein, in Übelbach, in Linz and Ligist. About a postmaster in Feistritz, a miller’s wife in Wolfsberg. About a ghastly automobile accident.

Frau Ebenhöh talks about no longer having pain, about a teacher’s wife from Unzmarkt who plays the church organ for her. She says that old pupils come to see her every day.

She points to the array of gifts on the table.

The priest visits her, she says. Her neighbor (“who’s just gone to the village!”) is reading to her, books she did not manage to read during her husband’s lifetime. She often thinks about Oberwölz, where her sister, sick like herself, has been put into an old-age home. “Confined to her bed.” She herself, Frau Ebenhöh, has always been opposed to the home, and whenever her son begins urging that she would be better taken care of in the Stiwoll old-age home, she begins to doubt her children’s kindness. Her grandchildren always come to see her in Sunday clothes that need washing, and play with old newspapers in her room.

Her husband, she says, had been nominated as a socialist candidate for national deputy in 1948, but before the final election lists were posted he’d had his fatal accident, as my father knew.

She remembers that four of her husband’s schoolmates carried the coffin. “All four are dead,” she says. “Died in a short time, one after the other.”

Only two months ago, when she came back from the hospital, everything had centered around fighting for sleep, she went on to say, but now it was a question of fighting to keep awake. The garden had come to a standstill. Nevertheless she had to complain of her neighbor: “Sometimes she doesn’t turn up here for hours.”

My father placed his stethoscope against her clothed chest and listened. He filled out a prescription. I noticed that he made an effort to stretch out the call, for all his eagerness to leave.

Frau Ebenhöh said that her life was a void without music, which she hadn’t been able to play for such a long time now, only imagine (“You know, I can still hear it!”). And for the longest time it had seemed to her as if her body were already dead. “When I look in the mirror I fall into a terrible state.”

She spoke of her sister, who was in the Oberwölz old-age home, sharing a room with six women her own age. She’d kept intending to visit her sister — that was before she imagined being sick herself. Now she would never see her again.

“Last night I dreamed I was standing under the Krimml waterfall — that was one of my earliest childhood experiences — and calling for my mother again and again.”

Suddenly she laughed.

She’d married her husband without knowing him, she said.

“Three weeks after I met him for the first time at the Corpus Christi procession in Köflach, he came from Stiwoll to fetch me — that was the evening before the wedding in Stiwoll and just the second time I’d seen him.” She was the daughter of a sawmill foreman and had grown up on a hill just outside of Knittelfeld.

On the chest of drawers stood a plaster bust of Franz Schubert; the head had once broken at the neck and been glued. The bust stood on a pile of sheet music.

In her youth, Frau Ebenhöh said, she used to love to dance. At sixteen she had swum the length of the Mondsee in Upper Austria. For a long time she and her husband had made a hobby of studying Greek statuary. She’d been in Rome once, and once in Paris. They were both of thrifty habits and had managed to buy their own house in Stiwoll early in their marriage. Soon after the end of the First World War, they had come into some money, with which they had paid off the mortgage.

For fifteen years, she said, one of her brothers had been in the Stein Penitentiary—“a convict brother, a brother who’s a criminal.” Behind her husband’s back she had sent him letters and money and packages every month. She did not speak about her brother’s crime, but my father knows that he killed his fiancée. Upon his release from the penitentiary her brother had come to Stiwoll and lived in her house. She’d fixed a room for him in the attic, where he’d locked himself up from the moment he arrived and never went out. Three days after his release from Stein she had found him dead — he’d hanged himself from the window frame. His funeral had been so terribly sad, she said, she hadn’t had the strength to go to it. And her husband had reproached her endlessly for having taken her brother in. That awful thing happening had made him feel uneasy in his own house, he used to say.

She had a photograph of her brother, taken the day he killed his fiancée and threw the body into the Mur below Fronleiten. She asked me to hand her an envelope lying on the table. I stood up and gave her the envelope, in which she kept the picture. “A handsome man,” she said. For the remainder of our stay she went on holding the photograph in her hand. Looking down at the blanket, she described, in connection with her brother, her childhood years in Knittelfeld.

Never, not for a moment, had she ever thought of her brother as a bad person, she said.

My father must have had the feeling that this would be the last time he would be seeing Frau Ebenhöh, for otherwise he surely would have taken his departure.

“With closed eyes I see everything much more distinctly than I did then,” she said.

“I have been thinking whom to leave my clothes to. They’re in the wardrobe, all in good condition.… I made my house over to my son long ago, though I haven’t let him know.”

She could not say he was not concerned about her, she added, but he did no more than was his duty. Her daughter-in-law had always hated her. It had started as spontaneous dislike at their first meeting and had grown ever stronger over the years. “My son doesn’t dare to love me any more because of the way his wife hates me.” And by now, Frau Ebenhöh said, she was “crushed” by the more and more revolting stories her daughter-in-law concocted about her. The fact was that with her husband’s death she had become all too vulnerable to the ill will of her son and her daughter-in-law. Her daughter-in-law had thrust her into the outer darkness of hopeless solitude, and her son had done nothing but look on. He’d entered into marriage much too soon; he’d been immature and regarded that girl from Köflach as a way to escape from his parents, and had gone downhill instantly. He was now employed as a helper to a tanner in Krottendorf, and worked even on Sundays. His clothes reeked when he came on a visit; they gave out a frightful odor of cadaver, and so did his wife’s clothes and the grandchildren’s clothes. Whenever they came, the whole house was filled with that odor of cadaver. After they left, she had to keep the windows open for hours or she couldn’t bear it. But they themselves never noticed they smelled so awful.

Her son, she said, was “huge,” with unusually long arms and “coarse” hands, but in the past he had always been good-natured. His father had been unhappy about the boy from the earliest years, for as soon as the child began to talk it became apparent that he’d never be very bright. And in fact his father had twice kept him back in his own elementary school. There’d never been any chance of his going to high school. Because of this son her husband had drifted more and more into a terrible depression. Tormented by doubts about the whole process of education, he’d found no peace, let alone any more satisfaction in his work. A psychiatrist he went to see in Graz did not help, merely cost a lot of money. The two of them still kept hoping that the boy’s sad condition, which cast a blight on both their lives, would end some day. But they had waited in vain for some sign of improvement. If her husband had not fallen to his death he would probably have been destroyed “slowly and miserably” by their son’s feeble-mindedness, she thought Then her son from one moment to the next, like an animal leaping up after crouching a long time, had suddenly gone after that Köflach girl, whose family went around with traveling exhibits to fairs and markets. He had to marry her because he made her pregnant right away.

At first her family had taken him along to the fairs in Styria, Lower Austria, and the Burgenland. But then, because that wasn’t working out, his wife arranged for him to have that job with the Krottendorf tanner.

Frau Ebenhöh often imagined her son standing in the steaming tannery, stripped to the waist, dully stirring the vats with a wooden paddle, stirring hour after hour while his wife, “unwashed and undressed” in a “greasy housecoat,” sat in her kitchen reading novels. She kept imagining her grandchildren’s home getting more and more filthy and stinking, she said, and brooded over the riddle of how out of the union with a husband from such a good family she could have borne a son who increasingly seemed to her a beast. However far she went back in both families, her own as well as her husband’s, she could see only “fine-nerved, decent people.” Among them all her son stood alone, “a kind of monster.” For her brother, the murderer, had also been one of the fine-nerved, kind, decent, intelligent, intellectually receptive, and she had never felt in the least ill at ease with him as she did with her own son. Granted, her son had never had any trouble with the law so far. Up to now his good nature had preserved him from crime. But she had been noticing more and more how her son’s good nature was leaking away, giving way to a callousness that frightened her. There they were, her closest relatives, and when they came along talking all at once in their common way so that she could perfectly well hear them from her bed while they were still in the garden, tossing the word “grandmother” back and forth, it seemed to her as if they’d agreed on an infamous baseness directed against her. They let their children crawl around the floor, and sat down on the bed beside her, and it seemed to her she would suffocate. They grumbled about each other to her; her daughter-in-law called her son a dull-witted “big gut,” and he called her a “lousy slut.” When they had run through their stock of insults, they waited for the time they could leave again, the children in the lead once more, talking all at once in their common way, leaving that smell of cadaver behind.

She thought her son was going to sell her house after her death, Frau Ebenhöh said, and squander the money in no time at all. After all, he couldn’t very well stay in Stiwoll. It made her sick to think of her furniture at the disposal of her son and her daughter-in-law — precious things like her piano, her husband’s violin, which was on the chest of drawers, the folders of music, the books, all at the tender mercies of the heirs. She didn’t have to go there to know in what a wretched, neglected state her son’s family in Krottendorf lived. Once, when she was still well, they’d invited her to Krottendorf. She’d managed to avoid going by claiming she had a head cold; she’d been so afraid of facing in reality what she had been imagining for years. From Krottendorf that smell of cadaver spread far and wide, as far as Graz on days when the east wind was blowing. Anyone who lived in Krottendorf lived in the perpetual stench of a money-making inferno.

What always shocked her, she said, was the impassive way her son described his work in the tannery as monotonous, uninteresting, harmful to his lungs and kidneys. To be sure, the doctors who examined the three hundred Krottendorf tannery workers every two months had so far found nothing wrong with either his lungs or his kidneys. But after ten years of work in Krottendorf, Frau Ebenhöh said, peering out fixedly above her blanket as if looking all the way to Krottendorf, “after ten years of stirring those Krottendorf vats,” changes took place in the lungs and kidneys of the workers. “Fatal ones,” she said. “But my son has the toughest constitution you can imagine.” His “gigantic” body had always seemed to her like something alien, to her just as much as to her husband. After finishing elementary school her son had stayed up in the attic where her brother had hanged himself, sitting torpidly in a chair day after day, staring into space, not saying a word, until her husband’s accident. And right after his father’s funeral, probably because this had been on his mind all along, he’d gone down to Knittelfeld, as she had mentioned, to the first skirt who came along, his wife. “The poor brute.” She often thought that if he had stayed at home she might have saved him nevertheless. She had long felt sorry for him, in his dull helplessness, even though or perhaps because he was so senselessly and without any fault of his own ruining his parents’ lives. But now she no longer felt sorry for him. She was sick of him. Now everything was ending for her in detestation of her own son and his wife and children.

And all the while she talked of her son, she told us, her mind dwelt on the thought that this room of hers was the one she was going to die in. It closed in on her at night, and she was afraid of suffocation. My father distracted her (and us) by talking about the Stub Alp. He described the stunted pines at the top, the cold autumnal air, the wind along the rocky peak, the rush of Lobming Brook down into the valley.

“I take my son with me more often nowadays,” my father said. “He has to get to know people; that’s going to be essential for him.… I live with my children but I can’t see inside them any more than they can see inside me. The difficulties between parents and children are growing worse all the time. After a while there’ll be no overcoming them, do what one will.”

To this day he had not comprehended his wife’s, my mother’s, death. But then everything was always incomprehensible.

Who would have thought, only five years ago, that he would suddenly be alone with me and my sister.

“A good person whom everything depended on suddenly no longer exists,” he said.

He knew I was doing all right at the Mining Academy in Leoben, he said. He wasn’t worried about me, only about my sister. She was so susceptible to every illness, had such a withdrawn life, left to herself with our housekeeper most of the time. And she was so sensitive that some days she was simply incapable of leaving her room.

My father spoke very affectionately about us. Frau Ebenhöh seemed to be listening attentively to him.

He needs someone to listen to him now and then, I thought. I recalled Bloch.

But he rather imagined my sister and I could lean on each other when he was not around, he said.

My interest in the sciences made him happy, he said. He was disturbed by my taciturnity, not alarmed, because it wasn’t morbid, just something I’d arrived at rationally. He thought my physical health was good.

“As far as I know his friends are all healthy young fellows, too,” he said. “I enjoy seeing them whenever I’m in Leoben. I usually have dinner with my son in the Gärner Restaurant. But the worst of it is, I’m always in a hurry.”

He was glad I had chosen my course of studies myself and was pushing on with them, to be finished as soon as possible. “He’s making wonderful progress — he’s better than all the others.”

Leoben was a good place for studying mining engineering, not too big and not too small, a town that offered what was necessary and nothing superfluous, he said. The climate wasn’t as good as up here at home, but still quite healthful. I took advantage of the amusements the town offered, but didn’t go overboard. That above all reassured him. It seemed to him fantastic that I was all of twenty-one.

He rather wished I could go in somewhat more for sports, but I surely knew best what I ought to be doing. All in all, since he didn’t scant me in any way, he could expect that I would act in good faith and fulfill his hopes. To do well always and everywhere took effort.

As for my sister, he’d been noticing things in her that were just like my mother, psychological and physical things. From day to day these elements grew stronger, her character more and more resembling our mother’s.

Inwardly she was never free from fear, and that bothered him. “She has the most sensitive organism imaginable.”

Her moods changed rapidly; she was constantly in danger, completely subject to her nervous system. She had been isolating herself from us more and more, withdrawing into herself. It had become a problem he didn’t know how to solve.

To me it seems that she has already moved too far away from us for us ever to catch up with her again. Both of us lost our mother at the most devastating moment, but for my sister this loss may possibly have been fatal.

At first, my father said, he had placed my sister in a boarding school on Lake Constance. But that had been the worst thing he could have done. Under the rule of stern, unyielding nuns she had plunged even more into melancholy, and from then on her state of hopelessness had been continuous.

For the past year at home she had fallen into a listlessness that cast a pall on the rest of us.

I keep trying to approach her, in letters from Leoben, but in vain.

It is not improbable, my father said, that her psychic illness is more and more affecting her organic state. “I’m always frightened for her.”

He had once taken her to Zeitschach, my father said, and stayed at an inn for two days. For the whole two days she did not speak to him. And yet it had been a lovely vacation spot, the countryside beautiful and the weather perfect. She had got up late and gone to bed early, as if distraught over the place and its surroundings. She had been unable to treat the stay there as a holiday, which he had meant it to be, but only as an ordeal.

Another time he had driven down to Laibach with her, and then on to Trieste and Fiume — all in all a six-day vacation, during which he had arranged with another doctor to take his place at home. But he had not been able to alter her mood. She was visibly growing more depressed all the time. In general he had observed that her spirits sank even more whenever she moved into the light.

Among cheerful people who take life easily she was wretched. Pleasant surroundings irritated her. A bright day plunged her into still deeper melancholia.

When visitors came to the house, she withdrew and stayed in her room until they were gone, my father said. The kind of amusements that are customary in the country simply baffled her. She had no girl-friends either. Sometimes she would go out of the house in the middle of the night and wander around the village.

Her sleeplessness reminds me of my mother’s sleeplessness.

When she leaves for what is supposed to be a longish stay in the Tyrol, in Salzburg, in Slovenia, she returns next day.

In spite of all this, my father said, she is attached, with a fondness she herself does not always understand, to us, to her father and brother.

Everything is easier for me, my father said; for her everything is difficult. We have been living together for so long and don’t know one another.

Each of us is completely isolated, although we are so close.

All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.

I thought I had never heard my father speak so emotionally about us.

He could already see me finishing my studies and launching on a career that would not disappoint him, he said.

At this point he noticed that Frau Ebenhöh had fallen asleep. He stood up and looked to see whether I was still there. He felt embarrassed that I had been listening to him.

We looked out into the garden and saw a woman, the neighbor, I thought, coming toward us through the grass in rubber boots. She took off the rubber boots at the door and entered. She had bought all sorts of provisions for Frau Ebenhöh, as well as a bottle of red wine, which she placed on the table. My father knew her, and she him. Frau Ebenhöh awoke. Did we know about the murder in Gradenberg? the neighbor asked. Grössl had not yet been apprehended. This was the fourth crime this year in these parts, she said, and reminded Frau Ebenhöh of the strangled potter, the throttled schoolmistress, both from Ligist, and Horch, the Afling furrier, who had been shot. Unpacking the bread and butter, she said: “It’s the sultry weather.”

My father admitted that he had been to see the innkeeper’s wife that morning. She had died in Köflach, he said.

The neighbor straightened Frau Ebenhöh’s bolster, turned her, tautened the sheet. The sick woman had fallen asleep again when we took our leave.

Walking back across the Stiwoll marketplace to our car, we talked about my forthcoming examinations, about the relationships among the students in Leoben, about their boredom and their general weariness with life. About the frequent suicides precisely among the most capable students. It was remarkable, my father said, that it should be the wealthy who incline to suicide; first they succumb to boredom, the worst disease anyone can fall prey to in this world.

The Mining Academy in Leoben is good, I said, famous, and unjustly deprecated by its own students. I imagine it’s one of the three best in the world, I said. In Leoben things are so arranged that you have to concentrate entirely on your studies to keep from going crazy.

I said I was not isolated, it was only that every day I had to exert myself anew to win the solitude I needed in order to make progress. Sometimes I was even rude, offended people I liked. But if my mind started to balk at studying, I would leave the dormitory, usually alone, and go walking along the bank of the Mur, thinking only of my work until I had conquered my restlessness. Often, however, I merely went down to the Mur, that brown, sluggish, viscous river, for the purpose of complete distraction. I would climb the northern hills and let myself dream while contemplating the outward aspects of nature. Whenever I looked at it, I said, and from any perspective, the surface of the earth struck me as new and I was refreshed by it.

Often, I went on, studying the quality of the air and tramping for miles northeastward, in the direction of the Semmering, gave me the greatest pleasure. It was almost a sense of rapture and probably stemmed from the feeling of being altogether free.

Speculating on the local geology near the Mur, I said, would often calm my mind and give me back the clarity I had lost by strenuous studying. My mind would feel receptive again.

For a long time now I had been regarding myself as an organism I could discipline on command by my own will power, I told my father. To be sure, I sometimes had relapses, but these did not plunge me into despair. It was worth making the maximum effort to shake off a tendency to despair, I said. Better to be terribly strained than despairing.

There were moments when I felt empowered to see right through the whole of creation. “Moments of pure recreation,” I said, though they left me exhausted.

Every day I completely built myself up, and completely destroyed myself.

Self-control, I said, is the satisfaction of using your brain to make the self into a mechanism that obeys your command.

Only through such control can man be happy and perceive his own nature. But very few people ever perceive their natures. To let the feelings predominate, to do nothing against the normal gloominess of the emotions, delivers people up to despair. Where the reason is in control, I said, despair is impossible. “Whenever this state of total irrationality closes down on me, there is nothing but despair inside me.” Nowadays I only very rarely succumb to this state, I said. Life always seemed grim if you did not step outside it; the satisfaction came from enduring it rationally. Most people were governed by their emotions, not their reason, I said, and the result was that most sank into despair. “But the kind of reason I mean,” I said, “is completely unscientific.”

My father had been struck by my sudden loquacity. He commented that he too sometimes found himself talking about something, or even only seeing something he could not put into words, which was actually out of the question for people, was really humanly impossible.

Passing Bloch’s house, we drove toward Hauenstein to call on a more or less crazy industrialist whose name I have forgotten. From Abraham we took a short cut over Geistthal.

Students were always prey to a kind of restlessness, I said, because as long as they are at school they live in a no-man’s land between the parents they have left behind and the world they cannot yet attain, and their instincts still draw them back to their parents rather than toward the world. There are often tragedies inside that no-man’s land, which happen when they realize that they can neither return to their parents nor step out into the world. In the last six months in my dormitory alone three students have killed themselves, I said. Up to the last, there had not been the slightest symptom of emotional or psychic trouble in any of the three.

I myself had never even thought of taking my life, I said. But my father remarked that the idea of suicide had always been a familiar one to him. Even as a child, when other ideas became too much for him, he had often sought refuge in this idea. But whenever the idea did come into his head, it had always taken the form of an alternative that made life possible, hence something rather restful, never something in its own right. Both of us were thinking how dangerous it was to have my sister continually absorbed in thoughts of suicide, either brooding about it or actually attempting it. From the time she was little she had inclined toward self-destruction. What had first been a bit of dramatics, my father said, might later develop into a genuine emotion that could end in the real thing.

Beyond Abraham the hills were covered with large orchards. The farmers had set out their casks of cider in the sun. The houses are old. There is hardly a more isolated region than that between Geistthal and Hauenstein.

We had stayed much too long in Stiwoll, my father said. He had been expected all morning in Hauenstein, which was where the industrialist had his hunting lodge. He had retired there to devote himself to a literary work over which he agonized, even as it kept his mind off his inner agony. The man was not yet fifty; my father had known him for some two years. His half-sister shared his solitude with him; she was, as I would shortly see, perfect for this role — ideal, as the man himself put it. He had bought the hunting lodge some fifteen years ago from Prince Saurau, whom we would next visit at Hochgobernitz Castle. Even as long ago as that, the industrialist had began conceiving this literary work on a “purely philosophical subject” that he would never talk about. If he talked about it, the industrialist repeatedly told my father, if he even began talking about it, he would then and there ruin the work, which had made such notable progress. And he would no longer be able to start again from the beginning. He was wont to say that he worked day and night, writing and destroying what he had written, writing again and again and destroying again and again, but approaching his goal. Aside from his work he permitted himself no diversion except the briefest talks with his half-sister in the library or in the kitchen, and then only for the purpose of settling questions of the meals. Twice a week his half-sister would go to Geistthal to shop, mail letters, and fetch their mail. They had enormous supplies in their hunting lodge in case of what they called “the disaster,” which supplies were never touched. The half-sister was his mother’s daughter, by a Chilean father; and as we slowly neared Hauenstein, my father explained their relationship. They lived together like man and wife. She would withdraw to her room immediately after admitting my father to the lodge and reporting his presence, and she would reappear only to let my father out again.

The industrialist suffered from diabetes, my father said, and had to administer injections to himself every few hours. Twice or three times a month my father called to check on the state of his disease. As far as my father knew, the couple never received anyone else except himself. He had often asked people in the vicinity whether anyone ever visited the lodge, especially anyone from the city, but apparently no one ever did. The house certainly gave the impression of being inhabited solely by the industrialist and his half-sister. It felt as if no other soul had entered it for decades. It was not, as such hunting lodges usually are, filled with hunting gear, but was almost empty; it contained only the barest necessities. Even in the half-sister’s room there was nothing but a bed, a table, a chest, and an easy chair. No pictures on the wall, not a picture in the whole house. The industrialist said he hated pictures. He wanted everything as empty as possible, as bare as possible. What little there was had to be as simple as possible. He regarded the dense woods around the lodge as a kind of wall. The mailman was allowed to enter this wall with telegrams, but not step inside the house; he had to call until the half-sister came to the door. There was a spring behind the house, my father said — excellent water.

We were now in a high valley and driving through nothing but woods and more woods.

There was not a single book in the industrialist’s house, my father said; he deliberately kept books out of the house in order not to be irritated. After all, nothing is more irritating than books if you want to be alone, must be alone.

He allowed his half-sister to read newspapers, including Le Soir, Aftonbladet, Le Monde, and La Prensa—not a single German newspaper. But even these foreign papers had to be at least a month old so that, as the industrialist said, they would have no power of destruction, would be already poetic.

The industrialist’s clothing was plain; my father had never seen him wearing anything but a shirt and slacks. He was said to speak not only all Central European languages, but also virtually all Far Eastern tongues.

Aside from a desk and chair, all he would have in his study was blank paper, so that he would be thrown entirely on his own resources and never diverted from his work. As for the subject-matter of his writing, he would say, he had the experience acquired in more than forty years in the metropolises of the world, in the industrial and commercial centers of all five continents.

His possessions were scattered throughout the whole world, chiefly in English-speaking countries. The industrialist ran his enterprises from Hauenstein; that took only an hour a day. A tremendously complicated apparatus, which was constantly in motion and included more than forty-thousand employees, was kept going from Hauenstein, and functioned better all the time.

When he was finished with his work—“which might possibly boil down to a single thought,” he had once said to my father — he intended to leave Hauenstein again, depart from the mountains, turn his back on them.

The simplest kind of food sufficed him, he would say. Long walks, deeper and deeper into the woods, into the impenetrable “evergreen metaphysical mathematics,” as he called the forests around Hauenstein, sufficed to keep his muscles from going slack. He was opposed to strolling and only walked in order not to “degenerate physically.”

A small iron stove warmed his room, my father said; there was a similar stove in his half-sister’s room. It was fortunate, he had once told my father, that he was diabetic, for that made it necessary for him to associate with one more person in Hauenstein beside his half-sister, namely my father. My father prevented “the perfect consistency of Hauenstein,” he had once said.

It was apparent that the industrialist rarely talked, and that when he did he was trying to fend off something that was a cruel irritation to him.

The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his; mind.

The industrialist’s sole occupation, aside from writing and walking in the forest and talking with his half-sister about the provisions, was shooting at a huge wooden target fastened to two trees behind the lodge. The desire to shoot overcame him from time to time, and of late more and more. “I’m practicing, but I don’t know what for,” he once said to my father. The gunshots could be heard throughout the vicinity, my father said; sometimes they went on for hours after midnight.

He alternated between total sleeplessness and total apathy for days at a time; there was no way for him to escape from this horrible state.

On normal days the industrialist rose at half past four in the morning and worked until half past one in the afternoon. Then he would eat a bite and work on until seven in the evening.

He allowed his half-sister the “greatest possible” freedom in Hauenstein. But only six or seven weeks after they moved in he had spotted signs of insanity in her, “a madness rooted deep in clericalism.” This insanity, the industrialist thought, might recede at once if his half-sister were to leave Hauenstein. In her extreme loneliness she was always close to the point of taking her own life. But her half-brother could see that out of sheer consideration for him, for whom she did everything though she did not understand him at all, she did not even permit herself a single loud outcry, or thrashing about, which might bring her some relief. My father, for his part, could see she had the withdrawn look characteristic of women in insane asylums. Incidentally, she was obsessive about cleanliness.

“Probably her half-brother has forbidden her to talk to me,” my father said. “I always have the feeling that she would like to, but isn’t allowed to.”

He usually arrived in Hauenstein in the early morning, on the way to Prince Saurau in Hochgobernitz. “The air is purest then and the view of the Rossbach Alp at its most beautiful.”

The road we were now driving on, he commented, had been built by the industrialist at his own expense. The whole length of it belonged to him. Everywhere, hidden in the woods, the industrialist had posted unemployed millers, miners, and retired woodsmen as guards whose task was to keep people from disturbing him.

My father said he thought the industrialist could spend a while longer in Hauenstein, a few more years, perhaps. As yet my father had not detected the slightest signs of madness in the man, unlike the half-sister. But no human being could continue to exist in such total isolation without doing severe damage to his intellect and psyche. It was a well-known phenomenon, my father said, that at a crisis in their lives some people seek out a dungeon, voluntarily enter it, and devote their lives — which they regard as philosophically oriented — to some scholarly task or to some imaginative scientific obsession. They always take with them into their dungeon some creature who is attached to them. In most cases they sooner or later destroy this creature who has entered the dungeon with them, and then themselves. The process always goes slowly at first. Yet my father was not inclined to regard the industrialist as an unhappy man. On the contrary, he was leading a life that suited him perfectly, in contrast to his half-sister, who on his account was compelled to lead a totally unhappy life.

At first such persons as the industrialist’s half-sister try to defend themselves, my father said. They do not want to be wholly at the mercy of their oppressor. But they soon see that fighting back is useless. They cannot help themselves. Then they become attached to their oppressor with a despair that systematically destroys them. “The cruel despair of servitude,” my father called it.

Because they are ruthless to the core, such people as the industrialist attain their goal, even though everyone else regards the goal as senseless and the method by which it is attained repulsive.

When we arrived at the hunting lodge, I saw that it indeed stood in a clearing and the whole picture conformed to what my father had said about it.

There was not a single trophy in evidence. The place did not look like a hunting lodge at all. I thought at once: a dungeon! A provisional dungeon! All the shutters were closed, as if the lodge were uninhabited.

The industrialist’s study was at the rear, my father said. The man never allowed himself more than a single open shutter.

Everything in the place had to further the industrialist’s concentration on his work.

We got out, and since my father was expected and our car must have been heard, the door was opened at once. The industrialist’s half-sister led us quickly into the vestibule, and it struck me that originally the place could not have been a hunting lodge, for there would not have been a vestibule in such a lodge, not in our district. Probably the building had once served some function in the Saurau system of fortifications. There was not a single movable object in the vestibule, aside from a heavy cord that hung from the ceiling. The purpose of this cord perplexed me.

My father said I was his son. The industrialist’s half-sister did not shake hands with me, however. She slipped away, leaving us alone in the vestibule. I was struck by how quickly she had bolted the front door again as soon as we had entered, thrusting a heavy wooden bar into a slot. Accustomed to my father’s visits, she did not apologize before she disappeared.

I followed my father through several rooms that received some faint light through the leaves of the shutters. The walls were whitewashed, the floors larch planks. We had to go upstairs to the second floor. There was a long corridor, just as dark, determinedly darkened. I thought of the interior of a monastery.

We walked cautiously, but nevertheless made far too much noise because the rooms were empty.

I wished I could scream at the top of my voice, and as I screamed wrench open the shutters. But reason checked me.

At the industrialist’s door my father stopped, knocked, and entered without me when the industrialist called. I waited outside as we had agreed.

For a long time I heard nothing, then words (but could make out little of the context), finally a clear reference to the industrialist’s literary work. He had made enormous progress during the past week, he said, and expected to go on making enormous progress. “Even though I have destroyed everything I have written up to now,” he said, “I have still made enormous progress.”

He was now prepared to go on working for years. Possibly the work would destroy him. Then: “No,” he said, “I won’t let myself be destroyed.”

Then he spoke of his current business affairs, which were focused more and more on the African countries. He had received the most gratifying news from London and Capetown, he said. Africa was developing at tremendous speed into the richest continent in the world, and it was essential to exploit the fact that the whites were withdrawing from it. “The white race is done for in Africa,” he said, “but I am just beginning there!”

Coming back to his writing, he said that right now, “these past few weeks,” he had made discoveries that were decisive for his work. His isolation, “the emptiness here,” was enabling him “to reach out to a whole tremendous cosmos of ideas.” Now everything was coming to fruition inside him. And he was mustering all his strength to complete his work.

In order to have nothing around that might interfere with his work, he said, he had ordered destroyed “the last real distraction I have had in Hauenstein.” He had ordered all the game that still remained in his forests to be shot, collected, and distributed preferably to “the poorest people” in the whole vicinity.

“Now I no longer hear anything when I open the window,” the industrialist said. “Nothing. A fabulous state of affairs.”

After a prolonged silence in the room I heard my father speak of me to the industrialist, saying that I had come home for the weekend from Leoben, where as the industrialist knew I was studying at the Mining Academy, and he had taken me on his rounds this morning. I was outside in the corridor now. But the industrialist was not tempted to call me in. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to see your son. A new person, a new face, will ruin everything for me. Please understand, a new face would ruin everything for me.”

The industrialist asked my father where he had been that day. It sounded like a routine question that he always asked.

“In Gradenberg,” my father said. “An innkeeper’s wife there was killed by a miner named Grössl. Then we were on the Hüllberg. And in Salla. And in Köflach. In Afling and Stiwoll.”

“Are you going up to Saurau now?” the industrialist asked.

“Yes,” my father said, “but before that I have to go down to the Fochler mill again.”

“No,” the industrialist repeated, “I prefer not to receive your son; I’d rather not meet him. When a new person suddenly turns up, it may be that he’ll destroy everything for me. Just one person turns up and ruins everything.” After a while the industrialist said: “Since all the rooms in this house are completely vacant, I cannot knock into any object in the darkness that fills them.”

My father emerged. We went down to the vestibule. The industrialist’s half-sister let us out. Even the clearing had something oppressive about it. “We’ll drive to Geistthal for a bit,” my father said. In silence we drove through the woods along the same road by which we had come, back to Geistthal. We did not see a soul. I was appalled, imagining that there was no longer any game in the forest and that invisible sentinels were watching us. Shortly before we reached Geistthal, we saw the first people. It was noon. At first we thought to drive to the Fochler mill by way of the Römaskogel, but then after all drove by way of Abraham to Afling, where we went to a restaurant that my father knew well.

All the tables were occupied. We were invited to come into the kitchen, where we were given preferential service. We heard talk about the killing in Gradenberg, and about the dead woman. Grössl had not been caught yet. But his hiding place couldn’t be far away, someone said; sooner or later hunger would drive him into the open.

While we ate, my father again talked affectionately about the child in Hüllberg, then about Bloch. “They’re all problems,” he said. He opened his medical bag and saw that he had forgotten the books he had wanted to borrow from Bloch, the Diderot, the Nietzsche, and the Pascal. But anyway, he remarked, he would not have a chance to do any reading in the next few days. Frau Ebenhöh was taking much of his time. But the habit of visiting her would end soon, for she had only a few more days to live, would surely simply fall asleep. Then he began talking about the schoolteacher, the first person he had visited that morning, who had died under his hands. The fate of country schoolteachers was bitter, he said. So often they came from a town, no matter how small a one, where they felt easy, into a grim mountain community where everyone was hostile to them. Such transfers were usually made as a punishment. The teachers would lead a more and more wretched, depressed life, all the more hamstrung by the hateful regulations issued by the Ministry of Education. Most of them lapsed fairly soon into an apathy that might at any moment turn to madness. In any case they were people all too prone to regard life as a penance. But now, constantly in surroundings where they were not taken seriously, looked down on by everyone, their initially weak intellects were torn to shreds and they stumbled into sexual aberrations.

For the longest time, my father said, the sad fate of the Salla schoolteacher had preyed on his mind. But he did not want to talk about that case, he said. As soon as these words were out of his mouth, he apparently ceased to feel any need for secrecy, for he went on to say that in the Obdach grammar school there had been a scandal over the teacher’s relations with a nervous boy, and the poor fellow had had to leave his post. He sought refuge in the Tyrol, then in Italy, and finally in Slovenia. For two full years, the man had lived like an outlaw, moving among people of foreign speech and subsisting mostly on small thefts. Then he had suddenly come back across the frontier, totally deranged, and had given himself up to justice. He was quickly brought to trial, and the court in Brock sentenced him to two years in jail and two additional years in a milder house of correction. He served his sentence in Garsten. Released (I thought of Frau Ebenhöh’s brother), he had returned to his parents, who owned a small farm in Salla and who had nursed him lovingly. “Of course you could say that the teacher died of heart disease, of a so-called cardiac rupture — you could make it that simple,” my father said. “But it wasn’t that.”

In the dying teacher’s face my father had clearly seen, he said, a man’s accusation against a world that refused to understand him.

The poor fellow had been twenty-six years old. His parents had had his shroud hanging up in the vestibule for weeks beforehand. “For weeks,” my father said, “whenever I entered the house, the first thing I saw was his shroud.”

The family had been relieved that he had died in the doctor’s presence. They too, like Frau Ebenhöh in Stiwoll, must have regarded their son as a terrible punishment (from God?), my father said.

While we ate, my father also told me the following story about the deceased teacher. Once when he was a boy, his grandmother had taken him along into the deep woods to pick blackberries. They lost their way completely, wandered for hours, and could not find the way out of the woods. Darkness fell, and still they had not found the path. They kept going in the wrong direction all the time. Finally grandmother and grandson curled up in a hollow, and lying pressed close together, survived the night. They were lost all the next day and spent a second night in another refuge. Not until the afternoon of the second day did they suddenly emerge from the woods, only to find they had all along gone in a direction opposite from that of their home. Totally exhausted, they had struggled on to the nearest farmhouse.

This ordeal had quickly brought about the grandmother’s death. And her grandson, not yet six, had had his entire future ruined by it, my father said.

You could always conclude that the disasters in a man’s life derived from earlier, usually very early, injuries to his body and his psyche, my father averred. Modern medicine was aware of this, but still made far too little use of such knowledge.

“Even today most doctors do not look into causes,” my father said. “They concern themselves only with the most elementary patterns of treatment. They’re hypocrites who do nothing but prescribe medicines and close their eyes to the psyches of people who because of their helplessness and a disastrous tradition entrust themselves completely to their doctors. And most doctors are lazy and cowardly.”

Putting yourself at their mercy meant putting yourself at the mercy of chance and total unfeelingness, trusting to a pseudo-science, my father said. “Most doctors nowadays are unskilled workers in medicine. And the greatest mystifiers. I never feel more insecure than when I’m among my colleagues. Nothing is more sinister than medicine.”

In the last months of his life the teacher had developed an astonishing gift for pen drawing, my father said. The demonic elements that more and more came to light in his drawings shocked his parents. In delicate lines he drew a world “intent upon self-destruction” that terrified them: birds torn to pieces, human tongues ripped out by the roots, eight-fingered hands, smashed heads, extremities torn from bodies not shown, feet, hands, genitals, people suffocated as they walked, and so on. In those last months the bony structure of the young man’s skull became more and more prominent. And he drew his own portrait frequently, hundreds, thousands of times. When the young teacher talked, the disastrous way his mind was set became apparent. My father had considered taking some of the drawings and showing them to a gallery owner he knew in Graz. “They would make a good exhibition,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who draws the way the teacher did.” The teacher’s surrealism was something completely original, for there was nothing surreal in his drawings; what they showed was reality itself. “The world is surrealistic through and through,” my father said. “Nature is surrealistic, everything is surrealistic.” But he felt that art one exhibited was destroyed by the very act of being exhibited, and so he dropped the idea of doing anything with the teacher’s drawings. On the other hand, he was afraid the schoolmaster’s parents would throw away the drawings or burn them — thousands of them! — from ignorance of how good they were and because they were still frightened, anxious, and wrought up about these drawings. So he had decided to take them. “I’ll simply take them all with me,” he said. He had no doubt they would be handed over to him.

The teacher’s parents must have kept thinking of their sick son’s unfortunate bent whenever they looked at him during his last illness, my father said. “What a terrible thing it is that when you know of some deviation, some unnaturalness, or some crime in connection with a person, as long as he lives you can never look at him without thinking about that deviation, unnaturalness, or crime.”

From his bed the teacher had a view of the peak of the Bundscheck on one side and the rounded top of the Wölkerkogel on the other side. “You can feel this whole stark landscape in his drawings,” my father said.

The teacher’s parents said, however, that during his last days he had not spoken at all, only looked at the landscape outside his window. But the landscape he saw was entirely different from theirs, my father said, and different from the landscape we see when we look at it. What he depicted was an entirely different landscape, “everything totally different.”

We were not alone at our table for long. An elderly man, obviously the father of the restaurant owner, sat down with us. He kept asking us what we knew about the crime in Gradenberg. He did not let us eat in peace.

Down toward the Fochler mill the valley narrowed in a way that struck even him as sinister, my father said. I recalled that the mill is situated deep in a dark gorge; shortly beyond it the path winds up to the Saurau Castle.

We paid and left. In the restaurant a band of schoolchildren were being fed. 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 Fochler mill is situated in the township of Rachau, but can be reached from Rachau itself only by a roundabout route forty miles long. That means that the mill is completely isolated. It lies directly below Saurau Castle, but the castle cannot be seen from the mill.

From Afling we drove directly into the gorge.

As it grew dark, I began thinking of my sister, whose wrist was still in a bandage.

A weekend was too short a time for me to be home from Leoben, my father said. We never got around to having a real talk. He himself, he said, could not have a good influence upon my sister, but possibly I could. Quite independently from one another, both of us had been thinking about my sister.

He used to watch her when she felt herself unobserved, my father said — when, for example, she stood musing in the garden, always at the same spot, staring fixedly at the wall of the shed. If he called her, she started and went to her room without a word. In his consulting room she was no help to him at all. She had the greatest dislike for everything medical. “In her I see my helplessness most plainly,” he said.

His science had failed him worst of all in the case of his child, he often thought; the most it had ever given him were faulty predications. Sometimes he took my sister along to visit relatives, but she felt ill at ease in any kind of society.

I shifted his attention to a herd of sheep that briefly appeared on the ridge above the gorge.

As we drove deeper into the gorge, it seemed to me that hundreds and thousands of images were crowding into my memory, and I saw nothing more.

He had to visit the mill owner once a week to drain the pus from the man’s ulcerated leg and change the dressing. It might amuse me, he said, while he was attending to this, to look at the aviary of exotic birds behind the mill. Now, as he mentioned the aviary, I remembered an association I had had with the Fochler mill. A funeral procession had passed by the Fochler mill on its way out of the gorge — I think it had probably come down from Saurau Castle — and the birds, hurling themselves in fright against the bars of the cage and disturbed by the intoned prayers of the people, had continually screeched at the funeral procession.

That had also been a Saturday. I reflected that most funerals are on Saturday. Baptisms, weddings, and funerals are almost always on Saturday.

But how different the mood was when we arrived at the mill this time. Two young workmen (“The sons,” my father said) were loading a wagon with sacks of flour. The turbines were making so much noise that we could not hear ourselves speak. I could not understand what my father said to me before he entered the mill.

The shutters were of black iron. There were no flowers to be seen.

Above the front door the Saurau coat of arms could still be distinguished. This whole land must once have belonged to the Sauraus, I think. Castles like Hochgobernitz always owned mills and breweries.

My father had said that Hochgobernitz was situated on the height overlooking the gorge, but I could not see it.

The men carrying and loading the flour sacks had not noticed our arrival.

The river is so noisy here that you can hear nothing else in the whole gorge.

On the wagon stood a third young man, younger than the two others; he looked like one of the Turks, so many of whom are employed in our country nowadays, and in fact he was a Turk. He took the sacks from the shoulders of the miller’s sons and piled them in regular order on the wagon. He was about my age, but not strong enough for the heavy mill work, which they do in the gorge today exactly as they did it centuries ago. But they produce their own electricity from the water of the river. Built adjacent to the mill, rising halfway above the surface of the water, is a power generator.

It occurred to me that the Turk had probably been in the gorge only for a few days. No doubt the miller’s sons have spent most of their time making fun of him, I thought. I felt sorry for him. But at the moment Turks provide the cheapest labor in our country. That was the only sort they could have hired to work in this gorge. The Turks do the hardest work and put up with everything. He’ll always have a rough time among these people, I thought; unless he promptly leaves, he’s in for years of slavery. They did not give the impression of wanting to make the least thing easier for him. But you’re only imagining that you are the Turk and ascribing your own thoughts to him, I reminded myself. Immediately, I also began relating the Turk to many people in whose field of tension he must exist — it’s always my unfortunate way never to see just one person, the one I am looking at, but everyone with whom he may possibly be connected. Just as it’s my way to look at each thing in conjunction with everything imaginable. I can’t help myself. How destitute the Turk’s life at home must have been for him to end up in this gorge in Central Europe, I thought. The gorge is a cruel betrayal of him.

But probably all this is quite different from the way I am conceiving it, I thought, and unnoticed by any of the three men working I walked around behind the mill, where I imagined the aviary would be.

The cage was even bigger than I remembered it. But it was completely uncared for and held not even half the number of birds I had seen that first time. Have so many of them died? I wondered. The few that were still in the cage, perhaps fifty or so, had fluttered in panic to the rear wall as soon as I appeared. They had no feed and were thirsty. The water bowl by the wall was empty. Everything inside the cage indicated that the person who had cared for the birds was no longer around. Two parrots were shrieking the same words in unison. I could not manage to make out what they were shrieking. I discovered a hose attached to the fountain in front of the birdcage and filled the bowl with water. The birds all rushed to drink. But everything about them was hostile; their plumage was constantly changing color from their nervousness. A madman must have been raising these birds and been destroyed by it, I thought. For a moment I had the impression that a person was standing behind me, and I turned around, but there was no one. I walked rapidly away from the aviary to the front of the mill where the three young men, though the Turk was more boy than man, were finished loading the sacks of flour. The Turk had just jumped down from the wagon; surprised by my presence, he halted for a moment at the wall of the house, looked searchingly at me, then ran like a flash into the mill.

I wanted to get away from the mill and walked along the river a bit, along the deafening stream of water that rushed ruthlessly out of the gorge and toward the mill. But then I told myself that my melancholy mood would only worsen if I walked any deeper into the gorge, and I turned back.

But didn’t mills, of whatever kind, always send me into a pleasant, in fact a happy mood? I thought.

When I looked at the mill, I saw the funeral procession that had passed by here six or seven years before, one of the most pompous I had ever seen.

If I had to stay in this gorge I would suffocate in no time, I thought. And to think that anyone here could hit on the idea of raising exotic birds.

Now I felt the need to be with my father.

Approaching the mill, I mused that it was associated to this day with counterfeiters and murderers, though all that lay more than a century in the past. The most evil deeds could be conceived and carried out easily in a place of this sort, I thought; and all at once I felt how uncanny the two miller’s sons were, as well as the young Turk. Why had these people brought this young Turk into the gorge? What crime were they nurturing?

After I had studied the Saurau coat of arms over the entrance, I quickly entered the vestibule. The voices I heard in the house promptly gave me my bearings. I paused at the right-hand stairway when one of the two miller’s sons suddenly called me from behind. He asked me to come with him, and I went out again.

The gorge was now even darker than before, although its atmosphere is always as lowering as before a thunderstorm. These people live continually in this thunderstorm atmosphere, I thought, following the miller’s younger son to an outbuilding. Too rapidly, I crossed a rotten plank over the river behind the miller’s son, fearing at every step that I would lose my balance.

At first I saw nothing in the outbuilding. But then, when I had become adjusted to the darkness and the curious smell, a smell of flesh, I saw lying on a long board across a pair of sawhorses a heap of dead birds. They were from the aviary, I saw at once, the finest exotic birds. The beautiful colors nauseated me. These slaughtered birds were in fact the most beautiful specimens from the cage, and I turned around to the miller’s son with a questioning look.

All three of them, he said, he himself, his brother, and the new young Turk who had been working in the mill only for a few days, had gone to the cage first thing in the morning, even before sunrise (But a sunrise in this gorge is impossible! I thought). They’d taken half of the birds, the finest first, and killed them with as little damage as possible to their precious plumage. How? They had wound the birds’ necks rapidly around their index fingers several times and squeezed the heads. I counted forty-two birds all together. After they were through with the day’s work, they were going to finish off the rest, the miller’s son said. His uncle, he said, had started raising birds about twenty years ago and lived only for those birds. He had died three weeks ago, and the birds had begun raising a terrible racket. It was driving them half crazy. At first they thought that the birds’ screeching over the death of their protector would let up after a while, or stop entirely, but they had been mistaken. It had only grown more and more unbearable. “You have to realize,” he said, “that that sort of noise sounds a hundred times louder in this gorge.” It was nothing you could get accustomed to, and you couldn’t ask a person to endure it. So yesterday their father had told them they could finish off the birds to shut them up. They had done a lot of thinking about the mode of execution, and finally had hit on the idea of not chopping off their heads like chickens, but doing it so there would be no sign of outward damage. That way they wouldn’t have to part with the birds, the miller’s son said. They’d all grown used to those marvelous birds, even though they weren’t completely daft about them the way their uncle had been. They intended to stuff the birds themselves and fill a whole room, their dead uncle’s room, with them.

He’d had the idea of setting up a bird museum at the mill, the miller’s son said. It hadn’t been easy to get at the birds. When they started taking the first birds out and twisting their necks, the shrieking had increased, of course, but then it had gradually come to a stop. By the time they were done killing this batch, the rest had fallen totally silent.

Now I understood why the birds had been so frightened when I approached the cage, for from the very first moment I had thought that the birds were reacting unnaturally.

Their faces were all scratched up from capturing the birds, the miller’s son said. But now, with their experience, they would be able to process the remainder much faster and more easily that evening, and by tonight they would have perfect peace.… At first his father had thought of selling the birds alive to a collector, he said, but to find such a collector would have taken too much time and in the meanwhile they would probably have gone out of their minds. It was hard to get to a taxidermist, too; that was why they wanted to stuff the birds themselves in their leisure time. His uncle, the miller’s son said, had had nothing in his head but those birds. He had left a vast number of notes about his birds; undoubtedly they’d be valuable for a bird specialist. (“We’re all fond of making notes!” the miller’s son said.) The miller’s son picked up one of the handsome birds and held it high, so that we could see it well, and described its fine points. The young man apparently knew a good deal about exotic birds, I thought. Possibly all the inhabitants of the mill had concentrated on those birds. He was able to identify them all correctly. Some, he said, came from Asiatic countries, others from the Americas, and still others from Africa. Most of them, however, were Far Eastern island birds, with not a single one from Europe, he said. His uncle had often sat in the aviary for hours, but none of the birds had ever attacked him. They all had names like Kalahari, Malemba, Mitwaba, Ching-tou, Koejijang, Amoy, Druro, Drirari, Cochabamba, Carrizal, and so on. He said he knew the most remarkable facts about birds from the hundreds of ornithology books piled up in his uncle’s room.

But I could stand it no longer in the outbuilding where those dead birds lay on the board as on a bier. Above all the smell made it impossible for me to stay any longer, and I went out. I distracted the miller’s son, and thus myself, from the dead birds by starting to talk about life in the gorge. Did he know Prince Saurau? I asked. Yes, of course. Sometimes the prince unexpectedly came down into the gorge and visited the mill. He would sit down and say “incredible things.” He always came on foot. When there were parties in the castle, they could be heard down in the gorge, the laughter and music and the shouts of drunken people. But of late there had no longer been any parties at Hochgobernitz, the miller’s son said. The prince was keeping more and more to himself. They had received the mill as a gift from a Saurau who died in the last century. One evening at the castle the prince had made a wager that he would give the mill away directly if he could not shoot a certain twelve-pointer next day in the gorge. He had not shot the twelve-pointer and had forthwith given the mill to the Fochlers, who had been working it for two hundred years. “When the Sauraus make a promise, they keep it,” the miller’s son said. I remembered that my father had said the prince was as crazy as he was rich. My father came out as I approached the front door again with the miller’s son. The miller’s son laughed. Seeing him laughing that way, I also saw him making pseudo-geometric movements with his hands, the movements of twisting birds’ necks.

We now drove deep into the gorge. At its end, where it was darkest, my father said, we would leave the car and walk up to the castle. It was a rather dangerous path, hugging the left wall of the cliff, but he was used to it and I was young and athletic enough to walk it without fear. The prince expects my father every other Saturday. From the castle you could look down over the whole beautiful countryside, my father said. There was no other point like it in all of Styria for seeing the lay of the land. You could see all the adjacent provinces of Austria from Hochgobernitz, and toward the southeast you could look as far as Hungary. There was a good road leading up to the castle from the other side, but to reach it we would have had to make a detour of more than fifty miles by way of Planhütte.

As we approached the end of the gorge, we talked about the Fochler mill. My father described the miller as a heavy-set man of sixty who was simply rotting beneath the skin; he lay on the old sofa all the time, could no longer walk; and his wife, who to judge by the smell of her mouth was undergoing rapid degeneration of the lobes of her lungs, had water on the legs. A fat old wolfhound ran back and forth between the two, from her sofa to his and back again. Were it not that fresh apples were kept heaped in all the rooms, the smell of the two old people and the wolfhound would be unendurable. The miller’s right leg was decaying faster than his left; he would never stand again. “When a funeral procession moves through the gorge,” my father said, “it’s uncanny.” So he too had once witnessed a funeral in the gorge. The miller’s wife could stand on her legs only for a few moments at a time. The two of them lay in their room almost all the time and occupied themselves with their dog. The animal, because it never went out of the room, was absolutely dangerous in its derangement. One of the two, the wife or the husband, had to hold it whenever my father entered their room. Because of the screeching of the birds in the last few weeks the dog had gone racing back and forth between the two people “like mad.”

By disposing of the birds the people at the mill hoped above all to calm the dog, and thus the calm themselves. The miller had told my father that he had ordered the birds killed off chiefly because of the dog’s condition. Both of them, the miller and his wife, had alternately been holding the dog’s leash day and night. Since they had been condemned to their room for months by their illnesses, they had gradually lost control over their sons. The elder, whom the miller described as prone to violence — he had often hit his mother and threatened to kill both of them — had once attacked his father with a hoe and severely injured him. The boy who had shown me the dead birds in the outbuilding was a weakling, completely at the mercy of his older brother. All the people in the Fochler mill were feeble-minded, not insane, my father said.

At present one of the miller’s wife’s sisters was running the household. She was in Knittelfeld today.

There were four cows in the barn, my father said. I wondered what the cows grazed on, since there was nothing but forest all around.

I said that the “weak son” had shown me the dead birds in the outbuilding. It was curious, I remarked, that we should have come to the mill on the very day the birds had been killed, or rather were being killed.

All the while we were there, I said, I had been reminded of the funeral I had seen on my former visit to the mill.

Even the Fochlers had heard about the killing of the woman in Gradenberg — the murder, they kept saying. But my father had deliberately refrained from saying that he had been involved in the case.

A notary from Köflach wanted to buy their mill, my father said. To make a summer resort (!) out of it. The miller and his wife had mentioned the matter, but they had no intention of selling.

That was good spring water they had at the Fochler mill, my father said. Then he added: “There is an oil painting in the old Fochlers’ room.” He would guess it to be between three hundred and fifty and four hundred years old. It was not a painting of saints, he said. On the contrary, it represented two naked men standing with their backs to each other but their heads “completely twisted, face to face.” He had long admired the painting, he said, and had always associated a great variety of “rather gruesome” ideas with it. “If you take it down from the wall where it must have been hanging for hundreds of years and get it out of that horrible room and put it against a clean white wall, all its beauty would come out.” The painting was absolutely ugly and at the same time absolutely beautiful, he explained. “It’s beautiful because it’s true,” my father said.

In many Styrian houses, he went on, especially places steeped in darkness, as in that gorge, valuable works of art had been discovered and brought to light in the recent past. They were all gone by now. Gripped by a mania for antiques, city people had systematically robbed the whole country of its art treasures in recent years, and left behind a proletarian wasteland.

The gorge narrowed still more. First hemlock instead of pines stood along the river bank. There must be trout there, my father said. If we weren’t in such a hurry — because before seeing Prince Saurau he also wanted to look in on the Krainer children who lived in one of the low-roofed servants’ houses right below the castle — he would stop and look for trout in the river.

I was feeling horrified by the thought that there were people living in a place situated where that mill was. And what people! The dead birds had all exuded an alien odor of decay, I said. Some people, like those at the mill, I said, were forced to live their lives in the kind of cruel solitude that prevailed in the gorge. They had no choice; they were bound to their house, to their meager source of income, to a river like the one we were now following to its source. Others, I said, like the industrialist, of their own free will deliberately entered such solitude as he and his sister had at Hauenstein. But even as I said that, I thought that no one does anything of his own free will, that it is claptrap to say that men have free will. Suddenly the world seemed to me completely eerie; never before had I felt it to be so eerie as now, while we were still driving into the gorge. Soon we could hardly see anything, but my father had known the road for years. Where nature is purest and most untouched, as here in the gorge, it is at its eeriest.

Had my father noticed, I asked him, that the Turk gave the impression of being utterly terrified? They had put him into the dead uncle’s room, but he had fled it in the middle of the night and gone to the sons’ room, where he had lain alternately in the bed of the one and the other and begged them not to throw him out. They would let the Turk sleep in their beds for a few days, the younger son had said, until he stopped being afraid, until he grew used to the gorge. They couldn’t keep the Turk’s name in mind, I said, nor had I been able to, and so they simply called him Turk. All the miller’s sons knew about him was that he had seven brothers and sisters at home, and parents to whom he wrote, because why otherwise would he have bought so much letter paper in Knittelfeld before he left with the older of the two sons, who had hired him away from a construction company there? They had not been able to make him understand their reason for killing all the birds. They did not understand him because they did not know a word of Turkish; he did not understand them because he spoke hardly any German. The Turk had been terrified of both of them, the miller’s son had told me, when he saw them wringing the necks of the birds as they were taken out of the cage. He had leaned against the wall of the house absolutely motionless. Of course he might well have thought they were crazy. Because it hadn’t entered their minds how brutal that was, they had laid the first corpses right in front of the birdcage, where the other birds could see them, and these first they had killed simply by squeezing their throats, which caused blood to spurt out. But then one of them thought to wind the birds’ necks around the index finger and break the spine; and for that they went behind the cage. The bird swooned anyhow as soon as the neck was vigorously crooked around the finger the first time. You could hear the backbone breaking under the head. Again and again they had called on the Turk to help them finish off the birds just the way they were doing it; they told him to fetch some more birds out of the cage, but he would not. Then, apparently, the Turk had suddenly understood and all alone had killed ten or twelve birds by their method, much more skillfully than they. He had also brought empty flour sacks and covered the birds with them as they lay side by side on the board with their dangling heads.

I suddenly felt that the only way to escape the depression that matched the prevailing duskiness of the gorge was to begin to talk about Leoben. It seemed to me when I abruptly spoke of Leoben that I was speaking of the outside world. I forced myself to see myself alternately in the Mining Academy and in the dormitory. I concentrated on a precise vision of my dormitory room. Now I am seeing the dormitory room and it is not empty, I thought. Now I am seeing the dining room, and I am in the dining room. I see the municipal square of Leoben and I am in the municipal square of Leoben. I see the engineering professors and I am among them, although I am not among them but in the gorge. In reality I am in the gorge. But I am also in Leoben in reality. Everything is in reality, I thought.

“For a long time now,” I said, “I have felt not merely exposed to my studies, but more and more committed to them. And for a long time now I have stopped regarding them as fantastic.” It was no longer so hard for me to discipline myself as it was at the beginning, I said. During the whole of the first year I had been more or less a pitiable victim of the melancholia rife among all the students, a melancholia that poisoned everything for everyone, and as a result had been capable of only the most ridiculous, the tiniest, progress in my science. But now everything seemed easy and clear to me. “I have been able to fend off bad influences, to keep them away from my body and my brain,” I said. “I know what is useful.” But it had been a terrible process, I said, and I had been able to escape from the monotony of my own mental blindness only by the greatest ruthlessness toward myself. Youth is a dreadful condition, I thought. But it seemed to me foolish to say anything of the sort to my father. I had long been giving him a false picture. I saw no good purpose in telling him that there were still many things that oppressed me, that I was by no means free from problems. Or that my problems were also increasing with time. He may believe I had no problems at all, I thought. I go on deliberately giving him a false picture. Just at this moment I was not at all sure why. “I have always taken pleasure in resolving my problems myself,” I said. Had I said too much? My father was not even listening to me. Perhaps he was thinking only of the two Krainer children, or of Prince Saurau. I am strong enough now to resolve everything by myself, I thought. Often I am ashamed of feeling that I am stronger than others, though this feeling keeps recurring. But I did not speak of that.

The most striking thing about me is my incommunicativeness, which differs entirely from my sister’s incommunicativeness. My silence is the opposite of my sister’s. And my father’s silence, his incommunicativeness, is again entirely different. What I know of him is always too little for me to be able to put together a picture of him as he really is, I thought.

For a moment I thought: You intended to spend today with your sister.

Aloud, I said: “The unforeseen is what is beautiful.”

I still have tomorrow, I thought, with relief. Tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll get up early and take a very long walk with my sister. And talk with her. In Leoben, I thought, I spend the whole week in my room, shut up within myself in my room, more and more hermetically isolated from the outside world as the year draws to its end, I don’t even allow myself a breath of air any more! I offend many people by isolating myself that way. If once in a while I weaken and engage in a conversation because the others press me, I am always sorry. Is there any other way for me? I must go to bed before eleven, I think, and I rise at five. If I let myself deviate by even a hair’s breadth from my schedule, I lose my equilibrium. As a scientist the only way is to pass through the endless, dark, and most of the time almost entirely airless corridor of your science in order to reach life.

We parked the car beside the waterfall and began climbing the dangerous footpath as quickly as possible. We had to watch every step; it was not advisable to look around. In silence we soon reached the outer walls of the castle. The climb had not strained my father at all. That surprised me. Before us we saw the one-story house in which the Krainer children live. Young Krainer, the son of upstanding parents who have served the Sauraus all their lives, is crippled. His sister led us straight into his room. He had heard us coming for some time, his sister said, and was restless. Their parents had gone into the castle early in the day. Young Krainer was just exactly my age, twenty-one, but looked twice as old. He had a black nightcap on his head and extended his hand to my father like a madman. Not to me. I sat down on a chair just inside the door. From there I watched what was going on in the room. Krainer’s sister said there was a draft from the window. She closed it. He had come today for a “general examination,” my father said.

I had the impression that up here an even more absolute silence reigned than down there in the gorge. It was no longer so dark as in the gorge, but everything here was also under the influence of darkness. The Krainer house, I had seen as we arrived, lay permanently in the shadow of the castle. The air on this height is keen; when you look down you are plainly looking into a pocket of sultriness.

My father and his sister undressed the cripple. It seemed to me that my father must be the only person whom the young Krainers see, aside from their parents, who work in the castle all day and are at home only at night.

As we emerged from the gorge and reached the peak, my father had proposed that while he was at the Krainers’ I walk on the lower wall of the castle. But I wanted to see the cripple and his sister. I had the impression that my father wished to keep me away from them. And so I went along just because he was averse to taking me with him. (Later, when we were descending into the gorge again, he told me that both Krainer children reminded him too much of his own; they were the same age as we, as myself and my sister, although “there was no real parallel.”)

Young Krainer had much too narrow a cranium. His eyes seemed to be starting out of his head. When his sister drew the blanket away from his body, I saw that he had one long and one short leg. For a while I could not decide whether his right leg was the longer one or his left. Finally I saw that the short leg was the left. If he stood up and started to walk, I thought, his motion would be like a huge insect.

They had difficulty persuading him to calm down. If anyone touched him, my father said, a quivering would seize his whole body, and at such times he was dangerous. He could hit out, bite, spit. He constantly made movements that complicated their efforts to prepare him for the examinations. Several times he struck out at his sister’s face. But my father finally succeeded in holding his arms down against the sides of the bed and at the same time in listening with the stethoscope. A smell characteristic of those who lie in bed for years filled the room. Krainer’s body was damp. He would slowly lose his speech entirely, my father later told me, as the result of progressive deterioration in his whole body. Even now you could understand only a fraction of what he said. He produced his words as if he were spitting them out. Most of it sounded as if spoken in an Oriental language. The rhythm in which he articulated was related to his physical malformation. What he spoke was just as crippled as the boy himself. Now and then he suddenly flung his long arms into the air, then let them drop again and laughed. His stomach was like an asthmatic sphere that his arms anxiously cradled for long moments. His head was relatively small; you saw that most plainly when he held it toward his protuberant belly in order to hear better the noises inside his stomach. He kept twitching his face almost continually in furious distortions. When he sat up, he seemed to be bobbing constantly. Maybe he imagines he is riding, I thought.

The bed linen was clean, probably because they expected my father, I thought. At times his bed had to be turned into a regular cage; a grating was placed over it for that purpose. But now, according to his sister, he was having a quieter period and did not need the grating. My father had always advised the Krainers never to remove the grating from his bed, but they did not follow his advice. He thought that the sick man might suddenly leave his bed and possibly kill them. But his sister had been unable to bear the sight of the grating after a while. It was now in the attic. She could not endure keeping her brother in a cage. If only they never had to bring that grating down from the attic again, she said. Her brother could no longer get up by himself, she thought, and if he did fall out of bed now and then it wasn’t as bad as having to see her brother continually in a cage.

My father took hold of the patient’s head and the sister held his arms down. Suddenly he wrenched his arms and head loose and tried to jump up. But he did not succeed. Abruptly, he laughed. Evidently it amused him to have my father examining his head, listening. My father tapped his forehead, drew down his eyelids, then pulled them up. He also checked young Krainer’s knee reflex. He would take a urine sample with him, he said. When he pulled off the nightcap, I was horrified because there was not a hair on young Krainer’s head. I noticed yellow spots on his temples, the same yellow spots, only smaller, that were on his chest. These yellow spots were scattered over his whole body. He had a tormenting fungus infection between his toes, his sister said, and for that reason he kept making rowing movements with his legs all night long. He no longer slept, she said. She herself sometimes closed her eyes from sheer exhaustion, but it was nothing like sleep. His trembling and dribbling had been going on for a year now. He relieved himself in bed. “Often he hears an army marching through the gorge,” she said.

Everywhere in the room, wherever there was space, were musical instruments on which young Krainer had been able to play when he was still healthy. There was a cello, and I saw an oboe lying on the chest of drawers. For years a music teacher from Knittelfeld had come up here to them and given him lessons. Her brother had learned the most difficult violin compositions by heart, she said. His favorite instrument was the cello, and Béla Bartok his favorite composer. There were hundreds of scores piled in the drawers of the chest, and he had learned them all by heart. He had done compositions of his own, including a Magnificat. As a child of eight he had already been able to play Mozart’s symphonies on the piano by heart. Only six months ago she had brought the cello to his bed twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and he had played it until he was exhausted.

There was an open sore on his back, I saw, and on his chest he had red as well as yellow spots.

The music teacher from Knittelfeld had come up from the valley for years “gratis,” the Krainer girl said. “Often they played together half the night.” But once her brother had for no apparent reason hit the music teacher on the head with his violin bow, and from then on they no longer saw the music teacher. Her brother’s illness had immediately begun rapidly worsening.

On the drive home my father told me that young Krainer had been in the Steinhof asylum for four years. Throughout that time his sister had rented a tiny room in Ottakring in order to be near him. At first it had looked as if he would never get out of the mental hospital; the doctors always used the word “hopeless” when they spoke of him. But suddenly, after four years at Steinhof, after he had spent four years in the largest and most terrible of all European insane asylums, the doctors had suddenly told the girl she could take her brother home.

“At your own risk,” they had said, while simultaneously declaring that he was not dangerous. For a while she had kept him in her room in Ottakring and shown him the capital. Whenever they walked in Vienna, they had created a great stir, for his deformity in conjunction with his madness had struck people as funny. But by then the Krainer girl no longer minded when people gawked at her brother. She showed him the Prater and took him to the opera and the Burgtheater. They also went to the Rebernigg circus. For a whole week they went about the city, visited St. Stephan’s Cathedral several times, went to the Naschmarkt, even attended a concert by the famous cellist Casals, who was playing the Beethoven sonatas. But soon their dragging around the city tired him; after a week it bored him; and she regretted spending the money Prince Saurau had given her (the Prince had also paid for the stay in Steinhof) on seeing a city that by now only aroused disgust in her. They gave up the room in Ottakring and went back to Hochgobernitz. At first he had enjoyed taking long walks. He enjoyed the countryside. Nature meant a great deal to him. The two of them loved to walk to the cliff and look down into the gorge. Standing there, his sister explained to him the villages in the valley. During that period he had been more receptive than ever before. Soon he resumed playing the cello, the violin, and the piano. She took longer and longer walks with him. But once, when she had walked with him as far as the oaks, from where you can look directly down upon the Frochlers’ mill, he had suddenly come up behind her and struck her on the head with a branch. When she came to, her brother was sitting beside her, weeping. They went home. That night, when she was sure he was asleep, she brought the grating from the attic and placed it over his bed. From then on she had the feeling that her brother hated her. But she loved him.

She seldom had a chance nowadays to go out of the house alone, to walk a bit toward the castle, into the castle yard, or on the castle walls. Whenever she did go out, she would always have to recount her adventures as soon as she got home. But it was a long time since she had seen or experienced anything, she said. “Yet if I don’t tell him things, he threatens me.” she said. Now and then he insisted that she powder his face to hide the redness of his constant fever.

The examination had been difficult but had taken only half an hour.

My father had actually made this totally insane and crippled young Krainer put out his tongue at the end of the examination. While he was filling out a prescription, I made a curious discovery: On the four walls of the room, which horribly enough had to serve as the bedroom for both the children because the house was so small, hung a number of large engravings — probably the property of Prince Saurau, I thought — representing the great men of music. At first I had not realized that all these engravings were of composers. But then I noticed that young Krainer had written on all of them in red ink. Above the head of Mozart he had written: “Very great!” and above Beethoven’s head: “More tragic than I!” and above Haydn’s head: “Swine,” and above Gluck’s: “Don’t like you.” Across Hector Berlioz’s face he had written: “Horrible,” and for Franz Schubert: “Womanish!” I could not see the two engravings above his bed so clearly, nor decipher their inscriptions. Young Krainer had been watching my efforts to decipher the inscriptions all the while, and when he saw that I could not make out those on the two engravings above his bed, he laughed at me. On Anton Bruckner’s face was a contemptuous “Music-hall stuff”; on Purcell’s, “Stop it, Scotty!” Beneath a large photograph of Béla Bartok he had written: “I am listening!” In the corner where I had been sitting all the while, I discovered before we went out three violins with their necks broken; the broken necks were bunched together with a cord. Young Krainer’s restiveness had given way, now that the examination was over, to exhaustion. He let his sister lay his head back on the pillow without protest. He asked for water, and his sister brought him some in a tin cup. Probably, I thought, he often hurled drinking vessels against the wall after he had drunk.

Such deformity is always joined by the corresponding insanity, my father said when we were outside. “The physical disease leads directly to the mental disease.”

I asked my father if he had read the inscriptions on the engravings. He said he had. Young Krainer had once carefully explained to him what all these legends meant. Incidentally, he wrote over or smeared over every piece of paper that came into his hands, my father said; he had scribbled thousands of curious remarks on the scores in the chests. “A person like young Krainer can live on to be terribly old,” my father said. He was taking me with him for the sake of my studies, my father said. He repeated that again and again: “For the sake of your studies.”