Correction: A Novel (23 page)

How, I often asked myself, how is it possible to see oneself going to ruin in so, to quote my mother’s constant phrase, luxurious an atmosphere? To be dying by inches, for no reason any outsider could see. Of course I wasn’t wholly a stranger to such concepts as joy, beauty, even the love-of-life, the beauty-of-nature andsoforth, so Roithamer. My eyes were as open in that direction as in the other. A man like me, who finds his greatest happiness in thought, most of all when engaged in thought out in the open, in the free (philosophical) world of nature, is saved by this fact in itself, by such an observation as this in itself, so Roithamer. Happiness can even be found in the so-called acceptance of pain, so Roithamer. One might, for instance, find supreme joy in writing well about supreme misery, so Roithamer. The ability to perceive, the ability to articulate one’s perception, can be a supreme joy andsoforth, so Roithamer. A statement in itself, no matter what is being stated, can be a supreme joy, as is ultimately the fact of simply existing, no matter how, so Roithamer. But we mustn’t keep thinking such thoughts all the time, keep mulling over everything we’re about, otherwise we may suddenly find ourselves deadened by our own persistent, relentless brooding and end up simply dead. I began by playing violin, against my will, so Roithamer, piano, against my will, because forced into it, later on the (voluntary) effort to study music on a higher and the highest level, the history of music andsoforth, so Roithamer, all came to nothing because under duress in the one case, in the other voluntary but formal, in the end serious involvement with music, getting into music of my own free will and without formal backing (university etcetera), Webern, Schönberg, Berg, Dallapiccola andsoforth. Began by reading against my will, read everything against my will, because my parents forced me to read, they’d thought that I was inclined to read, but because they assumed I had such an inclination, respect/inclination etcetera, I refused to read, never read anything but schoolbooks till my twelfth year, then, from about my twenty-fifth year on, I read incessantly, everything of my own accord, whatever I could lay my hands on. Because they demanded order, I chose disorder, because they demanded that we wear hats on our heads, never a hat on my head for decades, aversion to hats etcetera, so Roithamer. Because they always tried to stop me from going down to the various villages from Altensam, for all sorts of reasons which were bound to seem unreasonable to me, I’d always go down to the villages behind their backs, I made myself independent down there below Altensam, timidly at first but later with great firmness, while they believed me to be in my room, I’d actually gone down to the villages at night. And so more and more often behind their backs down to Altensam, so Roithamer, until one day I left Altensam for good and went down, never to come back to Altensam, never again, “never again” underlined. But in these outbreaks I was also alone. My siblings never and in no way followed me.

Absolute mutual incomprehension among us children even then. There’s nothing more for us to explain to each other, so Roithamer. Typical, mother’s fainting spells as a form of blackmail, her constant bouts with nausea, she controlled the household from her so-called nausea chair, I almost never saw mother free from nausea or the signs of nausea, father was the opposite, a robust constitution by nature, but she, my mother, always in her moods, always gloomy, bad moods because of her gloominess, father always in a good mood, she couldn’t stand it. Unlike his first wife, who had borne him no children, which was his reason, naturally, for divorcing her, as he always said, so Roithamer, she was the daughter of a Klagenfurt attorney, though all she’d ever had in her head was theaters and amusements, my father regarded everything connected with the theater and music as mere amusements, which is what he quite contemptuously called it, he had married this woman because he’d made her pregnant, but the child was born dead, its mother had been half insane for a long time after this stillbirth, so father said, until he, my father, simply couldn’t bear it any longer, because it was obvious that she could never have another child, hence the divorce, but then he overhastily married my mother, who certainly could and did give birth and to living children at that, so father said about my mother, she was never anything more to him than a
good breeder,
my father kept saying and he said it to anybody, even mere acquaintances, even strangers when he was drunk, unlike his first wife, who was always young and fresh, but then was completely ruined by that stillbirth, she’s still living, my father kept saying, whenever anyone asked him about her, his first wife, she’s still living, in France I think, anyway unlike his first wife, his second, our mother, was always an old woman, even as a young woman she was already old, her sort are old even as children, so my father said, a good observation, as I can attest, such people are born with wizened old faces, it’s always frightening how ancient their faces look, the kind of newborn human being my mother apparently was always looks from the first moment as he or she is likely to look at seventy or eighty, but this aged look stays on that face, always, our mother was always the Old Woman, from the beginning, unlike his first wife, his second, our mother, was also a calculating woman, she was all calculation, she never did anything without calculation, while my first wife, so my father, so Roithamer, without being at all calculating, suddenly became an
unhappy creature
as a result of that stillbirth, my second wife was always calculating, with every fiber of her being, to such an extent, so my father, so Roithamer, that she’d get into a terrible state whenever one of her calculations didn’t happen to work out, but basically her calculations always worked out, this type of woman will get a bee in her bonnet, for instance something unnecessary she wants to buy, so my father, and she gets her way, even though by getting her way she weakens the relationship, which she doesn’t notice, but she thinks that she is strengthening her position.

When it comes to trying things, she always got her way when it came to trips or innovations at Altensam, and she did it almost always by using her sick spells with which she ruled Altensam for long periods of time without a letup, especially in the spring, when Altensam was ruled entirely by nothing but our mother’s nausea, in the heat of summer, in the sudden chill of autumn. If she’d failed in getting her wish, those wishes and ideas and projects of hers that always had so devastating an effect on Altensam, she resorted to threats, and most of all to the most terrifying of all threats, so my father, so Roithamer, suicide, she’d throw herself off the top of the wall one day, see if she didn’t, she’d be smashed to bits, because her life meant nothing to us, even though we all depended on her, she was the
heart and core of our life,
but basically she wasn’t the heart and core of life in Altensam as she kept telling us, but rather the heart and core of our creeping death in Altensam, and she never made her threat good, these people, so Roithamer, never stop talking of suicide, they threaten suicide every time their wishes and ideas are balked, and because they have no other resources except this threat, because they’re basically without resources, absolutely without resources, but they don’t kill themselves, they go on living for years, for decades, with this threat and by grace of this threat, and then they die a perfectly natural death, so Roithamer. When she was alone in Altensam, because my father was away on business, she thought about how she might torment him when he’d come back home, what kind of horror she could surprise him with, it had to be a horror with at least a touch of perversion in it, which would instantly put him in a frightful mood which would of course have the most frightful effect on us children and on all of Altensam, and when father was coming home to Altensam, she’d sit for hours, always looking at her watch, in her turret room watching the road from the village by which he had to come up, watching everything that went on down there, always glancing at her watch.

noting who was coming up to Altensam on what errand, who was leaving Altensam and on what errand and with what baggage and especially what kind of tools, because more than anything else mother was mistrustful, she completely mistrusted not only us but everything, and it was probably this mistrust that had undermined her health from her earliest years because even as a child she had been most noticeably mistrustful, and so of course, what with her organism weakened by her incessant mistrustfulness, she was almost always sickly, or pretended to be sickly, you could never be absolutely sure at any given moment whether she was sickly or pretending to be sickly, what was interesting about it was just this, that she was always sickly, but never really sick, never seriously sick so as actually to arouse real concern, but only always sickly, this sickliness of our mother’s was one of the main characteristics of the atmosphere at Altensam as far back as I can remember, with her chronic sickliness she finally infected all of Altensam so that the entire atmosphere there was sicklied through, everything there in addition to herself was always equally sickly, it seemed as though she was quite consciously using this sickliness of hers as a means to her ends, meaning that she used it against us, also against her husband, our father, with this sickliness she controlled not only the most important aspects of life at Altensam but also all the secondary aspects, even the most insignificant ones, and this sickliness was instantly sensed by everyone who’d come to Altensam, even those who don’t know Altensam that well and those for whom Altensam was something new, such a newcomer was immediately included in this sickliness which had already seized and taken hold and poisoned everything at Altensam, he couldn’t know. what it was that had brought him into this peculiarly ailing condition when he’d barely set foot in Altensam, but it was nothing else than our mother’s sickliness, whereas father’s first wife was always fresh and young, so my father always said, so Roithamer, his second, the one he called the nanny, was always old and sickly, he always stated this quite openly and he’d often told my mother to her face that her only weapon apart from her boundless stupidity, was her sickliness, stupidity and sickliness which she used against him and against everything that made up Altensam, against everything Altensam had been until she appeared on the scene, and
it is a stage entrance, my dear! I
can still hear my father telling her to her face,
a stage entrance, my dear!

stupidity and sickliness, so Roithamer, were our mother’s chief attributes, father was right in his judgment of her, we children had always suffered from her stupidity and her sickliness, because our mother’s ill nature was fed as much by her stupidity as by her sickliness, which most times was a crafty production of hers, a spectacle she put on for us every day, in which she played the lead. My father had soon turned away from this wife, our mother, she had borne him children,
whelped
them, but even this at a time when he no longer wanted any children, once they were born he realized that he didn’t really want them at all, and so, since they (we) existed, willy-nilly, we were treated accordingly, always as creatures to be considered his own children but whom their progenitor basically no longer wanted and hadn’t wanted for the longest time. Mother, always unkempt, her appearance invariably neglected, as father said, so Roithamer, sloppily dressed, her buttons half undone, her stockingless feet in unlaced shoes, that’s how I remember her, on her feet all day long only in the hope of catching one of us or one of the so-called staff out, running or limping all the time, another typical trait of hers was a quick succession of injuries or ulcers, inflammations on her legs, mostly the calves, so she ran or limped along always smelling of every kind of medication, bought from so-called quacks, always bought in large quantities, always disseminating the smell of such medications throughout Altensam, most of the time wearing an old bathrobe, a legacy from my grandmother, in this bathrobe, which hadn’t even been worn by my grandmother any longer, she’d only used it to cover the dahlias against the autumn frosts, but my mother had dragged it out from the heap of rags in the gardener’s shack and put it on and then worn it for years afterward, my father loathed that bathrobe, we children loathed that bathrobe, but mother was always wearing this bathrobe we all hated, she even appears in this bathrobe in family photographs, the woman in these pictures is always a total stranger to me, these pictures convince me more than the reality did that my mother was always some strange woman, she’d turn up suddenly everywhere and always unpredictably, as if she had sneaked up on you, to check up on things, no matter whose room it was, suddenly there she was checking up, she’d always wanted to know what was going on in the various rooms, she’d rip the door open like a bolt of lightning and stand there, demanding an explanation, because we’d always just done something which, in her view, we shouldn’t have done or hadn’t been allowed to do, something improper always, if not strictly forbidden, nevertheless improper or useless or embarrassing, in any case something typical of us. In the farm buildings she was generally feared, she was always checking on everybody’s work and accused the farm workers, who’d stayed at Altensam only on account of my father, whom they loved, she accused them of getting nothing done, or not enough, she always criticized all of them for being too slow or careless, yet not one of them was ever slower or more careless than that woman, our mother. All day long she was on her feet in her repulsive state of slovenliness, toward evening she’d always retreat to her room and put on a simple black dress, basically even elegant, very expensive too, but on her it somehow didn’t look good, something seemed wrong with it, it was a collarless dress with a large diamondstudded gold pin on her chest, this pin had come into her hands from the estate of my grandmother’s sister as a wedding present, and so she got herself ready to go to the theater. She’d get one of the stewards to drive her to the Linz Theater, on principle she never missed a première, and returned toward midnight, never without a totally adverse opinion on everything she’d happened to see at the Linz Theater, making fun of everything, it was always the same story, she’d get out of the car in the courtyard, the steward would drive the car back to the car barn where all the cars were kept, and from the moment she’d come in the big front door, even before going to the downstairs kitchen for the hot coffee that was kept for her there, she’d unloose a tirade against everything she’d just experienced at the theater, I have never heard her say. anything positive about the Linz Theater, though I must admit that it’s one of the worst theaters extant, always producing only wellintentioned plays which invariably turned into some kind of catastrophe or other, in some repulsive way, too, anyway I never heard her say anything positive about it. Still she had never managed even once
to pass up
one of their premières. She was an addicted theatergoer even though she understood nothing whatever about the theater, a passionate theatergoer; that the Linz Theater was absolutely the worst theater in the world, as she said time and again, was of course no secret to her, especially since she was repeatedly confirmed in this judgment by others, so-called theater buffs with whom she’d chatted during the intermissions, but I happen to know that she only went out to the theater in order to lay in a supply of colognes and face creams at a certain cosmetics shop on the way to the theater, before curtain time, she had hundreds of these face creams and colognes in her bathroom and she made incredibly lavish use of the contents of these hundreds of bottles and tubes, unfortunately all these so-called fragrances, our mother’s taste in fragrances is debatable, were always overwhelmed by the stinking salves and concoctions of her quacks, they’re called health practitioners in our country, so they were basically always superfluous. The theater is only a pretext, so father said, so Roithamer, for stopping at the cosmetics shop for a supply of all that chemical stuff which is so totally ineffective on that woman (our mother), the grand opera is only a pretext for her crazy perfumes, the comedy or the tragedy in Linz is only a pretext for her ghastly moisturizing delusions. She understood nothing, neither the theater nor music, and cared less, but the theater (in Linz) and the music (in Linz), for she also attended the more important concerts in Linz, provided her with an opportunity and a pretext, not only to pick up supplies of every possible kind of aromatic filth (so my father) at the Linz cosmetics shop, but all this theater-and concert-going had also always served to prove to us her appreciation of art and her cultural requirements, but most of all they served to
humiliate
my father, this uncultured man, as she always said, who hasn’t the least regard for great art, all these forays to theaters and concerts, which cost heaps of money, so father said, just to rub it in how cultured she was. But in reality our mother was not at all a cultured woman, not cultured in the least, and our father, who in fact couldn’t care less about her kind of culture, the kind of culture she had in her head, she was quite right in this respect, he cared nothing at all about it, but the very fact that he cared nothing at all for her kind of culture makes him a cultured man, so Roithamer. Father had at least read a so-called good book from time to time, but mother had never, to my personal knowledge, read a good book, she detested everything that had to do with books, especially good books, as she herself said, hated them like the plague, and she’d always done everything in her power to keep us, my siblings included, away from so-called good books, away from all books on principle, she’d aborted any possibilities for us to get anywhere near good books or any books, it was typical that our three- to four-thousand-volume library at Altensam, dating back to the times of our great-grandparents and grandparents, was locked up, and that we had to ask mother, not father, when we wanted to get into the library, which incidentally was always in a state of terrible neglect, it was never put in order, never even dusted, for decades on end, and our mother never approved of our desire to read, she’d always sidetracked us, when we wanted to read a book in the library, any book, into the music room instead, that’s where she wanted us to spend our time, not in the library, the library was off limits to us, but she’d maneuvered us into the music room, doubtless the less dangerous of the two, even though our mother, our parents, knew that we, my siblings too, loving music as we did, nevertheless hated making music, because we’d been forced to practice. We were locked out of the library, the others were also less interested in it than I was, so Roithamer, I had no way to get into the library, because mother had locked the library keys up in her key safe, books were meant for grown-ups, they’d go to your head like a disease, mother always used to say, we could read fairy tales, but we didn’t want to read fairy tales, fairy tales yes, everything else, no. She was afraid that I, in particular, might discover in the library that the world was bigger than Altensam, that it was basically entirely different from the world I knew, I am speaking of the time prior to my eighth or ninth year. In my eighth or ninth year there was a sudden complete reversal: she, my mother, had persuaded herself that I should be
devouring
the library, that I should go into the library everyday, but now
I
no longer wanted to go in, I refused to read a single book, she couldn’t make me, my mother was of course totally baffled by this, so Roithamer, first I want to go in but I’m not allowed in, then I’m supposed to go in but I no longer want to go in. She’d been of the widespread opinion that children to the age of eight or nine have no business in a socalled adult library, but that at age eight or nine they should be
introduced
to these socalled adult books, and she’d meant to follow these recommendations. But now I was no longer interested in our library. It’s such an old library, I thought, after all, I’ll find new books once I’ve left Altensam, why bother with these old books now, they’d certainly have interested me, so Roithamer, but I refused to give in to force. Of new books there were none in Altensam, they were all at least forty or fifty years old, and many much older, without counting my father’s books on woods, forestry and hunting, which were always kept up-to-date with the latest information on woods, forestry, both practical and research, and hunting. Attempt at a description of father: we’d always trusted him absolutely, but under the influence of that woman, our mother, he’d become more and more estranged from us, we could feel how with the years and everything that happened in all those years, happenings in Altensam always brought about by his wife, our mother, nothing really but pathological processes resulting from that woman’s constitutional predisposition, she was simply a disaster for Altensam, how in time we grew away from our father, just as he grew away from us. That woman also exercised a most harmful influence on our father, but he had soon succumbed, after an initial resistance, to her superior willpower and came to be totally controlled by this willpower of hers, everything in Altensam came to be ruled by that woman’s willpower, because of our mother, the daughter of a butcher in Eferding, everything in Altensam was suddenly sickly, ailing, though it had never been ailing before, not even during the period of my father’s first wife, whom I often visit, and who has never forgiven my father, never could forgive him for more or less ruining her life by seeing her only as a potential breeder of his children, so that she ceased to mean anything to him once my father’s first child was stillborn, changing her beyond recognition, which caused my father to remove this wife entirely from Altensam, under the influence of my mother whom my father quite openly and even to her own face called a makeshift solution, because he thought that he must secure the first available woman, so my father, so Roithamer, under the influence of that woman as a makeshift, that makeshift as a woman, so Roithamer, “makeshift as a woman” underlined, who had no sooner turned up than she tried to transfer to Altensam her lower-middle-class mentality, her crudeness, yet pitiableness, her ill-bred and incorrigible ways, and in this she succeeded, my father immediately fell completely under this influence, which soon took its devastating, in fact annihilating toll of Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, it was only at the start that he was able to resist this influence, but afterward, after only a brief period of life with this Eferding woman, when he was about forty, he gave up, he gave himself up, first he gave up Altensam under the influence of this Eferding woman, so my father always said, so Roithamer, then he gave himself up, he was probably overcome with indifference toward everything in Altensam, all at once, from one minute to the next, I had made the crucial mistake of my life, so my father himself said, so Roithamer, I should never have married this Eferding woman, this butcher’s daughter with her butcher’s physiognomy, so my father always said, so Roithamer, with her butcher’s way of life. But it makes no difference in the end, so my father, so Roithamer. Before this so-called mistake my father, born and raised in Altensam, had the usual boarding school experiences, then went through the necessary secondary and university courses at Passau and Salzburg and Vienna, and eventually led the life or the existence which the men of Altensam always led, working at his forestry and his farming on the one hand, comfortloving on the other hand, with all the love possible in so fundamentally monotonous a life reserved for hunting, he’d led this quiet life of such activities and inclinations, a life unremarkable even in spurts, up to the point when he realized that he could not possibly go on alone, as he had been since his parents’, my grandparents’, early death, entirely devoting himself to running Altensam, which left him fully occupied yet not really satisfied, for no matter how much such a splendid and always basically well-functioning, going concern as Altensam, always a healthy, untroubled mix of farming and forestry, including lumbering, brick-making, quarries and cement works, no matter how much so healthy an economic enterprise could keep a man like my father, who had grown up with it and was wholly at home in it, fully occupied, it could not in the long run be enough to satisfy even him. But he had no other source of satisfaction by nature, unless he’d given the whole thing up, which he wasn’t the man to do, so he’d begun thinking, by the time he was forty, of saving himself by cutting down on all that, and then suddenly decided, purely out of cold calculation, to have heirs, to bring children into the world, after the failure with his first wife, who probably was better suited to him, with the second, the most impossible mate imaginable for him, as became quickly apparent, though she did bear him the desired children, whom, however, at the very moment they were suddenly present, he simply no longer wanted, as I now know and as I secretly always felt, he had needed the children in order to let himself go, to relax the intensity with which he’d been forced to live, freed by now having children, even when they were still very young, as though the children had already begun to succeed him, to take over from and for him, as far as he was concerned, long before it could actually be possible for them to do so.