Extinction (16 page)

truly poetic
is more neglected than anything else. It’s as though no one had any use for the
truly poetic
. The Children’s Villa, locked up and left to dilapidate, is a rather sad but interesting chapter in the history of Wolfsegg, I said, perhaps the saddest. The huntsmen were never my friends, I told Gambetti. It was only with reluctance that I visited the Huntsmen’s Lodge, though
it was my brother’s favorite haunt. Hunting soon became his ruling passion, just as it was my father’s. He goes hunting whenever he can, and several times a year they have hunting parties at Wolfsegg, which I haven’t attended in recent years. Members of the upper crust converge on Wolfsegg from all over Europe, and for days on end one hears many languages spoken, especially Spanish, when our Spanish relatives come over from Bilbao and Cádiz. These hunting parties were inaugurated by my father, who refused to let my mother put a stop to them. They’re now part of the Wolfsegg tradition. On these occasions all the rooms are occupied, even the coldest and most unfriendly. And a lot of Italians come too. The larders are emptied and dozens of jam jars are opened, and there’s even a large variety of salads and compotes. My brother loves the Huntsmen’s Lodge and retires there to work on the Wolfsegg balance sheets. All the bookkeeping is done there. I’ve never had much of a liking for hunting trophies, I told Gambetti. I’ve always been put off by the trophy cult. And I’ve always loathed hunting itself, though I’m convinced that it’s absolutely necessary. Whenever he can, my brother goes to Poland to hunt, even to Russia. To indulge his great passion he’s prepared to put up with the conditions in these Communist countries. Where hunting’s concerned, no price is too high for him. He’s crazy about sailing and crazy about hunting. And he’s only ever seen wearing hunting gear, which has long been the national costume of the Austrian countryside, so to speak. Because it’s so practical, I said. Everybody, of whatever class, goes around in hunting gear, even if he has no connection with hunting. They go around in their green-and-gray outfits, and sometimes it seems as though the whole population of Austria is made up of huntsmen. Even in Vienna they go around in their thousands dressed in hunting gear. Even city dwellers seem to have been smitten with the hunting craze, I said, for how else can you explain why you see people going around everywhere in hunting outfits, even where it seems ridiculous and perverse. The Huntsmen’s Lodge was built at the end of the last century, on the site of an earlier one that was destroyed by fire. A great-grandfather of mine had set up a library in it, I said. Imagine, Gambetti: that would have been the sixth library at Wolfsegg. It had originally been intended simply as a collection of hunting literature, but it was later extended and became a general library. I found the most incredible
treasures in it, I said. It was ideal for anybody who wanted to devote himself to the books, to yield himself up to them undisturbed. No one visits the Huntsmen’s Lodge, so no intrusion need be feared. The building is airy and warm, and hanging on the walls are fine examples of
verre églomisé
, mainly seventeenth century, painted with exquisite artistry. It also has a copy of Schedel’s
World Chronicle
, colored by my great-grandmother, which lies on a heavy Josephine writing desk from Styria. The desk is covered by a slab of Carrara marble eight inches thick, a great rarity north of the Alps. Uncle Georg used to say that at this desk, with its marble slab, he had the perfect place for putting his ideas down on paper. It was here that he started writing what he called his
Anti-autobiography
, a two-hundred-page manuscript in which he recorded everything he thought worth recording and on which he went on working for two decades in Cannes. When he died, none of us could find the manuscript, and it was suspected that he’d burned it shortly before his death, as we had evidence from his entourage that he’d made an entry relating to Wolfsegg two weeks earlier. The
good Jean
himself had seen the entry but could tell us nothing about it except that it was very short and concise. Having known Uncle Georg, I’m sure it was a fairly pungent remark that might have shocked my family greatly. Maybe the good Jean himself spirited the manuscript away, I said, but I can’t exclude the possibility that my mother destroyed it, as she had access to Uncle Georg’s study before anything was moved. The manuscript had always been kept in a desk drawer, but two days after my mother had been in the room this undoubtedly interesting document was missing and nowhere to be found. My mother probably came off worse than anyone in his Anti-autobiography, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have shut herself in his study for a while, as if grieving, and read the manuscript. She may have been outraged by what she read and made short shrift of the damaging document. After all, Uncle Georg had throughout his life blamed her for everything. He always told me,
Your mother is the bane of Wolfsegg
, and it’s quite probable that he recorded this observation in the Anti-autobiography. The slab of Carrara marble on the Styrian writing desk is always cold, ice cold, I told Gambetti, whatever the temperature outside; even at the height of summer, when everyone’s wilting under the heat, the Carrara marble is ice cold. It was over this ice-cold
slab that Uncle Georg noted down his ideas. Altogether the best place to think is over this cold marble slab, he used to say. In my last years at Wolfsegg, having consciously or unconsciously taken my leave of the place forever, as it were, I too sat at this marble slab and wrote down a few things I thought worth recording, I told Gambetti,
philosophical ideas
that admittedly led to nothing and that I later destroyed, like so much else. We do our best thinking over a cold stone slab, I said, and our best writing. This slab of Carrara marble was unique, absolutely unique. And it was one of the things that now and then made the Huntsmen’s Lodge attractive. Normally I never set foot in the Huntsmen’s Lodge, as I’ve told you, and certainly not during the hunting season. The huntsmen were my brother’s friends, not mine; my friends were the gardeners. I visited the Gardeners’ House frequently, nearly every day, in order to see ordinary people. That was what I craved, and I was happier there than anywhere else. I loved simple people with their simple ways. When I went to see them they treated me just as they treated their plants,
with affection
. They understood my troubles and anxieties. The huntsmen showed no such understanding. They were always ready with their overbearing remarks and saw fit to regale me, a small child, with their suggestive jokes; they thought to cheer me up by waving their liquor bottles above their heads, though in fact such crude behavior only made me feel sadder and more insecure. The gardeners were quite different: they understood me, without wasting words, and could always help me. Even from a distance the huntsmen would bear down on me in their boastful fashion and address me in their loud, drunken voices, but the gardeners behaved toward me in a way that was sensitive and reassuring. It was the
gardeners
I sought out when I was unbearably unhappy and distressed, not the huntsmen. There were always two opposing camps at Wolfsegg, the huntsmen and the gardeners. They had tolerated one another for centuries, and that can’t have been easy. It’s interesting that every so often one of the huntsmen would kill himself, naturally with a gun, whereas no gardener ever did. There were many suicides among the huntsmen at Wolfsegg, but none among the gardeners. Every few years a huntsman shoots himself and a replacement has to be found. The huntsmen don’t live long in any case; they soon go gaga and drown themselves in drink. The gardeners at Wolfsegg have always lived to a
ripe old age. Quite often a gardener will live to be ninety, but the huntsmen are usually finished at fifty because they’re no longer capable of doing their job. They tremble when taking aim, and even at forty they have problems with their balance. They’re mostly to be found in the village, sitting around in the inns, fat and bloated, their guns beside them with the safety catches off, holding forth with their absurd political opinions and often getting involved in brawls, which naturally end in injury or even death, as always happens in the country. The huntsmen were always hooligans and troublemakers. If they didn’t like the look of somebody they would take the next opportunity of shooting him and claim subsequently in court that they had mistaken the victim for an animal. The history of the Upper Austrian courts is full of such hunting accidents, which usually earn the offender a caution, on the principle that anyone shot by a huntsman has only himself to blame. The huntsmen were always fanatics, I told Gambetti. In fact it can be shown that huntsmen are to a large extent responsible for the world’s ills. All dictators have been passionate huntsmen who would have paid any price and even killed their own people for the sake of hunting, as we have seen. The huntsmen were Fascists, National Socialists, I told Gambetti. In the village it was the huntsmen who ruled the roost during the Nazi period, and it was the huntsmen who blackmailed my father, as it were, into National Socialism. When National Socialism emerged they were the strongmen; my father was the weakling who had to yield to them. So it was that because of the huntsmen Wolfsegg underwent a rapid switch to National Socialism. I must tell you, Gambetti, that my father was blackmailed into becoming a Nazi, and of course egged on by my mother, who was a hysterical National Socialist, a
German woman
, as she liked to call herself, throughout the whole of the Nazi period. On Hitler’s birthday they always ran up the Nazi flag at Wolfsegg, I said. It was most unedifying. Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg chiefly because he could not and would not put up with National Socialism, which was forcibly taking over. He went to Cannes, then for a time to Marseille, from where he worked against the Germans. That’s what my family found hardest to forgive. In the end my father was a Nazi not just by blackmail but by conviction, and my mother was a fanatical Nazi. It was the most abominable period that Wolfsegg has known, I told Gambetti, a deadly and
degrading period that can’t be glossed over or hushed up, because it’s all true. It still makes my blood run cold when I tell you that my father invited all the important Nazis to Wolfsegg, just because my mother demanded it of him. The local storm troopers used to parade in the courtyard and shout
Heil Hitler!
My father undoubtedly profited from the Nazis. And when they’d gone he got off scot-free. In the postwar period he remained the lord of the manor. He put the Children’s Villa at the disposal of the Nazis for their meetings, quite voluntarily, as I know, without needing any encouragement from my mother. The Hitler Youth practiced its handicrafts in the villa and rehearsed its brainless Nazi songs. Year in, year out, the swastika flag flew outside the Children’s Villa, until, weather-worn and washed out, it was taken down by my mother a few hours before the Americans arrived. While taking it down she cricked her neck, I told Gambetti, and from then on suffered from chronic rheumatism in the neck. Moreover, the many swastika flags at Wolfsegg were used to make aprons for the gardeners and kitchen maids after my mother had personally dyed them dark blue. My father joined the Nazi party at my mother’s instigation, and it has to be added that he was not ashamed to wear his party badge quite openly on all occasions. Some of his jackets still have holes in them where the party badge was worn for years. On Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg there was a discussion about world affairs generally but mainly about the
balance of forces
between the Russians and the Americans. At the end of it he reminded my father that he had once been a member of the Nazi party, and not just briefly. Whereupon my father leaped up, smashed his soup plate on the table, and stormed out of the room. My mother shouted
Swine!
at my uncle, then followed her husband out of the room. So Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg ended miserably. But his visits nearly always ended in unseemly quarrels about National Socialism. No sooner were the National Socialists gone than my family threw itself into the arms of the Americans and again reaped nothing but benefits from this distasteful association. They were always opportunists, and it’s fair to say that they were low characters, always trimming to the prevailing political wind and ready to resort to any available means to gain whatever advantage they could from any regime. They always supported the powers that be, and as true Austrians they were past masters in the art of
opportunism. They never came to grief politically. It’s because of their low character, I’m bound to say, that Wolfsegg has so far been spared: I mean the buildings and the lands belonging to the estate. It’s never been bombed or burned down by enemies. The improbable truth is that during the Nazi period Wolfsegg was a bastion of both National Socialism and Catholicism. The archbishops and the Gauleiters took turns visiting Wolfsegg on weekends, ceding the door handle to one another, as it were. My mother ruled the roost at that time, along with the huntsmen, who are still Nazis to a man, just as my mother,
at the bottom of her heart
, remains a Nazi to this day, notwithstanding her Catholic hypocrisy. National Socialism was always her ideal, as it was the ideal of nine out of ten Austrian women, I told Gambetti. So the Huntsmen’s Lodge was always on my mother’s side. Father was never more than her executive organ, to borrow a Nazi phrase—a stupid man, she once said, who understood nothing about anything and had to do what she told him to do. Thinking of the Huntsmen’s Lodge was what set me off on this digression, I told Gambetti. The very words
Huntsmen’s Lodge
bring the Nazi period back to me. I could tell you other things about the Huntsmen’s Lodge, things that I found quite sinister as a child, for instance about murders that were connected with it and with National Socialism, but I don’t feel like doing so at present, in the present cheerful atmosphere. But one day, I said, I’ll set about recording all the things about Wolfsegg that obsess me and give me no peace. For decades Wolfsegg has given me no peace. It haunts me day and night. And since my family have neither the will nor the ability to describe Wolfsegg as it is and always has been, it’s clearly incumbent on me to do so. At least I’ll try to describe Wolfsegg as