Extinction (8 page)

He’s been down to the village again
, he would say, and look on shamelessly, not batting an eyelid, as I was punished for my offense. My mother would beat me with a rawhide that she always kept in readiness, and my father would box my ears. I had many whippings, but I
cannot remember my brother being whipped or having his ears boxed. I was interested in anything that was different, but my brother was not, I thought, examining the photo of him in his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee. I once told Gambetti that my brother was always an
affection seeker
, but I never was. I tried to explain what I meant by the term. At mealtimes my brother was always silent and never dared to ask a question; I constantly asked questions and was reprimanded by my parents for asking
the most impossible questions
. I wanted to know
everything
—no question must remain unanswered. My brother was a slow eater; I always ate hastily, and still do. I always walked fast, wanting to reach my destination as soon as possible; my brother had a slow, one might almost say a
deliberate
, gait. As for my handwriting, it was fast and careless and, as I have said, almost illegible, whereas he always wrote in a careful, regular hand. When we went to confession he always spent a long time in the confessional, whereas I was in and out in no time. It did not take me long to list the many sins I felt obliged to confess, while he took at least twice as long over the few he had committed. Until I was about twelve we shared the same room, and I recall that in the morning I always dressed very quickly. Hardly had I woken up than I was washed and dressed. Johannes took at least three times as long. Right from the beginning, in fact, he resembled Father more than Mother, at least when it came to quickness, restlessness, curiosity, and percipience. Naturally my essays were better than his, even at primary school, but this did not mean that I got better marks. On the contrary, my marks were always worse than his, even though my essays were undoubtedly better; this is not surprising, however, as our teachers thought the form of an essay more important than the content. I always chose interesting subjects—what I called exotic subjects—when essays were assigned. Johannes always chose the simplest subjects, which he developed and presented in a simple manner, a manner that was not just simple but tedious and pedestrian, while my essays were always composed in a complicated and interesting manner, as is attested by the exercise books lying around in cardboard boxes in our attics. My brother was less interested in widening his knowledge and improving his mind than in winning the teachers’ approval. This was never my aim, and I was never in the teachers’ good books, as they say. They disliked me because they always found me intractable, but they
loved my brother because he was so uncomplicated. And instantly obedient. I was often impatient and recalcitrant, and never at a loss for words. He did whatever he was told and never rebelled, whereas I rebelled almost every day and so incurred the hostility of the teachers. Like my family, they were driven to distraction, as I now realize, by all the questions I asked and were nearly always out of their depth. I distrusted them, and my distrust was reciprocated. Unlike my brother, I had no respect for authority. Very early on, Uncle Georg had told me the truth about teachers: that they were moral cowards who took out on the pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives. When I was very young Uncle Georg impressed on me that among the educated classes teachers were the basest and most dangerous people, on a par with judges, who were the lowest form of human life. Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state—remember that. He was right, as I have discovered not just hundreds but thousands of times. No teacher and no judge can be trusted as far as you can throw him. Without scruple or compunction they daily destroy many of the existences that are thrown upon their mercy, being motivated by base caprice and a desire to avenge themselves for their miserable, twisted lives—and they are actually paid for doing so. The supposed objectivity of teachers and judges is a piece of shabby mendacity, Uncle Georg said—and he was right. Talking to a teacher, we soon discover that he is a destructive individual with whom no one and nothing is safe, and the same is true when we talk to a judge. My brother always began by trusting people and was hurt when they let him down, as they usually did. I, on the other hand, trusted hardly anybody on first acquaintance and was seldom let down. Having been let down so often, he became embittered at an early age and soon took on the embittered features of his father, whom life had generally let down—or rather he took them
over
, as one takes over a property—and he soon came to resemble his father in every way. How often have I thought to myself, Your brother walks like your father, sits like your father, stands like your father, eats like your father, and strings his words together like your father, in long, ponderous sentences; in thirty years he has become identical with your father. He adopted all the habits of his father, who was my father too. Like him, he very soon became
an indolent person
, who feigned activity, though in
reality he was inactivity personified. He pretended to be constantly on the go, working nonstop and never allowing himself a moment’s rest—and all for the sake of the family, who wished to see him as he pretended to be. The family took this show seriously, not realizing—or not wanting to admit—that they were watching an actor, not the essentially indolent person behind the act. The truth is that my brother did as little work as my father and merely feigned the unremitting activity that they all admired, the dedication to work that satisfied them and in the end satisfied him too, for suddenly even he could no longer see it as a pretense. Throughout his life my father played the part of the immensely hardworking, even work-crazy, farmer who never let up for a moment because, as a good family man, he could not permit himself to. And the same applied to my brother, who naturally copied my father’s act: both of them soon realized that it was sufficient to play at work without actually doing any. Basically they did nothing all their lives but polish their act, and in this field—not to say this art—they became consummate performers. Most people feign work, especially in Central Europe. They constantly play at working and go on polishing their act right into old age, but the act has as little to do with real work as a play has to do with real life. Yet because human beings would rather see life as a play than as real life—which they regard as far too tedious and laborious, indeed as a gross indignity—they prefer playacting to life and, therefore, to work. Unlike the others, I never attached much importance to my father’s capacity for work, knowing that it was for the most part just playacting. So was my brother’s, who imitated and improved on my father’s act in order to show it off to an admiring public. But it is not just in the higher classes, so called, that work is simulated rather than performed; even among supposedly simple people the simulation of work is widespread. Wherever we look, we see work being simulated and activity feigned by people who are in fact idling, doing nothing at all, and creating nothing but mischief instead of making themselves useful. Most workers today believe that all they have to do is put on their blue overalls and do nothing—certainly nothing useful. Having donned their costume, the ubiquitous blue overalls, they rush around all day in this costume and often even break out in a sweat, though it is a spurious sweat, generated not by work but by the simulation of work. Even ordinary people have
realized that such simulated work is more profitable than real work, though certainly not healthier—far from it. Today they merely simulate work instead of actually working, and the result is that suddenly every state is on the verge of ruin, as we can see. The truth is that there are no longer any workers, only actors who put on a show of working. Everything is acted, nothing is done. Watching my father at work, I often told myself, He’s only acting, he’s not working at all, and the same applies to my brother. I don’t blame them for simulating work and hoodwinking the public, as the rest of humanity does, I told myself, but they really shouldn’t say at every turn that they’re working themselves
to death
, let alone that they’re doing it
for the family
and even, on occasion,
for the country
. I can honestly say that Father always took it easy at Wolfsegg, and so did my brother. They did not overtax themselves, and under their regime Wolfsegg became generally run-down. Uncle Georg was right when he said to me once, Your father and brother are pretty smart; they pretend to be the family robots, when in fact they’ve turned Wolfsegg into a cozy rural stage on which they make fools of us all. We don’t take advantage of them—they take advantage of us. And we fall for their hypocrisy. If a farmer wants to pass for honest and hardworking, all he has to do is open the farm gate, turn up the sound of grunting pigs, as one turns up the radio, and broadcast the sound from the world of bad conscience. People are actually foolish enough to fall for such tricks. Every morning millions of people slip on their overalls and are taken seriously as workers, though in fact they’re an army of highly skilled idlers who only make mischief and think of their bellies. But the intellectuals are too stupid to see this, said Uncle Georg. Even the feeblest performance by an idle worker or craftsman suffices to give them a bad conscience, provided that he appears in his theater workshop dressed in his blue costume. The intellectuals have only a minor role to play in this revolting workshop, where work and activity have been in the repertory for over half a century, performed with the most spine-chilling professionalism and panache. I’ve nothing against people not wanting to work, said Uncle Georg, but they ought to come clean and admit that they’re lazy, and so spare us this nauseating charade. Your father and your brother are both superb principals on this particular stage. And your mother directs the show, at any rate at Wolfsegg. My sisters, it occurs to me, have a
habit of hopping, a hysterical condition acquired in early childhood, which became one of their most striking characteristics. They hop all day long—they don’t walk. They hop from the kitchen into the hall and back, into the drawing room and back. They really don’t walk—they hop. I always see them hopping, like the children they were thirty years ago. Although they now walk normally, they always seem to me to be hopping. I cannot see them walk without imagining that they are still hopping as hysterically as they did when they were little girls with long pigtails. They are now forty and graying, but I still see them hopping when they are actually walking. When I thought I had finally escaped them they would suddenly turn up, hopping and giggling; they never left me in peace but drove me half demented with their giggling. And all day they would sing songs that I hated and do everything possible to torment me. They were always dancing around me, encircling me and pouncing on me, even in my dreams. It was as though my parents had brought them into the world
deliberately to spite me
. I often woke from a dream in which they were about to kill me. They left my brother alone; they felt no urge to torment him, their greatest pleasure being to drive me to desperation. Their attitude to me was always malign, and they developed a routine for putting their malignity into effect. For a long time I was utterly at their mercy. They spied on me and informed on me, then gloated over the punishments that were meted out to me. They watched gleefully, unable to restrain their giggles, as my mother struck me over the head with the rawhide or my father boxed my ears. I cannot say which of my sisters was the more devilish, for Amalia would first be egged on by Caecilia, then Caecilia by Amalia. To me the so-called weaker sex was at that time the stronger, the more ruthless, as it took the greatest delight in tormenting me, more or less without compunction. My sisters were endlessly inventive and daily devised ever more subtle and diabolical torments. At an early age my sisters formed a conspiracy against me. They were believed, I was not; their word carried conviction, mine did not. And so I resolved to avenge myself. I locked them in the dark, airless larder, pushed them into the pond, or shoved them from behind so that they would fall full-length in their white Sunday-best dresses and get up dirty and bleeding from top to toe. The prospect of the terrible punishment that would ensue did not deter me from wreaking
cruel vengeance, in various ways, for their atrocious behavior. I would lead them into the wood, then run away, leaving them in mortal terror and ignoring their cries. But their cruelty to me came first and was from the beginning much worse than any I inflicted on them. In the photo I can see all this cruelty quite plainly; their story and their character are written in their faces. These cruel children grew up into equally cruel adults. As children they might have been called beautiful, but as adults they are downright ugly. It is hard to say which of them is more like her father and which more like her mother. Of course they both inherit
everything
from their parents, but in a coarsened form. At table they sit like dolls, talking the same twaddle they have talked for decades. They sit down together and jump up together, and if one of them runs to the bathroom the other goes with her. These women are incapable of being alone, even in the bathroom. In winter they used to spend most of their time sitting on the sofa in their room, knitting sweaters that fitted no one and were always a disaster, the ugliest sweaters I have ever seen. Either the sleeves were unequal in length, the back was too wide, or the waist and the neck were too narrow. The garments were sloppily knitted, with excessively large stitches, because my sisters were of course incapable of concentration. And they chose the most tasteless colors. My brother and I had to try on the half-finished sweaters; they would force us into them, pulling and stretching them in all directions, and finally pronounce them a success, though it was obvious from the start that their knitting was indescribably amateurish. At Christmas their hideous knitwear was placed under the tree, and we had to perform the most incredible contortions to get into it, and then we had to admire it. At Wolfsegg on Christmas Eve the whole family sat around in my sisters’ knitwear like a bunch of cripples. It is as though my sisters, with their craze for knitting, were determined to make us look ridiculous in their knitwear, after spending weeks and months locked in a kind of unnatural intercourse with the wool. For months before Christmas Wolfsegg was dominated by wool. Then on Christmas Eve our sisters dressed us all up in their hideous woolen garments and we had to thank them. I have always detested home-knitted garments, just as I detest home cooking and anything else homemade. Canning jars I find a nightmare, and we had hundreds of them at Wolfsegg, not just in the larders but on the