Concrete (10 page)

this
moment. The question is really only how we are to survive the winter as painlessly as possible. And the much crueller spring. And summer we’ve always hated. Then autumn takes everything away from us again.
Then she displayed the most ravishing bosom the world had ever seen:
Zadig. I don’t know why this sentence occurred to me just now and made me laugh. It doesn’t matter either: what matters is that the laughter was entirely unforeseen. About something that needn’t make me feel ashamed. We go through periods of agitation which can sometimes last for weeks and can’t be switched off. Then suddenly they’re gone, and we experience a fairly long period of calm. But we can’t say for certain when the calm began. For years it sufficed for me to go and see the woodcutters and talk to them about their work. Why didn’t it suffice for longer? Two hours’ walk straight there and back again in winter, every day — that was nothing. But all that is impossible today, I thought. The easy methods have all become ineffective — visiting people, reading the newspapers, etc. Even the reading of so-called serious literature no longer has the effect it once had. Suddenly we were afraid of gossip, particularly the gossip which is indulged in non-stop by the so-called celebrated journalists of the cultural papers, who are all the more repellent for being well-known. For years, for decades, we let ourselves be smothered by this repellent gossip. Admittedly I was never in the position of having to pawn my trousers in order to send a telegram, as Dostoyevsky was, and perhaps this was an advantage after all. I might call myself relatively independent. But shackled and imprisoned like everybody else. Impelled by disgust rather than possessed by curiosity. We always spoke of clarity of mind, but never had it. I don’t know where I got this sentence from, perhaps from myself, but I’ve read it somewhere. Perhaps it will turn up among my notes sometime. We say notes to avoid embarrassment, although we secretly believe that these sentences which we blushingly call notes are really more than that. But we believe the same of everything to do with ourselves. This is how we swing ourselves over the abyss, not knowing how deep it is. And in fact the depth does not matter if everybody falls to his death, which we know to be the case. At one time, as far back as I can remember, I used to ask other people questions — the first person was quite certainly my mother — until I finally drove my parents to the verge of madness with my questions. Then suddenly I only asked myself questions, but only when I was sure of being ready with an answer to my question. Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable caco-phany. The word
cacophony
was incidentally a favourite of my maternal grandfather’s. And the phrase he hated more than any other was
thought process.
Another of his favourite words was
character.
During these reflections it suddenly struck me for the first time how extraordinarily comfortable my armchair is. Three weeks ago it was a piece of junk, but now that it has been re-upholstered it is quite luxurious. But what good is that to me if I am going away? I was putting up a tremendous inward resistance to going away. But I really couldn’t cancel my plans. And then again I didn’t want to yield to my momentary feeling of attachment to Peiskam, beside which all else seemed tiresome, burdensome, futile. A pair of black shoes and a pair of brown, I told myself, and another pair for really bad weather. For running along the Molo, which was what I always enjoyed doing. But naturally there would be no question of my running. You’ll walk down to the Molo, very slowly, and take stock and see how far you get. After such a radical change of climate the first few days are the most dangerous. People arrive at nine in the morning, take a shower and rush out for a game of tennis; then they collapse and die, and by two o’clock in the afternoon they end up in the cemetery, as I know from the most dreadful firsthand experience. The dead are disposed of immediately in the south. Take everything slowly — get up slowly, have breakfast slowly, go into town slowly, but on the first day it’s better not to go straight into town — just down to the Molo. I drew a deep breath and sat up as straight as I could, then sank back exhausted in the armchair. However old we are, we go on expecting things to change, I told myself, we’re always waiting for a decisive change, because our minds are anything but clear. All the decisive changes took place many years ago, but at the time we didn’t recognize them as decisive. Those who were once our friends are either dead or have had unhappy lives, going mad before they died, or else they are still alive somewhere and no longer concern me. They’ve all got stuck in their outlook and become old; they’ve all basically given up, though some of them, to my certain knowledge, are still flailing about here and there. When we meet them they talk as though no time at all had elapsed in the last few decades — in other words they talk into the void. There was a time when I actually cultivated my friendships, as the saying goes. But at some point in the past all that suddenly ceased, and apart from the odd bit of information gleaned from newspapers — usually something silly or tasteless — I hear nothing about this or that person whom I once thought I couldn’t be without. Most of them have founded a family, as they say, made a living and built themselves a house; they’ve tried to secure themselves on all sides and in the course of time they’ve become uninteresting. I no longer see them, or if I do we’ve nothing to say to each other. One of them boasts non-stop about being an artist, another about being a scientist, a third about being a successful salesman. It makes me feel sick just to see them, long before they’ve opened their mouths, which utter only banalities and second-hand ideas, never anything original. It’s quite incredible that this house was once full of people whom I had invited and who spent the whole night drinking and eating and laughing. To think that I once not only loved parties, but actually gave them and was capable of enjoying them! But that was all so long ago that very few traces are left. This house is crying out for society, my sister exclaimed only recently. You’ve turned it into a morgue. I just don’t understand how you could have turned out the way you have. Although this was said theatrically it was meant seriously and affected me profoundly. Today all these people would simply get on my nerves. And I was actually the one who entertained all these people for years and even tried to put them right, but in vain. In the end they regard you as a fool. I don’t know which came first — my illness or my sudden distaste for society. I don’t know whether the distaste was there first and gave rise to the illness, or whether the illness was there first and gave rise to the distaste for this particular society, for social gatherings of this kind and for society in general. I don’t know. Did I drive them away, all these people, or did they withdraw from me? I don’t know. Did I cease having dealings with them or they with me? I don’t know. I once conceived the idea of writing about all these people, but then I gave it up: it was too silly. There comes a time when we actually think about these people, and then suddenly we hate them, and so we get rid of them, or they get rid of us; because we see them clearly all at once, we have to withdraw from their company or they from ours. For years I believed that I couldn’t be alone, that I needed all these people, but in fact I don’t: I’ve got on perfectly well without them. They only come to unburden themselves and to unload all their misery on to me, together with all the dirt that goes with it. We invite them thinking they’ll bring us something, something pleasant or refreshing of course, but all they do is deprive us of whatever we have. They come into our houses and force us into some corner where we can’t escape and suck us dry in the most ruthless fashion, until there’s nothing left inside us but the disgust they inspire; then they leave us standing, alone once more with all our private horrors. By bringing them into our house we are quite simply bringing in our tormentors, yet we have no choice but to let in, again and again, the very people who strip us of all our clothes and jeer at us when we stand naked in front of them. No one who thinks this way should be surprised if he gradually becomes isolated in the course of time and finds himself one day entirely alone, with everything that this ultimately and inevitably implies. Throughout our lives we repeatedly rule off the account, although we know that we are in no position to do so. When we suffer from this disease we are struck by the fact that everybody makes too much noise — and doesn’t notice it! People brutalise everything. They get up noisily, go about noisily all day, and go to bed noisily. And they constantly talk far too noisily. They are so taken up with themselves that they don’t notice the distress they constantly cause to others, to those who are sick. Everything they do, everything they say causes distress to people like us. And in this way they force anyone who is sick more and more into the background until he’s no longer noticed. And the sick person withdraws into
his
background. But every life, every existence, belongs to one person and one person only, and no one else has the right to force this life and this existence to one side, to force it out of the way, to force it out of existence. We’ll go by ourselves, as we have the right to do. That’s part of the natural course. At the one moment when I had the chance, namely when both my parents had died, I failed to see that I ought to turn my back on Peiskam as my sister had done; I really ought to have sold it and
thus come to my own rescue
, but I hadn’t the strength. Years of depression followed my parents’ death and made it impossible for me to take any initiative. I couldn’t even begin to study. I actually started on
several
courses of study
simultaneously
, but failed at them all, as I might have foreseen. I talked myself into studying mathematics, then philosophy, but it wasn’t long before I conceived a distaste for mathematics and philosophy, at least for the mathematics taught at the university, as well as for the philosophy that is taught there but in fact can’t be taught at all. Then suddenly I developed an enthusiasm, a true enthusiasm, for music and surrendered myself to it heart and soul. I got up from my armchair and looked at the clock; then I sat down again. I was incapable of doing anything before my departure, and so I at once relapsed into my fantasies. I found the universities repellent. I enrolled at a number of them. This had been the obvious thing for my father to do, but I attended them all only for the briefest spell. I went to Vienna, Innsbruck and finally Graz, a place I’ve loathed all my life, fully intending to begin and to complete a course of study there, but I failed right from the start. The reason was, on the one hand, that the stale intellectual mush that had been served up in universities for centuries at once turned my stomach and sickened my mind, and, on the other, that I found all the towns unendurable — Innsbruck, Graz and — in the end — even Vienna. All these towns, which of course I knew already, though not thoroughly, induced in me the most crushing depression, and in fact they are all, especially Graz, repulsive little provincial towns. Each one regards itself as the navel of the world and thinks it has taken a lease on the intellect. True, but it’s only the absolutely primitive intellect of the petty bourgeoisie; in these towns I became acquainted with the total insipidity of allot-ment-holders who taught philosophy and professed literature, with nothing else, and the stench of crass pedestrianism pervading these Austrian cesspits spoilt my appetite from the very beginning for anything but the briefest possible stay. And I didn’t want to stay in Vienna either for longer than was absolutely necessary. But to be truthful I owe it to Vienna that I learned about music, and in the most perfect way possible, I must add. Much as I despise and condemn the city, and repellent though I find it most of the time, I nevertheless owe to it my access to our composers, to Beethoven, to Mozart, even to Wagner, and naturally to Schubert, whom I admittedly find it difficult to link with the others, and above all I naturally owe the music of modern and recent times to Vienna, which my father always referred to as the most outrageous of cities -Schönberg, Berg, Webern and so on. And my years in Vienna - nearly twenty in all, during which I became thoroughly attuned to city life — finally spoilt me for Peiskam. During these years I lived at first with my sister, then by myself, at first in the inner city, where I occupied a whole house in the Hasenauerstrasse belonging to my uncle who lived in Dobling. These years in Vienna made Peiskam impossible for me. I was never a nature-lover, which one has to be to live at Peiskam. But in the end illhealth forced me out of the concert-halls and back to Peiskam. Because of my lungs I had to part from Vienna, which meant parting from everything that had any value for me at the time. I’ve never got over this parting. But if I’d stayed in Vienna I should have lived only for a very short time longer. Peiskam had been standing empty for almost twenty years since the death of our parents; it had been given over to nature. No one believed anybody could ever move in again. But one day I moved back. I threw open all the windows, letting in fresh air for the first time in years, and in time I made it habitable. But it’s remained an alien place to me, if I’m to be honest, right to the present day, I reflected. I’d had to give up Vienna and all it meant to me — which was literally everything — at the very moment when I believed I was inseparably linked with the city for ever, a city which admittedly I already hated and which I knew I’d always hated, but which I also loved like no other. Today I envy my sister only one thing: that she can live in Vienna. That’s what constantly rouses me to anger against Vienna - envy. It’s envy that prompts me to be so monstrously unjust and even contemptible in my behaviour towards my sister — envy because she can live in Vienna and because I know she leads an extremely pleasant and happy life there, and I don’t. I always think that if there is one place in the world where I would like to live, then that place is Vienna — there’s no other. But.I’ve put up a barrier between myself and Vienna, thus making it impossible for me to live there. I no longer deserve Vienna, I thought. And it was in Vienna that I first heard a piece by Mendelssohn Bartholdy,