Concrete (3 page)

right of domicile
in it, yet this right of domicile is for life and is not restricted to specific parts of the house. And if she cares to bring any of her dingy friends with her I can’t stop her. She spreads herself in my house as if she were sole owner and takes over from me. And I haven’t the strength to resist. To do so I should have to be an entirely different character, an entirely different person. And then I never know whether she’s going to stay two days or two hours, four weeks or six weeks, or even several months, because she doesn’t like city life any longer and has prescribed herself a cure of country air. It sickens me when she addresses me as
my dear little brother. My dear little brother,
she says,
I’m in the library now, not you
, and she actually demands that I leave the library immediately, even when I’ve only just entered it or have been there for some time before her. My
dear little brother, what good has it done you studying all that rubbish? It’s made you sick, almost crazy, a sad, comic figure.
That’s what she said on the last evening in order to hurt me.
For a year now you’ve been wittering on about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Where’s your great work?
she said.
You associate only with the dead. I associate with the living. That’s the difference between us. In the society I mix with there are living people, in yours there are only dead people. Because you’re afraid of the living
, she said,
because you’re not willing to make the least commitment, the commitment that has to be made if one wants to associate with living people. You sit here in your house, which is nothing but a morgue, and cultivate the society of the dead, of mother and father and our unfortunate sister and all your so-called great minds. It’s frightening!
In fact she’s right, it now seems to me; what she says is true. Over the years I’ve got completely stuck in this morgue, which is what my house is. In the morning I get up
in the morgue,
all day I go to and fro in the morgue, and late at night I go to bed in the morgue.
Your house!
she shouted in my face,
you mean your morgue!
She’s right, I now told myself, everything she says is true. I don’t associate with a living soul. I’ve even given up all contact with the neighbours. Unless I have to shop for groceries I no longer leave the house at all. And I hardly get mail because I no longer write letters. When I go out for a meal I flee from the restaurant almost before I’ve entered it or eaten my nauseating food. The result is that I hardly speak to anyone any longer, and from time to time I get the feeling that I can’t speak at all, that I’ve forgotten how to. Incredulously I practise speaking, to see whether I can still produce a sound, because most of the time I don’t even talk to Frau Kienesberger. She does her work, but I don’t give her any instructions, and sometimes I don’t even notice her before she’s gone again. Why did I in fact turn down my sister’s suggestion that I should go and stay with her in Vienna for a few weeks? I reacted brusquely as if to parry a malignant insult. What sort of person have I become since my parents died? I asked myself. I had sat down on the hall chair, and suddenly I felt frozen. The house wasn’t just empty, it was dead. It’s a morgue, I thought. But I can’t stand it at all if there are other people in it apart from myself. Again I saw my sister in a bad light. She had nothing but scorn and contempt for me. She made me look ridiculous wherever she could, every moment, and, when the occasion presented itself, in front of all the others. Thus, about a week ago, on Tuesday, when we visited the Minister (so-called — he’s Minister of Culture and Agriculture combined!), who had had his villa thoroughly restored and whom I find more repellent than all the others, she said to the assembled company in the so-called
blue drawing room (!), He’s been writing a book about Mendelssohn Bartboldy for the last ten years and still hasn’t even got the first sentence in his head.
This evoked uproarious laughter from all these brainless people sitting in their repulsively soft armchairs, and one of them, a specialist in internal medicine from the neighbouring town of Vockla-bruck, actually asked who Mendelssohn Bartholdy was. Whereupon my sister, with a devilish laugh, blurted out the word
composer
; which brought forth yet more sickening laughter from these people, who are all millionaires and all brainless, among them a number of seedy counts and senile barons who go about year in year out in leather shorts, the stench of which has been building up over decades, and occupy their pathetic days with gossip about society, illhealth and money. At that moment I wanted to leave
this company
, but one look from my sister was enough to stop me. I should have got up and left, I now reflected, but I remained seated and allowed myself to be subjected to this dreadful humiliation, which went on late into the night. It would after all have been impossible to leave my sister alone in this company, which suited her in every respect, since it consisted entirely of highly respected people with large, indeed vast amounts of money behind them and all kinds of breath-taking titles. Probably, I thought, she’s on to the scent of a business deal. After all, she did her biggest deals with these old counts and barons who, shortly before they died, often disposed of huge slices of their even huger estates in order to make things easier for themselves, and of course for their heirs. Naturally this kind of evening in this kind of house can bring my sister a deal running into millions, I thought. To me it means nothing, but of course I have to consider
her.
She crosses her legs and says something flattering and utterly insincere to some old baron and thereby earns herself a whole year’s high living. Even as a child my sister had an incredibly acute business sense. I remember how she would openly approach every visitor who turned up here and ask him for money. People found it cute in a child of seven or eight, though they ought to have been disgusted, as I was even then. Our parents naturally forbade it, but even at that time she took no notice of parental prohibitions. At the party I have just mentioned she ended up by prevailing on Baron Lederer — as he is called, though he is not a baron in fact, as I happen to know — to invite her to the Bristol on his next visit to Vienna. What must have struck everybody as a piece of impudence was in fact a superb move on her part; she’s always known just how to prepare the ground for her deals. And she’s always been successful. When she now says that after the death of our parents she was able to treble her fortune I am bound to assume that she trebled it not once, but probably three or four times, for she has always lied to me in matters of business, lest it might one day occur to me to demand something from her. She need have no fear of that. What I still have will suffice for as long as I live, because I shan’t live much longer, I told myself, getting up from my chair and going to the kitchen. Now that I’ve failed in my plan to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy early in the morning, I told myself, I can sit in the kitchen and have breakfast. As I sat in the kitchen, forcing myself to eat the bread and drink the tea, which had meanwhile gone cold — and I couldn’t be bothered to make fresh tea — I kept hearing my sister say, Do
come and stay with me in Vienna, just for a few weeks. You’ll see it will do you good. It’ll get you away from everything, take you out of yourself,
she emphasized more than once. The very idea of having to live with my sister in Vienna sickened me. And even if she’s one hundred per cent right, I’ll never do it. I detest Vienna. Just walking up and down the Karntner Strasse and the Graben a couple of times and having a look at the Kohlmarkt is enough to turn my stomach. For thirty years the same sights, the same people, the same imbecilities, the same baseness, meanness and mendacity. She had built a new
luxury penthouse,
she had told me, with a thousand square feet of floor space, on the top floor of her own house (on the Graben!). I must come and see it. I wouldn’t dream of it, I told myself as I chewed the stale bread. She came here, I told myself, not only, as she would have me believe, to look after a sick man, possibly a mortally sick man — which in fact I probably am — but to look after a madman, though she couldn’t bring herself to say it outright. She treats me just like a madman — only a madman, someone demented, is treated like that, I was forced to tell myself as I chewed my bread. In the end, however, she did say quite clearly,
My visit hasn’t done any good, I see. All the same, I’ve done a few good deals with your neighbours.
Those were her very words. Brazen, cold, calculating. You can’t be helped, no one can help you, she said during our last lunch together. You despise everything, she said, everything in the world. Everything that gives
me
pleasure you despise. And above all you despise yourself.
You accuse everybody of every possible crime. That’s your misfortune.
That’s what she said, and at first I didn’t appreciate the full enormity of it. Only now do I realize that she’d hit the nail on the head. I enjoy life, she said, though I have my sufferings too.

Everybody suffers, my dear little brother, but you despise life. That’s your misfortune, that’s why you’re ill, that’s why you’re dying. And you soon will die if you don’t change, she said. I could hear it clearly now, more clearly than when the words were uttered in that cold, unfeeling manner of hers. My sister the clairvoyant — absurd! She’s probably right though, that it would be a good thing to get away from Peiskam for a while, but I’ve no guarantee of being able to start my work anywhere else, let alone get on with it. Several times during dinner she exclaimed,
Mendelssohn Bartholdy!
as if to give herself some particularly intense amusement, probably because she knew precisely that each time it was bound to cut me to the quick. The fact is that well over ten years ago I told her I was thinking of writing something -1 didn’t say a book or an article, but
something
- on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At that time she’d never heard of Mendelssohn Bartholdy. It now drove her mad to hear me mention the name at every end and turn. She couldn’t bear to hear it any longer, at least from me. She forbade me ever to utter the name again in her presence. If Mendelssohn Bartholdy was to be mentioned at all, then it must be by her: that gave her pleasure because she knew, after trying it out for ten years, that it was bound to make me look ridiculous. Besides, she hates Mendelssohn’s music — that’s just like her.
How can one love Mendelssohn when there’s Mozart and Beethoven!
she once exclaimed. There would never have been any point in my explaining why I had chosen to work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. For years the name Mendelssohn Bartholdy has carried an emotive charge for both of us, bringing us into collision and sparking off all our dreadful, unhealthy and hence agonizing conflicts. You only love Mendelssohn Bartholdy because he’s a Jew, she said scornfully. She came out with this remark for the first time on her last visit, quite out of the blue, and perhaps it was true. She had turned up, ruined my work, and in the end almost ruined me. Women turn up, get you in their toils and ruin you. But hadn’t I sent for her? Hadn’t I suggested that she should come to Peiskam, for a few days? I’d sent her a telegram inviting her to Peiskam. Only for a few days though, not for months. How far gone I must have been to wire her! What I actually hoped for from her was help, not destruction. But it’s always the same: I beg and beseech her to help me, and she ruins me! And knowing this, I wired her. For the hundredth time I invited my destroyer to my house. It’s true that I wired to her for help: she didn’t come to Peiskam uninvited. The truth is always terrible, but it’s always better to stick to the truth than to resort to lies, to lying to oneself. But I hadn’t said in my telegram that she was to stay for months, because having my sister in my house for months is hell, and I told her so. I said, When you’re here for months it’s hell, and she laughed. My dear little brother, she said, you’d have gone to pieces if I’d left you alone again so soon. You probably wouldn’t have survived. I didn’t reply, perhaps because I realised at this moment that she was right. But what good is it now to argue with myself as to whether I sent for her or not? The facts are no longer in question. But the fact is that she ought to have left, simply cleared out of Peiskam, the moment I was capable of starting my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But a person like my sister isn’t perceptive enough to see when such a moment has come. And naturally I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that it had, that I was capable of writing my study or whatever of Mendelssohn, probably about a hundred and fifty pages or even more, and that it was time for her to clear out. So suddenly I hated her — she probably didn’t know why — and cursed her, and in this way I missed my chance of starting work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But I was probably ashamed to tell her that I had made her come to Peiskam only because of this work, which I’d not yet begun, that I was capable, in other words, of exploiting her as a mere tool for my intellectual product. The so-called man of the intellect constantly walks all over others, killing them and making corpses of them for his intellectual purposes. When the moment comes, such a man of the intellect, so called, would have thought nothing of sacrificing for his intellectual product the one person who had made it possible, misusing him and doing him to death in his devilish speculation. I’d thought I could misuse my sister in this way, but my calculation didn’t work out. On the contrary, I had committed the greatest folly by wiring to my sister in Vienna,
Come for a few days.
As it transpired she would have come to Peiskam that very day anyway, without being invited, because she was sick of Vienna, suddenly sickened by the continual parties and all these unendurably brainless people. She deserved it, because in recent months she’d been overdoing her socializing. I clapped my hands to my head when I realised that I could have saved myself the telegram, for had I not sent it I should probably have had the courage to tell her after a few days that it was time for her to clear out. As it was, I didn’t have the courage, since I’d asked her to come. It would after all have been unparalleled impertinence to ask her to come and then to throw her out of the house. In any case I knew her too well not to realise that if I’d told her to clear out she wouldn’t have dreamt of it. She’d have laughed in my face and then taken over the house completely. On the one hand we can’t be alone, people like us; on the other we can’t stand company. We can’t stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it’s totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time. Admittedly I’d always credited my sister with the ability to rescue me from the hell of being alone, and, to be honest, she often has succeeded in dragging me out of the black, hideous, revolting, stinking bog of loneliness, but lately she has no longer had the strength, and probably not the will either; perhaps she has doubted for too long whether I am really serious, as is proved, after all, by the way she continually teases me unmercifully about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. I hadn’t written anything for years — because of my sister, I always maintain, but perhaps also because I am no longer capable of writing. We’ll try anything in order to be able to start work on a study, absolutely anything, and we don’t recoil from even the most terrible things if they’ll make it possible for us to write such a study, even if they involve the greatest inhumanity, the greatest perversity, the gravest crime. Alone in Peiskam, surrounded by all these cold walls and with only the banks of fog to look at, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I had tried the most senseless experiments: for instance I had sat on the stairs which lead from the dining room to the first floor and declaimed a few pages of Dostoyevsky, from
The Gambler,
in the hope that this would help me to begin my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, but naturally this absurd experiment was a failure, ending with a prolonged shivering fit and with my tossing to and fro in bed for several hours, dripping with sweat. Or I would run out into the yard, breathe in and out deeply three times and then stretch out first the right arm, then the left, as far as possible. But this method too only led to exhaustion. I tried Pascal, then Goethe, then Alban Berg — in vain. If only I had a friend! I said to myself again, but I have no friend, and I know why I have no friend. A woman friend! I exclaimed, so loudly that the hall echoed, but I have no woman friend either; I quite deliberately have no woman friend, since that would mean giving up all my intellectual ambitions. One can’t have a woman friend and at the same time have intellectual ambitions if one’s general condition is as bad as mine. There’s no question of having a woman friend
and
intellectual ambitions! Either I have the one or I have the other; to have both is impossible. And I decided very early in favour of intellectual ambitions and against having a woman friend. I never wanted a male friend from the time I was twenty and suddenly began to think independently. The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others. And I’d always found it hard to have any relationship with another person — I wouldn’t think of using such an unappetizing word as
friendship
, a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one—I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but — what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought — needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick — impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word. I always believed that I could get on with my intellectual work if only I were completely alone, with no one else around. This proved to be mistaken, but it is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. We need someone for our work, and we also need no one. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one. In the last few days I have once more become aware of this totally absurd fact: we never know at any time whether we need someone or no one, or whether we need someone and at the same time no one, and because we never ever know what we really need we are unhappy, and hence unable to Start on our intellectual work when we wish and when it seems right. I believed
fervently
that I needed my sister in order to be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And then, when she was there, I knew that I didn’t need her, that I could start work only if she wasn’t there. But now she’s gone and I’m
really
unable to start. At first it was because she was there, and now it’s because she isn’t. On the one hand we overrate other people, on the other we underrate them; and we constantly overrate and underrate ourselves; when we ought to overrate ourselves we underrate ourselves, and in the same way we underrate ourselves when we ought to overrate ourselves. And above all we always overrate whatever we plan to do, for, if the truth were known, every intellectual work, like every other work, is grossly overrated, and there is no intellectual work in this generally overrated world which could not be dispensed with, just as there is no person, and hence no intellect, which cannot be dispensed with in this world: everything could be dispensed with if only we had the strength and the courage. Probably I lack extreme concentration, I thought, and I went and sat in the ground floor room which my sister, for as long as I can remember, has always called the
salon —
which is dreadfully tasteless, for there’s no place for a
salon
in an old country house like this. But it’s just like her to use this designation for the ground floor room. She uses the word
salon
all too readily, but of course in Vienna she really has
a salon
— she actually runs a
salon,
though the
way
she runs it would be a subject for a large dissertation if I cared to write one. So I stretched out my legs in the downstairs room which my sister calls
the salon —
every time I hear the word it makes me want to vomit. I stretched them out as far as possible and tried to concentrate on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But naturally it’s quite wrong to begin a work of this sort with
On the third of February 1809
… I hate books and articles which begin with a date of birth. Altogether I hate books and articles which adopt a biographical and chronological approach; that strikes me as the most tasteless and at the same time the most unintellectual procedure. How shall I begin? It’s the simplest thing in the world, I told myself, and I can’t understand why this simplest thing in the world eludes me. Perhaps I’ve made too many notes, written down too much about Mendelssohn Bartholdy on these hundreds and thousands of bits of paper that are piled up on my desk? Perhaps I’ve done too much work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, my favourite composer? I’d often wondered whether I hadn’t overdone my research on Mendelssohn Bartholdy and whether this was the reason why I was now incapable of starting my work on him. A subject that has been overworked can no longer be realised on paper, I told myself. I had masses of evidence to prove this. I won’t list all the projects I didn’t succeed with because I’d overworked them in my head. On the other hand, Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a subject requiring years, if not decades, of research. If I say I’ve got the whole article, essay, book, or whatever in my head, then it follows that I can’t realise it on paper. That’s how it is. Is this the case with Mendelssohn Bartholdy? It almost drives me crazy, indeed demented, to think that I might have overworked the subject, and that it was therefore pointless, on the one hand, to telegraph my sister, as a rescuing angel so to speak, and, on the other, to throw her out of the house, and so on. I’d spent two weeks in Hamburg and two in London. It was in Venice, curiously enough, that I’d found the most interesting documents relating to Mendelssohn Bartholdy. To ensure myself the best possible protection I had at once withdrawn to the Bauer-Griinwald, to a room which had a view of the church of San Marco across the red-tiled roofs, and studied these documents, which I had borrowed from the archbishop’s palace. In Turin I had found a number of Mendelssohn autographs on Carl Friedrich Zelter, and in Florence a whole pile of letters written to his Cecile. I made my own copies of all these texts or had them copied and brought the copies back to Peiskam. But these journeys in pursuit of Mendelssohn took place years ago, some of them more than ten years ago. I set aside a room to house this Mendelssohn material and finally managed to catalogue it all, often spending whole weeks in this room (which is above the green room on the first floor!). It was not long before my sister christened it the Mendelssohn Room. At first, I believe, she actually spoke of the Mendelssohn Room with genuine respect, but in the end only with scorn and contempt, in order to hurt me. Only after some years did I begin moving various items which seemed important from the Mendelssohn Room to my desk, always hoping and believing that the moment was not far away when I could begin my work. But I was wrong. My preparations have now been going on for years, for more than a decade, as I have said. Perhaps, it occurs to me, I ought not to have interrupted them by doing other things, perhaps I shouldn’t have begun anything on Schönberg or Reger, or even contemplated the Nietzsche sketch: all these diversions, instead of preparing me for Mendelssohn, simply took me further and further away from him. And if only these subjects, of which I can no longer give a complete list, had at least led to something! But they only proved to me again and again how hard it is to produce any intellectual work at all, even of the briefest and apparently most peripheral kind — though obviously there can’t be any such thing as a peripheral intellectual work, not to my mind at least. All these attempts to write on Schönberg, Reger and so on had basically been merely distractions from my main subject; moreover, they had all been failures, a fact which could only weaken my morale. It’s a good thing I destroyed them all, all these attempts which eventually got stuck in the initial stages and would now cause me profound embarrassment had they ever been published. But I’ve always had a sound instinct about what should be published and what should not, having always believed that publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. We publish only to satisfy our craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money, which in my case, thank God, is ruled out by the circumstances of my birth. Had I published my essay on Schönberg I shouldn’t dare to be seen in the street any longer; the same would be true if I’d published my work on Nietzsche, although that was not a