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Authors: Thomas Bernhard

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Concrete (8 page)

BOOK: Concrete
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Now I was following her suggestion and suddenly taking decisive action. I’m actually leaving, I thought. But for me to arrive at this decision, and finally get myself to Palma, it was necessary for her to have left first. I was now pretending to her that it was my idea, my brainwave, my decision, to go to Palma. In doing so I was lying not only to her — which of course was impossible, because she could see through me — but most of all to myself. You’re mad and always will be, I thought. On the day of my departure there were still twelve degrees of frost at eight in the morning. On the previous day Frau Kienesberger had been, and I had discussed all that was necessary with her, telling her above all that she mustn’t let the house get cold. She was to put the heating on three times a week, though not too high, I told her, for there was nothing so dreadful as returning to an old house that was completely cold. I didn’t know when I should be back, I said. I thought I should be back in three months, two months, four months, but I told Frau Kienesberger three or four weeks. I gave her instructions to clean the windows at last when the cold had become less severe, to polish the furniture, do the washing and so on. I particularly asked her to tidy up the yard and to clear away any snow that fell as quickly as possible so that people would think I was at home and not away. For this purpose I had fitted a so-called timeclock to a lamp in the top room on the west side so that it would be on for several hours in the morning and evening. This is always my practice when I go away. I had been lecturing Frau Kienesberger to such an extent that I was suddenly horrified by myself, for although I had actually broken off my dreadful torrent of words I could still hear myself telling her how my shirts were to be ironed and placed one on top of the other, how she was to stack the mail, which the postman always throws in through the open window on the east side, in the small room next to the right of the entrance, how the stairs were to be polished and the carpets beaten, and how she was to remove all the cobwebs behind the curtains and in the folds of the curtains and so on. She was not to tell the neighbours where I had gone, as that was nobody’s business. I told her I should possibly return the next day, and in any case I might return at any time. She was to strip the beds and air the mattresses and put fresh linen on them all and so on. And she must never under any circumstances touch anything on my desk, but I had said that thousands of times and she had always obeyed this instruction. Frau Kienesberger is really the only person I’ve spoken to for years, I tell myself, even though that’s a gross exaggeration which can be immediately disproved, but I feel that she is the only one with whom I have any extensive verbal contact over long periods, indeed very long periods, often months on end. She lives with her husband, a deaf mute (!), in a little one-storey house at the edge of the wood, not far from the village, and she only has a ten-minute walk when she comes to me. She herself has a speech impediment, which ensures that she doesn’t gossip, but she’s not a gossip by nature. She’s been coming to me for fourteen years, and in these fourteen years there has never been any disagreement between us. Everybody knows how important that is. And I often think she’s the one reliable person I have — there’s nobody else. And perhaps she senses this or even knows it. Not that I am continually giving her orders or telling her how to conduct herself: on the contrary I seldom have any particular wishes; most of the time I leave her entirely alone, and if she makes a noise while she’s working, because she can’t help making some noise, I leave the house for hours, or simply withdraw to the huntsman’s lodge. It would be a calamity, I reflect, if Frau Kienesberger failed to turn up one day for whatever reason, and at any moment a reason might suddenly crop up; but she probably knows as well as I do what I am to her and what she is to me, and so we have the most favourable relationship, in which we can both say we benefit equally from each other. She has three children and sometimes tells the story of their lives as she stands in the hall - how they are developing, what illnesses they have, what torments they have to endure at school, what they wore when they went sledging, when they go to sleep and when they wake up, what they get to eat on Tuesday and on Saturday, and how they react to everything. On such occasions 1 can’t help reflecting that mothers observe their children intensely if they are mothers like Frau Kienesberger, and they cosset them neither too much nor too little. She brings her children up by never thinking about their upbringing; she practises to perfection what others have to work out in their passion for theorizing, and where they are bound to fail she never does. By contrast with all my earlier domestic helps, who without exception were nothing but clumsy sluts, she has the gentlest manner. Where is that still to be found, I wonder? Looking out of the window, I am forced to conclude that I must wear my fur coat on the journey, together with warm underclothing and long woollen socks, for nobody catches cold and immediately becomes ill as easily as I do. Since my sarcoidosis developed I can’t afford to catch a cold, although I get a heavy cold three or four times a year, and so my life is always in danger. As a result of the prednisolone my resistance is virtually nil. When once I’ve caught a cold it takes me weeks to throw it off. And so there’s nothing I dread so much as catching cold. Even a slight draught is enough to make me take to my bed for weeks, and so at Peiskam I live most of the time in fear of catching cold. This fear almost verges on madness and is probably one of the reasons why I find it so hard to begin any protracted intellectual work; when so many fears are concentrated in one person, everything about him constantly breaks down. I’ll wear my fur coat and the warmest underclothes and the warmest socks, because I have to get to the station, and in Munich I have to get from the station to the airport, and who knows, I said to myself, what it will be like in Palma? When I had left Palma eighteen months before, in November, there had been driving snow, and I had been frozen through and through. When I got back to Peiskam I spent two months in bed, and the effect of going to Palma to recuperate was cancelled out at a stroke by my catching cold. Instead of coming back to Peiskam refreshed and fortified as I had hoped and expected, I came back looking like death. The people who saw me at the time didn’t know me, in the worst sense of the phrase, not in the sense that I looked much better and more normal than when I had left for Palma. The fur coat and the fur cap and the warm English scarf, I said to myself. Twelve degrees of frost! I was alarmed. But if there is the right contrast, I told myself, if it’s twelve degrees above zero in Palma and not twelve degrees below as it is here — perhaps even eighteen or twenty degrees, as is quite possible in Palma at this time of the year, late January — I shall profit from the change all the more. I deliberately said profit from and not enjoy, as would have been normal, in order to keep the extravagance of my desires under some measure of control. If it’s eighteen or twenty degrees in Palma, it will be to my profit, I said, adopting precisely the intonation used by my sister, whose pronunciation of the word
profit
is quite incomparable. In saying the word I almost reproduced the intonation she uses when speaking of her business deals. Oh, that’ll bring in another tidy profit! she often says, without of course going into the actual amount of the profit, let alone the method by which she makes it. And if it suddenly gets too warm in Palma, I told myself, I’ll carry my fur coat on my arm. It was now out of the question for me to leave simply wearing a greatcoat, as I had at first intended. And so I put the greatcoat back in the wardrobe, having got it out the day before, and took out my fur coat. As I did so I thought, How many fur coats I used to have! But I’ve gradually given them all away, forcibly got rid of them, as I tell myself, because each of them was associated with some town I’d visited. One was bought in Warsaw, another in Cracow, a third in Split, a fourth in Trieste - on each occasion it was when the weather had become unexpectedly cold and I’d thought I should become ill or even freeze to death without a fur coat. I gave a lot of these fur coats to Frau Kienesberger. The only one I’d kept was one that I’d bought twenty-two years ago in Fiume. This one was my favourite. I shook it out and laid it on the chest of drawers. What a long time it is since I wore this coat! I thought. It wasn’t as valuable as the others I’d given away. It’s heavy, but it’s my favourite. It’s been in the wardrobe for years, and it smells as though it had, I said to myself. We are attached to certain garments and reluctant to part with them, even when they almost fall off us because they’re so threadbare and shabby, just because they bring to mind some journey, some particularly enjoyable journey, some particularly enjoyable experience. In fact I could tell a pleasant story about every one of the garments I still possess; most of them I’ve got rid of — given them away or burnt them. I haven’t kept any which were associated with some sad or dreadful experience; I parted with them as quickly as possible, because I couldn’t bear to open the wardrobe and be reminded of something dreadful, by a scarf, for instance, even if it was an expensive one. For a long time I’ve kept only garments which remind me of enjoyable, or at least of pleasant occasions, but among those I still have are a number which bring back feelings of great happiness, the sight of which, I have to admit, can still make me feel supremely happy years later, even decades later. But I could write a whole book on the subject. If we lose someone we love, we always keep some garment that belonged to them, at least as long as it retains their smell, in fact as long as we live, because we go on believing that the garment brings back their smell, even when this has ceased to be anything but pure imagination. For this reason I still have one of my mother’s coats, though this is a secret I’ve never divulged to anyone, not even to my sister. She would have simply made fun of it. My mother’s coat hangs in a wardrobe which is otherwise empty and which I keep firmly locked. However, never a week goes by but I open the wardrobe and smell the coat. I slipped my fur coat on and found that it fitted me
—still
fitted me, I had to say after looking at myself in the mirror, for in the last few years, so it seemed to me, I’d gone down to about half my previous weight, if not less. There had been the fresh attack of sarcoidosis, the repeated colds I caught every year, the general chronic debility resulting from them, and then the constant alternation between being bloated by too much prednisolone and losing weight through having to cut down or discontinue the medication. At the moment my weight was reduced, and I was waiting to become bloated again, for I had started taking large doses of prednisolone two weeks earlier. I was now taking eight tablets a day. I realised that this method of survival couldn’t be kept up for much longer. But I suppressed the thought — suppressed it although it was there all the time, suppressed it because it was there all the time. I’ve got used to it. Naturally the fur coat is unfashionable, I thought, standing in front of the mirror, but the very fact that it was unfashionable pleased me. In fact I’ve never worn fashionable clothes; I’ve always detested them and still do. The important thing is that it keeps me warm, I told myself; how it looks is really of no importance. It has to serve its purpose; nothing else matters. No, I’ve never had anything fashionable on my person, just as I’ve never had anything fashionable in my head. People were more inclined to say of me, he’s old-fashioned than he’s fashionable or even he’s
modern —
such a repulsive word. I’d always cared extremely little for public opinion because I was always obsessed with my own opinion and hence had no time at all for the public’s. I’ve never gone along with it, I don’t go along with it today, and I never shall. I’m interested in what people say, but obviously it mustn’t be taken in any way seriously. As far as I am concerned this is the best way forward. I can already see myself getting off the plane in Palma, with the warm African wind in my face, I said to myself. I shall drape the fur coat round my shoulders, and suddenly my feet will be light and my mind clear, and so on — I shall no longer feel this hopelessness which gnaws away at both mind and body. Of course it’s possible that everything will turn out to be a cruel deception. How often that has happened to me! I’ve gone away for months and returned after two days. The more luggage I’ve taken, the sooner I’ve been back home again. Having taken enough luggage for two months, I’ve been back in two days, and so on. And I’ve made myself look ridiculous, especially in front of Frau Kienesberger - having told her I’d be away for months when in fact it was only for two days, having told her it would be for six months when it proved to be only for three weeks. On such occasions I felt ashamed of myself and went about Peiskam with my head low, but I was ashamed only in front of Frau Kienesberger, nobody else, because in the meantime I had become supremely indifferent to everyone else. I had no explanation to offer, for the word
despair
would have been just as ludicrous as the word
mad.
I couldn’t expect somebody like Frau Kienesberger to take it seriously. It’s hard enough to convince oneself by using such words, let alone a difficult person like Frau Kienesberger, who is anything but simple; people are always talking about simple folk, yet nobody is more difficult, more complicated indeed, than these so-called simple folk. One can’t expect them to take words like
despair
and
mad
seriously. So-called simple people are in reality the most complicated people, and I find it increasingly difficult to get on with them. I have of late almost ceased having any dealings with them. It’s beyond my capacity: I can’t expect simple people to take me seriously any longer. In fact I’ve entirely given up all dealings with simple people, who, as I’ve already said, are the most difficult people of all, because such dealings require too great an effort, and I’m not prepared to lie to them in order to gain their understanding. It’s become clear to me also that it’s the simplest people who make the highest demands, and I’ve now reached the stage where I can no longer afford them. I can hardly afford myself any longer. I accuse my sister of going away for several weeks or for months and then perhaps turning up again a few hours later, and yet I’m no different — I intend to be away for ages, and two days later I’m back again. With all the devastating consequences that this entails. We’re both like this: for decades we’ve been accusing each other of being impossible, and yet we can’t give up being impossible, erratic, capricious and vacillating. This is what makes up our existence, my sister’s and mine, and always has; this is what has always got on other people’s nerves and yet has never ceased to fascinate them and make them seek our company — fundamentally because we’re capricious, erratic, vacillating and unreliable. This is what has always attracted others. People seek the society of others who are exciting, disconcerting and volatile, who are never the same from one moment to the next and usually change complexion completely. And all our lives my sister and I have been asking ourselves what it is we really want, without ever being able to find the answer. All our lives we’ve been looking for something, in the end for everything imaginable, and never finding it, always wanting to achieve everything and not succeeding, or else achieving it and losing it the selfsame moment. It’s an age-old inheritance, it seems to me, coming neither from our father nor from our mother, but from generations back. But Frau Kienesberger is not even surprised now if she finds me back home unpacking my bags two days after I’ve gone away for three or four months. She’s no longer surprised by anything to do with me. What a simple person and yet what an infinitely vigilant seismograph! I reflect. But suddenly everything is in favour of Palma and my work: I’ve got to get out, away from Peiskam, in fact until — I hardly dare say it, though I do dare to think it —

BOOK: Concrete
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