Extinction (15 page)

yet real, splendid yet terrible. This dining table undoubtedly saw history in the making, and not just local history. But dining tables don’t talk, I said. Which is all to the good, for if they did they’d very soon be smashed to pieces by those who have to sit at them. I remember sitting at this table with altogether eight different archbishops and cardinals and at least a dozen archdukes, I told Gambetti, and this naturally made a big impression on me as a child. And with many grand society ladies (I don’t recall their names), who came to visit us from Vienna, Paris, and London. And who all spent the night at Wolfsegg, in rooms that were normally kept locked but were opened up specially for guests, big, stuffy rooms with dark wallpaper and heavy drapes, so heavy that you have to be very strong to be able to draw them in the evening or draw them back in the morning. In these guest rooms, which are all on the north side, I always felt scared. Anyone who stayed in them even briefly was sure to become ill. But guests were always accommodated on the north side, in rooms that were deliberately furnished in this uninviting manner and kept at such a low temperature because guests were not meant to stay longer than was absolutely necessary. Nobody was invited to stay unless there was a particular reason, unless the family wanted something from them, some benefit that couldn’t be obtained in any other way. Guests who had spent the night in these rooms invariably showed signs of having caught a chill, turning up for breakfast with scarves around their necks and, what was most striking, usually coughing. Yet in spite of this they kept coming back, because they found Wolfsegg so fascinating. They couldn’t wait to be invited back. My grandparents used to invite lots of guests, my parents far fewer, as they didn’t have such a craving for company. My father didn’t care for company at all, and my mother at first had too many inhibitions and hang-ups about all these people, who in her opinion came to Wolfsegg only to spy out her social errors and report them wherever such intelligence could harm her. And for the first ten years she didn’t invite my father’s friends; she invited only hers, from whom she had much less to fear, with the result that all these frightful people from the so-called educated middle class descended on us, people who unfailingly make you cringe, Gambetti, especially if they come from Wels and Vöcklabruck, from Linz and Salzburg, and fancy they are a cut above the rest of humanity. I always found such guests repugnant.
On the other hand, Wolfsegg was very new and strange to my mother, not her scene at all, in fact, and she would very soon have been utterly isolated beside my not exactly exciting father. She’d have been bored to death. Wolfsegg would very soon have crushed her, the
wife who came up in the world
, as my father used to say jocularly in the early years of their marriage. She’d have simply curled up and died, as they say. So from a certain moment on, a moment that was crucial to her survival, she started dragging her own sort up to Wolfsegg and, as my father put it,
throwing it open to the proletariat
. She was entitled to come to her own rescue, I told Gambetti, even if we couldn’t stand the means she employed. In the main house alone there are more than forty rooms, though I’ve never done a precise count. We children weren’t allotted rooms of our own until we were twelve, and interestingly enough my brother and I both had rooms on the south side, while my sisters’ rooms were on the north side. They were forever catching colds, and it’s more than likely that they owe their susceptibility to colds to being exiled the north side. The girls were always exiled on the north side, as if to punish them for being girls. But that’s only my surmise, I said. People who grow up on the north side are at a disadvantage later on, I told Gambetti, and remain at a disadvantage all their lives. The north side was unpleasant even in summer, as it never warmed through. The walls at Wolfsegg never warm through, whether they’re north-facing or south-facing. They’re always cold, and it’s dangerous to get too close to them. Even the third-floor windows at Wolfsegg are more than six feet tall, and as children we always had difficulty in opening them. We had to get help if we wanted to let in the fresh air. Our parents had a servants’ bell by their beds, but of course we didn’t. When we were children there were no bathrooms on the third floor, where we not only slept but spent most of the day, since our rooms served as both bedrooms and studies. If we had to answer the call of nature in the night, we used the china chamber pots, as had our grandparents, for whom this was a matter of course. And these, I must tell you, were routinely emptied next morning from one of the windows of the third-floor corridor. In the evening we had to take our washing water up to our rooms in big stoneware jugs, as there was no water supply on the third floor. The dirty water was also thrown from a window. On the ground seventy feet or more below the windows
from which we emptied our chamber pots and washbasins, the grass was more luxuriant than anywhere else. The Wolfsegg children soon overcame any fear they had and got used to feeling exposed in this huge, icy building. Visiting children were terribly scared and screamed if they were left alone even for a moment, but we were not in the least scared. I think it was when we were four or five that we were banned from our mother’s room, first to a shared room, of course, but banned all the same. After we had washed she would come in and kiss us good night. Johannes always wanted to be kissed good night, but I didn’t. I hated this good-night kiss but couldn’t evade it. Even now my mother haunts me in my dreams with her good-night kiss, I told Gambetti. She bends over me, and I am completely powerless as she presses her lips firmly to my cheek, as if to punish me. After kissing us good night she would put the light out, but she didn’t leave the room at once. She would stay by the door for a while and wait for us to turn on our sides and fall asleep. Even as a child I had very acute hearing and knew that she was standing listening behind the closed door before going down to the second floor, where she and my father slept. She even distrusted her children; I don’t know why. She suffered from an immense, compulsive distrust that couldn’t be cured or allayed and that now strikes me, I must say, as quite perverse and unnatural. All the rooms at Wolfsegg were whitewashed. In the third-floor rooms the drapes were dark green, almost black; in the second-floor rooms they were dark red and almost black. On the third floor, where we had our rooms, they were made of heavy linen; on the second floor they were of heavy velvet, imported from Italy by my paternal grandmother before the turn of the century. For as far back as I can remember these drapes were never washed, which means that they were never taken down. When we were doing our homework, my brother and I, and later our sisters, were locked in our rooms until we had finished it, and only in the most urgent cases, when we couldn’t get any further with it, were we allowed to call for help. But Mother didn’t help us; she always said we must find the answers to our problems ourselves. This procedure was not meant to be educative: it merely suited her convenience. Father never troubled about our schoolwork. He would simply be angry if we came home with bad marks. If one of us got a five or a six (the lowest mark was still
a six when we were at school) he would tell us that we were absolutely
unworthy
of him. Two sixes inevitably entailed repeating a year, but although we often got one, we never got two. Our rooms on the third floor were heated only in exceptional circumstances, when the temperature fell to ten degrees below freezing, though we always had more wood than we knew what to do with. And even then we had to carry the wood up to our rooms and light the stoves ourselves, as the servants weren’t allowed to carry firewood up to the third floor for us. This was on my father’s orders, because he wanted to bring us up
tough
. Gambetti did not understand this use of the word
tough
, and I tried to explain it to him. In fact these attempts to
toughen
us, to give us what my father called a
tough upbringing
, didn’t toughen us at all but made us
exceptionally susceptible to every possible ailment
, though less so than our sisters, who grew up on the north side. Father’s toughening methods only made us unusually sensitive and achieved the opposite of the desired effect, making us far sicklier than those who were spared such treatment, far sicklier than the village children, whose rooms were properly heated, even though their families were poor, while we were rolling in wealth. Wolfsegg, I told Gambetti, was dominated by the most dreadful avarice, and my mother was the most avaricious of them all. I’ve often thought that avarice was her only real passion. Leaving aside the small fortune she spent on clothes, I have to say that she was the cheapest person I’ve ever known. She never treated herself to anything. Only the most basic food could be cooked in the Wolfsegg kitchen, and it had to be home produced, not bought in the village. This was why we always ate so much pork and beef. At Wolfsegg we had blood sausage all the time, and all kinds of porridge, pasta, oatmeal, and puddings. And of course egg dishes galore. Only when some important visitor came did they put on a show; the kitchen would then go into top gear and produce an abundance of matchless delicacies. My mother was always anxious to impress outsiders and preoccupied with what others thought of her, how they assessed her, and she naturally wanted to be well thought of, well assessed. In the kitchen they could cook superbly, I exclaimed to Gambetti, but most of the time they produced boring dishes, which came around again every few days. I often wondered why we employed three gardeners, since we never had decent vegetables or any other reasonable garden produce,
though it would have been so easy to serve good, tasty vegetables prepared in various ways, and delicious salads. I happen to be very fond of vegetables and salads. But no, all our vegetables and lettuces were sold: they never appeared on the table but were taken by the gardeners to the markets in Wels or Vöcklabruck, as this brought in a profit. There was no need for my father to suffer from stomach complaints, I said. The cooks and their assistants, as I have said before, were kept busy most of the time canning and pickling, and even making sausages, because the slaughtering was done at Wolfsegg and we ate only home-slaughtered meat. They certainly made the best blood sausage I’ve ever had. A butcher would come up from the village to slaughter the cows, calves, and pigs, which were then neatly dressed in our own butchery next to the Farm. It was a pleasure to see the butcher at work. As small children, of course, we found it repulsive and sickening, but later I came to regard butchery as one of the supreme arts, on a par with that of the surgeon, if not even more admirable. As small children we thought it natural for animals to be slaughtered and dressed, and were soon no longer scared by it. What had at first seemed repulsive came to be seen as entirely necessary. Butchery is a difficult art, and when it is done with consummate skill it deserves our admiration. From an early age country children are accustomed to dealing with life and death, once they’ve gotten over the first shock. It soon ceases to be scary, because it’s not sensational, merely natural. At the Farm we had a curing room in the attic, I told Gambetti. This expression amused him, and I had to repeat it for him several times. In our curing room hundreds of sausages and pieces of smoked meat hung from the ceiling. Around the inner courtyard of the main house, where the greater part of family life takes place, I told Gambetti, there is a colonnade at each floor level. That is where I always clean my shoes. At this remark Gambetti laughed again as he poured some wine into my glass. And in this courtyard, in winter, we used to keep the sick or injured deer that the huntsmen found and brought to Wolfsegg for us. The Huntsmen’s Lodge is in front of the Children’s Villa but in back of the Gardeners’ House, I told Gambetti. A bird’s-eye view of Wolfsegg is like this: high above the village is the house, and in front of it the park, roughly oval in shape, extending to the east for about a hundred sixty or a hundred eighty yards, as far as the boundary wall. Set
in the wall is a high stone gateway, through which the farm vehicles pass. Built onto the wall at the right is the Orangery, and opposite this is the right wing of the Home Farm, which is built in the shape of a horseshoe and is altogether two hundred fifty yards long. In back of the Farm, directly to the east, is the Gardeners’ House, in back of this the Huntsmen’s Lodge, and a little farther on the Children’s Villa that I love so much. This was built about two hundred years ago, in the style of the Florentine villas you can still see on the way to Fiesole. Of course it’s less ornate, but it’s quite extraordinary for Austria. Yet you can’t say it’s out of place in the Austrian landscape; on the contrary, it’s more attractive than anything else in the landscape. It may sound odd, but it was built for children. It has a miniature theater, where puppet plays used to be put on. The children wrote the plays, little comedies of the kind that young people can easily think up, with sad endings that on reflection weren’t really all that sad. And naturally in verse. Hundreds of children’s costumes are stored in the villa. Today the building is locked up, and I don’t think anyone has set foot in it for years. Some of the windows have been broken, probably by children from the village, but the roof doesn’t let in the rain,
or at least not yet
. I’ve always wanted to restore it, I told Gambetti, but my family wouldn’t countenance spending money on
anything so stupid
. My brother and sisters and I often put on shows there but were then forbidden to because we should do
more studying and less playacting
. It’s a pity that the Children’s Villa is now dead, I said, as it’s the most beautiful building for miles around. You can’t imagine how charming it is, Gambetti, in a part of the world that is not rich in charming buildings, attractive houses, and architectural gaiety. Perhaps one day I’ll get my way with the family and restore the villa. Then I’ll have the local children put on a comedy for the opening. My greatest delight was to watch the performances given by the local children, all wearing costumes that were centuries old and so colorful, so imaginative, so artistic, so truly poetic. Yet as always, I told Gambetti, whatever is