Extinction (29 page)

son-in-law she could imagine and the happiest daughter anyone could imagine. She went over to the wine cork manufacturer, showered him with kisses in front of the whole company, embraced Caecilia, and then asked us all to go down to the park. The weather being fine, a large number of tables had been placed on the lawn, and soon the gardeners and huntsmen were mixing with their so-called betters. Many villagers had come up to join in the celebration and did so without restraint. Again it was the gardeners and the miners that I found most appealing. The wind band had taken up position on a newly constructed platform and worked its way gradually through its whole repertoire, which it repeated every hour. It was said that the sound of revelry could be heard as far away as Atzbach, nearly four miles to the east. My brother was noticeably reserved during the proceedings and soon withdrew, not to be seen again. From an early age he had disliked such festivities, but his reasons were different from mine. Mine had to do with the superficial and ultimately pathetic character of such celebrations, which I could not endure for more than a few hours, but his had to do with his health. On such occasions he would immediately develop a headache. All his life he suffered from headaches, just like my father, whose headaches spoiled his enjoyment of every thing. My brother is eminently suited to marriage, I thought, but he still hasn’t married and I can’t think why. He definitely needs an heir; my mother’s always pressing him to marry and constantly quarrels with him on the subject. I kept thinking about this throughout the wedding. Of course he’ll get married one day, I thought, before it’s too late, in haste, to a grocer’s daughter from Wels or Vöcklabruck or a nurse from Salzburg, or an innkeeper’s daughter from Unterrach or Strasswalchen. Men like my brother wait till they’re fifty and time’s running out; then they close their eyes and take the plunge, so placing the crown of life on the old fools they’ve become. Up to this point they let every chance slip by, all the best matches, as they say, failing to capitalize on their so-called adventures or regularize one of their relationships. My brother doubtless thinks that his bed belongs not just to one woman but to several, and even if it doesn’t belong to many, it never belongs to the present occupant, but to the next, who is then expelled from it in her turn, out of fear of lifelong imprisonment, I thought. Silly Caecilia has married, my brother was probably thinking to himself, but I won’t marry
until I’m over fifty, whereupon he probably clapped his hand to his forehead and retired with the resultant headache. Like his father, he’s taken to wearing old hats, I thought, old jackets, old trousers, and old shoes. Everything he wears has to be old. Like most men of his class and background, he regards this as the best way to demonstrate that he belongs to this class and this background; he thereby conforms with the taste of the upper crust, of which he has always considered himself part. Having bought himself a hat, he exposes it to the rain, leaving it on a peg on the balcony of the Huntsmen’s Lodge for a few weeks until it is weatherworn, then places it over a pan of boiling water and puts it on when it is still hot, so that it will take on the shape of his head. He immerses his trousers in water for a short time, then hangs them from the window in the wind before wearing them. He does the same with his jackets, and when he buys new shoes he first takes a good walk through the garden mud so that they will not look absolutely new. For nobody wears new shoes, nobody wears new jackets or hats. Everything new is utterly despised and detested, and that is as it should be. And the same applies to new houses, new churches, new roads, new inventions, and of course new people. To everything new, in fact, including of course new ideas. Over the centuries this society has become accustomed to despising and detesting everything new, and in this way it has become old and ceased to renew itself. My poor brother, I often used to say to myself—he’s been completely devoured by what he regards as the one true society that can confer salvation. There’s nothing left of him to remind one of his individual personality. Like his father he leads the same life as millions of other products of this old society, who are all exact replicas of himself. Everything he has on him and around him has to be old and weatherworn, I thought—except his car, which has to be the newest and best, and hence the most expensive. He has made a habit of buying a new car each year. Since my mother travels in it, having no car of her own and not even a driver’s license, she has always insisted on its being the best and most beautiful car available. And this best and most beautiful car, the
Jaguar
, has been their undoing, I thought. Their car cult has proved fatal. Though normally a quiet man, he was quite uncontrolled when driving, a wielder of power, something he could never be outside the car, thanks to Mother, who saw herself as the only legitimate wielder
of power. But in the
Jaguar
Johannes wielded the power, and she had to submit. He may not have decided on the direction they took, but he decided on the speed, while she sat terrified in the passenger’s seat, unable to do anything about it—which naturally went against the grain, as they say. My father loved the tractor, not the car, which was too light for him, and he never missed a chance to get up on one of our McCormicks, even when he had no reason to. Sitting on a tractor, he was the happiest man in the world. And the most independent. On the tractor he was himself, he said, and sad though this seemed, I believed him.
I’ve reached the point where I can be alone and happy only on the tractor
, he once told me. Johannes, on the other hand, often said that he had to get into the car in order to be able to breathe freely and pursue his thoughts, whatever he meant by that. It depressed me to hear him say this, but I have to accept it as the truth. My brother’s getting more and more like my father, I often thought. Recently he’s become so much like him, I reflected at the wedding, that it won’t be long before
he is our father
. His gait, his posture, and his voice are getting more and more like my father’s. He’ll soon be an exact replica of my father in posture, gait, and temperament, and hence in mental attitude. The firstborn son is predestined, as it were, to be the father, and he soon will be, I thought—it’s only a matter of time, a very short time. Sometimes when my brother’s speaking, I thought, I have a feeling that it’s my father speaking; sometimes when I hear my brother’s step I have a feeling that it’s my father’s step; sometimes when my brother is thinking I have a feeling that it’s my father thinking. In Johannes my parents got the son they had wished for, I thought. They couldn’t have wished for a better or more suitable son. He got closer and closer to the ideal image they had always had of a son, at the same speed as I moved farther and farther away from it. This was why they came to love him more and more and increasingly despised, detested, and abhorred me, though they dared not acknowledge the truth to themselves, given the many
self-protective devices
that were built into their minds. The image is almost complete, I thought at Caecilia’s wedding, almost completely identical with the model they adopted as their ideal image, though admittedly only with hindsight, as they say. My brother let himself be brought up to become the ideal image, but I always resisted such an imposition. I had never been interested in embodying an ideal image conceived by my parents. I was unwilling to conform to any model and
thus unable to embody any such image. Johannes could be molded and
knocked into shape
, as they say, but I could not. And they began this molding process very early; when the infant clay was no more than three or four years old they realized that it could be shaped into their ideal image, and so they proceeded to mold Johannes and knock him into shape. They met with no resistance from him, but from me they met with the utmost resistance. Right from the beginning I succeeded in evading the parental sculptors; I at once repulsed them and would not allow them near me. They molded Johannes to their liking and were delighted with the result, not realizing that this entailed his ultimate destruction and annihilation. They ruthlessly transformed his
natural head
into an
ideal head
and thus destroyed it in what seems to me the vilest and most shameless fashion, making of him what they were unable to make of me,
an ideal blockhead
, who in due course would become what they longed for, their own creature, who was entirely complaisant and acquiesced in their intentions right down to the minutest detail. My brother, I thought, is completely in thrall to my parents, above all to my mother, having offered no resistance and found it easier to yield than to defend himself against every parental enormity and indignity. Only behind the wheel of the Jaguar was he allowed to give free rein to his thoughts. On these
nightmare journeys
, as my mother called them, he was free, but once out of the car, the poor man had to pay for this freedom a thousand times over, I thought. I’m sure that when he’s fifty there’ll be a proper wedding here. But a dead man can’t marry, I now reflected as I passed through the doorway. The entrance hall was empty. The lamps, as I expected, were decorated with laurel branches,
each with two branches
in conformity with the funeral plan. Silence reigned, the strange, sweetish silence characteristic of a house in mourning. The hall floor had been washed a few hours earlier,
scrubbed by the housemaids
on their knees. The oldest housemaid is seventy-four, but she still counts as a
maid
, and even on her deathbed, having reached a great age, like most of our maids, possibly over eighty, she will still be described as a maid. My mother maintained that the
housemaids
at Wolfsegg had always been happy, but she also said that they never had it easy. This is still true. They wear gray aprons, by which they can be recognized at a distance, made by our tailoress in the village, their hair is brushed back flat, and they wear no adornments whatever, which according to my mother was as it should
be at Wolfsegg.
That suits them best
, she would say. They usually come to us at fourteen or fifteen and grow old in our service. They have nothing to laugh about, as they say, but—again according to my mother—they are highly regarded by everybody at Wolfsegg. Their numbers have been radically reduced in recent years. At one time there were twelve, including the kitchen maids, the oldest of whom is now over seventy, but now there are only five, all told. Most of them, according to my mother,
were born with unpleasant voices
, or they developed such voices in the course of time, for at Wolfsegg they were never allowed to speak in their natural voices. My mother trained them to speak in an unnatural tone, as quietly and deferentially as possible, she said, with the result that their natural voices were inevitably distorted. Nearly all the housemaids now come from the village, but at one time my mother preferred to take on girls from the Mühlviertel,
where labor was cheap
, she said, if possible from large peasant families, because such girls were well known for being satisfied with anything (my mother’s phrase), as well as
efficient and generally hardworking
. Recently, however, the supply from the Mühlviertel has dried up, as the girls there prefer to become factory hands rather than housemaids. To my mother this was evidence of the decline of the Mühlviertel, and not only of the Mühlviertel but of the world in general. The housemaids were naturally staunch Catholics and showed a becoming deference to both ecclesiastical and secular authority. The most favored housemaids always came from the Freistadt district and Aigen-Schlägel, where the borders of Bohemia, Bavaria, and Austria converge and there is no railroad. They were always
the most devout girls
, my mother said,
the most decent girls
. She recruited them herself by visiting the convents at Freistadt and Aigen-Schlägel to make known her requirements. The nuns or monks usually let her take two or three
young, unspoiled girls
back to Wolfsegg, where they were introduced to the job and put to the test. This introductory test involved scrubbing the entrance hall, which was a huge task, given the length and breadth of the hall, and required a superhuman effort. But the girls were so impressed by my mother’s bearing and by the estate itself, the like of which they had never seen in all their lives, that they thought nothing of scrubbing the hall, no matter what torment it cost them. Not all of them passed the test, but if a girl failed to scrub the whole of the hall at the first attempt
and my mother imparted the dread news that she could not take her on, she always managed to complete the task at the second attempt. My mother was implacable, above all toward herself, and subjected those around her to at least the same degree of implacability. The housemaids worked themselves to death, as they say, but they were happy to be
allowed
to work at Wolfsegg, as they put it. My mother paid them next to nothing, but in witness, as it were, of the good treatment they received at Wolfsegg, they reached a great age, as I have said. They worked themselves to death and yet, absurdly, lived to a great age. None died young, or at any rate before the age of sixty. They were all given
a fine funeral
, as my mother put it, and their families were always grateful for the fact that one of their members was
privileged
to work at Wolfsegg. This attitude has not changed, I thought, as I entered the empty, freshly scrubbed hall with its broad larchwood floorboards. The spiders’ webs that normally darkened its corners had been removed for the wedding; the windows had been cleaned and the lamps smeared with oil to make them glisten. The gardeners had told me that my sisters were in the house, together with the new master, as they naively called the wine cork manufacturer. The three of them will be up on the second floor, I thought, not guessing that I’m already in the entrance hall and thus roughly underneath them. I did not want to go straight up and join them, however, but waited in the hall for a few minutes, standing at the foot of the stairs that lead to the second floor, in front of a picture of my great-great-great-granduncle Ferdinand, who is reputed to have saved the emperor’s life by throwing himself between him and a Hungarian traitor who was about to lunge at him. This act of heroism cost my great-great-great-granduncle his life, though it is rumored that he was