Extinction (3 page)

human beings to perverse caricatures—his and theirs. I have yet to see a photograph that shows a natural person, a true and genuine person, just as I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature. Photography is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century. Nothing has ever sickened me so much as looking at photographs. And yet, I now told myself, the longer I look at the distorted images of my parents and my brother in these pictures—the only ones I ever took of them—the more I see the truth and the reality behind the distortion. This is because I’m not concerned with the photos as such; I don’t see the people portrayed in them as they are shown by the distorting lens of the camera but as I myself see them.
My parents at Victoria Station in London
is written on the back of one photo. On the other is written:
My brother sailing at Sankt Wolfgang
. I put my hand in the drawer and took out another photo. It showed Amalia and Caecilia posing in front of Uncle Georg’s villa in Cannes. Uncle Georg, my father’s brother, bought this villa with the money my father made over to him—a one-shot payment, as they say—after my grandparents died. He invested it so shrewdly in several French portfolios that he not only was able to live quite comfortably but could afford a degree of luxury that suited his tastes. He got a better deal than my father, I thought, looking at the photograph of my sisters with their rather mocking expressions. Uncle Georg died four years ago, as suddenly as his brother, after suffering a heart attack in his garden while inspecting his roses, which were his only passion in later life. At thirty-five he was able to leave Wolfsegg and retire to the Riviera with masses of money and loads of books. He loved French literature and the sea, and he devoted himself entirely to these two loves. It often strikes me that I take very much after Uncle Georg, at least more than after my father. I too have always loved literature and books and the sea, and I too left Wolfsegg, at an even earlier age. On the back of the picture are the words:
My sisters Amalia and Caecilia at Uncle Georg’s villa
. I last went to Cannes in 1978. I visited Uncle Georg at least once a year. A few days spent with him at his villa always did me good. To the horror of the family, he designated his manservant, whom he always called affectionately
my good Jean
, as his sole heir. On several occasions Uncle Georg came to see me in Rome, a city that we both loved and appreciated more than any other. Gambetti and he got along
well with each other and spent many evenings on the Piazza del Popolo or, if it was raining, at the Café Greco, discussing
everything imaginable
, especially painting. Uncle Georg was a keen collector, and I know that he spent the interest from his investments largely on acquiring pictures and sculptures by contemporary artists. Thanks to his good taste and a quite extraordinary instinct for the value of the works of art he preferred, his passion for collecting soon brought him a second sizable fortune, amounting literally to millions. The unknown artists he patronized became famous soon after he had more or less discovered them and brought them to public notice by buying their works. Uncle Georg had no time for the
primitive business sense
of my family; he abhorred the yearly exploitation of nature that goes on in the country, and he despised the centuries-old traditions of Wolfsegg—the production of meat, fat, hides, wood, and coal. Most of all he detested hunting, which was a ruling passion with my father and my brother (his brother and his nephew). Of all detestable passions, he had the profoundest detestation for hunting. Whereas his parents and his brother were devotees of hunting, Uncle Georg always refused to join in their sport. Like me he did not eat game, and when the others were out hunting he would shut himself in one of the libraries and divert his mind from their hunting excesses by intensive reading.
While they were out killing deer
, he would say,
I was sitting in the library reading Dostoyevsky, with the shutters firmly closed so as not to hear the shooting
. Like me Uncle Georg loved Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky and Lermontov, about whom he had some perceptive things to say, and he read and reread the revolutionaries Kropotkin and Bakunin, whose memoirs he thought the best in the genre. It was he who introduced me to Russian literature, about which he was very well informed, being as well versed in Russian as he was in French. It was from him that I acquired my love of Russian literature, and later of French literature. Indeed, I owe much of my mental capacity to him. At an early stage Uncle Georg opened my eyes to the rest of the world, so to speak, and made me aware that there was something else beyond Wolfsegg and beyond Austria, something far more splendid, far more tremendous, and that the world consisted not just of one family, but of millions of families, not just of one place, but of millions of places, not just of one people, but of many hundreds and thousands of peoples,
each in its own way more attractive and more important than the others. The whole of humanity teems with countless beauties and possibilities, he said. Only an imbecile believes that the world stops where he stops. Uncle Georg not only introduced me to literature and opened it up as an
infinite paradise
, he also opened my eyes to the world of music and the arts generally. It’s only when we have a proper concept of art that we have a proper concept of nature, he said. It’s only when we can
apply the concept of art correctly and enjoy art
that we can make proper use of nature and enjoy it too. Most people never acquire even the most rudimentary concept of art, and so they never understand nature. The ideal contemplation of nature presupposes an ideal concept of art, he said. People who claim to see nature without having a concept of art see it only superficially, never in an ideal way, in its infinite splendor. For a thinking person it is possible first to arrive at an ideal concept of art by way of nature, and then to arrive at the ideal contemplation of nature by way of the ideal concept of art. On our visits to Italy, Uncle Georg, unlike my father, did not rush me from one column to another, one monument to another, one church to another, one Michelangelo to another. He never took me to see a work of art. I owe my understanding of art to him precisely because, unlike my parents, he never dragged me from one famous work of art to another. He never pestered me with them but simply pointed out that they existed and told me where they could be found, instead of bashing my head against some column or some Greek or Roman wall, as my parents constantly did. Having been bashed against so-called famous antiquities from early childhood, my head soon became quite insensitive to art of any kind; my parents’ head-bashing brought me no closer to art, but only sickened me with it. It took me years to set my head right after it had been brainlessly bashed against hundreds and thousands of works of art. If I had been under Uncle Georg’s influence as a child, I thought, when my parents were indiscriminately stuffing everything into my head, I would have benefited greatly. But the fact is that I had to be virtually destroyed by my parents before I could be cured by Uncle Georg, by which stage I was over twenty and, it seemed, hopelessly lost. By the time I realized what Uncle Georg meant to my future and my whole development, I was almost beyond treatment. I ultimately owe my salvation not only to my resolve
to get away from the destructive ambience of Wolfsegg and halt the damage inflicted on me by my parents but also to Uncle Georg’s perspicacity. The result was that in adulthood, instead of being forced into the kind of life my family led, I was able to lead an entirely different one, like Uncle Georg’s. They hated Uncle Georg as long as he lived, and in the last ten or twenty years they took no trouble to conceal their hatred. In due course they treated him exactly as they treated me, thought of him as they thought of me, and went behind his back as they went behind mine. But he was not beholden to them in any way. One day, having settled his financial affairs, he boarded a train and went to Nice. There he rested for a few weeks, and then, fully refreshed, as he often said, he looked around for a place that would suit him. It had to be by the sea, set in a large garden, with the best air, but with good transport connections. His first picture postcards were sourly received at Wolfsegg. My family had visions of Uncle Georg lolling in the sun or strolling on the beach in linen suits, made to measure by Parisian tailors, of course, and in their dreams, which of course were always nightmares, they saw this
good-for-nothing rogue
, as they called him, walking into banks at smart Riviera resorts to collect the interest on his ever-growing fortune. They were too stupid to believe that anyone could lead an intellectual existence. Uncle Georg led one, as is attested by some hundred notebooks that he filled with his thoughts and observations. The narrowness of the Central European, who lives to work, as they say, instead of working to live, and without ever pausing to wonder what is meant by work, soon got on Uncle Georg’s nerves, and he drew the unavoidable conclusion. Marking time was not for him. One must let fresh air into one’s mind, he used to say, and that means letting the world into one’s mind, day after day. At Wolfsegg they never let fresh air—or the world—into their minds. Stiff and rigid by nature, they sat stiffly and rigidly on their estate, their life’s mission being to ensure that this immense mass of inherited wealth progressively solidified and under no circumstances dissolved. In the course of time they all took on the rigidity and solidity, the absolute hardness, of this mass and fused with it into a dreadful, sickening unity, without even noticing what was happening. Uncle Georg noticed, however. He wanted nothing to do with this mass of wealth. He waited for the propitious and probably ideal moment when he could detach
himself from the Wolfsegg mass. They had, as I know, suggested to him that instead of withdrawing his inheritance from Wolfsegg he should settle for a more or less guaranteed pension. But his perspicacity saved him from doing anything so foolish. When the need arises, people like my parents are never more unscrupulous than in their dealings with members of their own families. They recoil from no baseness, and under the cloak of Christian principle, high-mindedness, and social conscience they are merely rapacious and treat anyone as fair game. Right from the beginning, Uncle Georg failed to fit in with their plans. They were actually afraid of him, because he had seen through them at an early stage. Even as a child he had caught them out in their underhanded dealings, with which he was never afraid to reproach them. He is said to have been
the most feared child
at Wolfsegg. Clear-sighted from the beginning, he is reputed to have developed an early passion for exposing his family. As a small child he would spy on them and confront them with their unprincipled conduct. No child at Wolfsegg was known to have asked so many questions and demanded so many answers. My parents would always reproach me by saying that I was getting like my uncle Georg, as though he were the most dreadful person in the world.
You’re getting like your uncle Georg
, they would say, but they achieved nothing by holding up Uncle Georg as a warning example, because right from the start there was no one at Wolfsegg whom I loved more. Your uncle Georg is a monster, they would say. Your uncle Georg is a parasite! Your uncle Georg is a disgrace to us all! Your uncle Georg is a criminal! The list of horrific designations they came up with for Uncle Georg never produced the desired effect on me. Every few years he would come over from Cannes to visit us for a few days, occasionally for a few weeks, and during these visits I was the happiest person in the world. I had a great time whenever Uncle Georg was at Wolfsegg. It suddenly became a different place. It had the air of the big city about it. The libraries were aired, books moved around, and rooms that at other times seemed like cold, dark, silent caverns were filled with music. The rooms at Wolfsegg, usually forbidding, became cozy and homey. Voices that usually spoke in harsh or suppressed tones suddenly sounded quite natural. We were allowed to laugh and to speak in normal conversational tones, not only when instructions were being given to the staff. Why do you always talk
French when the servants are present? Uncle Georg asked my parents fiercely—it’s quite ridiculous! It made me happy to hear him say such things. Why don’t you open the windows during this glorious weather? he would ask. Whereas the mealtime conversation normally centered on pigs and cattle, on wagonloads of timber or on whether the warehouse prices were favorable or unfavorable, we suddenly heard words like Tolstoy, Paris, or New York, Napoleon or Alfonso XIII or Meneghini, Callas, Voltaire, Rousseau, Pascal, or Diderot. I can’t see what I’m eating, my uncle would say without the least compunction, whereupon my mother would jump up from the table and open the shutters. You must open the shutters wider, he would say to her, so that I can see my soup. How can you exist in this semidarkness all the time? It’s like living in a museum! Everything looks as though it hasn’t been used for years. What’s the point of having that fine china in the cupboards if you don’t eat off it? And your expensive silver? I admired Uncle Georg. There was never any boredom when he was around. He did not sit stiffly and rigidly at table like the others but constantly turned to one or another of us to ask a question, tender sound advice, or pay a compliment. You must wear more blue, he once told my mother—gray doesn’t suit you. You look as if you were in mourning, and it’s fifteen years since Father died. You, he once told my father, look like one of your own
employees
. That made me laugh out loud. When the meal was served, a procedure normally attended by complete silence, he would joke with the maids, which was something my mother found hard to endure. It won’t be long, he once said, not in the least inhibited by the presence of the maids, before there’s nobody to serve you. Then you’ll suddenly come alive. There’s a whiff of revolution in the air. I’ve got a hunch that something’s coming that’ll liven everything up again. Hearing such remarks, my father would shake his head and my mother would stare fixedly into my uncle’s face, as though she had no qualms about showing her dislike for him. In Mediterranean countries everything’s quite different, he said, but he did not elaborate. I was seventeen or eighteen at the time and wanted to know in what way things in the Mediterranean countries differed from things in Central Europe; he said he would explain it to me one day when I visited these countries myself. Life in the Mediterranean countries is a hundred times more rewarding than here, he said. I was