Extinction (49 page)

newspapers still lay on the table. I sat down and picked them up, thinking that I could now read them as nonchalantly as my brother-in-law had done a few hours before. After all, he had demonstrated how to read the newspapers without feeling ashamed or embarrassed, but I had not been able to. He had been quite shamelessly absorbed in the newspapers, but I was now instantly revolted by them, having at first imagined that I would enjoy them. I threw them down and left the kitchen. In the hall the smell of the overnight guests still lingered, especially that of our aunt from Titisee, and it was still present in the chapel, to which I now repaired. It was probably twelve o’clock, but I cannot remember exactly. The chapel had always frightened me, as I have said, because it had seemed
like a law court
, not just when I was a child but even later, when I was grown up. And now the feeling came back. I could not stay in the chapel and feel safe; I had to leave. I felt far too warm, and so I took off my jacket, hung it over my shoulders, and went across to the Orangery, which was of course still open. The whole park seemed to be filled with the smell of decomposition. I decided to go in. The huntsmen were still there, not having been relieved, and on seeing me they at once sprang to attention. They were surprised by my sudden appearance, because I had approached the Orangery
so quietly
. These people are perpetual stage figures, I thought on seeing them again. Whoever controls them can get them to do anything. They’ll carry out the most absurd and senseless instructions—that’s the military part of their makeup, I thought. Order them out and they’ll obey, order them in and they’ll obey, send them to their deaths and they’ll obey. To them Father was always
the Colonel
, I thought, which was his wartime rank, in the Nazi period. But
the Colonel
didn’t die on the
field of honor
, as befitted his calling, I thought, but was killed when his head collided with the windshield of his car at the Lambach turnoff. Again I wanted to know whether the ice blocks had been changed and whether there were enough, but instead of beckoning one of the huntsmen over, which would have been the obvious thing to do, I went over and asked one of them whether the ice blocks had been changed and whether there were enough. He answered with a nod. By addressing the huntsman I had signified my approval of the ceremonial organized by my sedulous sisters in accordance with our time-honored funeral plan. Again unable to control myself, I tried to raise the lid of my
mother’s coffin, only to find that it really was firmly screwed down. I was by now inured to any embarrassment I felt at being observed by the two huntsmen as I attempted to raise the lid. We no longer know what we’re doing, I told myself, when our nerves are so tense that we expect them to snap at any moment. I stepped back and, not wanting to show myself up in front of the huntsmen by casually leaving the Orangery, I stood for a while in front of the coffins, but as I stood there I thought of nothing but how repulsive the huntsmen were—the most repulsive people I knew—how I could no longer stand the sight of their uniforms, how I loathed their faces and had always loathed them. I was suddenly afraid of the coming day. But
it’ll all go off smoothly
, I told myself, echoing the words that Caecilia had used several times in the last few hours. I can rely entirely on my sisters, I told myself, especially Caecilia. She’s not asleep; she’s lying in bed, watching the cortege pass before her mind’s eye and checking it all thoroughly. She won’t miss anything that’s out of place or even seems to be out of place, I thought. Her gift for combination and arrangement—what might be called her stagecraft—is inherited from Mother, I thought. She’ll stage the funeral as Mother would have staged it. And all the time she’ll have the feeling that Mother is watching to see that everything is staged as she would have wished, not otherwise. A funeral is about to be presented, I thought—the funeral of our parents and our brother, production by Caecilia. I could see the playbill announcing the details of the performance—the title, the actors, the producer, and so forth. The huntsmen did not lose control, nor did I. I stood for a while in front of the coffins, imagining tomorrow’s premiere, produced by my sister, and enjoying it. Suddenly I wondered what would happen if Mother’s coffin were opened and I were to compel Spadolini to inspect the contents. With an immense effort I forced myself to drop the thought, and to prevent its reemerging, I went out of the Orangery. The air outside was worse than before, almost unbearably oppressive. It occurred to me that if I went over to the Children’s Villa, this time alone, my frame of mind might improve. I walked across to the Children’s Villa, pausing on the way at the Farm. The animals were lying in their stalls as though dead. I was disgusted by the sight and could not endure the smell. I was not like Johannes, who was attracted by the smell of animals, who actually loved this animal smell. People always say
that one can find peace with animals, but I never have; I am always agitated when I am with animals and forced to inhale their smell. I have never acquired what they call a love of animals and feel no affinity to animal lovers. I find animals disturbing. I have always dreamed of being attacked and devoured by animals; my childhood was full of such terrifying animal dreams. Unlike Johannes, I was always scared of animals, and even now I am haunted by dreams of animals attacking and devouring me. Time and again I have tried to find peace in the presence of animals, as others can, but I have never succeeded. Animals always make me uneasy, even the smallest and most insignificant animals. I am scared of any contact with insects, for example, to say nothing of fish, which my brother used to enjoy catching. He would seize them by the tail, bash their heads in, and throw them back in the water. To this day I have visions of the fish he killed, glinting in the sunlight as they float down the stream behind the Children’s Villa. Our servants’ children thought nothing of decapitating chickens on the chopping block. They got immense pleasure from this sport, and so did Johannes. His parents forbade it, but this only increased his enthusiasm for chopping off chickens’ heads. Even as a small child he could chop off the head of a hen with one blow and then watch as the headless bird flew twenty or thirty yards through the air in its death throes. Johannes enjoyed watching the sticking of pigs and the slaughtering of cows in the Wolfsegg slaughterhouse—
for our beef broth
, Father used to say. I too was enthralled by these activities and sometimes took part in them, but they never gave me the same pleasure as they gave Johannes; on the contrary, they horrified me, I thought. I am not Johannes. In the cowshed I took in at a glance ninety-two head of cattle—
the ideal number
, my father called it. Here at least the business is still intact, I thought. It occurred to me, because my mother had once impressed the fact on me, that the milk pipe over the cows’ heads had cost three hundred eighty thousand schillings. The milk-producing unit is naturally quite decent, I thought. I then went across to the Children’s Villa. They’ve actually left all the windows open, I thought, not because I said they were to stay open but because they’ve forgotten to shut them. There hasn’t been a storm, I thought, but there was certainly one in the air. You can’t go and look for Alexander now, I told myself. I sat down on the bench in front of the villa. If Alexander had been with us at
supper, Spadolini would have been less expansive, I thought. Supper would have passed off quite differently, and Spadolini would have projected a quite different image of himself. Otherwise Alexander would have simply laughed out loud at his remarks and made him look ridiculous. In Alexander’s presence Spadolini would have had to resort to quite different tactics. It now seemed to me that Spadolini was the bad character and Alexander the good one. But to say that Alexander is the good character and Spadolini the bad one is not right either, I thought. Alexander’s goodness conceals much that is bad, such as the ruthless single-mindedness with which he forces his ideas on others and his way of punishing those who resist by refusing to talk to them for days, locking himself in his room and threatening suicide. This good character is a ruthless bully, I thought, who is capable of driving another person to desperation and even, in some circumstances, doing him to death in order to vindicate some undoubtedly ridiculous idea he has conceived. Yet this demonic Alexander is concealed beneath the popular Alexander, always lovable and unfailingly helpful. However lovable a person is, we have merely to consider him for a time—if only in our mind, in which case he can be as far away as we like—and little by little he is transformed from a good person into a bad person. We are not content until we have turned this good and lovable person into someone wicked and worthless, if it serves our turn. We are prepared to misuse him, to misuse anyone, in order to rescue ourselves from some dreadful mood that is tormenting us, some mood we have gotten into without knowing how. Just now, I thought, I have been misusing Alexander in order to rescue myself, probably because Spadolini and the others can no longer serve my purpose; I have simply seized on the good Alexander and gradually transformed him into someone wicked and malign, treating him no differently from all the others who seemed to lend themselves to such misuse. No longer able to make do with reading or pacing up and down or looking out the window, we have to resort to our dearest and closest friends in order to rescue ourselves from some dire mood, I thought. Time and again I have observed that when I am possessed by one of these dire moods, I seize upon all available persons, one after another, and tear them apart, denigrate them, demolish everything about them, and denude them of more or less all their virtues so that I can rescue
myself and breathe freely again. When I’ve done with my parents, my sisters, Johannes, and all the others, I thought, because they can no longer serve my purpose, I set about myself with what can be described only as the utmost ruthlessness. At this moment the victim happens to be Alexander, because my sisters and Spadolini and my brother-in-law are no longer adequate. That’s the truth. In order to gain relief we walk on faces, I thought. In the Children’s Villa I looked for my childhood, but naturally I did not find it. I went into all the rooms in search of my childhood, but of course it was not there. What’s the point of restoring the Children’s Villa, I wondered, when there’s no longer anyone around to enjoy it and benefit from it? It would be senseless to restore the Children’s Villa, which is what I had intended to do until this moment, to restore it to what it had once been for
us children
, I thought. It’s absurd even to think of it: I can’t restore my childhood by restoring the Children’s Villa, I thought. At first I had believed that if I had the Children’s Villa thoroughly restored—or renovated, as my sisters would say—I would be restoring or renovating my childhood. But my childhood is now as dilapidated as the Children’s Villa. Its rooms have been cleared out and plundered and their contents sold off as ruthlessly as those of the Children’s Villa. Unlike the Children’s Villa, however, my childhood was plundered not by my mother but by myself. I was even more ruthless in disposing of my childhood than she was in selling off the contents of the Children’s Villa. I’ve disposed of the finest pieces that furnished my childhood, just as my mother disposed of the finest pieces in the Children’s Villa. There’s no longer any point in opening the windows of my childhood, I thought; this would be as ludicrous as opening the windows of the Children’s Villa. My childhood became worn out and was sold for a song. I exploited it until there was nothing left to exploit. We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only
a gaping void
. We go into a house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we’re revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a
gaping void
. Entering the Children’s Villa means nothing more or less than entering this notorious
gaping void
, just as going into the woods where we used to play as children would mean going into this
gaping void
. Wherever I was happy as a child, there now appears to be a
gaping void
. We dispose of our childhood as if it were inexhaustible,
I thought, but it isn’t. It’s very soon exhausted, and in the end there’s nothing left but the notorious
gaping void
. Yet this doesn’t happen just to me, I thought; it happens to everyone. For a moment this thought consoled me: no one was spared the knowledge that revisiting our childhood meant staring into this uniquely sickening void. To this extent it was a good idea to go back to the Children’s Villa, thinking I was going back to my childhood and believing it was possible. It proved to be an error, but the error was wholly beneficial, for it cured me of the belief that in order to reenter my childhood I had only to reenter the Children’s Villa, or the woods or the landscape I had known as a child. I now knew that wherever I went I would find nothing but this
gaping void
. I won’t expose myself to it again, I thought. In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell myself that I have only to go back there in order to rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a
gaping void
. You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. You have to accept this. All you see when you look back is this
gaping void
. Not only your childhood, but the whole of your past, is a
gaping void
. This is why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of self-protection, I thought. Whenever you look back into the past, you’re looking into a
gaping void
. Even yesterday is a
gaping void
, even the moment that’s just passed. You wanted to go into the Children’s Villa in order to go back into your childhood, which you’ve spent years throwing out the window, believing it to be inexhaustible. And now it’s exhausted—you’ve spent it all quite thoughtlessly. Having used up all your other possibilities, you yielded to base sentimentality and conceived this plan for the Children’s Villa, which has now been revealed in all its horror: the Children’s Villa is a nightmare. When you first thought of restoring it and told your sisters of your plan, you actually thought that by doing so you could restore your childhood. You actually believed that your childhood could be repainted and redecorated, as it were, that it could be refurbished and reroofed like the Children’s Villa, and this in spite of hundreds of failed attempts at restoring your childhood, I thought. For