Extinction (5 page)

and Caecilia taken at his villa, it was of him that I thought, with him that I was mainly preoccupied as I looked at the photograph and tried to divert my attention from the telegram from Wolfsegg, the full horror of which I had not yet taken in. My parents dead, dead beyond recall, and my brother, Johannes, dead too. I still could not cope with this fact and its consequences, and I put off trying. Uncle Georg would have been the best support to have at a time like this, but I had no support. I must not think of what lay in store for me. I placed the photographs one above the other on the desk, so that my uncle was on top, though he was not visible on the picture of my sisters taken in Cannes, occupying a position above my parents, and my brother, Johannes, below them. All three dead, at one fell swoop. How, I wondered, did they relate to one another and to me? At the Hotel de la Ville, where of course he occupied the best and most beautiful of all the rooms, my uncle had once told me that he was bound to love his family, though he could not help hating it. This was precisely how he described his relations with the family. His brother, my father, he both loved and despised. My mother he detested as a sister-in-law, while respecting her as the mother of myself and Johannes. They’ll live to a ripe old age, he once said. People like that reach a great age. Their stupidity encloses them for decades like protective armor plating—they don’t drop dead suddenly like us. He was wrong. They have chronic illnesses that prolong their lives instead of shortening them, he said. Such illnesses are irksome but not fatal—they don’t come along all of a sudden and carry you off. Such people aren’t worn down by their interests or driven mad by their passions, because they don’t have any. Their equanimity and ultimately their apathy regulate their day-to-day digestion, so that they can count on reaching their dotage. Basically there’s nothing in the world that attracts them and nothing that repels them. They don’t indulge in anything to the point where it could debilitate them. The moment they realized that I was a disruptive element, said Uncle Georg, they excluded me from the charmed circle, first covertly and then overtly. Basically they would have paid any price, however high, to be rid of me. Quite automatically I had assumed a function at Wolfsegg that they couldn’t accept. I was the one who constantly drew attention to their shortcomings, who spotted every symptom of character weakness and always caught them out in unworthy
behavior. How surprised they were, said Uncle Georg, when I pointed out one day that they hadn’t unlocked our libraries for six months and demanded access to them. People were always surprised when I said
our libraries
, for others could at best have spoken of
our library
, having only one. But we, having five, had much more to be ashamed of intellectually than those who had only one. One of our great-great-great-grandfathers inaugurated these five libraries that I’ve been so proud of all my life. He certainly wasn’t a madman, a
crazy intellectual
, as they always said at Wolfsegg. He could afford to set up these libraries—with the greatest understanding of literature—instead of filling the house with drawing rooms, which serve only to promote boredom and brainlessness. One day, said Uncle Georg, I burglarized these dead libraries, as it were, and was never forgiven for it. But when I left Wolfsegg they locked them up again and didn’t set foot in them for years, until word got around that the libraries existed and they were obliged to show them to the curious rather than lose face. At Wolfsegg nothing was ever used, said Uncle Georg, until I suddenly started using everything, sitting on chairs that no one had sat on for decades, opening cupboards that no one had opened for decades, drinking out of glasses that no one had drunk out of for decades. I even walked down passages that no one had walked down for decades. Right from the start I was the inquisitive one, whom they couldn’t help fearing. And I began to leaf through our centuries-old documents, which were stored in big chests in the attics and which they had always known about but never looked at, as if they were afraid of discovering something unpleasant. I was interested in everything, said Uncle Georg, and of course I was especially interested in our family connections, in our history, though not in the way
they
were, not just in its hundreds and thousands of glorious pages but in the whole of it. I ventured to do what they had never dared to do—to look into the fearful depths of our history—and this angered them.
Georg
was a name they all came to fear at Wolfsegg, said my uncle. They were afraid that the child I was then might one day control them, instead of their controlling me. My parents, your grandparents, chained me to Wolfsegg and gagged me, he said, which is precisely what they shouldn’t have done. And your parents learned nothing from your grandparents’ mistake; on the contrary, they used even worse methods in dealing with you. But on the
other hand, he said, what would have become of you if they hadn’t behaved to you as they did? The question needed no answer: it answered itself. When I look at you, said Uncle Georg, I’m actually looking at myself. You’ve developed exactly as I did. You parted from them, got out of their way, turned your back on them, and escaped from them at the right moment. They never forgave me, and they won’t forgive you. My God, he said, Rome is to you what Cannes is to me. In this way we can deal with Wolfsegg, from a distance. When I think of those dreary evenings with the family, when the most marvelous topics fizzle out as soon as they’re broached. Whatever you say is met with incomprehension. Nothing you mention is taken up. If your father reads a paper, it’s the
Upper Austrian Farmers’ Weekly
; if he reads a book, it’s the
accounts book
. And then, because they have to make use of their theater subscription, they go to Linz and see some dire comedy, without feeling in the least ashamed of themselves. And they go to those ridiculous concerts at the Bruckner House, where innumerable wrong notes are played at maximum volume. These people—I mean your parents—haven’t just taken out subscriptions for the theater and concerts: they live their whole lives on a subscription basis. Every day of their lives is like an evening spent at the theater seeing some frightful comedy or at a ridiculous concert where wrong notes predominate, and they’re not ashamed of it. They live their lives because it’s the done thing; not because they want to, not because they have a passion for life, but because their parents took out a subscription for them. And just as they clap in all the wrong places at the theater, so they clap in all the wrong places in their lives, applauding when there’s no occasion for applause, just as they do at concerts, and making the ghastliest grimaces when they should be laughing heartily. And just as the plays they see are of the most dismal quality, so their lives are of the most dismal quality. On the other hand, he said, we should by now be indifferent to what they do and what they’ve made of their lives—it doesn’t concern us. And who’s to say that we’ve taken the right course? We’re not the happiest of people either—always searching for the ideal and failing to find it. The fact is that we’ve all tried to find a way of getting closer to one another and ended up farther apart. The closer we’ve tried to get, the farther apart we’ve become. Our overtures have ended only in bitterness, and we’ve only ever given up because
otherwise we’d have been smothered with reproaches. We made the mistake of not resigning ourselves to the fact that Wolfsegg no longer concerns us. It’s
their
Wolfsegg,
not ours
. We always tried to force
our
Wolfsegg on them, instead of leaving them alone with theirs. We’ve always interfered with their Wolfsegg when we’d have done better to leave them in peace. They paid us off, and we ought to have been content with that, once and for all. We no longer have any right to Wolfsegg, he said. I looked carefully at the photograph of my sisters, taken when they were twenty-two and twenty-three. Their mocking faces have taken their revenge on them, I thought. They remained alone; they didn’t have the strength to break away from Wolfsegg. These mocking faces were their only weapon against their surroundings and their parents, from whom they couldn’t escape, but it was a weapon that scared off all the men they wanted. My sisters were never beautiful, I thought. And they weren’t interesting either. They haven’t developed: they’ve remained the silly country cousins they always were. Twenty years on, their mocking faces, no longer fresh, are lined with bitterness. In fact they’re rather ugly. Caecilia is probably more good-natured than Amalia. The greed they inherited from their mother is compounded by bitterness. At one time they were both musical, and Uncle Georg tried to make musicians of them—a futile attempt that was doomed to failure. They lacked the staying power and had no real interest in music, and so naturally their talent was lost; they were just about good enough to be stand-ins for the church choir. At the age of four or five their mother started dressing them in dirndls, always identical in pattern and cut, in which they were bound to atrophy sooner or later. Both have delicate health, inherited from their mother, but it is the kind of delicate health that augurs a long life. They are always coughing. I have never known them not to cough. At Wolfsegg they cough all over the house, but their coughing is not to be taken seriously; it is not lethal. It is as though coughing were their one passion, the easiest fun that life could afford them. Their musical talent seems to have withdrawn into coughing. Even in company they cough all the time. They have nothing to say but never stop coughing. Each wears a silver chain around her neck, inherited from our grandmother, and if asked what they are, the first word they utter in reply is
Catholic
. They were both sent on cookery courses at
Bad Ischl, where it was hoped they would learn Austrian imperial cooking, but neither learned to cook at Bad Ischl. Their cooking is even worse than Mother’s, whose incompetence always comes to light when the cook is on vacation at Aschach on the Danube. Potato soup is the only dish Mother cooks well. But none of us likes potato soup—except Father, who is passionately fond of it, or so he says. My sisters were always well brought up, as they say, but this does not alter the fact that they have always been the most devious creatures imaginable. If one of them picked up a book, the other would knock it out of her hand. They were always seen together, never alone. There is a year between them, but they behave like twins. If I say that I have always loved them, this does not mean that I have not always hated them in equal measure. When we grew up I naturally hated them more than I loved them. It now occurs to me that hate may be all that is left. They were always disappointed in me. They had only bad things to say about their brother, as I know, especially when others were present and they knew it would have a devastating effect. And what stories they invented in order to disparage me! Stupid people are always the most dangerous, it occurs to me. To say that I always loved them does not mean that I was not continually cursing them. Right from the start their mother chained them to herself and never let them loose. They were not allowed to travel or attend balls, and even at the age of about twenty they still had to ask permission to go to the Thursday market at Lambach. They got only so much pocket money, not enough for them to step out, just enough for a drink and a slice of bread to go with it. Their shoes were mostly made to measure by the shoemaker at Schwanenstadt, who had made our grandparents’ shoes. They were always unfashionable, and in time my sisters developed a rather clownish gait, which remained in later years, when they were able to buy shoes in Vienna. I cannot say which of them is the more intelligent. I cannot say that Caecilia has better taste than Amalia. I cannot say that Amalia knows more than Caecilia. Their voices are so alike that if one of them calls out it is difficult to know which of them it is. Since they were always together and neither felt the need to break loose from the other, they were for a long time unable to find a
suitable
husband. In fact I do not think either ever thought of marrying until last year, when Caecilia went to visit an old aunt of ours at Titisee
in the Black Forest. There she met the wine cork manufacturer. Caecilia married him and thereby incurred the hatred of her sister Amalia. Amalia moved out of the main house into the Gardeners’ House, put in a brief appearance at the wedding breakfast after the church ceremony, and then left, not to be seen again. Knowing her, I guess that she stayed in the Gardeners’ House until she heard of the death of her parents and her brother and then, having a much greater sense of the theatrical than her sister, emerged from the Gardeners’ House and ran screaming to the main building, though of course I have no way of being sure. At the time of the accident Caecilia’s husband was probably still at Wolfsegg, I thought, as he didn’t intend to return to the Black Forest and Freiburg for two more weeks. Caecilia’s marriage was supposedly
engineered
, as they say, by our aunt in Titisee. It is typical of Caecilia that she should have thought she could stay on at Wolfsegg after the wedding. What it must have cost my mother to persuade her to go to Freiburg with her husband, considering that she had secretly sworn not to let either of her daughters leave Wolfsegg, as she had a lifelong dread of being left alone! Both her daughters were to stay with her at Wolfsegg so that if she should lose one of them she would still not be entirely alone. Mother always planned well ahead and took all eventualities into account, especially where her own future was concerned. She had always reckoned with losing my father,
but then I’ll still have my daughters, even if both my sons are no longer at Wolfsegg
. This was her plan.
And if one daughter leaves home I’ll still have the other
. Throughout the wedding festivities she was angry with Caecilia for deserting her and let her feel it, but as she is shrewd—or rather
was
shrewd—she was careful not to display her anger and sudden hatred for the deserter; on the contrary, she made a point of expressing her delight at what she called