The Loser (14 page)

couldn’t
have committed the murder, a third party or several third parties must have committed the murder, but of course the jurors had already reached their verdict and the trial was never reopened, I thought, in my life few things have actually absorbed me with greater intensity than the criminal-justice aspect of our world. When we follow this criminal-justice aspect of our world, and that means of our society, we experience miracles, as they say, on a daily basis. When the innkeeper came out of the kitchen and sat down at my table, more or less exhausted, she had been washing clothes and reeked of kitchen odors, I asked her what had become of her uncle, the Dichtel-keeper, putting the question not in a blunt but in an extremely cautious way. Her uncle had moved in with his brother in Hirschbach, she said, Hirschbach was a small town on the Czech border, she herself had been there only once, but that was years ago, her son was just three years old at the time. She’d been planning to show her son to her uncle in the hope that he, who she assumed was still quite rich, would help her through her difficulty, that is give her money, that’s the only reason she and her son had undertaken such a grueling trip, to Hirschbach on the Czech border, six months after the death of her husband, the father of her son, who despite all adverse circumstances had turned out so well. But her uncle wouldn’t see them, had his brother deny he was there, hadn’t shown himself at all until she finally gave up waiting for him with her son and they took the train back to Wankham, empty-handed. How can a person have such a heart of stone, she said, on the other hand, however, she could understand her uncle. He didn’t want to hear anything about the Dichtel Mill and Wankham, she said. Prisoners, once they’re released, never go back to the place where they were before going to prison, I said. The innkeeper had hoped to get financial help from her uncle or at least from her second uncle, the so-called Hirschbach uncle, but hadn’t received this help from precisely the two persons who were her only relatives and today still are and about whom she knew that they, although still living in the meager circumstances she had noted in Hirschbach, disposed of a rather large fortune. The innkeeper also made an allusion to the amount of her two uncles’ fortune, without mentioning a definite sum, a pitifully small sum, I thought, but one that must have struck her, the innkeeper, as so enormous that she could see in it the key to her salvation, I thought. Old people, even when they no longer need anything, are stingy, the older they get the stingier they get, won’t part with anything, their offspring can starve to death before their eyes and it won’t bother them in the slightest. Then the innkeeper described her Hirschbach trip, how tiring it is to go from Wankham to Hirschbach, she’d had to change trains three times with her sick child and her Hirschbach visit not only didn’t bring her any money but also gave her a throat infection, a nasty throat infection that lasted for months, as she said. After her visit in Hirschbach she thought she would take down the photograph of her uncle, but then she didn’t remove it from the wall because of her customers, who surely would’ve asked why she’d taken the photograph off the wall, she didn’t want to explain the whole story again to everybody, she said. Then they suddenly would’ve wanted to know everything about the trial, she said, she wouldn’t let herself get into that. The fact is she loved her uncle in the photograph
before
the Hirschbach trip, whereas
after
her return from Hirschbach she could only hate him. She had the greatest compassion for him, he not the least for her. Finally
she
started running the Dichtel Mill again as an inn, she said, under the most unfavorable circumstances, she hadn’t let the building get run down, hadn’t sold it either, although she’d had more than a few offers. Her husband didn’t care about the inn business, she explained, she met him at a carnival party in Regau, where she’d gone to buy a few old chairs for her inn that an inn in Regau had thrown out. She saw right away that a good-natured man was sitting there completely alone, without companions. She sat down at his table and took him back to Wankham, where he then stayed. But he never was an innkeeper, she said. Here all married women, she actually used the words
married women
, have to count on their husbands falling into the paper mill, or at least on their having one of their hands or several fingers ripped off by the paper mill, she said, basically it’s an everyday event when they injure themselves at the paper mills, and the whole area is filled with men like that who’ve been crippled by the paper mills. Ninety percent of the men in this town work in the paper factory, she said. No one here has any other plan for their children than to send them right back to the factory, she said, for generations the same mechanism, I thought. And if the paper factory goes broke, she said, they’ll all be left high and dry. It was only a matter of the shortest time before the paper factory would close, she explained, everything points that way, since the paper factory has been nationalized it would soon have to close, because like all other nationalized companies it was up to its ears in debt. Here everything revolves around the paper factory, and when it closes everything’s over. She herself would be washed up, for ninety percent of her customers worked in the factory, she said, paper workers at least spend their money, she explained, woodsmen on the other hand not at all, and farmers would turn up in her inn once or twice a year, they also had stayed clear of the Dichtel Mill since the days of the trial, wouldn’t come in without asking unpleasant questions, so she said. She had long since stopped worrying about this hopeless future, it didn’t matter what would happen to her, after all her son was twelve now and at fourteen the kids around here can already stand on their own two feet. I’m not the least bit interested in my future, she said. That Herr Wertheimer, as she put it, had always been
a welcome guest
in her inn. But
such refined gentlemen
have no idea what it means to live the way she does, to run an inn like the Dichtel Mill. They (the refined gentlemen) always talked about matters she didn’t understand, didn’t have any worries and spent all their time thinking about what they should do with their money and their time. She herself had never had enough money and never enough time and hadn’t even been unhappy once, in contrast to those she called
refined gentlemen
, who always had enough money and enough time and constantly talked about their unhappiness. She was totally incapable of understanding how Wertheimer could always tell her he was an unhappy person. Often he sat in the restaurant until one in the morning, bemoaning his fate, and she
took pity
on him, as she said, took him up to her room because he no longer wanted to go back to Traich at night. That people like Herr Wertheimer had every opportunity to be happy and never even once took advantage of this opportunity, she said. Such a noble house and so much unhappiness in one person, she said. Basically Wertheimer’s suicide didn’t come as a surprise to her, but he shouldn’t have done that, hanged himself from a tree in Zizers right in front of his sister’s house, she wouldn’t forgive him for that one. The way she said
Herr Wertheimer
was moving and sickening at the same time.
Once I went to him to ask for money, but he didn’t give me any
, she said,
I could have used some cash for a new refrigerator. But they zip their pockets shut, those rich people
, she said,
as soon as you ask for money
. And yet Wertheimer had thrown millions out the window for the fun of it. She considered me to be like Wertheimer, well-to-do, in fact rich and inhuman, for she said spontaneously that all well-to-do and rich people are inhuman. But was
she
human then? I had asked her, to which she gave no answer. She stood up and went over to the beer-truck drivers who had parked their huge truck in front of the inn. I was thinking about what the innkeeper had said and for that reason didn’t get up right away to go to Traich but remained sitting in order to observe the beer-truck drivers and especially the innkeeper, who without a doubt was on more intimate terms with the beer-truck drivers than with any of her other customers. Beer-truck drivers have fascinated me since my earliest childhood, so too that day. I was fascinated by the way they unloaded the beer kegs and rolled them through the lobby, then tapped the first one for the innkeeper and sat down with her at the next table. As a child I had wanted to become a beer-truck driver, admired beer-truck drivers, I thought, couldn’t look often enough at beer-truck drivers. Sitting at the next table and watching the beer-truck drivers I again fell prey to this sentiment from my childhood, but I didn’t dwell on it for long, instead I got up and left the Dichtel Mill for Traich, not without having told the innkeeper that I would be back toward evening or even earlier,
depending
, and that I was counting on an evening meal. While going out I heard the beer-truck drivers ask the innkeeper who I was and since I have sharper ears than anybody I also heard her whisper my name and add that I was a friend of Wertheimer’s, the fool who’d killed himself in Switzerland. Basically I would have preferred to sit in the restaurant and listen to the beer-truck drivers and the innkeeper instead of going to Traich now, I thought while leaving, would have liked most of all to sit at the same table with the beer-truck drivers and drink a glass of beer with them. Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren’t the way we’ve pictured them and that we absolutely don’t belong with them, as we’ve talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion. Wertheimer often described how he always failed in his effort to fit in, to be together with so-called simple folk and thus with the so-called people, and he often reported that he went to the Dichtel Mill with the idea of sitting at the table of simple people, only to have to admit after the first such attempt that it was a mistake to think that individuals like him, Wertheimer, or like me could just sit down at the table of simple people. Individuals like us have cut themselves off from the table of simple people at an early age, he said, as I recall, have been born at quite a different table, he said, not at the table of simple people. Individuals like us are naturally drawn to the table of simple people, he said. But we have no business sitting at the table of simple people, as he said, as I recall. To lead a beer-truck driver’s existence, I thought, to load and unload beer kegs day after day and roll them through the lobbies of inns throughout Upper Austria and always sit down with these same decrepit innkeepers and fall into bed dead-tired every day for thirty years, for forty years. I took a deep breath and went as fast as I could to Traich. In the country we’re confronted with all the unresolvable problems of the world for all time and in a much more drastic manner than in the city, where, if we want to, we can completely anonymize ourselves, I thought, the hideousness and awfulness of the country hit us
right
in the face and we can’t get away from them, and this hideousness and awfulness, if we live in the country, are sure to destroy us in the shortest time, that hasn’t changed, I thought, since I’ve been away. If I go back to Desselbrunn I’ll definitely go to rack and ruin, a return to Desselbrunn is out of the question, not even after five, six years, I said to myself, and the longer I stay away the more necessary it is for me not to go back to Desselbrunn, to stay in Madrid or in another big city, I said to myself, just not in the country and never again in Upper Austria, I thought. It was cold and windy. The absolute madness of going to Traich, of having got out in Attnang-Puchheim, gone to Wankham, came to my mind. In this region Wertheimer had
had
to go crazy, indeed in the end lose his mind, I thought, and I said to myself that he always was exactly
the loser
that Glenn Gould had always spoken of, Wertheimer was a typical dead-end guy, I said to myself, he was sure to go from one dead end to another dead end, for Traich had always been a dead end, as was later Vienna, naturally Salzburg too, for Salzburg had been nothing but an uninterrupted dead end for him, the Mozarteum nothing but a dead end, just as the Vienna Academy, just as the whole business of studying piano had been a dead end, in general people like him have a choice only between one dead end and another one, I said to myself, without ever being able to extricate themselves from this dead-end mechanism.
The loser was a born loser
, I thought,
he has always been the loser
and if we observe the people around us carefully we notice that these people consist almost entirely of losers like him, I said to myself, of dead-end types like Wertheimer, whom Glenn Gould had pegged the moment he saw him as a dead-end type and loser and whom Glenn Gould had also first called the
loser
in his ruthless but thoroughly open Canadian-American manner, Glenn Gould had said out loud and without any embarrassment what the others
also
thought but never said out loud, because this ruthless and open, yet healthy American-Canadian manner isn’t their own, I said to myself, they all saw the
loser
in Wertheimer, though of course hadn’t dared to call him the
loser;
but perhaps with their lack of imagination they never even dreamed of such a nickname, I thought, which Glenn Gould had coined the moment he saw Wertheimer, sharp-eyed, as I have to say, without having observed him for very long he came up with the