The World as I Found It (41 page)

But it was easier for Karl Wittgenstein to let strangers do these things, and like many invalids, he took a secret, crafty pleasure in being willful and unpredictable, closing off his family even as they were preparing to lose him. The old man did not easily surrender to fatality. Painful as it was for him to move, he still insisted, in those first weeks Wittgenstein was home, on sitting at the head of the supper table.
Careful… careful
, he would hiss as two young footmen carried him down the stairs, placing him in his carved chair, then wedging him in with an elaborate assemblage of pillows. Propped up there, valiantly eating his own bland and pitiful portion, he looked like a pasha, albeit a rapidly thinning one, bundled in his smoking jacket and muffler. With his gray hair oiled and combed and his muttonchops carefully trimmed and scented, the old man looked more fastidious than ever, thanks to these two
hirelings
, as Mining called his nurses. And still, greedily, the sick man licked the delicious dew off those last leaves that life held out to him. After dinner, following a sponge bath and massage, the nurses would help him onto the oval settee where, as was his custom, he would play his cello, hugging it to him like a woman as he coaxed forth those last nocturnal groans.

More than ever now, Karl Wittgenstein's home was a factory in which his children took their shifts. Kurt would sometimes play several rubbers of bridge with the old man, who took great pleasure in beating him. Paul's job was to play the piano downstairs, letting the music rise like a draught up the grand stairway into his father's open chambers. At first his father might clap weakly. Later, he would send a footman down to convey his compliments — or, just as likely, to present a piece of criticism scrawled on a sheet. As time progressed, though, Paul was asked to play shorter and shorter pieces. Playing along, Paul would see a handkerchief waft past his eyes. And looking upstairs he would see the nurse who had dropped it as a sign to stop: the old man was asleep.

As his favorite, Mining took up much of her father's available day. Wittgenstein's job was to relieve her. In the corner of his father's room was a gramophone with a trumpeting brass bell, with stacks of records heavy as plates on the table beside it. In the afternoon, after opening the curtains to let the sun beam across the Oriental carpets, Wittgenstein would often crank up the gramophone and play several records for his father. Caruso singing Puccini, Beethoven performed by the Berlin Philharmonic — his father listened and never said a word, careful not to betray the emotion that surely surged within him when he heard great music. Peeping out with those bulgy, watery eyes, the old man rather showed tremendous, cultivated attention, stoical and aloof. Still, Wittgenstein noticed how, when he thought his son wasn't watching, the sick man would tightly shut his eyes, almost shuddering at moments of exceptional beauty. Yet if Wittgenstein ventured to praise a passage later, his father would cut him short, saying, Yes, it was excellent. Very nice. Very nice, indeed.

But Wittgenstein and his brothers felt another unspoken reproach. This came every few days when the old man's solicitors reported to him on the plans he had set in motion to sell all his interests in the Wittgenstein Gruppe. For Kurt, who was titularly in charge of one factory, this was in effect a vote of no confidence — why, his future wasn't even a matter of serious question. Certainly Kurt didn't question it, his own confidence having eroded to the point where he grudgingly agreed with his father's estimation of him.

Had Wittgenstein and Paul shown any desire to assume control of their father's enterprises, it might have been a different story. That developments had passed that point — not to mention the fact that neither wanted a business career — did not make them feel any easier about what Karl Wittgenstein no doubt saw as a repudiation of his life and values. Talking together in the study one afternoon, Wittgenstein and Paul recalled one summer nine years before when their father had attempted to introduce them to the business life. This was the summer following their brother Hans's suicide, when the recalcitrant Rudi was showing many of the same disturbing signs. Kurt, if unpromising, was at least stable: he was working under the stern eye of Herr Graben, one of his father's top assistants. With Kurt in tow and Rudi a losing cause, a worried Karl Wittgenstein instead focused his attention on his two youngest sons, Ludwig and Paul.

Wittgenstein and Paul were then fifteen and sixteen, respectively — old enough, their father said, to learn about the affairs of the world, meaning, of course, the business world. With this in mind, Herr Wittgenstein took them on a tour of his factories in lower Bohemia.

From the start, Wittgenstein felt it was hateful, two princes who had never done a day's work being trotted through plants to watch other men toil. And fearsome toil it was, too, ladling liquid fire and beating red-hot ingots under a burning pall of poisonous yellow smoke.

Karl Wittgenstein would question and reward only his very best workers, and he was carefully advised beforehand as to who deserved this signal honor. Imagine how a latheman feels to explain his lathing to me, the Direktor himself, Karl Wittgenstein told his sons. And for him to see that I thoroughly understand his problems and cares, as if I wore the same greasy black apron. Or for the soot-faced forge operator to shake the factory owner's hand — why, for him this is as if God visited hell.

Wittgenstein best remembered the first plant on their tour, a machine shop in the vast Teplitz works, which made special steel castings for the Imperial-Royal military. At his father's entrance, with the nervous plant manager hurrying before him, the grinding, banging and shrieking of the iron-girdered shop abruptly ceased. Wittgenstein could still remember the feel of the floor, slick with a heavy black coating of grease, carbonized steel and curled lathe filings. Shrouds of yellowy sunlight filtered through the grimy skylights, trickling over the chain hoists and massive geared winches onto the hairy shoulders of the men, all heavily muscled as draft horses as they stood hobbled by their lathes, anvils, punches and presses. Herr Wittgenstein was dignified and charming — the two boys saw the awed, admiring looks of the workers as he walked down the line, more than a man, someone actually
clean
, bespeaking rectitude and prosperity in a suit that his butler, who accompanied him on all his travels, had zealously pressed and brushed that morning. Of the hundred and fifty men in that shop, Karl Wittgenstein personally complimented just four, the shop's top producers. The chosen men were moved beyond words — moved almost to tears, several of them — as the Direktor stopped in the stream of his busy life and told the whole shop, in his gruff and barreling voice,
how much
, and precisely
why
, he valued
this man
, whom he called by name as he seized his grimy hand. This done, the Direktor gave a hortatory speech, emphasizing the importance of their work to the empire. And when the speech ended, they were at first unsure, afraid to applaud. But then with a stutter it started, clapping, then cheers and then the whistle that brought on the grinding, banging and shrieking that continued for two ten-hour shifts, six days a week.

They went through one more plant that morning, and another that afternoon. But at one factory Karl Wittgenstein told his sons to wait outside the foreman's office, saying ruefully, I have to speak to several individuals. From the long bench where they sat, his sons could hear his voice, hunking, guttural. The tempo was all too familiar, and as they sat ashen on that bench, three men and then a fourth hurried through the door with ruined faces. Stripped of their aprons under the gaze of a guard, they were summarily given their pay and their belongings. It was not by accident that the sons witnessed this. Wittgenstein could well remember his father's charged expression, his active eyes, when he returned to bundle the two novitiates inside. And before it seemed they were even through that door, they could see their father's aspect change like the sun. Looking back genially, he said, They all have their story. Always the same story, with variations of course. The sick wife and the children, the sore back, the bottle that calls to them. Believe me, I have heard them all. Look, he said under his breath, with a glance at the workers who were working harder than ever now, with the killing done. Look at these fine men. Do you suppose for a second they are angry at me for this?
Angry?
For sacking the slacker, the drunk who might get them maimed or killed? I did these men a service. Sad and unpleasant business to be sure, but one cannot delegate everything. Sometimes to clear the air, I must see to this personally. Men respect this in a leader. It is not enough to hand out awards. They must see your face. They must see it in both guises.

Karl Wittgenstein's fate was certain. Less certain was his youngest son's.

In those last weeks, Wittgenstein increasingly felt the force of his father's critical gaze. As he sat reading to him, he would feel that questioning look like a burning handprint on the side of his face. They both knew the question:
What will you do with your life?

Karl Wittgenstein made various feints at asking this question. After dozing off during their concert one afternoon, the old man awoke to find his son at his bedside, making those peculiar logical notations in his notebook. Blinking with irritation, the father asked:

Tell me, what does all that business mean?

What? asked Wittgenstein, offering him the scrawled page. These symbols?

His father nodded. Any of it.

Do you really want to know?

Yes. Please explain it to me.

So against his better judgment Wittgenstein explained. His discussion of logical symbology was basic and down to earth, but his father grew increasingly agitated. Yet whenever Wittgenstein tried to end the lesson, the old man insisted that he continue, apparently in the hope that his son would hear his own foolishness. But finally, looking up, Wittgenstein saw that his father was near tears — impotent invalid's tears.

I'm sorry, gasped his father with a heave of his chest. I did not mean to say this — honestly, I didn't — but I do not see what relevance this has to
anything
, or — With a sudden wince of pain then, he hissed, Leave me now —
go
! He pressed his hand over his face, his voice frantic, and there came a sharp smell. Please! I can't continue this now! Don't you hear me? I said,
Call the nurse! Call
her, will you —

The sick man did not have to call the nurse again. A moment later he was covered with comforting flesh, and Wittgenstein was hurrying down the long hallway, mortified at the coddling way the nurse spoke to his proud father, whom he could hear crying.

Gretl fared no better. For her there was also this criticism, as powerful as it was unspoken. Even now, and ever so subtly, they were still quarreling. Yet Gretl knew that by keeping her composure she would win — by outliving him she would win, for all the good that winning would do. Her father could see she was winning. She always dressed especially smartly when she came to visit him, the better to remind the sick man of their now vastly differing status. A black dress with bottle-green panels. A veiled hat with a brace of pheasant quills fastened by a diamond signet. With each subsequent visit, Gretl seemed to outdo herself, the better to show herself as one of the secular world of the living, while he, succumbing to his own dark medicine, was fast slipping into that black tarn of his own belatedness, soon to be a face sunk beneath the earth, unheeded and forgotten.

Yet neither won. With a look, the father could undo months of her work with Freud. Several times Wittgenstein found his sister quietly crying downstairs — crying, she said, because she was so appalled at the persistence and virulence of her anger, the way it sunk only deeper without ever emerging into anything else. Wittgenstein also had that anger, but unlike his sister he kept it hidden, even to himself. However buried or transmogrified, though, it sometimes would emerge, as one day when he impulsively told her:

I just want to ask him once, What would you have me do with my life?

But why? she asked. He'll never tell you. Can't you see that? He'd only be relinquishing his advantage.

Yes, but at least I would have asked.

Gretl sat there staring at him. But if he refuses to answer, what's the point of asking?

I don't know. His hands were inert. I suppose so I could tell myself that I had asked.

Gretl had good reason for advising him to let it go. She had put a big question to her father once. She and Wittgenstein both remembered her question. They also bitterly remembered his answer.

Gretl's question concerned Hans. After his death, four trunks containing his belongings were shipped home from Cuba. Like the rest of the family, Gretl knew Hans had kept a voluminous journal. She also knew that those trunks probably contained the many letters her father had written Hans, especially in the last year before his banishment, when their relationship had degenerated into little more than an abusive exchange of notes thrust under closed bedroom doors late at night.

Karl Wittgenstein wasn't about to have his family burrowing through Hans's trunks. He wasn't even about to discuss them, or Hans, who for him was a closed book. Without a word to anyone, Karl Wittgenstein took possession of those trunks. Gretl thought he might even have had them burned.

Gretl found it maddening to have anything withheld from her. But it was more than mere sorrow or curiosity that drove her to ask her father about the trunks. It was revenge. Even at twenty-four, Gretl was exceptionally bold. She told Wittgenstein that she was going to ask her father. She even invited him to hide in the next room and listen. Wittgenstein begged her not to do it, but he was fascinated — fascinated and ashamed that she, a woman, should carry this grievance to their father. He hated himself for being so meek and obedient. A queasy, silent thirteen, he felt like a bent nail that somebody had pried from a door as he positioned himself — quite against his principles — in the next room.