Wittgenstein's Nephew (2 page)

cortisone
, together with the therapy associated with it, cast a pall over my thoughts. Yet I did not necessarily spend the whole day in a mood of hopelessness. Having woken
with a feeling of hopelessness, I tried to escape this feeling, and until about noon I succeeded. Then in the afternoon it returned, only to disappear again toward evening, but if I woke up during the night it was naturally back again in all its intensity. Observing that the doctors treated the patients I had seen die no differently from myself, that they exchanged the same words with them and made the same remarks, even the same jokes, I thought: The way I am going will not be much different from the way the others have gone. They died unobtrusively in the Hermann Pavilion, without screaming or crying for help, usually without a sound. In the morning their empty beds would be standing in the corridor, freshly made up for the next occupants. As we walked past, the sisters would smile, untroubled by the fact that we knew. Sometimes I thought to myself: Why do
I
want to delay the course I have to take? Why don't
I
accept it like the others? What's the point of all the effort I make on waking up, the effort of refusing to die—what's the point? Naturally I often wonder, even today, whether it would not have been better to give in, for had I done so I would assuredly have run
my
course in a very short time; I would have died within a few weeks—of that I have no doubt. But I did not die—I went on living, and I am still alive today. I regarded it as a good omen that my friend Paul was in the Ludwig Pavilion while I was in the Hermann Pavilion, though at first he did not know of my presence. However, one day he found out from our garrulous friend Irina, who visited each of us in turn. I knew that for a long time my friend had spent several weeks or months in Steinhof every year, and that
every time
he had been discharged.
This led me to believe that I too would be discharged, even though there was no comparison whatever between us. I imagined that I would spend a few more weeks in the hospital and then leave, as
he
always did. And in the end I was proved right. After four months I was able to leave the Baumgartnerhöhe; I had not died like the others, and Paul had left long before me. Yet as I walked back from the Ernst Pavilion to the Hermann Pavilion, I was still obsessed by unrelenting thoughts of death. I did not believe I would leave the Hermann Pavilion alive; I had seen and heard too much there to believe this possible, and in all I felt there was not one glimmer of hope. Nor did the dusk bring any relief, as one might imagine: it only made everything harder and almost unbearable. After being taken to task by the duty sister, who lectured me on my foolish, irresponsible, and criminal behavior, I collapsed into bed and at once fell asleep. Yet on the Baumgartnerhöhe I was never able to sleep through the night, but usually woke up after only an hour, either startled out of a dream that had taken me, like all my dreams, to the very brink of my existence or wakened by a noise in the corridor, by someone in another room who urgently needed help or was dying, or by the man in the next bed using his urine bottle. He could never use it without making a noise, even though I repeatedly told him how to do so; he usually knocked it against the iron locker next to my bed—not just once but repeatedly—and every time this happened he had to submit to an angry lecture from me about how to handle the urine bottle without waking me up. He also woke up the man on the other side of him, in the bed nearest the door (I had the
one by the window). This was a policeman named Herr Immervoll, who had a passion for blackjack, a game that I learned from him and have never been able to give up, though it often drives me to the verge of insanity. And it is well known that a patient who needs sleeping pills in order to sleep at all cannot get to sleep again once he has been wakened, especially in a hospital like the one on the Baumgartnerhöhe, where all the patients were gravely sick. The man next to me was a theology student whose parents were both judges and lived in Grinzing—in the Schreiberweg, to be precise, one of the most exclusive and expensive districts of Vienna. He was an utterly spoiled character, who had never shared a room with anybody, and I was without doubt the first person to point out to him that when one is sharing a room with other people one simply has to show them some consideration. That went without saying, I added, especially if one was a theology student. But there was no way of getting through to this man, at least not at first. He had been admitted after me, also in a hopeless condition, and, like me and all the others, he had had his neck cut open and a tumor removed. The poor fellow was said to have been within a
hair's breadth
of dying during the operation, which was performed by Professor Salzer—though of course this is not to say that he would not have come
close
to dying under the hands of a different surgeon. It clearly pays to be a theology student, I thought after he moved into the room: the sisters pampered him quite disgustingly, while no less disgustingly neglecting Officer Immervoll and myself. In the morning, for instance, the night sister would bring all the presents the patients had given her
during the night and put them on our theology student's locker—chocolate, wine, and all kinds of confectionery from the city, always from the choicest confectioners, of course, from Demel's and Lehmann's, and from Sluka's, the equally famous confectioners by the City Hall. They also made sure that he always got a double helping of
chaudeau
, not just the statutory single helping we were all entitled to. This frothy dessert made of eggs and wine, which was served regularly in the Hermann Pavilion and which I still love, is standard fare for the gravely sick, and all the patients in the Hermann Pavilion were gravely sick. However, I soon managed to cure our theology student of many of his antisocial habits, thereby earning the gratitude of Officer Immervoll, who was no less affected than I was by the insufferable selfishness of our fellow patient. Immervoll and I, being chronic invalids, had long since accustomed ourselves to playing the part of the considerate, unobtrusive, self-effacing patient, the only part that can make sickness endurable for any length of time; misbehavior, rebelliousness, and recalcitrance seriously weaken the system, and no chronic invalid can afford to sustain such conduct for long. One day, since our theology student was in fact quite capable of getting up and going to the toilet, I forbade him to use his urine bottle and thereby at once incurred the enmity of the sisters, who were naturally
only too pleased
to collect the theology student's bottle. I insisted on his getting up and leaving the room, because I did not see why Immervoll and I should get up and leave the room to pass water when the theology student was allowed to stay in bed to do so and thereby further pollute the already unendurable
atmosphere in the room. I succeeded: the theology student, whose name I have forgotten (I think it was Walter but am no longer sure), went to the toilet, and for several days the sisters would not deign to look at me. But this did not worry me. I was only waiting for the day when I would be able to pay a surprise visit to my friend Paul, but after I had had to abandon my first attempt outside the Ernst Pavilion, this day seemed to have receded into the far distance. I lay in my bed, looking out at the unchanging view of the upper branches of a gigantic pine tree, behind which the sun rose and set for a whole week before I found the courage to leave the room. Then one day I had a visit from Irina, who had just been to see Paul. It was in Irina's apartment in the Blumenstockgasse that I had first met Paul Wittgenstein. I had dropped in during a debate on a performance of the Haffner Symphony by Schuricht and the London Philharmonic; this was right up my alley, as I too had heard Schuricht conduct the symphony the previous day at the Musikverein and felt that I had never, in the whole of my musical experience, heard a more perfect performance. All three of us—Paul, myself, and his friend Irina (who was also extremely musical and altogether extraordinarily artistic)—were of the same mind about this concert. Out of this discussion, which was naturally concerned not with fundamental questions but with crucial points that had not struck us all with equal force, my friendship with Paul grew spontaneously, as it were. I had seen him many times over a number of years, but I had never spoken to him before. It all began in the Blumenstockgasse, on the fourth floor of a house with no elevator, built around the turn of the
century. The three of us sat in an enormous room, simply but comfortably furnished, and talked for hours, to the point of exhaustion, about Schuricht, my favorite conductor, about the Haffner, my favorite symphony, and about this concert, which was the foundation of our friendship. I was immediately captivated by Paul Wittgenstein's uncompromising passion for music, a passion that was shared by our friend Irina. He had a quite extraordinary knowledge of music, especially of the big orchestral works of Mozart and Schumann, as well as a fanatical love of opera, which admittedly very soon struck me as somewhat sinister. His love of opera was famous throughout Vienna; it was not only feared but had something dangerously unhealthy about it, as was soon to be demonstrated. He had a fine artistic education, by no means confined to music, which differed from that of others in that, for instance, he would constantly draw comparisons, always verifiable, between works he had heard, concerts he had attended, and different virtuosi and orchestras he had studied. Given all these qualities, which were absolutely authentic, as I quickly realized, I had no difficulty in recognizing and accepting Paul Wittgenstein as my new and quite extraordinary friend. Our friend Irina, whose life was at least as remarkable and eventful as Paul Wittgenstein's and who had had more marriages and liaisons than could be counted on the fingers of two hands, often visited us in those difficult days on the Wilhelminenberg, turning up in a red knitted cardigan and paying no regard to visiting hours. One day, as I have said, she unfortunately revealed to Paul that I was in the Hermann Pavilion and so frustrated my plan to
surprise him by suddenly appearing in the Ludwig Pavilion. It is ultimately to Irina, who is now married to a so-called musicologist and has moved out to a rural idyll in the Burgenland, that I owe my friendship with Paul. When I went into the Hermann Pavilion I had known him for two or three years, and it seemed to me no coincidence that we should both have suddenly landed on the Wilhelminenberg,
at the end of our lives
, as it were. But I did not read too much significance into this circumstance. Lying in the Hermann Pavilion, I thought to myself: I have my friend in the Ludwig Pavilion, and so I am not alone. But the truth is that even without Paul I would not have been alone during the days and weeks and months I spent on the Baumgartnerhöhe, for I had
my life support
in Vienna. I use this expression to describe the one person who has meant more to me than any other since the death of my grandfather, the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side over thirty years ago. Without her I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time happy. The initiated will understand what I mean when I use this expression to describe the person from whom I draw all my strength—for I truly have no other source of strength—and to whom I have repeatedly owed my survival. From this woman, who is wise and sensible and in every way exemplary, who has never failed me in a moment of crisis, I have learned almost everything in the past thirty years, or at least learned to understand it, and it is from her that I
still learn everything important, or at least learn to understand it. She visited me and sat on my bed nearly every day, after laboriously making her way up to the Baumgartnerhöhe in the sweltering heat, laden with books and newspapers, into an atmosphere that need hardly be described. She was already over seventy, yet I believe that even today, at the age of eighty-seven, she would act no differently. She is not the central figure in these notes that I am writing about Paul, though even in those days on the Wilhelminenberg, when I was isolated, shunted aside, and written off, it was she who played the most important role in my life and existence. The central figure is my friend Paul, who was hospitalized with me on the Wilhelminenberg and who also was isolated, shunted aside, and written off. I want to see him clearly again with the help of these notes, these scraps of memory, which are meant to clarify and recall to mind not only the hopeless situation of my friend but also my own hopelessness at the time, for just as Paul's life had once again run into an impasse, so mine too had run into an impasse, or rather been driven into one. I am bound to say that, like Paul, I had once more overstated and overrated my existence, that I had exploited it to excess. Like Paul, I had once more made demands on myself in excess of my resources. I had made demands on everything in excess of all resources. I had behaved toward myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessness that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own unhealthy overestimation
of myself and the world. Like Paul, I woke up in a hospital bed on the Wilhelminenberg, almost totally destroyed through overrating myself and the world. Paul, quite logically, woke up in the mental clinic, and I woke up in the chest clinic—he in the Ludwig Pavilion, I in the Hermann Pavilion. Just as Paul had more or less raced himself almost to death in
his
madness, I too had more or less raced myself to death in mine. Just as Paul's career had repeatedly been brought to a halt and been cut off in a mental clinic, so mine had repeatedly come to a halt and been cut off in a lung clinic. Just as Paul had again and again worked himself up to an extreme pitch of rebellion against himself and the world around him and had to be taken into a mental clinic, so I had again and again worked myself up to an extreme pitch of rebellion against myself and the world around me and had to be taken into a lung clinic. Just as Paul, at diminishing intervals, found himself and the world insupportable, as may be imagined, so I, at diminishing intervals, found myself and the world insupportable and