Wittgenstein's Nephew (6 page)

predictions—and had returned to Nathal, I heard nothing from my friend for some time. I had the greatest difficulty in
normalizing
myself, and there was no question of my starting on a new work, but I did make an effort to tidy up the house, which had been somewhat neglected during my absence. Don't rush things, I told myself. It'll take time to get back to the kind of conditions that will one day make it possible to start work on a new book. When a sick person returns home after a long absence, he finds everything strange, and the process of familiarizing himself with it again, of resuming possession of everything, is long and arduous. Having lost everything, he has to rediscover it. And because a sick person is always deserted—to say anything else would be a gross lie—he must try to develop a quite superhuman energy if he wants to carry on from where he left off months before (or even years before, as I have had to do more than once). A healthy person cannot understand this and immediately becomes impatient, and by his impatience he only makes life harder for the returning invalid, though he ought to be making it easier. The healthy have never had patience with the sick, nor, of course, have the sick ever had patience with the healthy. This fact must not be forgotten. For naturally the sick make far greater demands than the healthy, who, being healthy, have no need to make such demands. The sick do not understand the healthy and the healthy do not understand the sick. This conflict often proves fatal, because ultimately the sick cannot cope with it, and the healthy naturally cannot cope with it either, with the result that they often become sick themselves. It is not easy to deal with a sick person who suddenly returns
to the place from which he was wrenched by sickness, and the healthy usually lack the will to help him: they constantly play at being good Samaritans, without actually being good Samaritans or wanting to be, and because it is only a feint, it merely harms the sick person and does not benefit him. In reality, a sick person is always alone, and whatever help he gets from outside nearly always proves merely vexatious. A sick person needs the most unobtrusive help, the kind of help the healthy cannot give. Through their essentially selfish pretense of helping him they succeed only in harming him and making everything harder for him, not easier. Most of the time the sick are not helped, but merely vexed, by their helpers. When a sick person returns home, however, he cannot afford any vexation. Should he point out that he is being vexed rather than helped, he will at once be rebuffed by those who are ostensibly helping him; he will be accused of arrogance and boundless selfishness when in fact he is only resorting to the ultimate self-defense. When a sick person returns home, the healthy world receives him with ostensible kindness, ostensible helpfulness, ostensible self-sacrifice, but its kindness, helpfulness, and self-sacrifice, when put to the test, turn out to be a sham, and one does well to forgo them. But of course there is nothing more difficult than to recognize genuine kindness, genuine helpfulness, and genuine self-sacrifice; there is nothing harder than to distinguish between the
genuine article
and the
sham
. For a long time we may believe that we are dealing with the genuine article, only to discover that we have been taken in by a sham. The hypocrisy practiced by the healthy toward the sick is extremely common.
Basically the healthy want no more to do with the sick, and they are put out if a sick person—one who is gravely sick—suddenly reasserts his claim to health. The healthy always make it particularly difficult for the sick to regain their health, or at least to normalize themselves, to improve their state of health. A healthy person, if he is honest, wants nothing to do with the sick; he does not wish to be reminded of sickness and thereby, inevitably, of death. He wants to stay with his own kind and is basically intolerant of the sick. It has always been made difficult for me to return from the world of the sick to the world of the healthy. While a person is sick, the healthy shun him and cast him off, in obedience to their instinct for self-preservation. Then suddenly this person who has been shed and has meanwhile ceased to matter reappears and claims his rights. Naturally he is at once given to understand that basically he has no rights. As the healthy see it, the sick have forfeited whatever rights they once had (here I am speaking of the gravely sick, those with chronic diseases, like Paul Wittgenstein and myself). Their sickness has robbed them of their rights and thrown them upon the charity of the healthy. When a sick person, having ceded the place that he once occupied by right, suddenly demands its restitution, the healthy regard this as an act of monstrous presumption. A sick person who returns home always feels like an intruder in an area where he no longer has any business to be. It is a well-known pattern the world over: a sick person goes away, and once he is gone the healthy move in and take over the place he formerly occupied, yet instead of dying, as he was meant to do, he suddenly returns, wishing to
resume and repossess his former place. The healthy are incensed, since the reappearance of this person whom they had already written off forces them back into their previous confines, and this is the last thing they want. The sick person needs the most superhuman strength if he is to resume and repossess his former place. On the other hand, it is well known that the gravely sick, once they return home, set about the
reappropriation
of their rights with the utmost ruthlessness. Sometimes they even have the strength to displace the healthy, to drive them out and even to kill them. But this very rarely happens: the normal situation is the one I have already described, in which the sick person returns home, expecting nothing but gentleness and consideration, only to meet with brutal hypocrisy, which, with a kind of clairvoyance, he is at once able to see through. A gravely sick person who returns home must be treated with gentleness and consideration. But this is difficult, and therefore rare. The healthy immediately make him feel he is an outsider and no longer one of them, and while pretending that this is not so, they do all in their power to repulse him. I met with none of these difficulties, since I returned to a completely empty house, and Paul, who was discharged before me, was fortunate in being able to return to Edith. I have hardly ever known a more helpful person than my friend's wife; she surrounded him with loving care until one day, about six months before his death, she suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. She had a long spell of hospitalization, and then for some months she would be seen in the city center, but of course she was no longer the Edith she had once been. She had lost much of her self-confidence
and insisted on doing her shopping in the immediate vicinity of their apartment, and since cooking was now such an effort, she went for lunch to the Grabenhotel in the Dorotheergasse, where the food has always been cheap but was still of excellent quality, as it no longer is. After the death of the two proprietors of the hotel, who also owned the Regina and the Royal and both died of Parkinson's disease, the food in all three establishments became inedible, and it is a long time since I last visited any of them—which is a great pity, as the Grabenhotel is the most pleasant place to sit. One day Edith died, leaving my friend Paul completely alone. He went rapidly downhill. At times he seemed like his former self, but death was
written on his face
, as they say, and he knew it. He had absolutely nothing more to lose in the world. Once or twice he tried to recuperate in the Salzkammergut, but to no avail. While Edith was alive he had left her alone most of the time in their apartment above the Bräunerhof, but now that she was dead he could no longer exist without her. He seemed
lost
, and there was no longer any way of helping him. I and various other friends often took him out for a drink—to take him out of himself, as they say—but without success. Once or twice he himself invited me and my friends to the Sacher and ordered champagne, as in the old days, but this only deepened his depression. In their last years together, when he was not in Steinhof or in the Wagner-Jauregg Hospital (Wagner-Jauregg, after whom this psychiatric hospital was named, had been a relative of his), he and Edith often went to Traunkirchen. Now he went there alone, but the effect was devastating. Even at a distance one could see that he was desperate,
rushing this way and that and finding nothing to cling to. In his own quarters, up on the hill between Altmünster and Traunkirchen, in a house that belonged to a brother (who spent most of the year in Switzerland) and only partly to Paul, it was so cold, all the year round, that as soon as one entered one felt that before long one would freeze to death. The high walls were damp right up to the ceiling. On them hung four hideous paintings, spotted with mold, from the Klimt period, and beside these was one by Klimt himself, who, like other famous painters of his day, was commissioned to paint the portraits of the arms-producing Wittgensteins, since it was the fashion among the
nouveaux riches
at the turn of the century to have their portraits painted, under the pretext of patronizing the arts. The Wittgensteins, like the rest of their kind, had basically no interest in art, but were keen to patronize it. In a corner of the room stood a Bösendorfer grand, on which, as may be imagined, all the virtuosi of their time had played. The main reason for the freezing conditions was that the huge tiled stove in the ground-floor room had been out of order for decades, so that for decades it had been impossible to heat the house. The stove therefore acted as a refrigerator. Whenever I saw Paul and Edith sitting by it, they were wrapped in fur jackets. In the Salzkammergut the houses have to be heated until June, and then again from mid-August onward. It is a cold and unfriendly region, perversely described as a
summer resort
, and for anyone with a sensitive constitution it is lethal. Everyone there suffers from rheumatic disorders; all the old people are bent and deformed, and one has to be very strong to survive. The
Salzkammergut is marvelous for a few days but annihilating if one stays there for any length of time. Paul loved the Salzkammergut, having spent his childhood there, but it increasingly depressed him. He went there from Vienna in the hope that his health would improve, but it only worsened. He found the Salzkammergut more and more oppressive, both physically and mentally. I went for walks with him near Altmünster, but they did him no good. We were still able to have
ideal
conversations, but after Edith's death everything suddenly became hopeless, or at least radically changed. It was as though everything had been
destroyed
. It was an effort for him to laugh. Apart from the death of his beloved wife, he had reached the age when everything becomes doubly difficult. In the room where we sat, the air was so damp and stale that I thought I would suffocate, even though outside it was sunny. I realized why he and his wife hardly ever stayed at the house, preferring the little boardinghouse down by the main road, where they did not have to do everything for themselves. After the age of sixty nobody likes doing everything for himself, and Edith was nearly eighty when she died. I recall that he went sailing again on the Traunsee, with my brother and me. It was an absurd thing to do. Though gravely ill, Paul was in his element and as enthusiastic as ever, while I cursed this sailing trip and the high waves on the lake. My brother tried to get Paul to go for another outing on the lake, but it was no use: he was far too weak. Although this trip made him happy while we were
on the lake
, it depressed him as soon as we were back on shore, since he knew it was his last. He kept on saying,
It's the last time
, and this became
a refrain. If I had friends staying with me he would go for walks with us. He was not keen to do so, but was prepared to join us. I do not care for walks either, and have been a reluctant walker all my life. I have always disliked walking, but I am prepared to go for walks with friends, and this makes them think I am a keen walker, for there is an amazing
theatricality
about the way I walk. I am certainly not a keen walker, nor am I a nature lover or a nature expert. But when I am with friends I walk in such a way as to convince them I am a keen walker, a nature lover, and a nature expert. I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me. I live in the country only because the doctors have told me that I must live
in the country
if I want to survive—for no other reason. In fact I love everything except nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and implacability of nature through the way it has dealt with my own body and soul, and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can. The truth is that I am a city dweller who can at best tolerate nature. It is only with reluctance that I live in the country, which on the whole I find hostile. And naturally Paul too was a city dweller through and through, who, like me, was soon exhausted when surrounded by nature. On one occasion I had to have a copy of the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
because I wanted to read an article about Mozart's
Zaïde
that was due to appear in it. Believing that I could obtain a copy in Salzburg, I drove the fifty miles to this so-called
world-famous
festival city, with Paul and a woman friend of
ours, in her car. But the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
was not to be had in Salzburg. Then I had the idea of getting a copy in Bad Reichenhall, and so we drove to this
world-famous
spa. But the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
was not to be had there either, and so we drove back to Nathal, somewhat disappointed. Just outside Nathal, Paul suddenly proposed that we drive to Bad Hall, another
world-famous
spa, where we would be sure to get the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
and so be able to read the article on
Zaïde
. So we actually drove the fifty miles from Nathal to Bad Hall. But the