Wittgenstein's Nephew (9 page)

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in front of the whole assembly and then left the chamber, slamming the glass door behind him with such force that it shattered into a thousand fragments. Everybody present jumped up and watched in astonishment as the minister stormed out. For a moment complete silence reigned, as they say. And then the strangest thing happened: the whole assembly, whom I can describe only as an opportunistic rabble, rushed after the minister, though not without shouting curses and brandishing their fists at me as they went. I clearly remember the clenched fist that Herr Henz, the president of the Art Senate, brandished at me, and all the other marks of respect I was shown at that moment, as the whole assembly, consisting of a few hundred kept
artists, most of them writers—colleagues of mine, one might say—together with their hangers-on, raced through the shattered glass door in pursuit of the minister. I will refrain from mentioning names, as I have no wish to appear in court over such a ludicrous matter, but they were the best known, most celebrated, and most respected names in Austrian letters. They all raced out of the audience chamber and down the stairs after the minister, leaving me standing there with my companion. Like a leper. None of them stayed behind with us; they all rushed out, past the buffet that had been prepared for them, and followed the minister down the stairs—all except Paul. He was the only one who stayed with me and my companion, horrified, yet at the same time amused, by the incident. Later, when they could safely do so, a few of those who had at first disappeared slunk back and joined me in the audience chamber. This little group finally got around to discussing where to go for a meal in order to choke down the whole ridiculous episode. Years later Paul and I would go through the names of those who had raced after this brainless Styrian politician in their unscrupulous subservience to the state and its ministers, and we knew why each of them had done so. The following day the Austrian newspapers carried reports of how
Bernhard the nest fouler
had insulted the minister, when in fact the opposite was the case: the minister Piffl-Per?evi? had insulted the writer Thomas Bernhard. However, the event drew fitting comment abroad, where people do not have to rely on the Austrian ministries and their involvement in artistic subventions.
Accepting a prize is in itself an act of perversity
, my friend Paul told me at the time,
but
accepting a state prize is the greatest
. Visiting our
musical
friend Irina in the Blumenstockgasse had become one of our favorite habits, and it was nothing short of a disaster when one day she moved to the country, to a remote village in Lower Austria that could be reached only after a two-hour drive, as it did not even have a rail connection. We could not imagine what a city dweller like Irina hoped to find in the country. Year in, year out, she had gone to a concert or the opera or the theater every evening, yet now she suddenly took a lease on a one-story farmhouse, half of which was used as a pigsty, as Paul and I discovered to our horror, and where not only did it rain in but damp rose from floor to ceiling, there being no cellarage. Suddenly there she was, sitting with her musicologist, who for years had written for Austrian newspapers and periodicals, leaning against an American cast-iron stove, eating her own home-baked farm bread, wearing shabby old clothes, extolling the country life and inveighing against the city, while I had to hold my nose against the stench from the pigsty. The musicologist no longer wrote articles on Webern and Berg, Hauer and Stockhausen, but spent his time chopping wood outside the window or clearing out the blocked cesspit. Irina talked no longer about the Sixth or the Seventh but only about the smoked pork she hung in the chimney with her own hands, no longer about Klemperer and Schwarzkopf but about the neighbor's tractor, which woke her at five in the morning to the accompaniment of the dawn chorus. At first we thought it would not be long before Irina and her musicologist spouse lost their fascination for husbandry and returned to music, but we were deceiving ourselves. There was
soon no more talk of music—it was as though it had never existed. We drove out to see her and were given home-baked bread and home-made soup, home-grown radishes and home-grown tomatoes. We felt we had been let down and led up the garden path. In a few months Irina, until recently a sophisticated city dweller with a passion for Vienna, had transformed herself into a stolid provincial farmer's wife who spent her time hanging smoked pork in her chimney and growing her own vegetables. To us this seemed a gross self-degradation, and we could not help being disgusted, so we soon stopped driving out to see her, and she actually vanished from our horizon. We were obliged to seek a new venue for our conversations and discussions, but found none: there was no substitute for the Blumenstockgasse. Thrown upon our own resources without Irina, we were suddenly deprived of all musical inspiration as we sat in the Sacher or the Bräunerhof—or the Ambassador, which also had an ideal corner for the likes of us, where we could see everything without being seen and where our conversations were not instantly stifled as soon as they got under way. Not caring for walks, we would meet somewhere and at once set off for the Sacher or one of the other coffeehouses that suited our purposes. Seated in
our
corner at the Sacher, we would at once find a victim for our speculations. Seeing some other guest, either an Austrian or a foreigner, self-consciously eating his cake or a portion of Prague ham stuffed with the ever-popular horseradish cream, or drinking coffee as he recovered from a strenuous sightseeing tour of the city—and therefore consuming his cake too hastily or gulping down his coffee too greedily—we would launch
into denunciations of the mindless gluttony that had generally been on the increase in recent decades. From some German woman, sitting there in her tasteless fur coat and spooning up the whipped cream with gusto, we would derive our distaste for all the Germans in Vienna. Some Dutchman sitting by the window in a loud yellow pullover, endlessly picking pellets of snot from his nose and believing himself unobserved, would at once inspire a blanket condemnation of everything pertaining to the Netherlands, which we suddenly felt we had detested all our lives. If we saw nobody we knew, we had to make do with strangers, but if an acquaintance appeared on the scene, he would become the focus of observations that were precisely tailored to their object and could keep us amused literally for hours. To dispel our boredom we would exploit these observations in the service of what we fancied were rather more exalted topics, as starting points for discussions of quite different subjects that we ventured to regard as entirely philosophical. Thus some quite ordinary person, sitting there drinking his coffee, would often launch us into a discussion of Schopenhauer, or a lady sitting with her naughty grandchild under the portrait of an archduke and working her way through great slices of apple strudel might set us talking for hours about the court jesters of Velázquez in the Prado. If an umbrella fell to the ground, it put us in mind not only of Chamberlain, as one might imagine, but of President Roosevelt, or a passerby with a little Pekingese might conjure up the extraordinarily lavish life-style of the Indian maharajas. And so on. When I am in the country, bereft of mental stimulus, my thinking atrophies, because my whole mind
atrophies, but nothing so calamitous ever happens to me in the city. As Paul once put it, people who leave the city for the country and want to keep up their intellectual standards have to be equipped with tremendous potential, with incredible mental resources, yet sooner or later even they are prone to stagnation and atrophy, and by the time they become aware of this process it is usually too late, and they inevitably come to a miserable end without being able to help themselves. Hence, throughout the years of my friendship with Paul I accustomed myself to the lifesaving rhythm of constantly switching between the city and the country, a rhythm that I intend to maintain for the rest of my life—going to Vienna at least every other week, and at least every other week to the country. For in the country the mind is drained just as fast as it is recharged in Vienna—faster, in fact, since the country always treats the mind more cruelly than the city ever can. The country robs a thinking person of everything and gives him virtually nothing, whereas the city is perpetually giving. One has simply to see this, and of course feel it, but very few either see it or feel it, with the result that most people are sentimentally drawn to the country, where in no time they are inevitably sucked dry, deflated, and destroyed. The mind cannot develop in the country; it can develop only in the city, yet today everyone flees from the city to the country because people are basically too indolent to use their minds, on which the city makes the greatest demands, and so they choose to perish surrounded by nature, admiring it without knowing it, instead of seizing upon all the benefits the city has to offer, which have increased and multiplied quite miraculously
over the years, and never more so than in recent years. I know how
deadly
the country is, and whenever possible I flee from it to some big city—no matter what it is called or how ugly it is—which always does me a hundred times more good than the country. I have always cursed my unhealthy lungs, which prevent me from spending all my time in the city, which is what I would most like to do. But it is senseless to go on agonizing over something that cannot be changed and has not been worth talking about for years—something I must refrain from talking about. It occurs to me how lucky my friend Paul was to have good lungs and not to have to live in the country merely to survive. He could afford what I regard as the greatest boon—to spend all his time in the city—something that I could never afford if I wanted to go on living. Although he had not drunk alcohol for years, his favorite nightly resort, even in the last year of his life, was the
Eden Bar
, for naturally he could not bear to stay at home after Edith died. Only now did I learn why he had never invited me up to his apartment, even though we had met hundreds of times at the Bräunerhof, which was in the same building. This apartment consisted of one quite large room and a small adjacent room that served as both kitchen and bathroom. Only a few months before his death he took me to this
apartment
, climbing laboriously up the stairs, which were probably even more taxing for me than they were for him, since for years I have hardly been able to climb stairs and am out of breath after three or four flights. The elevator being out of order and the stairway in almost complete darkness, we groped our way up the stairs, urging each other on by our panting.
The apartment itself was
not much to write home about
, he said after we had entered, but the
location
was
superb
. One could not be more central, he said, and the location was what mattered most to him, aside from the fact that he could afford this apartment but not a bigger one.
Naturally that was very depressing for Edith
, he said, pointing to the half-open door to the kitchen-cum-bath, behind which were heaps of dirty linen and crockery, and a great pile of groceries that had been kept too long to be usable. The last refuge of a failure, I thought. We sat down on a sofa covered in black-and-green velvet to get our breath back before we could think of doing anything more than make embarrassed remarks about the cramped space, the dirt, the darkness, and the ideal location of the apartment. The sofa was from his childhood, he said, from his parents' home; it was his favorite piece of furniture. I can no longer say what we talked about as we sat on the sofa, but I soon got up and took my leave, while my friend remained sitting hopelessly on his black-and-green sofa. I suddenly could not stand being with him any longer. I kept thinking that I was no longer sitting with a living person, but sitting with one who had long been dead, and so I made my escape. Before I was out of the apartment he began to weep, his hands pressed between his knees, because he suddenly saw once more that it was all over, but I was determined not to turn back. I went down the stairs and into the open air as fast as I could. I ran along the Stallburggasse and the Dorotheergasse, then across the Stephansplatz to the Wollzeile, where I was at last able to slacken my pace. I sat down on a bench in the City Park and ordered myself to breathe regularly as I tried to
escape from my situation; it was a terrible situation, in which I kept feeling that I was about to suffocate. Sitting on the bench in the City Park, I thought that I had perhaps seen my friend for the last time, for I could not believe that such a debilitated body, which had hardly a spark of life left in it, since all will to live had gone, could survive for more than a few more days. What shattered me most was that this man was suddenly so alone—a man like him, who was born and brought up to be what they call a man of society and had finally grown old. I thought of how I had met this man, who really had been my friend, who had so often brought so much happiness into my existence, which, though not actually unhappy, was a burden most of the time, who had acquainted me with so much that was at first quite foreign to me, pointing me in ways I had not known before, opening doors that had previously been closed, and who brought me back to my true self at the crucial moment when I might easily have gone to pieces in the country. For before I met my friend there had been a period when I was prey to a morbid melancholy, if not depression, when I really believed I was lost, when for years I did no proper work but spent most of my days in a state of total apathy and often came close to putting an end to my life by my own hand. For years I had taken refuge in a terrible suicidal brooding, which deadened my mind and made everything unendurable, above all myself—brooding on the utter futility all around me, into which I had been plunged by my general weakness, but above all my weakness of character. For a long time I could not imagine being
able
to go on living, or even existing. I was no
longer capable of seizing upon any purpose in life that would have given me control over myself. Every morning on waking I was inevitably caught up in this mechanism of suicidal brooding, and I remained in its grip throughout the day. And I was deserted by everyone because