Suddenly I thought of the bustle of the capital, where between twelve and half past one everyone who is anyone walks along the Graben or shows themselves on the Kärntner Strasse, as in a display window several hundred meters long, from the point of view of the businessman, from the point of view of the manager’s wife, from the point of view of the attorney’s wife, and from several hundred other points of view, as for instance the chartered accountant’s wife or the woman with the fruit stand, who’s come up from the Naschmarkt, to be there as well. And I think how I fit into the scene with my books and papers under my arm, how I pick up snatches of conversation, a greeting or a goodbye, or even just swearwords or complaints. There I am, suddenly in the fresh air, which seems to have come down into these streets from the outlying hills, and I don’t know what to do with myself this lunchtime. My friends are all gone, headed home, eating lunch with their girlfriends or their brothers or their aunts from the provinces, and I’m all alone. I ponder which is better, to take in the words of the self-important and the curious passersby, or to go and sit in a park, of which there are many in the capital, one more beautiful than the next, and finally I decide on the latter course, and I’ve already turned down the Albrechtsrampe to the green island, where day in, day out the birds sing and the children play tag. That’s where the secretaries sit eating their sandwiches, and the milk women have a break here, and the occasional doctor of philosophy with no better option sits on some stone step or pedestal to dig into his salt beef, carefully wrapped this morning for him. It smells of jasmine and hard-boiled eggs, and there’s the periodic rustle of dried leaves being pushed by one of the innumerable attendants from one end of the park to the other. A look at my watch tells me I have two hours till the next lecture. I put my books down on the top step of the staircase that leads up to the rather pompous Greek Temple of the Muses, and before long I’m stretched out in the sun, which seems to be almost setting. Before long, October’s finished, and there are no more leaves on the trees and no more humans in the park. Before long, the first snowflakes will fall on my shoulders, and my sandals will be replaced by shoes. But even in winter the Kärntner Strasse is so thronged with people that it feels warm, even when it’s thirty below. And the Graben is lit up at Christmastime, and people bump into each other, and everyone feels glad to be alive. Sometimes you might shiver a little to be standing all alone in the midst of so many people, but then you think of your bed, and you don’t feel sad anymore.
Today as I was sitting in front of the window, I had the idea that I ought to do something about my future. At least the immediate future. About what would happen once my internship in Schwarzach is finished. How will I get ready for my exams? I don’t have the sense that I know enough to even attempt them. And here I’m not even able to do anything to prepare. There’s no time. Because I’m altogether under the painter’s thumb, I have to go where he goes, although that’s not really it: I can’t help going with him wherever he goes. Even if he didn’t ask me to go with him, I’d still want to go. They are always the same walks. They aren’t really walks at all. Just tramping through the snow, the wind, the forest, the cold. Sometimes I’m on my own. After lunch, when he goes back to his room, to lie on his bed—“Don’t imagine I’m sleeping!”—when he suddenly sends me packing, like he did the day before yesterday. Then he looks at me and taps me with his stick and says: “Now go back to the inn. I want to be on my own.” Then I leave him, but even then I’m still with him, in my thoughts, which are forever circling around him.
I ought to write home, at the very least I ought to tell them where I am, so that, having heard nothing from me in two weeks—I bet they’ve asked in the hospital if they know anything—they know what’s going on. But they would think it was strange if I wrote and told them I was here to observe someone. Observe someone? They wouldn’t understand that, they can’t imagine what it is to observe someone, I’m not sure I know myself what it is. The assistant’s brother? Well, why? Because he’s very ill? Mortally ill? But they don’t even know the name of the illness? Something in the brain? Something in the head? Someone who’s not quite normal? And they expose you to him? On the assistant’s say-so? And with the agreement of the registrar? A recognized surgeon? A danger like that? Such a young person? Who doesn’t really know what he’s about himself? A painter, with confused ideas? Someone who’s perhaps utterly confused? Someone altogether abnormal? But that could have a terrible effect on our son and brother and nephew! Better, then, not to write. After all, what are two weeks! I’ve often not been in touch for longer than two weeks. Sometimes not for months. They’re used to me turning up and disappearing again and not being in touch. And if they think I’m at the hospital, where they know I’m very well looked after, they won’t assume anything too strange merely if I don’t write to them. My future’s like a stream in a forest, of which there are many precise descriptions, but nothing more; the forest is endless and as dark as only a childish notion of a forest can be, on the edge of gloom, and about to turn into utter gloom. The future is a long way off. And yet it’s at the door. Go through the door? How? How to equip myself as I pass through the door, into the dark, or even down into the dark? I’ll go home, shut myself in my room, and study the skin and the liver and the pancreas and “hearing tests.” I will study coldly, implacably. The window will be closed, maybe it’ll already be snowing outside, I’ll have to turn everything else down, I won’t come down for meals, not even join the others for breakfast; they’ll call, I won’t answer. Then, one evening a walk through the forest and back, along the stream, past the mill, sit on the bench with a wide view over the countryside.
Then set off on my journey. Back to my room at the hostel, with no light and no sunshine. I’ll fix myself something to eat, look at my watch, lie down and not be able to sleep, I’ll pace up and down the street, and open my books again. And what about the internship? What will it bring me? How much longer will I be at Schwarzach? What if the assistant is dissatisfied with me? If he thinks, oh dear, I should have given someone else the task, not him? And will I get five hundred schillings, as I do every year? Even if I’ve been gone quite a long time? Wonder whether the matron knows? Yes, of course, she’ll be reminded of the fact that I’m not there at every mealtime. Now I think of the ghostly atmosphere in the staff room. There’s a radio there that hasn’t worked for years. A clock that ticks, but tells the wrong time. Vases with flowers that are long since dried out. A gray oilcloth spread over the long table, tacked down. Paintings on the walls, scenes from village life, done by a rather fetid academic painter. Books from the nineteenth century, unopened for decades. There I see down one side of the table the registrar, the assistant, the assistant’s assistant, the bonesetter, the pediatric surgeon. And on my side of the table the other two interns, the Greek doctor, the new med students. They eat in silence, and sometimes they draw a complicated fracture of the ulna on the table, or the position of an embryo, and the sister who carries in the food then wipes everything off once they’re all gone. I walk down the long passages, get lost at the end, where all the doors are suddenly locked and you can’t remember which way you came, I bang on a door, and already I’m thinking I’ll have to spend the night there, in that room, surrounded by locked doors. I hear footfalls, and I bang on the door with my fists, and the door opens, and the sister says: “Why, doctor, what are you doing in here?” And the sound of that “doctor.” Sounds how? And then I try and compare a human being with another human being, both with the same illness, and reacting to it differently. One dies, the other survives as if nothing had been the matter. And both had the same illness. I read, it’s almost dark, but I read in my Koltz, a section which explains about diseases of the brain, but the disease the painter has, which is a disease of the brain—what else would it be?—doesn’t appear anywhere in Koltz. And we’re talking about a very new book, by a leading authority, just imported from the States.
And then I go to the chapel, only a few yards, because the chapel is buil
t onto the hospital, or is it the hospital is built onto the chapel, I don’t know, both of them are several generations old, they have the same thick walls, and both give off the same chill. And then I cross the bridge, and I sit in the café, and I pick up a newspaper. And later, in the middle of the night, I am woken up, because “for you, doctor, an interesting case,” there’s a new admission. “A fractured atlas, with paraplegia.” I pull on my white coat, and follow the nurse who woke me down along the long corridors to the operating room, where the assistant is standing ready, just one or two preparations, and he makes the first incision. “There’s almost no light,” he says, and the operation gets under way. And continues perhaps until morning, and there’s no time to go to the staff room for breakfast. A head needs to be raised a little, a leg wants to be reset, a camphor injection is required, and a blood transfusion. The sisters perform astonishing feats. Never get to bed before eleven, and are back from church already by five, having been heard singing there at half past four. Everywhere, the great white tulips of their bonnets, which manage to flower where everything is dark with despair, where everything else is bleak and bare and inimical. The relatives of the patients who died overnight are standing between the elevator and the bathroom, holding in their hands the last possessions of their brother or sister. About to be dispatched to the cemetery administration. And the smiles of the young nurses put all sadness to flight. What will my future bring? What awaits me? Tomorrow! The day after! I don’t want to think about what might be. What will be. What’s the future anyway? I don’t want to think!
I quickly took a letter to the assistant to the post office. There was the postmistress, a relative of the knacker’s, with her back to me, writing something in a ledger. “The painter,” she said, taking my letter and stamping it, “the painter hasn’t been by in a long time.” Earlier, he’d used to get mountains of mail, the postman had had so much to carry for him. And now nothing. Not one letter in all the weeks the painter had been here this time. “He doesn’t look well,” she said. “Yes,” I said, “he’s ill.”—“Ill?” she said. What was wrong with him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”—“Something serious?”—“Yes,” I said, “something serious.”—“But why doesn’t he get any mail?” That was nothing to do with his being ill. She seemed to think if someone is ill, they will need letters, more than if they’re healthy. What else does a person need if he’s got his health, she seemed to think. I don’t know anything about his postal arrangements, I said. Of course, I couldn’t help being struck by the fact that he got no mail. But I didn’t want to continue the conversation with the postmistress, and I went out.
Outside the post office, I thought: It must be a terrible thing for his housekeeper, not to know how he is. Where he is. And then I hurried across the village square. I climbed up the steps to the cemetery. There was the knacker, up to his belly in the earth. I had just come from the post office, I said. It was so quiet today, why was that. “I’ve never known it this quiet,” I said. “Yes,” said the knacker, “it is quiet. There’s no wind.”—“No,” I said. And then I thought of something: “The landlord … How did the manslaughter case come about? You know, that business at the pub,” I said. “The manslaughter case?” he said. “Yes, the manslaughter case. What sort of man was he?”—“What sort of man?”
He had sat in the inn for a couple of weeks, but got rowdy every night, and often called for more to drink at three in the morning. And once the landlord had refused. Then the workman had lashed out with his fists. And the landlord with a beer glass. “It happens,” said the knacker. “They usually get up afterward and sit together and have a drink and get to be friends. Didn’t happen on this occasion,” he said. “But at first, people thought it wasn’t a crime?”—“Yes,” said the knacker, “at first.”—“Then how did it come up?”—“Yes,” said the knacker, “how did it come up?”
He picked up his shovel again, and went back to work. I went over to the children’s graves and looked at the photographs on the tombs. Whey-faces, I thought. Puffy faces. Dead faces. Faces attacked by birds of prey. When I went back, I passed the knacker again, and he stopped digging. “Isn’t it strange,” I said, “that it’s so quiet today?”—“Yes,” he said, “it often gets so quiet, you can’t hear nothing but your own heart beating.” I went down to the rectory, and headed off to the larch wood, away from the village.
• • •
Nothing, not one thing, was mute. Everything continually expressed its pain. “The mountains, you see, are great witnesses to great pain,” said the painter. He walked toward the mountain: “People always say: the mountain reaches up into heaven. They never say: the mountain reaches down into hell. Why not?” He said: “Everything is hell. Heaven and earth, and earth and heaven, they’re all hell. Do you understand? Above and below are hell, here. But of course nothing reaches into anything else. Do you understand? There is no adjacency.” The newly arrived Föhn showed up details on the shady side that normally were not seen. “You see?” said the painter, “all those shadows? They’re mountain goats, look!” He drew me closer. “Look!” he said. But I didn’t see any. “That mountain always put me in mind of a gigantic catafalque. See!” It’s true, the mountain does have the outline of a gigantic catafalque. “In summer I sit here for hours, and study it all,” he said. “Insight? I don’t think so. I just look at everything. So that it doesn’t kill me.” He now went on ahead. “Death doesn’t want us to occupy ourselves with it,” he said. “Come along, you go first. And that’s why I continually occupy myself with death!” Was I not cold? Was I not shivering? I wasn’t shivering. “In the Föhn, nothing seems to make sense. Everything you say seems nonsense. Religions dupe us about the fact that everything is nonsense, you know. Christianity is nonsense. Christianity. Yes. Prayer is a false state of consciousness. One that turns everything into nothing. Prayer. Absolutely.” But the human animal liked to live in such a false state of consciousness, with misleading impressions, “that pressed his head down to the ground. Suddenly, one renounces all falsehood. Renounces unchastity, chastity, weakness, the opposite of weakness, renunciation itself. Then everything comes clear. There have been such dark moments in my life that left me unable to speak finally, and that are killing off and will kill off what existed in me, and exists in me, and will never exist again.
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