The Loser (13 page)

agnostic
. With Wertheimer I had visited the Wertheimer crypt in the Döbling cemetery, right next to the so-called Lieben crypt and the Theodor Herzl grave, it hadn’t irritated him that a beech tree growing out of the crypt had progressively dislodged the immense granite block inscribed with the names of all the Wertheimers in the Wertheimer crypt; his sister had always wanted to make him cut down the beech tree and put the granite block back in place, the fact that the beech tree had shot up out of the crypt and dislodged the granite block didn’t disturb him, on the contrary, every time he visited the crypt he marveled at the beech tree and the increasingly dislodged granite block. Now his sister will have the beech tree removed from the crypt and the granite block set straight and before that she will have Wertheimer
transported
from Chur to Vienna and buried in the crypt, I thought. Wertheimer was the most passionate cemetery lover I have ever known, even more passionate than me, I thought. With my right index finger I drew a large
W
on the dusty wardrobe door. Desselbrunn came to my mind at this point, for a moment I caught myself in the sentimental thought of perhaps also going to Desselbrunn, but repressed this thought immediately. I wanted to stick to my principles and said to myself, I’m not going to Desselbrunn, I’m not going to Desselbrunn for the next five or six years. Such a visit to Desselbrunn will surely weaken me for years, I said to myself, I can’t afford a Desselbrunn visit. The countryside outside my window was the dreary, sickening countryside I knew so well from Desselbrunn and which years ago I suddenly couldn’t take anymore. If I hadn’t left Desselbrunn, I said to myself, I would have succumbed, I wouldn’t be here anymore, I would have succumbed
before
Glenn and
before
Wertheimer, wasted away, as I have to say, for the countryside around Desselbrunn is a countryside meant for wasting away, like the countryside outside this window in Wankham, which threatens everybody, slowly suffocates everybody, never uplifts, never protects. We’re not asked to choose our place of birth, I thought. But we can leave our place of birth if it threatens to suffocate us, go off and away from the place that will kill us if we miss the moment of going off and away. I was lucky and left at the right moment, I said to myself. And in the end left Vienna, because Vienna was threatening to suffocate and choke me. Nevertheless I owe it to my father’s bank account that I’m still alive, still
am allowed
to exist, as I suddenly said to myself. Not a life-giving region, I said to myself. Not a soothing countryside. Not pleasant people. Lying in wait for me, I thought. Making me anxious. Pulling the wool over my eyes. I’ve never felt safe in this region, I thought. Constantly visited by disease, almost killed finally by insomnia. Sigh of relief when the men from Altmünster came and took away the Steinway, I thought, sudden freedom of movement in Desselbrunn. Didn’t give up art and whatever else the term means by giving the Steinway to the schoolteacher’s child in Altmünster, I thought. To have exposed the Steinway to a schoolteacher’s vulgarity, exposed it to the cretinism of the schoolteacher’s child. If I’d told the schoolteacher what my Steinway was truly worth he would have been shocked, I thought, this way he had no idea of the instrument’s value. Even when I had the Steinway transported from Vienna to Desselbrunn I knew it wouldn’t be in Desselbrunn for long, but naturally I had no idea I would give it away to the schoolteacher’s child, I thought. As long as I had the Steinway I wasn’t independent in my writing, I thought, wasn’t free, as I was from the moment the Steinway was out of the house for good. I had to part with the Steinway in order to write, to be honest I had been writing for fourteen years and actually had only written more or less useless junk because I hadn’t parted with my Steinway. The Steinway was barely out the door and I was writing better, I thought. In the Calle del Prado I was always thinking about the Steinway standing in Vienna (or in Desselbrunn) and thus could write nothing better than these inevitably botched attempts. I’d barely gotten rid of the Steinway and I was writing differently, from the first moment, I thought. But that doesn’t mean of course that I’d given up music with the Steinway, I thought. On the contrary. But it no longer had the same devastating power over me, simply didn’t hurt me anymore, I thought. When we peer into this countryside we are frightened. Under no circumstances do we want to return to this countryside. Everything is perpetually gray and the people are always depressing. Then I would just crawl into my room and be incapable of thinking a single useful thought, I thought. And would gradually become like everybody here, I just need to look at the innkeeper, this person who has been totally destroyed by the all-governing force of nature here, who can’t get out of her petty, vulgar ways, I thought. I would have perished in this evil-spirited countryside. But I never should have gone to Desselbrunn, I thought, never should have accepted my inheritance, could have renounced it,
now I’ve abandoned it
, I thought. Desselbrunn was originally built by one of my great-uncles, who was director of the paper factory, as a manor house with rooms for all his many children. Simply abandoned it, that was my salvation, surely. At first went to Desselbrunn with my parents only in the summer, then went to school for years in Desselbrunn and in Wankham, I thought, then to the gymnasium in Salzburg, then to the Mozarteum, once also for a year to the Vienna Academy, I thought, back to the Mozarteum, then back to Vienna and finally to Desselbrunn with the idea of withdrawing there permanently with my intellectual ambitions, but where I very quickly succumbed to the realization that I’d wound up in a dead end. The piano virtuoso career as an escape, but pushed nonetheless to the most extreme limit, to perfection, I thought. At the height of my ability, as I can say, gave everything up,
tossed it out the window
, as I
have
to say, hit myself on the head, gave away the Steinway. When it rains here for six or seven weeks without stopping and the local inhabitants go crazy in this unstoppable rain, I thought, one has to have tremendous discipline not to kill oneself. But half the people here kill themselves sooner or later, don’t die a natural death, as one says. Have nothing but their Catholicism and the Socialist Party, the two most disgusting institutions of our time. In Madrid I leave the house at least once a day to eat, I thought, here I would never have left the house in my increasingly hopeless deterioration process. But I never seriously thought about selling, I toyed with the idea, as in the last two years, sure, but naturally without results. At the same time I never promised anyone responsible for such things
not
to sell Desselbrunn, I thought. No sale is possible without real estate agents and I shudder at the idea of real estate agents, I thought. We can leave a house like Desselbrunn standing for years without a problem, I thought, let it go to seed, I thought, why not. I won’t go to Desselbrunn under any circumstances, I thought. The innkeeper had made me my tea and I went down to the restaurant. I sat at the table by the window where I used to sit in past years, but it didn’t seem to me that time had stood still. I heard the innkeeper working in the kitchen and I thought she was probably making lunch for her child who came home from school at one or two, warming up some goulash or perhaps some vegetable soup. In theory we understand people, but in practice we can’t put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our own point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn’t possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody. The innkeeper once had a lung disease like mine, I thought, like me she was able to squeeze this lung illness out of her, liquidate it with her will to live. She finished high school by the skin of her teeth, as they say, I thought, and then took over the inn from her uncle, who had been implicated in a murder case that even today hasn’t been entirely cleared up and who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Together with a neighbor, her uncle is said to have strangled a so-called
haber-dashery
salesman from Vienna who had stopped for the night, strangled him in the room next to mine to get at the enormous sum of money that the Viennese salesman is said to have had with him. The
Dichtel Mill
, as the inn is called, has been so to speak notorious since this murder case. At first, that is when the murder case became known, the Dichtel Mill started going downhill and was closed for more than two years. The court turned over ownership of the Dichtel Mill to the niece of the murderer, that is her uncle, the niece took over the Dichtel Mill and reopened it, but naturally since the reopening it was no longer the same Dichtel Mill it was before the murder. No one ever heard anything more about the innkeeper’s uncle, I thought, but he probably was let out after just twelve or thirteen years, like all murderers and criminals sentenced to twenty years, it’s also possible he’s no longer alive, I thought, I wasn’t planning to ask the innkeeper for news about her uncle for I had no desire to hear the murder story, which she had already told me several times and once more at my request, from the beginning. The murder of the Viennese salesman had caused a sensation back then, and during the trial the daily newspapers spoke of nothing else and the Dichtel Mill, long boarded up, was besieged by curious visitors for weeks, although there was nothing particularly worth seeing at the Dichtel Mill. Since the murder case the Dichtel Mill has always been called the
murder house
, and when people want to say they’re going
to the Dichtel Mill
they also say they’re going
to the murder house
, it’s become a local tradition. At the trial the prosecutor presented only circumstantial evidence, I thought, and the murder wasn’t actually traced to the innkeeper’s uncle or his accomplice, whose family was plunged into misfortune, as they say, by the whole murder story. Even the court had trouble believing the so-called path-clearer capable of committing such a murder in concert with the innkeeper’s uncle, who was known everywhere and by everybody as
easygoing and modest and a solid citizen through and through
and even today is considered easygoing and modest and a solid citizen by those who knew him, but the jurors decided on the maximum sentence, and not just for the innkeeper’s uncle but also for the former path-clearer, who, as I know, died in the meantime, as his wife always said, of grief at having been the innocent victim of misanthropic jurors. The courts, even after they have destroyed innocent people and their families for life, go back to their everyday business, I thought, the jurors, who always follow the mere whim of a moment in their judgment, but also a boundless hatred for their fellowman, will quickly come to terms with their mistake and themselves even after they have long since recognized that they’ve committed an irreparable crime against innocent people. Half of all convictions, I have heard it said, actually rest on such mistaken verdicts, I thought, and it’s a hundred to one that the so-called
Dichtel Mill trial
was just like the others, that the jurors reached a mistaken verdict. The so-called Austrian municipal courts are known for the fact that every year dozens of mistaken verdicts are reached by jurors who thus have dozens of innocent people on their conscience, most of whom are serving a life sentence in our correctional institutions without the prospect of ever being
rehabilitated
, as they say. In fact, I thought, there are more innocent than guilty people in our prisons and correctional institutions because there are so many conscienceless judges and misanthropic jurors who despise their fellowman, who take revenge for their own unhappiness and their own hideousness on those who, because of the horrifying circumstances that have led them into court, are at their mercy. The Austrian criminal system is diabolical, I thought, as we repeatedly are forced to conclude if we read the newspapers carefully, but it becomes even more diabolical when we know that only the tiniest portion of its crimes comes to light and is made public. Personally I’m convinced that the innkeeper’s uncle was not the murderer or rather the murderer’s accomplice that he was branded as thirteen or fourteen years ago, I thought. I also judge the path-clearer to actually be innocent, I still recall the trial reports in detail and at bottom both of them, the innkeeper’s uncle, the so-called Dichtel-keeper, as well as his neighbor the path-clearer, absolutely should have been exonerated, in the end even the prosecutor pleaded for that, the jurors however convicted them both of first-degree homicide and had the Dichtel-keeper and the path-clearer carted off to the Garsten prison, I thought. And if no one has the courage and the strength and the money to reopen such a ghastly case, as they say, a mistaken verdict like that of the Dichtel-keeper and the path-clearer simply stands, such a ghastly miscarriage of justice against two truly innocent people whom one, and that means society, finally wants to have nothing to do with for all time, whether guilty or innocent, it doesn’t matter. The Dichtel Mill trial, as it was always called, came to my mind and kept me occupied the whole time I sat at the window table because I’d discovered the photograph tacked to the wall facing me, a photograph that showed the Dichtel-keeper in his innkeeper coat, smoking a pipe, and I thought that the innkeeper probably nailed the photograph to the wall not only out of gratitude to her uncle who had given her the Dichtel Mill and provided her with her livelihood but also to keep the Dichtel miller or rather the Dichtel-keeper from being completely forgotten. But most of the people who were truly and actively interested in the Dichtel Mill trial have long since died, I thought, and people today can’t understand the photograph. But it’s true that a certain odor of felony still clings to the Dichtel Mill, I thought, which naturally attracts people. We’re not unhappy when people become suspects and are charged with a crime and locked up, I thought, that’s the truth. When crimes come to light, I thought while looking at the photograph opposite me. When she comes back from the kitchen I’ll ask the innkeeper what has become of her uncle, I thought, and I said to myself, I’ll ask her about it, then I said, I won’t ask her about it, I’ll ask her, I won’t ask her, in this way I kept staring at the photograph of the Dichtel-keeper the whole time and thought, I’ll ask the innkeeper all about him, etc. Suddenly a so-called simple person, who of course is never a simple person, is ripped out of his surroundings, actually put in prison at the drop of a hat, I thought, from which he can only emerge, if he emerges at all, as a totally destroyed human being, as legal flotsam and jetsam, as I had to say to myself, for which finally all society is responsible. After the trial was over the newspapers debated the question whether the Dichtel-keeper as well as the path-clearer might actually be innocent and wrote editorials to this effect, but two, three days after the trial was over no one talked about the Dichtel Mill trial. From these editorials one could deduce that the two who were branded and sentenced as murderers