The World as I Found It (69 page)

That's enough. No more, do you hear me?

One more.

You already had that one. Why must you fight me?

Max stood there open-mouthed, goggling at him. Fight
you
? That's a laugh! Oh, you like to think I'm a hard man, Wittgenstein, but you're harder — much harder. Frau Beck — I remember she once said to me, He thinks he's Jesus Christ, doesn't he? He thinks he is Jesus Christ among us peasants.

Wittgenstein whirled around in a fury. That's enough from you!

Max caught him by the arm. All right. I'll stop if you will.

I want to go, said Wittgenstein, seeing other drinkers staring at them. I think you ought to stay here. I can meet you here Tuesday.

But Max was wise to his threats. Oh, come off it, he said, waving him off. I told you, I'll be all right. Look! Max stood back from the bar with his arms extended. Am I not all right? Do you see me weaving? Forget Russell — I won't bother him. I'll keep my trap shut. I promise.

I mean it!

And I told you, I promise.

Max was standing at bum's muster. Of course Max would go to Russell's. Max's arms were outstretched like an aerialist, and he was smiling. For a moment then, he was the old, irrepressible Max, Wittgenstein's former guide and translator, the intermediary between Wittgenstein and the people he wanted to haul up from the muck. Or so it was until the Trattenbachers dragged the schoolteacher and his impressionable disciple down with them.

I
T HAD BEEN
the other way around in Trattenbach, that sodden toadstool sitting between two sloven mountains. There, it was Wittgenstein who had been in bad shape, and it was Max, a beefy boy of twenty-one, a year out of the English prison camp and just back, disillusioned, from revolutionary Russia, who had pulled him out of his trough. Without Max, Wittgenstein never would have stayed as long as he had in Trattenbach, hanging on for almost five years. Then again, without Max, Wittgenstein might have had the sense to leave before the villagers had turned completely against him.

Wittgenstein wasn't the first would-be reformer the villagers had driven away. Before him, there had been Father Haft, Wittgenstein's friend and ally and Catholic Trattenbach's sole clergyman. Tall, big-boned and gaunt, with an acne-pocked horse face, Father Haft was a gruff and inflexible ascetic who fasted on Fridays and feast days and gave away most of his pitiful living allowance. The priest was the type who was unable to keep a crumb for himself while others were in want, and he wore himself down to no purpose. Few could have emulated or equaled Father Haft in self-denial, least of all his poor parishioners, who thought a priest ought to have more dignity than to tramp around in worn black gabardines and broken-down boots, without even an umbrella to stave off the rain or a pot to piss in. Father Haft couldn't have cared less — he had nothing but contempt for his parishioners. Like Wittgenstein, the priest was an educated man from a good family, but having come from people of some means, he had no interest in hobnobbing, as had his deceased predecessor, with the mill owner and the more prosperous villagers and outlying farmers. To Father Haft, these were piddling fish in a piddling pond, and they now found themselves battling the zealous young priest for control of the crumbling church, which they seemed to feel was a God-granted concession for their own benefit.

From the day Father Haft arrived, they had hated him, this fierce bearer of bad news. From his black gallows of a pulpit in the gritty church he contemptuously called Our Lady of Perpetual Disrepair, Father Haft was forever berating his grubbing parishioners for the peevish smallness that left them growling and scrapping at each other like hungry dogs, then circling like a pack at the approach of outsiders or the threat of progress.

These were the days, soon after his awakening but before the fervor, when Max would still enter a church. Every Sunday, in fact, just after the Epistle, Wittgenstein and Max used to slip into the empty choir loft, where they would sit for the next half hour, cackling with delight at Father Haft's jeremiads against his parishioners. On deaf ears the priest's sermons rained; in resounding silence they suffered him, this threadbare rich man's son from Linz. (For them everyone outside Trattenbach was thought to be rich.)

Why, Father Haft wanted to know, why were these people so blind to the good in others and so unconscious of the good in themselves? A camel sooner could have passed through the eye of a needle than a Trattenbacher could have been gathered into Father Haft's nutlike ascetic's heart. Only Wittgenstein, Max and a handful of others seemed to meet with Father Haft's grudging approval, and even they regularly fell from grace. Every week, Wittgenstein and the priest met for discussion and mutual criticism, groping together for higher states of the good that, in the villagers' jealous eyes, made them too good, thereby preventing them from doing much good at all. Father Haft claimed that man must be a moral witness, but he didn't know where to stop in his moral denunciations. One of his most memorable and histrionic sermons concerned a drunkard who had frozen to death in plain view of the village's main street. Showing himself weak with hunger and exhaustion, his voice low and tremulous, then growing staccato, Father Haft described the Lord's pain as He died in the snow with that drunkard. Kneading his fingers into a clove of rhetorical essence, drawing out his attenuated words as if he were pulling a needle through Christ's still quivering Sacred Heart, Father Haft claimed that Christ had suffered a second Calvary with his poor son Alois, the toeless, babbling drunkard. Yes, said Father Haft, looming down from his pulpit, there was left and right, and right and wrong; there was life and death, heaven and hell, Good Samaritans — and Trattenbachers! The priest rose up to smite them, his vestments flapping, they would say, like the devil's wings. And so it was at every sermon. Father Haft would lean down from his pulpit as from a fiery hell chariot, heaping them with abuse, begging for an outpouring of Charity and Spirit and receiving in return only a torrent of hatred. At times even the self-styled evangelist Wittgenstein thought his friend and cellmate had finally pushed them too far.

It took some doing, but after numerous complaints to the bishop about the Jesuit's heresies and abuse, the villagers succeeded in booting the priest out of town. And later, much later, after Wittgenstein's trial, they would proudly say that after they drove out the priest, they gave his crazy friend the schoolmaster the sack as well.

And to think that Wittgenstein had once called Trattenbach “a peaceful little nest of a place”!

Many times afterward, he would try to recall just how the villagers had seemed to him at first. Certainly, they were not as wicked as he thought in the end. Nor, for that matter, was he as blameless as he had thought all along.

Quite objectively, though, Trattenbach was a poor and ugly town — even the Trattenbachers said so. Not far from Trattenbach was a place known as the Gates of Hell, an iron mine that for generations had killed and crippled the region's men, at least while there was any profit in it. But now, as the joke went, the Trattenbachers were safe from damnation: the Gates of Hell were closed. Slammed behind them, was more like it. Those left behind mostly eked out a living as subsistence farmers or unskilled laborers. The more “lucky” worked at the little textile mill or at another local sweatshop, sewing cheap girdles. Among the women, a few even turned to prostitution — mostly of the seasonal or itinerant variety, often to feed the children while their husbands nursed the bottle.

So hell was closed and heaven drifted along, never farther, never closer. The mountains brought nothing either; they only hogged the light and held the clotted clouds that drained the rain and hemmed in the fog, which hung for days like a blight over Trattenbach's ashen hovels. Helmeted and turreted, with spearlike roofs, the houses were as dented and squashed together as the stunted fortress folk who dwelt within them, scheming, brooding, breeding, snarling at one another. It seemed that every wall in Trattenbach needed a coat of paint — paint or dynamite. Wittgenstein could remember slopping through the filthy slush during the winter, his eyes burning with the cheap soft coal they used. Slowly, like a web, the soot sifted over the town, caking everything, to the point he would feel he was scraping between abrasive sheets, his face sparking with the malice he felt seeping out from those scabby walls.

Without the sense to leave and only his own inflexible pride to keep him there, even he could see he had outlasted his potential to do the place any good. But of course poverty was what had brought him to Trattenbach in the first place. Ugliness fell to the poor. After all, he had not renounced his wealth to minister to prosperous people in scenic surroundings. And it was the poor who needed him, he thought. But here, like Father Haft, Wittgenstein failed to see that while he had chosen poverty, the villagers had no such choice, and knew it.

Later, when Wittgenstein had come to realize the extent of his arrogance, he saw that he had been bewitched by an image. This was the idea that poverty and misfortune were something that could be communally
shared
by assuming poverty's outer manifestations. But poverty wasn't brotherhood or comradeship; it wasn't bread that might be broken and distributed like alms so that its hardships might thereby be diminished. Father Haft's and Wittgenstein's chosen poverty was nothing like the trapped hopelessness the villagers knew. But for the elect, for those philanthropists for whom poverty was a vocation, God had removed the meat but reserved the broth, the essence, of poverty; for Father Haft and Wittgenstein, unlike the ignorant villagers, there was poverty of the spirit in full knowledge of one's condition. Knowledge also was a sickness, and Wittgenstein and the priest well knew this predicament, knew it in all its depth and breadth. Spiritual poverty or material poverty — which was the more painful, and painful for whom? At first, Wittgenstein was inclined to believe that for the person of superior intellect, the anguish of spiritual poverty was a far deeper anguish, grossly speaking, than that borne by an ignorant person in the face of hopeless material poverty. But later, when Wittgenstein became more sensitive to the pain of ordinary people, he realized that God, in His wisdom, had apportioned pain according to one's lights, so that these two pains, while qualitatively different, were psychically equal, a bountiful table spread for all.

And the truth was, Wittgenstein needed the poor then to assuage his own impoverished spirit, which at that time, just after the war, was immeasurably poorer than theirs. The aftermath of the war was crueler to Wittgenstein than ever the war had been. At least during the war he had been able to salvage a soupçon of self-respect. But now that the mobilization was over it seemed as if his spirit were mobilizing against him, reducing him, like the rest of Austria, to a state of complete rottenness and decay.

Why had he ever come to Trattenbach? he wondered. Until the very end, Wittgenstein never dreamed that the feeling against him was so bitter and virulent, so deep-seated. Yet why had he come to the village but to debase the currency — to challenge the values of these poor farmers, mill workers and day laborers? And if he couldn't rouse these troglodytes from their hideous ignorance and lethargy — if they were to continue their slavish allegiance to Austria's hemorrhaging money and remain stuck in this stupefying wallow they mistook for a life — then he figured he could at least save their children.

Wittgenstein knew the villagers found him forbidding and peculiar. How could they not? They had only to take one look at him, let alone hear his impeccable high German, to know he was a cultured gentleman from the city. They weren't fooled for one moment by his conspicuous, aggressive poverty. They could spot him a mile off in his cast-off army coat, swinging that cane and carrying a notebook under his arm — that spying notebook in which it was said he jotted down misdeeds that Father Haft would blast them for on Sunday. Still, Wittgenstein felt it was inevitable, and probably healthy, that they fear him. And if, as Max said, they took him for a wealthy eccentric — a
baron
, no less — well, then so much the better. Every St. Paul wants his Ephesians to know that he was formerly a Saul.

How Wittgenstein would have loved to have seen their greedy eyes gorge with the fortune he had given away before coming to Trattenbach! In the disastrous inflation after the war, when Austria's fat blotter bills were devalued two and three times a day, when money was being carted and valued almost by weight, his wealth could have done much for the war orphans and the widows whose savings had been wiped out. For that matter, it could have done much for his former comrades, the maimed or unemployed veterans whom he would see sleeping in parks and doorways. Yes, Wittgenstein could have done many good deeds with his money, but he still heard Tolstoy counseling him that to give money to the poor was like spreading disease. Common people couldn't be trusted with money; it went to their heads like cheap wine. Besides, though Wittgenstein could himself renounce the accumulated power, the hegemony, of this money, he instinctively felt the need to preserve it in his own people. In this respect, he would always harbor the instincts of a man of wealth.

His family, in any case, was rich beyond corrupting. As a result of her highly successful wartime relief work, Gretl was now Herbert Hoover's personal representative in Austria, charged with overseeing the efforts of the American Food Relief Commission. Frau Wittgenstein had died of a heart attack early in the spring of 1920. Freed from her mother's care, Mining was again overworking herself, helping Gretl and running a grammar school for poor children. As for Paul, he was away most of the time, traveling across Europe giving highly acclaimed one-armed piano concerts.

Wittgenstein was not so lucky. On his return from the Italian prison camp, he had found Vienna's half-starved populace chopping down the city's woods and hauling it off in rattling wagons and wheelbarrows. But the worst thing for him was realizing that he was now one of the wealthiest men in Vienna, the bulk of his fortune safely sheltered in America, earning vast sums in interest. It was hell for him to have so much while others had so little — to feel so indelibly the guilt and responsibility of old money, which had accumulated so long in the sun, concentrated in power like the bee's honey. The weight of this stacked money only dragged down his drowning soul. Wittgenstein had hardly been home a week when the guilt of his wealth became unbearable. Amid their happy relief at being reunited with him, Mining and Gretl felt his anxiety rising like ripples on a lake. He talked not at all, then talked in a rush, with alarming, vertiginous complexity. He couldn't think for thinking, couldn't sleep for dreaming, which was thinking, too, since all was thinking and all thinking, dreaming.
Music!
He craved music, but music was also thinking and was always being played a hair too slow or too fast, like conversation, which made him, in his anxiety and impatience, want to speed to a point that was never forthcoming amid all the jabber.
It
was the house
, he would think, it was the Palais Wittgenstein, that bloated pastry stuffed with dead dreams. He loathed the house. Steeped in the soil of an earlier culture, it was just like himself, an anachronism. If only he could have died in a moment of brilliance! If only he could have been a star in the sky! But now he felt himself being hurled into the furnaces of a featureless future, another useless war relic to be scrapped and melted down.