Extinction (21 page)

Heil Hitler
. They were probably very expensive, because they never wore out. They’re actually quite smart, I told myself, but not on
my father—on him they look ridiculous. He wore these knickerbockers when he received the Gauleiter of Salzburg at the entrance to the farmyard and then led him straight to the stables, believing that this would make the best impression on him, immediately proving that Wolfsegg was a great estate and he a great landowner. And he wore these knickerbockers to receive the archbishops—which was tasteless but in keeping with the Nazi period. There they were, boarding the train in London, my mother stretching out her neck so that her hat perched precariously on her head, probably held by a single hatpin. Why have I only this picture of my parents in my desk and no other, I asked myself, this comic, ridiculous picture that shows my parents as comic, ridiculous people, and not some other, on which they’re not comic and ridiculous? Most of the time they were quite different, not at all comic and ridiculous but severe, forbidding, cold, and calculating. While their Burberry umbrellas hang vertically from their arms, their bodies are inclined, as is normal when boarding a train. The main reason for their looking so comic and ridiculous in this photo is the combination of the inclination of their bodies with their vertical umbrellas. The law of gravity is what makes them comic and ridiculous, though they naturally did not know this when they were photographed. They did not want to be photographed, but they
were
photographed, by me. I once had hundreds of photos of my parents, but I have destroyed them all or thrown them away. This is the only one I kept and put in my desk, the one in which they appear comic and ridiculous. Why? I asked myself. I probably
wanted
to have comic and ridiculous parents in the photo I was going to keep, I told myself. I also wanted to have a photo of my brother that showed him not as he really was but
as I wanted to see him
, in a ridiculous pose on his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee—an undoubtedly good-looking man who was made to look ridiculous, insignificant, and unnatural, not to say foolish and helpless, so that he could not be taken seriously. I only ever wanted this one photo of my brother, in which he looks ridiculous, I told Gambetti. I wanted to have a comic, ridiculous brother, just as I wanted to have comic, ridiculous parents, and no sisters at all, only their mocking faces—that’s the truth, Gambetti. There is a devilish streak in us that manifests itself in such trifles, as we like to call them, in such trivialities as the photographs we collect, which reveal how base and
despicable and shameless we are. And for no other reason than that we are weak, for if we are honest we have to admit that we ourselves are far weaker than those we wish to see as weak, far more ridiculous than those we wish to see as ridiculous, comic, and characterless. It is primarily
we
, not they, who are characterless, ridiculous, comic, and unnatural, Gambetti. By keeping only these photos of my family and no others—and, what’s more, in my desk, so that I can look at them whenever I wish—I am documenting my own baseness, my own shamelessness, my own lack of character. I have only to open the drawer of my desk in order to gloat over my impossible sisters, the ridiculous appearance of my parents, and the pathetic posture of my brother; I have only to take out these photos and look at them in order to fortify myself in an access of weakness and console myself with what I am bound to describe as my own baseness. This shows how low one can sink. We describe others as base and contemptible and adduce every possible argument in support of our case, yet the description applies even more alarmingly to ourselves. Instead of hiding
ourselves
in the desk drawer as we ought, in the form of some comic and ridiculous photo, we hide our family there, so that when the need arises we can misuse them for our own utterly base ends, I told Gambetti. Naturally, I said, there are people who keep photos showing their relatives in a good light, but I am not one of these: I keep only comic and ridiculous photos, as I am fundamentally a weak person, a thoroughly weak character. Although every photo is a vulgar falsification, there are some that we keep out of respect and affection for the persons they depict, and others that we put in our desks or hang on our walls for unworthy motives, out of hatred for the subjects. Unfortunately I have to own that my motives belong to the second category. At a certain age, I said, when we are about forty, we often manage to present ourselves as we really are, with all our contemptible traits—something we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing earlier. From then on we occasionally allow alarming glimpses of our inner selves. At my age, Gambetti, we have to a large extent drawn back the curtains that for decades were drawn so closely that we almost suffocated behind them. One day they’ll be fully drawn back, I said. How will my sisters react, I wondered, when I confront them as executor and heir? Will they receive me as
insolently
as ever? I dared not pursue this question and took
care not to.
The surviving beneficiaries
, my sisters and I, I thought. The surviving beneficiaries are the very people whom no one thought of as survivors. They always thought I would soon die, a victim of what they called my
breathlessness
, somewhere or other, but not at Wolfsegg. It’s possible, even probable, I now thought, that
they
always expected to receive a telegram informing them that
I
had died. And my sisters have survived, the two people who didn’t matter at all in any serious sense, because according to my mother they were totally unimportant. But
I
never expected a telegram telling me that
my parents
were dead. Lots of people are afraid of receiving such a telegram, but I never was. Millions of people, I had often told Gambetti, live in daily dread of getting a telegram telling them that someone they love and respect has died. I’ve never been afraid of getting such a telegram. Seeing photographs like those on my desk, we think that the people depicted in them at least pose no danger to us, but they may in fact pose the utmost danger. Mortal danger. The people in the photographs, at most four inches high, don’t even contradict us. We attack them and they don’t defend themselves. We can say anything we like to their faces and they don’t move. This drives us to fury, to ever greater fury. We curse the figures in the photographs because they refuse to answer back or respond in any way, when there’s nothing we hope for, nothing we crave, so much as a response. Contending with microscopic dwarfs, as it were, we become demented. We lash out at microscopic dwarfs and drive ourselves utterly crazy. We let ourselves get so carried away that we hurl insults at heads only half an inch in diameter, Gambetti, and so make ourselves quite ridiculous. I look at my parents in the photo of them boarding the Dover train at Victoria Station in London and insult them. What ridiculous creatures you always were! I say, without realizing how ridiculous that makes me—far more ridiculous than my parents could ever be or ever have been, Gambetti. You idiot! I say to my brother, not quite four inches tall. You perverse creatures! I say to my sisters, who measure less than three inches on the terrace at Cannes. To take a photograph of a person is to mock him, Gambetti, and by the same token all who take photographs, even if they do it professionally and achieve the greatest artistry, are nothing but mockers of humanity. Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world. But today, I
told Gambetti, there are a hundred times more people in photographs than there are in reality—than natural people, in other words. That should give us pause. Am I glad, I said to Gambetti two days ago on returning from Wolfsegg, to be back here, to have escaped from the north and its imbecilities for a while! From the clutches of my family, above all from my mother’s excited moods, my father’s constant carping, and the Austrian weather. For three-quarters of the year we have bad weather, and when we think spring has come it’s months before it’s really there, only to merge at once into summer, and the summers get shorter and shorter. And the fall, which is actually the most beautiful season, causes trouble for all who suffer from gout or rheumatism in Austria, where bad weather predominates, reminding them, with its frequent storms and the icy cold that comes even in October, that their existence is constantly threatened. To say nothing of the winters, which make everything unendurable for anyone over thirty. People here don’t appreciate the unique climate they live in but long for the cool north—the fir trees, the mountain lakes, and the refreshing Alps. You see, Gambetti, some people yearn for the south and others for the north, with the result that they’re all more or less equally discontented. But at present I enjoy this refreshing but warm air, these noisy but carefree people, I said. At Wolfsegg I wore my winter overcoat, but here I go around in an open-necked shirt with my sweater around my shoulders. That’s the difference. People are not weighed down here with pounds of clothing, heavy shoes, heavy jackets, and thick felt hats. They walk around in the lightest of clothes and eat out of doors nearly all year round.
Not for a long time!
I could still hear myself exclaiming, meaning that I would not be returning to Wolfsegg for a long time. But this telegram now compels me to return in the shortest possible time. Obvious though this was, I sought to delay the inevitable by doing nothing, by simply sitting at my desk and looking at the photographs. I continued to contemplate them and submit them to minute scrutiny. I spread the telegram out beside them, so that I would have its short message announcing the deaths in front of me all the time. I repeatedly spelled out the message until I felt I would go mad. My brother, unlike me, was a calm person: at Wolfsegg I had always been
the restless spirit
, but he was
the soul of calm
. My parents always referred to him as the contented one and to me as the malcontent.
If we got in trouble, it was always my fault, never his. They believed his explanations, not mine. If, for example, I lost money that had been entrusted to me for some reason, they refused to believe I had lost it, despite all my asseverations. They preferred to believe that I had pocketed it and only pretended to have lost it, but if my brother said he had lost some money they believed him. If he told them that he had lost his way in the wood, they instantly believed him, but if I told the same story they refused to believe me. I always had to justify myself at great length and in great detail. On one occasion my brother pushed me into the pond behind the Children’s Villa. Whether intentionally or not, he pushed me in while passing me at the edge of the pond, where the wall is not wide enough for two people to pass. I had the greatest difficulty keeping my head above water and not going under. I actually thought I was going to drown, and I also thought that my brother might have pushed me in on purpose, not inadvertently out of clumsiness. This thought tormented me as I struggled for dear life in the pond. My brother could not help me without risking his own life. He naturally made many attempts, but failed. The pond is deep, and a child is bound to go under and drown if he can’t keep himself on the surface, I told Gambetti. Just as I felt sure I was going to drown I caught hold of a ring fixed to the wall below the surface, which was used for mooring the little boats we had on the pond, and managed to clamber out. When I got home, my parents wanted to know why I was completely soaked. Instead of telling the truth, I lied to protect my brother, saying that I had accidentally fallen into the pond. They at once accused me of having deliberately jumped into the pond in order to get my brother in trouble. When I said no, I had fallen in by accident, they called me a liar and drew my brother close to them as if to protect him, while I was packed off to the kitchen to be dressed in fresh, dry clothes. Throughout this scene my brother remained silent. He did not say a word, he did not tell the truth or even say that I was not to blame for falling into the pond. He watched the whole sorry scene without attempting to explain anything or put me in a better light. He just pressed his head against my mother’s skirt as if for protection, and this made things even worse for me. If I fell and tore my socks, they scolded me for tearing my socks but did not think of comforting me because I had grazed my knee and was bleeding and in pain. Instead they scolded
me for hours, and in the evening, when I had forgotten about the mishap, they scolded me again, as if it gave them pleasure to make me cry. They comforted my brother if he hurt himself even slightly, but they never comforted me, even if I hurt myself badly. They repeatedly scolded me because they thought I visited the gardeners too often and for too long; they disapproved of my spending time with the gardeners, who supposedly had
a bad influence on me
. They wanted me to spend my time with the huntsmen, who were thought to have a good influence; but I hated the huntsmen, as I have said, and always went to see the gardeners, whom I loved. I was scolded whenever it transpired that I had been with the gardeners, and they were scolded too for paying attention to me, because their company was considered very harmful to me, as my mother put it. Whenever my brother visited the huntsmen they would say, It’s nice that you’ve been with the huntsmen—that’s what we like to see. And they always said it in my hearing, when they were sure of hurting me. Once, when I had been with the huntsmen because for some reason I wanted to go and see them—I cannot recall why—they asked me where I had been, and I told them I had been with the huntsmen. They did not believe me and boxed my ears in the presence of my brother, who knew that I had been with the huntsmen, as he had gone with me, but instead of coming to my aid and telling them the truth, he kept quiet. He always kept quiet, even when our mother boxed my ears because I had told what she took to be a lie, when in fact it was the truth. I recall that even when I grew up, my parents never believed me. If someone had been to see me they would ask the name of the visitor, but when I told them, they refused to believe me, saying that they knew very well who had been to see me, and it was not the person I said it was. If I had been to Wels and they asked me where I had been, I would tell them, whereupon they would say that I had not been in Wels: they knew where I had really been—in Vöcklabruck, in Linz, in Styria, but not in Wels. They could never be persuaded of the truth. They never believed anything I told them; they considered me to be not just a normal liar but, as my mother used to say, a born liar. What do you do all the time in the library? they would ask when I emerged from one of our five libraries, all of which were suspect, as I was the only person to use them. You certainly don’t go there to read, they would say, and take me to