The day after tomorrow I’ll be in Palma, I’ve suddenly decided to go, she said, There you are, you see, my little brother. Going to Palma is the most sensible thing you could do. These last words immediately riled me because they were said teasingly, but I didn’t respond to them, and said goodbye to my sister fairly briefly, though not without telling her that I would call her as soon as I had arrived in Palma and was in my hotel. I’m curious to know how your Mendelssohn Bartholdy will come along, she added, though naturally she couldn’t have expected me to reply. On the other hand I was touched by her last words, which were a simple injunction to look after myself. However, I didn’t want to give way to sentimentality and suppressed a sudden urge to cry as I put down the receiver. How fragile we are! I thought. We’re full of such brave words and constantly go on every day about how hard and sensible we are, and then from one moment to the next we cave in and have to choke back our tears. Naturally I’ll call my sister every week, as I’ve always done from abroad, and I’m sure she’ll call me every week. That’s what we’ve always done. When you’re in the Melia — you know it of course, she had added. Naturally, I had replied. However marvellous the prospect was of being in Palma in two days’ time, I was still extremely fearful about what was actually in store for me there — which of course I couldn’t know. No, no one who travels, even if he keeps returning to a place where he thinks everything is thoroughly familiar, can ever be completely sure. If I’m lucky, I thought, I’ll get my usual room. If I’m lucky I’ll get over the first few days, which will be dangerous as far as my health is concerned. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to start work in a few days. Every time when I’m about to make a journey, when I’ve packed my bags and everything is settled and there’s no turning back, I have this fear of all the dreadful consequences attendant upon the journey. At such times I would dearly love to cancel everything. Then I realise that Peiskam is by no means as frightful as I’ve been making it out to be for months, that it really is a marvellous, comfortable house which has everything to be said for it, and that it is not in the least like a morgue. At such times I feel a specially keen affection for all the rooms, all the furniture, and I walk all round the house, putting my hand lovingly on the individual pieces of furniture. Then I sit in my armchair in the bedroom and wonder whether it’s worthwhile going away and incurring such a tremendous effort. But I must get away, I told myself. Just because it may be the last time, I’ve got to get away. I mustn’t give way now and make myself look ridiculous, especially not in front of myself. I mustn’t appear a fool to myself. You must discuss everything with Frau Kienesberger, go and see the specialist, get all the necessary medicaments, pack them in your case, and then clear out. You must turn your back on this house and everything in it, since you know full well that everything in it has been threatening to crush you and stifle you in recent months. You must leave behind you everything that has pushed you so ruthlessly to the very extremity of existence, and you must do it without emotion. At that moment I was ashamed of the feelings which I had just had for my house and which seconds later I could only regard as diabolical. This private sentimentality at once disgusted me. Were it not for the fact that I have all my life, as I know, been a man of quick decisions, I would have stayed put from the start in one place as if paralysed — I know this too. As it is, I’ve always had the knack of taking myself by surprise, with regard to travelling or work or whatever else. I’ve always had to employ this technique of surprise. When I visited the old man at Niederkreut, I was still thinking of
not making the journey to Palma, believing it might be possible to discipline myself by means of regular visits, at intervals of a few days, to the old man at Niederkreut and other old people — and young people too — and that I should be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy without going away. But after the old man had told me the story about the London telephone directory and its connection with his will, it was clear to me that I had to go away. Sarah Slother — that certainly makes an impressive story. But it would have been absolutely the high point in this endless Austrian winter, and all subsequent visits would have been profoundly disappointing. And what the other neighbours have to offer is, I know, insufficient to help me on to my feet and so help me get on with my work. The old man’s story about his Sarah Slother had simply triggered off my sudden decision to make the trip to Palma which, as I now reflected, had probably been planned long before by my sister. She actually came to Peiskam, first to suggest to me the idea of going to Palma and then to make me actually go — certainly not, as I now had to admit, simply in order to amuse herself and to tyrannize me, as I had believed all along, but to rescue me. My big caring sister! At that moment I despised myself. Once more I was the weak one. Again and again I played my accustomed role, however much I rebelled against it. And she played hers. While she had long since made her entrance in Vienna, I was waiting to go on in Palma. Everything about us, in fact, was theatrical — terribly real, yet theatrical. As I sat in my armchair, contemplating the relentless decay to which the furniture and everything else in the room bore witness, I thought with a shudder of having to spend the whole winter here in Peiskam, a winter that drags on interminably into May, and of having to rely on what I call neighbourhood help, on the old man at Niederkreut, for instance, and on the minister and suchlike folk. Having to scrape along, as we say, through the wet, cold, foggy months, meeting all these people who over the years had become stale and lack-lustre and whose society had long since become unendurable. This thought wrapped itself round my head like a winding sheet. To have to give myself up to all these people, yet at the same time to be all alone in Peiskam, where suddenly treachery lurked once more in every corner. Making my own breakfast and my own supper and having to endure constant nausea from one breakfast to the next, from one supper to the next, from one disappointment in the weather to the next. Having to read the newspapers every day with their diet of local political dirt and all the garbage they carried on their political, economic and cultural pages. Yet not being able to escape from the newspapers because, despite everything, I have a compulsion to devour this journalistic dirt every day, as if I were afflicted by a perverse and gluttonous appetite for the newspapers. Not being able to escape from all this public and published dirt, in spite of having the will to do so, the will to