Now I was following her suggestion and suddenly taking decisive action. I’m actually leaving, I thought. But for me to arrive at this decision, and finally get myself to Palma, it was necessary for her to have left first. I was now pretending to her that it was my idea, my brainwave, my decision, to go to Palma. In doing so I was lying not only to her — which of course was impossible, because she could see through me — but most of all to myself. You’re mad and always will be, I thought. On the day of my departure there were still twelve degrees of frost at eight in the morning. On the previous day Frau Kienesberger had been, and I had discussed all that was necessary with her, telling her above all that she mustn’t let the house get cold. She was to put the heating on three times a week, though not too high, I told her, for there was nothing so dreadful as returning to an old house that was completely cold. I didn’t know when I should be back, I said. I thought I should be back in three months, two months, four months, but I told Frau Kienesberger three or four weeks. I gave her instructions to clean the windows at last when the cold had become less severe, to polish the furniture, do the washing and so on. I particularly asked her to tidy up the yard and to clear away any snow that fell as quickly as possible so that people would think I was at home and not away. For this purpose I had fitted a so-called timeclock to a lamp in the top room on the west side so that it would be on for several hours in the morning and evening. This is always my practice when I go away. I had been lecturing Frau Kienesberger to such an extent that I was suddenly horrified by myself, for although I had actually broken off my dreadful torrent of words I could still hear myself telling her how my shirts were to be ironed and placed one on top of the other, how she was to stack the mail, which the postman always throws in through the open window on the east side, in the small room next to the right of the entrance, how the stairs were to be polished and the carpets beaten, and how she was to remove all the cobwebs behind the curtains and in the folds of the curtains and so on. She was not to tell the neighbours where I had gone, as that was nobody’s business. I told her I should possibly return the next day, and in any case I might return at any time. She was to strip the beds and air the mattresses and put fresh linen on them all and so on. And she must never under any circumstances touch anything on my desk, but I had said that thousands of times and she had always obeyed this instruction. Frau Kienesberger is really the only person I’ve spoken to for years, I tell myself, even though that’s a gross exaggeration which can be immediately disproved, but I feel that she is the only one with whom I have any extensive verbal contact over long periods, indeed very long periods, often months on end. She lives with her husband, a deaf mute (!), in a little one-storey house at the edge of the wood, not far from the village, and she only has a ten-minute walk when she comes to me. She herself has a speech impediment, which ensures that she doesn’t gossip, but she’s not a gossip by nature. She’s been coming to me for fourteen years, and in these fourteen years there has never been any disagreement between us. Everybody knows how important that is. And I often think she’s the one reliable person I have — there’s nobody else. And perhaps she senses this or even knows it. Not that I am continually giving her orders or telling her how to conduct herself: on the contrary I seldom have any particular wishes; most of the time I leave her entirely alone, and if she makes a noise while she’s working, because she can’t help making some noise, I leave the house for hours, or simply withdraw to the huntsman’s lodge. It would be a calamity, I reflect, if Frau Kienesberger failed to turn up one day for whatever reason, and at any moment a reason might suddenly crop up; but she probably knows as well as I do what I am to her and what she is to me, and so we have the most favourable relationship, in which we can both say we benefit equally from each other. She has three children and sometimes tells the story of their lives as she stands in the hall — how they are developing, what illnesses they have, what torments they have to endure at school, what they wore when they went sledging, when they go to sleep and when they wake up, what they get to eat on Tuesday and on Saturday, and how they react to everything. On such occasions 1 can’t help reflecting that mothers observe their children intensely if they are mothers like Frau Kienesberger, and they cosset them neither too much nor too little. She brings her children up by never thinking about their upbringing; she practises to perfection what others have to work out in their passion for theorizing, and where they are bound to fail she never does. By contrast with all my earlier domestic helps, who without exception were nothing but clumsy sluts, she has the gentlest manner. Where is that still to be found, I wonder? Looking out of the window, I am forced to conclude that I must wear my fur coat on the journey, together with warm underclothing and long woollen socks, for nobody catches cold and immediately becomes ill as easily as I do. Since my sarcoidosis developed I can’t afford to catch a cold, although I get a heavy cold three or four times a year, and so my life is always in danger. As a result of the prednisolone my resistance is virtually nil. When once I’ve caught a cold it takes me weeks to throw it off. And so there’s nothing I dread so much as catching cold. Even a slight draught is enough to make me take to my bed for weeks, and so at Peiskam I live most of the time in fear of catching cold. This fear almost verges on madness and is probably one of the reasons why I find it so hard to begin any protracted intellectual work; when so many fears are concentrated in one person, everything about him constantly breaks down. I’ll wear my fur coat and the warmest underclothes and the warmest socks, because I have to get to the station, and in Munich I have to get from the station to the airport, and who knows, I said to myself, what it will be like in Palma? When I had left Palma eighteen months before, in November, there had been driving snow, and I had been frozen through and through. When I got back to Peiskam I spent two months in bed, and the effect of going to Palma to recuperate was cancelled out at a stroke by my catching cold. Instead of coming back to Peiskam refreshed and fortified as I had hoped and expected, I came back looking like death. The people who saw me at the time didn’t know me, in the worst sense of the phrase, not in the sense that I looked much better and more normal than when I had left for Palma. The fur coat and the fur cap and the warm English scarf, I said to myself. Twelve degrees of frost! I was alarmed. But if there is the right contrast, I told myself, if it’s twelve degrees above zero in Palma and not twelve degrees below as it is here — perhaps even eighteen or twenty degrees, as is quite possible in Palma at this time of the year, late January — I shall profit from the change all the more. I deliberately said profit from and not enjoy, as would have been normal, in order to keep the extravagance of my desires under some measure of control. If it’s eighteen or twenty degrees in Palma, it will be to my profit, I said, adopting precisely the intonation used by my sister, whose pronunciation of the word