Everybody suffers, my dear little brother, but you despise life. That’s your misfortune, that’s why you’re ill, that’s why you’re dying. And you soon will die if you don’t change, she said. I could hear it clearly now, more clearly than when the words were uttered in that cold, unfeeling manner of hers. My sister the clairvoyant — absurd! She’s probably right though, that it would be a good thing to get away from Peiskam for a while, but I’ve no guarantee of being able to start my work anywhere else, let alone get on with it. Several times during dinner she exclaimed, Mendelssohn Bartholdy! as if to give herself some particularly intense amusement, probably because she knew precisely that each time it was bound to cut me to the quick. The fact is that well over ten years ago I told her I was thinking of writing something -1 didn’t say a book or an article, but something — on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At that time she’d never heard of Mendelssohn Bartholdy. It now drove her mad to hear me mention the name at every end and turn. She couldn’t bear to hear it any longer, at least from me. She forbade me ever to utter the name again in her presence. If Mendelssohn Bartholdy was to be mentioned at all, then it must be by her: that gave her pleasure because she knew, after trying it out for ten years, that it was bound to make me look ridiculous. Besides, she hates Mendelssohn’s music — that’s just like her. How can one love Mendelssohn when there’s Mozart and Beethoven! she once exclaimed. There would never have been any point in my explaining why I had chosen to work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. For years the name Mendelssohn Bartholdy has carried an emotive charge for both of us, bringing us into collision and sparking off all our dreadful, unhealthy and hence agonizing conflicts. You only love Mendelssohn Bartholdy because he’s a Jew, she said scornfully. She came out with this remark for the first time on her last visit, quite out of the blue, and perhaps it was true. She had turned up, ruined my work, and in the end almost ruined me. Women turn up, get you in their toils and ruin you. But hadn’t I sent for her? Hadn’t I suggested that she should come to Peiskam, for a few days? I’d sent her a telegram inviting her to Peiskam. Only for a few days though, not for months. How far gone I must have been to wire her! What I actually hoped for from her was help, not destruction. But it’s always the same: I beg and beseech her to help me, and she ruins me! And knowing this, I wired her. For the hundredth time I invited my destroyer to my house. It’s true that I wired to her for help: she didn’t come to Peiskam uninvited. The truth is always terrible, but it’s always better to stick to the truth than to resort to lies, to lying to oneself. But I hadn’t said in my telegram that she was to stay for months, because having my sister in my house for months is hell, and I told her so. I said, When you’re here for months it’s hell, and she laughed. My dear little brother, she said, you’d have gone to pieces if I’d left you alone again so soon. You probably wouldn’t have survived. I didn’t reply, perhaps because I realised at this moment that she was right. But what good is it now to argue with myself as to whether I sent for her or not? The facts are no longer in question. But the fact is that she ought to have left, simply cleared out of Peiskam, the moment I was capable of starting my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But a person like my sister isn’t perceptive enough to see when such a moment has come. And naturally I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that it had, that I was capable of writing my study or whatever of Mendelssohn, probably about a hundred and fifty pages or even more, and that it was time for her to clear out. So suddenly I hated her — she probably didn’t know why — and cursed her, and in this way I missed my chance of starting work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But I was probably ashamed to tell her that I had made her come to Peiskam only because of this work, which I’d not yet begun, that I was capable, in other words, of exploiting her as a mere tool for my intellectual product. The so-called man of the intellect constantly walks all over others, killing them and making corpses of them for his intellectual purposes. When the moment comes, such a man of the intellect, so called, would have thought nothing of sacrificing for his intellectual product the one person who had made it possible, misusing him and doing him to death in his devilish speculation. I’d thought I could misuse my sister in this way, but my calculation didn’t work out. On the contrary, I had committed the greatest folly by wiring to my sister in Vienna, Come for a few days. As it transpired she would have come to Peiskam that very day anyway, without being invited, because she was sick of Vienna, suddenly sickened by the continual parties and all these unendurably brainless people. She deserved it, because in recent months she’d been overdoing her socializing. I clapped my hands to my head when I realised that I could have saved myself the telegram, for had I not sent it I should probably have had the courage to tell her after a few days that it was time for her to clear out. As it was, I didn’t have the courage, since I’d asked her to come. It would after all have been unparalleled impertinence to ask her to come and then to throw her out of the house. In any case I knew her too well not to realise that if I’d told her to clear out she wouldn’t have dreamt of it. She’d have laughed in my face and then taken over the house completely. On the one hand we can’t be alone, people like us; on the other we can’t stand company. We can’t stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it’s totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time. Admittedly I’d always credited my sister with the ability to rescue me from the hell of being alone, and, to be honest, she often has succeeded in dragging me out of the black, hideous, revolting, stinking bog of loneliness, but lately she has no longer had the strength, and probably not the will either; perhaps she has doubted for too long whether I am really serious, as is proved, after all, by the way she continually teases me unmercifully about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. I hadn’t written anything for years — because of my sister, I always maintain, but perhaps also because I am no longer capable of writing. We’ll try anything in order to be able to start work on a study, absolutely anything, and we don’t recoil from even the most terrible things if they’ll make it possible for us to write such a study, even if they involve the greatest inhumanity, the greatest perversity, the gravest crime. Alone in Peiskam, surrounded by all these cold walls and with only the banks of fog to look at, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I had tried the most senseless experiments: for instance I had sat on the stairs which lead from the dining room to the first floor and declaimed a few pages of Dostoyevsky, from