Absolute mutual incomprehension among us children even then. There’s nothing more for us to explain to each other, so Roithamer. Typical, mother’s fainting spells as a form of blackmail, her constant bouts with nausea, she controlled the household from her so-called nausea chair, I almost never saw mother free from nausea or the signs of nausea, father was the opposite, a robust constitution by nature, but she, my mother, always in her moods, always gloomy, bad moods because of her gloominess, father always in a good mood, she couldn’t stand it. Unlike his first wife, who had borne him no children, which was his reason, naturally, for divorcing her, as he always said, so Roithamer, she was the daughter of a Klagenfurt attorney, though all she’d ever had in her head was theaters and amusements, my father regarded everything connected with the theater and music as mere amusements, which is what he quite contemptuously called it, he had married this woman because he’d made her pregnant, but the child was born dead, its mother had been half insane for a long time after this stillbirth, so father said, until he, my father, simply couldn’t bear it any longer, because it was obvious that she could never have another child, hence the divorce, but then he overhastily married my mother, who certainly could and did give birth and to living children at that, so father said about my mother, she was never anything more to him than a good breeder, my father kept saying and he said it to anybody, even mere acquaintances, even strangers when he was drunk, unlike his first wife, who was always young and fresh, but then was completely ruined by that stillbirth, she’s still living, my father kept saying, whenever anyone asked him about her, his first wife, she’s still living, in France I think, anyway unlike his first wife, his second, our mother, was always an old woman, even as a young woman she was already old, her sort are old even as children, so my father said, a good observation, as I can attest, such people are born with wizened old faces, it’s always frightening how ancient their faces look, the kind of newborn human being my mother apparently was always looks from the first moment as he or she is likely to look at seventy or eighty, but this aged look stays on that face, always, our mother was always the Old Woman, from the beginning, unlike his first wife, his second, our mother, was also a calculating woman, she was all calculation, she never did anything without calculation, while my first wife, so my father, so Roithamer, without being at all calculating, suddenly became an unhappy creature as a result of that stillbirth, my second wife was always calculating, with every fiber of her being, to such an extent, so my father, so Roithamer, that she’d get into a terrible state whenever one of her calculations didn’t happen to work out, but basically her calculations always worked out, this type of woman will get a bee in her bonnet, for instance something unnecessary she wants to buy, so my father, and she gets her way, even though by getting her way she weakens the relationship, which she doesn’t notice, but she thinks that she is strengthening her position.
When it comes to trying things, she always got her way when it came to trips or innovations at Altensam, and she did it almost always by using her sick spells with which she ruled Altensam for long periods of time without a letup, especially in the spring, when Altensam was ruled entirely by nothing but our mother’s nausea, in the heat of summer, in the sudden chill of autumn. If she’d failed in getting her wish, those wishes and ideas and projects of hers that always had so devastating an effect on Altensam, she resorted to threats, and most of all to the most terrifying of all threats, so my father, so Roithamer, suicide, she’d throw herself off the top of the wall one day, see if she didn’t, she’d be smashed to bits, because her life meant nothing to us, even though we all depended on her, she was the heart and core of our life, but basically she wasn’t the heart and core of life in Altensam as she kept telling us, but rather the heart and core of our creeping death in Altensam, and she never made her threat good, these people, so Roithamer, never stop talking of suicide, they threaten suicide every time their wishes and ideas are balked, and because they have no other resources except this threat, because they’re basically without resources, absolutely without resources, but they don’t kill themselves, they go on living for years, for decades, with this threat and by grace of this threat, and then they die a perfectly natural death, so Roithamer. When she was alone in Altensam, because my father was away on business, she thought about how she might torment him when he’d come back home, what kind of horror she could surprise him with, it had to be a horror with at least a touch of perversion in it, which would instantly put him in a frightful mood which would of course have the most frightful effect on us children and on all of Altensam, and when father was coming home to Altensam, she’d sit for hours, always looking at her watch, in her turret room watching the road from the village by which he had to come up, watching everything that went on down there, always glancing at her watch. noting who was coming up to Altensam on what errand, who was leaving Altensam and on what errand and with what baggage and especially what kind of tools, because more than anything else mother was mistrustful, she completely mistrusted not only us but everything, and it was probably this mistrust that had undermined her health from her earliest years because even as a child she had been most noticeably mistrustful, and so of course, what with her organism weakened by her incessant mistrustfulness, she was almost always sickly, or pretended to be sickly, you could never be absolutely sure at any given moment whether she was sickly or pretending to be sickly, what was interesting about it was just this, that she was always sickly, but never really sick, never seriously sick so as actually to arouse real concern, but only always sickly, this sickliness of our mother’s was one of the main characteristics of the atmosphere at Altensam as far back as I can remember, with her chronic sickliness she finally infected all of Altensam so that the entire atmosphere there was sicklied through, everything there in addition to herself was always equally sickly, it seemed as though she was quite consciously using this sickliness of hers as a means to her ends, meaning that she used it against us, also against her husband, our father, with this sickliness she controlled not only the most important aspects of life at Altensam but also all the secondary aspects, even the most insignificant ones, and this sickliness was instantly sensed by everyone who’d come to Altensam, even those who don’t know Altensam that well and those for whom Altensam was something new, such a newcomer was immediately included in this sickliness which had already seized and taken hold and poisoned everything at Altensam, he couldn’t know. what it was that had brought him into this peculiarly ailing condition when he’d barely set foot in Altensam, but it was nothing else than our mother’s sickliness, whereas father’s first wife was always fresh and young, so my father always said, so Roithamer, his second, the one he called the nanny, was always old and sickly, he always stated this quite openly and he’d often told my mother to her face that her only weapon apart from her boundless stupidity, was her sickliness, stupidity and sickliness which she used against him and against everything that made up Altensam, against everything Altensam had been until she appeared on the scene, and