it is a stage entrance, my dear! I can still hear my father telling her to her face, a stage entrance, my dear! stupidity and sickliness, so Roithamer, were our mother’s chief attributes, father was right in his judgment of her, we children had always suffered from her stupidity and her sickliness, because our mother’s ill nature was fed as much by her stupidity as by her sickliness, which most times was a crafty production of hers, a spectacle she put on for us every day, in which she played the lead. My father had soon turned away from this wife, our mother, she had borne him children, whelped them, but even this at a time when he no longer wanted any children, once they were born he realized that he didn’t really want them at all, and so, since they (we) existed, willy-nilly, we were treated accordingly, always as creatures to be considered his own children but whom their progenitor basically no longer wanted and hadn’t wanted for the longest time. Mother, always unkempt, her appearance invariably neglected, as father said, so Roithamer, sloppily dressed, her buttons half undone, her stockingless feet in unlaced shoes, that’s how I remember her, on her feet all day long only in the hope of catching one of us or one of the so-called staff out, running or limping all the time, another typical trait of hers was a quick succession of injuries or ulcers, inflammations on her legs, mostly the calves, so she ran or limped along always smelling of every kind of medication, bought from so-called quacks, always bought in large quantities, always disseminating the smell of such medications throughout Altensam, most of the time wearing an old bathrobe, a legacy from my grandmother, in this bathrobe, which hadn’t even been worn by my grandmother any longer, she’d only used it to cover the dahlias against the autumn frosts, but my mother had dragged it out from the heap of rags in the gardener’s shack and put it on and then worn it for years afterward, my father loathed that bathrobe, we children loathed that bathrobe, but mother was always wearing this bathrobe we all hated, she even appears in this bathrobe in family photographs, the woman in these pictures is always a total stranger to me, these pictures convince me more than the reality did that my mother was always some strange woman, she’d turn up suddenly everywhere and always unpredictably, as if she had sneaked up on you, to check up on things, no matter whose room it was, suddenly there she was checking up, she’d always wanted to know what was going on in the various rooms, she’d rip the door open like a bolt of lightning and stand there, demanding an explanation, because we’d always just done something which, in her view, we shouldn’t have done or hadn’t been allowed to do, something improper always, if not strictly forbidden, nevertheless improper or useless or embarrassing, in any case something typical of us. In the farm buildings she was generally feared, she was always checking on everybody’s work and accused the farm workers, who’d stayed at Altensam only on account of my father, whom they loved, she accused them of getting nothing done, or not enough, she always criticized all of them for being too slow or careless, yet not one of them was ever slower or more careless than that woman, our mother. All day long she was on her feet in her repulsive state of slovenliness, toward evening she’d always retreat to her room and put on a simple black dress, basically even elegant, very expensive too, but on her it somehow didn’t look good, something seemed wrong with it, it was a collarless dress with a large diamondstudded gold pin on her chest, this pin had come into her hands from the estate of my grandmother’s sister as a wedding present, and so she got herself ready to go to the theater. She’d get one of the stewards to drive her to the Linz Theater, on principle she never missed a première, and returned toward midnight, never without a totally adverse opinion on everything she’d happened to see at the Linz Theater, making fun of everything, it was always the same story, she’d get out of the car in the courtyard, the steward would drive the car back to the car barn where all the cars were kept, and from the moment she’d come in the big front door, even before going to the downstairs kitchen for the hot coffee that was kept for her there, she’d unloose a tirade against everything she’d just experienced at the theater, I have never heard her say. anything positive about the Linz Theater, though I must admit that it’s one of the worst theaters extant, always producing only wellintentioned plays which invariably turned into some kind of catastrophe or other, in some repulsive way, too, anyway I never heard her say anything positive about it. Still she had never managed even once to pass up one of their premières. She was an addicted theatergoer even though she understood nothing whatever about the theater, a passionate theatergoer; that the Linz Theater was absolutely the worst theater in the world, as she said time and again, was of course no secret to her, especially since she was repeatedly confirmed in this judgment by others, so-called theater buffs with whom she’d chatted during the intermissions, but I happen to know that she only went out to the theater in order to lay in a supply of colognes and face creams at a certain cosmetics shop on the way to the theater, before curtain time, she had hundreds of these face creams and colognes in her bathroom and she made incredibly lavish use of the contents of these hundreds of bottles and tubes, unfortunately all these so-called fragrances, our mother’s taste in fragrances is debatable, were always overwhelmed by the stinking salves and concoctions of her quacks, they’re called health practitioners in our country, so they were basically always superfluous. The theater is only a pretext, so father said, so Roithamer, for stopping at the cosmetics shop for a supply of all that chemical stuff which is so totally ineffective on that woman (our mother), the grand opera is only a pretext for her crazy perfumes, the comedy or the tragedy in Linz is only a pretext for her ghastly moisturizing delusions. She understood nothing, neither the theater nor music, and cared less, but the theater (in Linz) and the music (in Linz), for she also attended the more important concerts in Linz, provided her with an opportunity and a pretext, not only to pick up supplies of every possible kind of aromatic filth (so my father) at the Linz cosmetics shop, but all this theater-and concert-going had also always served to prove to us her appreciation of art and her cultural requirements, but most of all they served to humiliate my father, this uncultured man, as she always said, who hasn’t the least regard for great art, all these forays to theaters and concerts, which cost heaps of money, so father said, just to rub it in how cultured she was. But in reality our mother was not at all a cultured woman, not cultured in the least, and our father, who in fact couldn’t care less about her kind of culture, the kind of culture she had in her head, she was quite right in this respect, he cared nothing at all about it, but the very fact that he cared nothing at all for her kind of culture makes him a cultured man, so Roithamer. Father had at least read a so-called good book from time to time, but mother had never, to my personal knowledge, read a good book, she detested everything that had to do with books, especially good books, as she herself said, hated them like the plague, and she’d always done everything in her power to keep us, my siblings included, away from so-called good books, away from all books on principle, she’d aborted any possibilities for us to get anywhere near good books or any books, it was typical that our three- to four-thousand-volume library at Altensam, dating back to the times of our great-grandparents and grandparents, was locked up, and that we had to ask mother, not father, when we wanted to get into the library, which incidentally was always in a state of terrible neglect, it was never put in order, never even dusted, for decades on end, and our mother never approved of our desire to read, she’d always sidetracked us, when we wanted to read a book in the library, any book, into the music room instead, that’s where she wanted us to spend our time, not in the library, the library was off limits to us, but she’d maneuvered us into the music room, doubtless the less dangerous of the two, even though our mother, our parents, knew that we, my siblings too, loving music as we did, nevertheless hated making music, because we’d been forced to practice. We were locked out of the library, the others were also less interested in it than I was, so Roithamer, I had no way to get into the library, because mother had locked the library keys up in her key safe, books were meant for grown-ups, they’d go to your head like a disease, mother always used to say, we could read fairy tales, but we didn’t want to read fairy tales, fairy tales yes, everything else, no. She was afraid that I, in particular, might discover in the library that the world was bigger than Altensam, that it was basically entirely different from the world I knew, I am speaking of the time prior to my eighth or ninth year. In my eighth or ninth year there was a sudden complete reversaclass="underline" she, my mother, had persuaded herself that I should be devouring the library, that I should go into the library everyday, but now I no longer wanted to go in, I refused to read a single book, she couldn’t make me, my mother was of course totally baffled by this, so Roithamer, first I want to go in but I’m not allowed in, then I’m supposed to go in but I no longer want to go in. She’d been of the widespread opinion that children to the age of eight or nine have no business in a socalled adult library, but that at age eight or nine they should be introduced to these socalled adult books, and she’d meant to follow these recommendations. But now I was no longer interested in our library. It’s such an old library, I thought, after all, I’ll find new books once I’ve left Altensam, why bother with these old books now, they’d certainly have interested me, so Roithamer, but I refused to give in to force. Of new books there were none in Altensam, they were all at least forty or fifty years old, and many much older, without counting my father’s books on woods, forestry and hunting, which were always kept up-to-date with the latest information on woods, forestry, both practical and research, and hunting. Attempt at a description of father: we’d always trusted him absolutely, but under the influence of that woman, our mother, he’d become more and more estranged from us, we could feel how with the years and everything that happened in all those years, happenings in Altensam always brought about by his wife, our mother, nothing really but pathological processes resulting from that woman’s constitutional predisposition, she was simply a disaster for Altensam, how in time we grew away from our father, just as he grew away from us. That woman also exercised a most harmful influence on our father, but he had soon succumbed, after an initial resistance, to her superior willpower and came to be totally controlled by this willpower of hers, everything in Altensam came to be ruled by that woman’s willpower, because of our mother, the daughter of a butcher in Eferding, everything in Altensam was suddenly sickly, ailing, though it had never been ailing before, not even during the period of my father’s first wife, whom I often visit, and who has never forgiven my father, never could forgive him for more or less ruining her life by seeing her only as a potential breeder of his children, so that she ceased to mean anything to him once my father’s first child was stillborn, changing her beyond recognition, which caused my father to remove this wife entirely from Altensam, under the influence of my mother whom my father quite openly and even to her own face called a makeshift solution, because he thought that he must secure the first available woman, so my father, so Roithamer, under the influence of that woman as a makeshift, that makeshift as a woman, so Roithamer, “makeshift as a woman” underlined, who had no sooner turned up than she tried to transfer to Altensam her lower-middle-class mentality, her crudeness, yet pitiableness, her ill-bred and incorrigible ways, and in this she succeeded, my father immediately fell completely under this influence, which soon took its devastating, in fact annihilating toll of Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, it was only at the start that he was able to resist this influence, but afterward, after only a brief period of life with this Eferding woman, when he was about forty, he gave up, he gave himself up, first he gave up Altensam under the influence of this Eferding woman, so my father always said, so Roithamer, then he gave himself up, he was probably overcome with indifference toward everything in Altensam, all at once, from one minute to the next, I had made the crucial mistake of my life, so my father himself said, so Roithamer, I should never have married this Eferding woman, this butcher’s daughter with her butcher’s physiognomy, so my father always said, so Roithamer, with her butcher’s way of life. But it makes no difference in the end, so my father, so Roithamer. Before this so-called mistake my father, born and raised in Altensam, had the usual boarding school experiences, then went through the necessary secondary and university courses at Passau and Salzburg and Vienna, and eventually led the life or the existence which the men of Altensam always led, working at his forestry and his farming on the one hand, comfortloving on the other hand, with all the love possible in so fundamentally monotonous a life reserved for hunting, he’d led this quiet life of such activities and inclinations, a life unremarkable even in spurts, up to the point when he realized that he could not possibly go on alone, as he had been since his parents’, my grandparents’, early death, entirely devoting himself to running Altensam, which left him fully occupied yet not really satisfied, for no matter how much such a splendid and always basically well-functioning, going concern as Altensam, always a healthy, untroubled mix of farming and forestry, including lumbering, brick-making, quarries and cement works, no matter how much so healthy an economic enterprise could keep a man like my father, who had grown up with it and was wholly at home in it, fully occupied, it could not in the long run be enough to satisfy even him. But he had no other source of satisfaction by nature, unless he’d given the whole thing up, which he wasn’t the man to do, so he’d begun thinking, by the time he was forty, of saving himself by cutting down on all that, and then suddenly decided, purely out of cold calculation, to have heirs, to bring children into the world, after the failure with his first wife, who probably was better suited to him, with the second, the most impossible mate imaginable for him, as became quickly apparent, though she did bear him the desired children, whom, however, at the very moment they were suddenly present, he simply no longer wanted, as I now know and as I secretly always felt, he had needed the children in order to let himself go, to relax the intensity with which he’d been forced to live, freed by now having children, even when they were still very young, as though the children had already begun to succeed him, to take over from and for him, as far as he was concerned, long before it could actually be possible for them to do so.