During this period when he let go, when he gave up, and took to devoting himself wholly to nothing but his inclinations, the period after his fortieth year, the effective influence of his second wife, our mother, had naturally been enabled to spread very rapidly, because he was no longer emitting any energies of his own to counteract it, but, as noted, it was all the same to him, “all the same” underlined, he’d made a mistake and he’d also let go, given (himself) up, and from that point on I never saw my father do anything in particular except go out hunting, alone or with friends, often with my brothers, too, but never with me, hunting never even entered into my thoughts, I never understood it at all, while all my father cared about was the forest as forest, not as an economic reality, but just for the game in it, nothing else, till the day he died, and this indifference of his to everything other than his one single interest, hunting, wholly encompassed us, his children. Once he’d realized the aversion he felt for the Eferding woman, his dislike of her that grew from day to day, as he always said, he ended by resigning himself to the presence of this woman in his life as someone unacceptable, whom he couldn’t any longer accept, nor could he get her out of the way, but he could have no relationship with her not conditioned by aversion and hatred. He, our father, was the opposite of that woman in every respect and it had become ever more obvious that theirs was the case of a purely accidental encounter, probably during one of his visits to a friend in Eferding, actually it was only despair over the failure of everything he had hoped for from his first wife, which made him actually, and without a grain of sense, as he put it, take the bait of that Eferding woman, who was an absolute nothing, she was simply old and sloppy, which she simply continued to be at Altensam, only to a greater degree. But to judge the whole case in this biased fashion, putting all the blame on the Eferding woman, is also impossible, “impossible” underlined. The fact is that our father had quite often stopped at the public house in Eferding where our mother came from, to which the butcher shop was attached which is still being run by our mother’s brother today, and one day he stopped there again, and this led to the decline of Altensam, or rather the decline of what was left of Altensam that could still decline, because at that time Altensam was actually already in _ the process of deteriorating, because my father had already given up on everything inwardly, all he still wanted was to make good his decision, once he had taken it, to beget children, regardless with which woman, though deep down he no longer really cared. And from the moment in which he let go of things and finally gave up, Altensam, what was left of it, had been let go and had been basically given up. The appearance of our mother at Altensam was then no more than the outwardly visible sign of his letting-go and giving-up, by the time we children were born this process of letting-go and giving-up had been going on for a long time, and we were already weakened in advance by this very fact alone. Enveloped in this process of letting-go and giving-up, we had naturally been sensitive to this process from the very start of our existence and had then fallen increasingly under its influence, we could never escape from it, we were swept along downward in our father’s tendency to let go and give up. By the time we were born, our father had already turned away from Altensam, turned his back on it, all we ever experienced was this condition, more prevalent from one day to the next, this process of decay hastened on the one hand by my father, who had already turned away from Altensam, and for all sorts of easily understandable reasons such as her different background, lower-middle-class milieu, lower-middle-class mentality in general and throughout, Eferding etcetera, it was also hastened along by my mother in truly despicable fashion. A son in distress, no matter which son, will naturally go to his father for advice, but I never went to my father, no matter how troubled I was, and I never asked my father serious questions, because I knew that none of my questions would receive an answer from him, because he had turned away from us even before we were born, and I also never went to my mother, because I feared my mother. I had no way of reaching my father, although I longed all my life to reach him, because my father was not interested in me, no more than in my siblings, and mother I feared, we feared her, but I feared her more than my siblings did because I was more hated by my mother than my siblings, on the other hand I did have a somewhat better relationship with my father than my siblings did, who leaned toward my mother rather than my father as their parent. Only my sister was loved by my father like no one else, that was evident always and on every occasion, after his death she was the most defenseless creature in the world. She, my sister, was, like myself but perhaps even more demonstrably, her father’s child, akin to him, even more than myself who was akin to father, not to my mother, there was absolutely nothing in me, about me, coming from my mother’s, the Eferding woman’s, side, everything or almost everything came from my father and all this was true in an even higher degree of my sister, while both my brothers take after the Eferding woman in every respect, even though it expresses itself quite differently than with the Eferding woman, my mother, herself. This is also the reason I could never have a closer relationship with my brothers, because I always saw Eferding in them, everything connected with Eferding and the Eferding woman and her origins, while conversely my brothers always saw in me and in my (and their) sister everything connected with my, with our father, they saw more of it in my sister, but they hated me, my sister they always regarded as