To the left of the door in the wall opposite the window is where they, the Hoellers, had pinned Roithamer’s death notice, and to the right of the door, the death notice of Roithamer’s sister. For a long time to come the mood throughout the whole valley will probably be determined by these two dead people, I thought, and most noticeably in Hoeller’s house with which these two, each in his or her own way, had such strong ties, the one by actually having lived here, in fact until his own violent death, the other as his sister, because she was always welcome in Hoeller’s house and especially popular with Hoeller’s children, with whom she had made friends. While Roithamer had been drawn to Hoeller, originally, by Hoeller having been his schoolmate, and subsequently by Hoeller’s idea of building his house in the Aurach gorge and Roithamer’s sudden clear perception, derived from this building plan, of the kinship between himself and Hoeller, whose inward and outward simplicity had always been attractive to Roithamer, Hoeller’s house as a building, in itself which had interested Roithamer so much that he often took part all day long, for weeks on end, in the building of Hoeller’s house, it was not in Altensam he spent his vacations from England but taking part in the building of Hoeller’s house, then it was, for Roithamer’s sister, Hoeller’s children for whose sake she often visited the Hoellers, at Christmas or Easter, Roithamer’s sister always brought Hoeller’s children presents particularly suited to these children, from time to time she would buy them completely new outfits and take them on trips to the lakes or even into town.
The Aurach gorge with Hoeller’s house, so perfectly, because so functionally, adapted to the Aurach gorge, had always been the destination, in their last years, of these two people whose faces I now saw pictured on those death notices on: he wall opposite me, I thought, and I couldn’t take it in that the deaths of those two should have come so quickly and, after all, so unexpectedly, plunging everything in the Aurach valley into such gloom as had certainly been prevalent here for some time now, ever since the death of those two. The Hoellers had always had a tender spot in their hearts, as I know, for the two Roithamers, as they most affectionately referred to the now dead brother and sister, who were so different from their brothers and parents, they had never looked down on the simple inhabitants of the valley and the villages below Altensam, as their birth might have entitled them to do, as the people hereabouts put it, but had rather, from earliest childhood on, felt more kinship with them than with their own family, the two Roithamers had felt closer to the Hoellers than to their own brothers, their own parents, and they had never made a mystery of it. Whenever they had a moment they’d used it, as I’ve said, to escape from Altensam and go down to the valley, to go down there was all they ever wanted, and always preferably to the Hoellers. It was owing to those two that in earlier days, when they were still children, Hoeller’s house was always filled with life, first the old house and then the new-built Hoeller house, the two young Roithamers had always seen to it that the rather overburdened and drab life of the Hoellers in the Aurach valley, which tended by nature to a certain even, depressing grayness, was brightened up and so made bearable again, every time. By their mere presence, being basically amusing people, Roithamer and his sister had often rescued the Hoellers from one of their usual states of despair, as young people almost always will. They owed much to the two Roithamers just as, conversely, the two Roithamers owed much to the Hoellers. This catastrophe, I suddenly said when we had all finished eating, need not have happened, meaning the death of the sister and the suicide of the brother, though what I had been thinking just then was that everything had led directly to this catastrophe and that actually it had to happen.