she who took the initiative in tormenting me, even though I was the one who kept coming back to Altensam because I couldn’t stand it in England after a while of trying to adjust to it, and so I always showed up at home again, just as if it were somehow possible for me, as it simply no longer was or never had been, to spend any time at all with my mother. As regards any kind of intellectual interests, she could only pretend to them, in which respect she differed in no way from the rest of her sex, in fact I’d say that everything in and about her was nothing but pretense, but then our whole era is antiintellectual at heart, it only pretends to be interested in intellectual matters, these days the trend is all against intellect and for hypocrisy, it’s all an era of hypocritical pretense, hypocrisy everywhere, nothing real left, it’s all hypocrisy. She hated my sister, so the Eferding woman hated what she called my doting talk about my sister, in fact I was always instinctively moved to speak of the sister I loved more than anything in the world, it’s true that I was almost constantly intent upon studying my sister’s personality, while at the same time I kept loving her and having to show my love for her quite openly and in fact I did show it at all times, most of all probably because I hated my mother, the Eferding woman, I compulsively made her witness my love and tender concern for my sister, the studied care which I lavished on he even in my thoughts, especially the care and delicacy with which I made every effort to treat her when we met, without actually having to make an effort because care and timidity came quite naturally to me with regard to my sister, all this was naturally hateful to the Eferding woman, everything I had noticed about my sister in the course of my life that had made her more and more the peculiarly lovable person that my sister always was for me, more and more endeared her to me and ended by making her a sort of second and superior self, in the way I saw her and felt about her, it all acutely distressed the Eferding woman, at first she had always tried to draw me over to her side by means of her so-called pretended sympathy for my sister, whom she knew to be no more her partisan than I was, my sister naturally was of my father’s party all her life, and like myself, though most of the time secretly she was happy in her loyalty to him, but the Eferding woman tried to win me over by her so-called hypocritical sympathy for my sister, but precisely because the sympathy she offered, which always turned out to be hypocritical anyway, was repellent to me, her efforts always ended up by repelling me. My sister always had innate good taste, good taste inherited from my father, while my mother, that is to say, her mother and mine, was totally deficient in taste or tact, she had never known how to please people in a friendly and natural way, while my sister always had the gift of pleasing through her friendliness and naturalness, so Roithamer, our mother suffered from this defect and whenever she’d suffered from it for any length of time she’d always go to Eferding, to her father’s house, the butcher’s house, for sanctuary, but of course she’d only come back, after some days or weeks, back to Altensam, with even less sympathetic understanding for Altensam than before, and even less understanding for us. But my brothers never sensed any of this, since they were of the same mind as the Eferding woman, who had been able to endure life in Altensam at all only because her own children, our brothers that is, I am safe in saying that my sister and I did not consider ourselves her children but only our father’s children, but our brothers were on her side, they felt deeply akin to her family, our brothers had often gone with her to Eferding and felt at home there as nowhere else, while for me Eferding had always been an imposition, mentally and emotionally, and I’d gone there only a few times, when I was forced to go, on quite ordinary occasions, weddings of my mother’s relatives, their funerals, or perhaps to stock my mother’s larder with meat out of her father’s butcher shop during the war, but that always involved sending the Altensam cattle down to Eferding, where they’d be butchered in my maternal grandfather’s butcher shop, then dressed, and then we brought back the meat butchered and dressed in Eferding, up to Altensam. Our mother hadn’t wanted to adapt herself to Altensam, which would have been the most natural thing, but she had tried to adapt us to Eferding, “us” underlined, in which she of course did not succeed, under all the prevailing conditions at Altensam, the fact being that our father was always a quite original character, just as Altensam was altogether original by nature, though I must admit that this entire situation must be considered an extraordinary one. I can only say that she hated everything as she hated herself, because, once she was in Altensam, she had to hate everything and therefore also herself. But it would be overhasty to describe her only as an unhappy person, “overhasty” underlined. She hated everything and everyone and in this pathological process she was as if arrested by an incurable paroxysm against everything, of course she was an unhappy person, she was not alone in this unhappiness but rather in the company of almost all human beings who’ve never for a moment tried to understand the causes of their unhappiness, who constantly blame particularly the people closest to them for their own unhappiness, and never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves, she had never worked on herself, even though she was always full of doubts about herself, but not in a way that would have forced her to dig for causes, she had buried herself steadily deeper into her eventually hopeless life against Altensam, just as my brothers buried themselves in their hopeless life against Altensam, isolated themselves, for undoubtedly my brothers, siding with the Eferding woman, had also isolated themselves, they’d actually in time worked their way entirely out of Altensam, because they’d basically always worked with my mother against Altensam. In Altensam, ever more deeply buried in isolation in Altensam, while at the same time working their way out of Altensam, so Roithamer, “at the same time. out of Altensam” underlined. It’s a logical consequence that now, after they’d always worked against Altensam, after their mother’s death, after the death of the Eferding woman, they will have to leave Altensam; by my selling Altensam this process is rounding itself off, so Roithamer. My brothers were also Eferding people, so Roithamer, and there have always been two parties living against each other and existing ever more intensively because of their mutual opposition while always trying to liquidate this in the opposing party, the Eferding party on the one hand, viz. my mother and my brothers, and on the other hand the Altensam party, that is my father, my sister, and me. Because of her ultimately misanthropic nature and her environment- and self-destructive spirit, which was an Eferding spirit, her face had in time become a misanthropic and self-destructive face and every morning upon awakening she already entered, almost in panic, into her misanthropy and self-destruction as facial destruction, as if into an incurable malignant disease, and with all these malignant, pathologically malignant facial features she encountered us early in the morning over breakfast. Mistrustfully or at least with a most insulting reserve she met each and all of those whom she associated with Altensam, all persons who came to Altensam and had been instantly classified by her as belonging to Altensam; she thought she had a right to hate people because she thought everybody hated her, so Roithamer. Not one, not one single hour of my life have I spent in harmony alone with my mother, “in harmony” underlined, so Roithamer. And so it wasn’t easy, either, to go out and meet people with her, because she could meet all these people only with mistrust and rejection, because these people all tended to belong to Altensam, and Eferding was far away, so Roithamer. As a child I’d hardly met people with her, no matter whether in Stocket or in another of the villages below Altensam, when these people, no matter what they were like, were irritated by her, they’d instantly noticed that something was going on here against them, whether they were conscious of this peculiarity or not, they usually took their leave of us at once. She mastered the art of separating me from people I valued, it wasn’t long before hardly anyone came up to Altensam to see me, and I soon had very few friends left, so-called playmates, in my childhood, friends from Stocket for instance, once she noticed a spiritual kinship to Altensam in them, she was against them, so Roithamer. Because she had determined to exploit Altensam for her own purposes, such as, for instance, to take possession of me, simply to take possession of Altensam, she naturally always ran into opposition at Altensam, just as my brothers, the Eferdingers, had always run into opposition. Whenever I showed my sister an article that was bound to interest her, so Roithamer, my sister was always most charmingly, “most charmingly” underlined, ready to discuss the contents of that article with me, to try to understand the contents of the article and then the reasons for the article, along with me, precisely what I’d found stimulating in that article was what she’d also found stimulating, I had told her what it was that particularly interested me in that article, what particularly attracted me, for instance, what was true or false in it, and we’d always noted a particularly deep accord in our shared view of the various subjects of whatever kind, my sister was always interested in hearing my opinion, just as she’d always been able to listen, unlike our mother, who could never listen, just as I was always interested in hearing my sister’s opinion (on this or that subject). But my (and my sister’s) mother had always shown a lack of interest in everything that interested and concerned us, no matter in what sense. All her life she had always reacted to us with a total lack of interest, so Roithamer, “total lack of interest” underlined. Just as my sister always took an interest in my own scientific work, any of my intellectual work, it was more than an interest, actually, in what I was thinking and writing, my inventions and fantasies, so I took more than an interest in all of my sister’s artistic inventions, and in everything she thought, but most of all in her miniature painting, in which she quickly achieved great mastery, her miniatures, painted on enamel and porcelain, are the most beautiful imaginable, between me and my sister there’s always been the greatest and most loving sympathy, she, my sister, had always entered wholly into anything concerning me, as I always wholly entered into whatever concerned her. For days on end we’d amuse ourselves talking about a book we’d read one after the other, exchanging ideas about this book until we could sum up all these ideas in a single idea which precisely characterized that book, or else a work of art, a painting, for days on end we could discuss and debate a certain formulation we had read somewhere, for the two of us our reading was always the most important subject, without reading neither my sister nor I could have stood life for any length of time, not that we had been brought up to read, quite the opposite was the case, as already described, but in the course of time we had managed to acquire our passion for reading, our delight in books, the pleasures of experience by way of reading, the intellectual discipline connected with reading, while pacing the floor together in my room or in hers, we could talk about every kind of thing we’d read or heard or observed or about every kind of discovery we’d made, each on his own, we talked it all out, quite in contrast to our mother, the Eferding woman, with whom all of that would never have been possible.