Undisturbed we spent entire nights together up in the attic, considering and concerning ourselves with books we’d just been reading, studying, without noticing that daylight had broken already, because our discussions had always been full of the greatest intensity, yet also the greatest possible serenity. Our favorite place for these talks, critical reflections, suppositions, andsoforth, was always the attic, though very often, in summer, also the area behind the farm building from which you could see down country all the way to Stocket. Very often, too, we’d walk through the park, quite casually in every way, finding its neglected state more and more of a stimulus to conversation, because the park at Altensam was all the more beautiful for having been left to run wild, overgrown with weeds, and hence all the more conducive to our rambles back and forth. From a certain, no longer exactly identifiable point on, what I most enjoyed was to withdraw into my reading, my scientific, natural science, a kind of reading which my mother most particularly loathed my doing, just as she, the Eferding woman, also secretly hated my sister’s work, her miniature painting, though she didn’t dare hate it openly, for what and how my sister painted could not but please even my mother, and in contrast to my scribbling it wasn’t dangerous, either, but she could not quite suppress her dislike of everything that’s Altensam even in this respect. Actually I asked myself over and over again why I didn’t break off contact with my mother, simply stopped going to see her, but then I’d have had to stop going to see Altensam and after all I was attached to Altensam, just as I kept on feeling attached to my childhood, be it how it may have been, Altensam was my childhood and childhood is in every case an obstacle to making a final break, “final break” underlined. That woman, I keep thinking, so Roithamer, who hated my sister because I loved her and vice versa and who basically also hated our father because he couldn’t hate us, so Roithamer. How those two could keep on living together, I asked myself, my father and mother, I don’t know, I can only suppose that they’ve always lived with