to death, let alone that they’re doing it for the family and even, on occasion, for the country. I can honestly say that Father always took it easy at Wolfsegg, and so did my brother. They did not overtax themselves, and under their regime Wolfsegg became generally run-down. Uncle Georg was right when he said to me once, Your father and brother are pretty smart; they pretend to be the family robots, when in fact they’ve turned Wolfsegg into a cozy rural stage on which they make fools of us all. We don’t take advantage of them — they take advantage of us. And we fall for their hypocrisy. If a farmer wants to pass for honest and hardworking, all he has to do is open the farm gate, turn up the sound of grunting pigs, as one turns up the radio, and broadcast the sound from the world of bad conscience. People are actually foolish enough to fall for such tricks. Every morning millions of people slip on their overalls and are taken seriously as workers, though in fact they’re an army of highly skilled idlers who only make mischief and think of their bellies. But the intellectuals are too stupid to see this, said Uncle Georg. Even the feeblest performance by an idle worker or craftsman suffices to give them a bad conscience, provided that he appears in his theater workshop dressed in his blue costume. The intellectuals have only a minor role to play in this revolting workshop, where work and activity have been in the repertory for over half a century, performed with the most spine-chilling professionalism and panache. I’ve nothing against people not wanting to work, said Uncle Georg, but they ought to come clean and admit that they’re lazy, and so spare us this nauseating charade. Your father and your brother are both superb principals on this particular stage. And your mother directs the show, at any rate at Wolfsegg. My sisters, it occurs to me, have a habit of hopping, a hysterical condition acquired in early childhood, which became one of their most striking characteristics. They hop all day long — they don’t walk. They hop from the kitchen into the hall and back, into the drawing room and back. They really don’t walk — they hop. I always see them hopping, like the children they were thirty years ago. Although they now walk normally, they always seem to me to be hopping. I cannot see them walk without imagining that they are still hopping as hysterically as they did when they were little girls with long pigtails. They are now forty and graying, but I still see them hopping when they are actually walking. When I thought I had finally escaped them they would suddenly turn up, hopping and giggling; they never left me in peace but drove me half demented with their giggling. And all day they would sing songs that I hated and do everything possible to torment me. They were always dancing around me, encircling me and pouncing on me, even in my dreams. It was as though my parents had brought them into the world deliberately to spite me. I often woke from a dream in which they were about to kill me. They left my brother alone; they felt no urge to torment him, their greatest pleasure being to drive me to desperation. Their attitude to me was always malign, and they developed a routine for putting their malignity into effect. For a long time I was utterly at their mercy. They spied on me and informed on me, then gloated over the punishments that were meted out to me. They watched gleefully, unable to restrain their giggles, as my mother struck me over the head with the rawhide or my father boxed my ears. I cannot say which of my sisters was the more devilish, for Amalia would first be egged on by Caecilia, then Caecilia by Amalia. To me the so-called weaker sex was at that time the stronger, the more ruthless, as it took the greatest delight in tormenting me, more or less without compunction. My sisters were endlessly inventive and daily devised ever more subtle and diabolical torments. At an early age my sisters formed a conspiracy against me. They were believed, I was not; their word carried conviction, mine did not. And so I resolved to avenge myself. I locked them in the dark, airless larder, pushed them into the pond, or shoved them from behind so that they would fall full-length in their white Sunday-best dresses and get up dirty and bleeding from top to toe. The prospect of the terrible punishment that would ensue did not deter me from wreaking cruel vengeance, in various ways, for their atrocious behavior. I would lead them into the wood, then run away, leaving them in mortal terror and ignoring their cries. But their cruelty to me came first and was from the beginning much worse than any I inflicted on them. In the photo I can see all this cruelty quite plainly; their story and their character are written in their faces. These cruel children grew up into equally cruel adults. As children they might have been called beautiful, but as adults they are downright ugly. It is hard to say which of them is more like her father and which more like her mother. Of course they both inherit everything from their parents, but in a coarsened form. At table they sit like dolls, talking the same twaddle they have talked for decades. They sit down together and jump up together, and if one of them runs to the bathroom the other goes with her. These women are incapable of being alone, even in the bathroom. In winter they used to spend most of their time sitting on the sofa in their room, knitting sweaters that fitted no one and were always a disaster, the ugliest sweaters I have ever seen. Either the sleeves were unequal in length, the back was too wide, or the waist and the neck were too narrow. The garments were sloppily knitted, with excessively large stitches, because my sisters were of course incapable of concentration. And they chose the most tasteless colors. My brother and I had to try on the half-finished sweaters; they would force us into them, pulling and stretching them in all directions, and finally pronounce them a success, though it was obvious from the start that their knitting was indescribably amateurish. At Christmas their hideous knitwear was placed under the tree, and we had to perform the most incredible contortions to get into it, and then we had to admire it. At Wolfsegg on Christmas Eve the whole family sat around in my sisters’ knitwear like a bunch of cripples. It is as though my sisters, with their craze for knitting, were determined to make us look ridiculous in their knitwear, after spending weeks and months locked in a kind of unnatural intercourse with the wool. For months before Christmas Wolfsegg was dominated by wool. Then on Christmas Eve our sisters dressed us all up in their hideous woolen garments and we had to thank them. I have always detested home-knitted garments, just as I detest home cooking and anything else homemade. Canning jars I find a nightmare, and we had hundreds of them at Wolfsegg, not just in the larders but on the cupboards in the other rooms. At an early age the prospect of having to spend the next few decades consuming all the jam that was stored in these jars, carefully labeled by my mother and sisters, filled me with a permanent loathing for everything jarred, especially jam. The larders also contained hundreds of jars full of preserved chicken thighs, pheasant thighs, and pigeon thighs, which were of a dull yellow color that never failed to nauseate me. Although we ate gradually less and less jam and less and less jarred fruit at Wolfsegg, my mother and sisters jammed and jarred increasing quantities; having been obsessed with jamming and jarring for as long as I could remember, they could no longer be cured of this obsession. And every week they made bread crumbs from the stale bread, so that we had whole galleries of jars full of bread crumbs, which were never used, as we no longer had schnitzels, Viennese cooking having gone out of favor. We went in mostly for Parisian-style cooking, which was to my mother’s taste, and at Wolfsegg her taste prevailed in all things. Looking at Wolfsegg, one could see quite plainly that hers was the predominant taste. As soon as she moved in she got rid of all the things my father liked and replaced them with whatever she liked. My