wife who came up in the world, as my father used to say jocularly in the early years of their marriage. She’d have simply curled up and died, as they say. So from a certain moment on, a moment that was crucial to her survival, she started dragging her own sort up to Wolfsegg and, as my father put it, throwing it open to the proletariat. She was entitled to come to her own rescue, I told Gambetti, even if we couldn’t stand the means she employed. In the main house alone there are more than forty rooms, though I’ve never done a precise count. We children weren’t allotted rooms of our own until we were twelve, and interestingly enough my brother and I both had rooms on the south side, while my sisters’ rooms were on the north side. They were forever catching colds, and it’s more than likely that they owe their susceptibility to colds to being exiled the north side. The girls were always exiled on the north side, as if to punish them for being girls. But that’s only my surmise, I said. People who grow up on the north side are at a disadvantage later on, I told Gambetti, and remain at a disadvantage all their lives. The north side was unpleasant even in summer, as it never warmed through. The walls at Wolfsegg never warm through, whether they’re north-facing or south-facing. They’re always cold, and it’s dangerous to get too close to them. Even the third-floor windows at Wolfsegg are more than six feet tall, and as children we always had difficulty in opening them. We had to get help if we wanted to let in the fresh air. Our parents had a servants’ bell by their beds, but of course we didn’t. When we were children there were no bathrooms on the third floor, where we not only slept but spent most of the day, since our rooms served as both bedrooms and studies. If we had to answer the call of nature in the night, we used the china chamber pots, as had our grandparents, for whom this was a matter of course. And these, I must tell you, were routinely emptied next morning from one of the windows of the third-floor corridor. In the evening we had to take our washing water up to our rooms in big stoneware jugs, as there was no water supply on the third floor. The dirty water was also thrown from a window. On the ground seventy feet or more below the windows from which we emptied our chamber pots and washbasins, the grass was more luxuriant than anywhere else. The Wolfsegg children soon overcame any fear they had and got used to feeling exposed in this huge, icy building. Visiting children were terribly scared and screamed if they were left alone even for a moment, but we were not in the least scared. I think it was when we were four or five that we were banned from our mother’s room, first to a shared room, of course, but banned all the same. After we had washed she would come in and kiss us good night. Johannes always wanted to be kissed good night, but I didn’t. I hated this good-night kiss but couldn’t evade it. Even now my mother haunts me in my dreams with her good-night kiss, I told Gambetti. She bends over me, and I am completely powerless as she presses her lips firmly to my cheek, as if to punish me. After kissing us good night she would put the light out, but she didn’t leave the room at once. She would stay by the door for a while and wait for us to turn on our sides and fall asleep. Even as a child I had very acute hearing and knew that she was standing listening behind the closed door before going down to the second floor, where she and my father slept. She even distrusted her children; I don’t know why. She suffered from an immense, compulsive distrust that couldn’t be cured or allayed and that now strikes me, I must say, as quite perverse and unnatural. All the rooms at Wolfsegg were whitewashed. In the third-floor rooms the drapes were dark green, almost black; in the second-floor rooms they were dark red and almost black. On the third floor, where we had our rooms, they were made of heavy linen; on the second floor they were of heavy velvet, imported from Italy by my paternal grandmother before the turn of the century. For as far back as I can remember these drapes were never washed, which means that they were never taken down. When we were doing our homework, my brother and I, and later our sisters, were locked in our rooms until we had finished it, and only in the most urgent cases, when we couldn’t get any further with it, were we allowed to call for help. But Mother didn’t help us; she always said we must find the answers to our problems ourselves. This procedure was not meant to be educative: it merely suited her convenience. Father never troubled about our schoolwork. He would simply be angry if we came home with bad marks. If one of us got a five or a six (the lowest mark was still a six when we were at school) he would tell us that we were absolutely