always played a large part in my life since I took this fatal photo, as I have often called it. So far I’ve been talking about the mocking faces of my sisters, which I can’t switch off and expel from my mind, I told Gambetti, but we have the same experience with other photos, though its effect may be less drastic, with photos of well-known and famous people whom we regard as important. Just think of the photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out. I can no longer visualize Einstein without his tongue sticking out, Gambetti, I said. I can’t think of Einstein without seeing his tongue, that cunning, malignant tongue, stuck out at the whole world, indeed the whole universe. And I can only see Churchill with his lower lip distrustfully thrust forward. The likelihood is that Einstein only once stuck his tongue out in that cunning, malignant manner, and that Churchill only once thrust his lower lip forward in such an expression of distrust, on the occasion when the particular photo was taken. Yet when I read Churchill’s writings, I told Gambetti, I constantly see him with his lower lip thrust forward, and when I read something by Einstein, I’m completely obsessed with his tongue, stuck out at the whole world, the whole universe. I even fancy that it was not Churchill who wrote his memoirs, but his distrustfully prominent lower lip, not Einstein who made those earth-shaking pronouncements, but his malignantly protruding tongue. I once considered whether I could free myself from the mocking faces of my sisters Amalia and Caecilia by writing a piece about them, but I naturally rejected the idea as one of the absurdest I had ever entertained. I’ll never be able to free myself from my sisters’ mocking faces, I told Gambetti. I’ll have to live with them for the rest of my life. It might of course be incredibly useful to write a piece entitled The Mocking Faces of My Sisters. But what would be the point? I’d have to endure the most extreme boredom in order to write such a piece, Gambetti. I was always prevented from doing so by these mocking faces, which have never given me any peace for as long as I can remember. It would of course be foolish to think I’d be rid of them if I tore the photo up or threw it in the stove or cut it into a thousand fragments. They’d torment me all the more. And my parents in the second photo don’t make a good impression either, only a pathetic, ridiculous, comic impression as they board the Dover train at Victoria Station in London. No luggage, just their Burberry umbrellas on their arms, and my father in his thirties knickerbockers, which he bought before the war in Vienna, at Habig’s elegant store in the Kärntnerstrasse. He went around in them throughout the Nazi period. For as far back as I can remember I’ve seen him wearing these knickerbockers, I told myself. Even when he’s wearing something quite different I still see him in these knickerbockers from Habig’s, constantly saying Heil Hitler. They were probably very expensive, because they never wore out. They’re actually quite smart, I told myself, but not on my father — on him they look ridiculous. He wore these knickerbockers when he received the Gauleiter of Salzburg at the entrance to the farmyard and then led him straight to the stables, believing that this would make the best impression on him, immediately proving that Wolfsegg was a great estate and he a great landowner. And he wore these knickerbockers to receive the archbishops — which was tasteless but in keeping with the Nazi period. There they were, boarding the train in London, my mother stretching out her neck so that her hat perched precariously on her head, probably held by a single hatpin. Why have I only this picture of my parents in my desk and no other, I asked myself, this comic, ridiculous picture that shows my parents as comic, ridiculous people, and not some other, on which they’re not comic and ridiculous? Most of the time they were quite different, not at all comic and ridiculous but severe, forbidding, cold, and calculating. While their Burberry umbrellas hang vertically from their arms, their bodies are inclined, as is normal when boarding a train. The main reason for their looking so comic and ridiculous in this photo is the combination of the inclination of their bodies with their vertical umbrellas. The law of gravity is what makes them comic and ridiculous, though they naturally did not know this when they were photographed. They did not want to be photographed, but they were photographed, by me. I once had hundreds of photos of my parents, but I have destroyed them all or thrown them away. This is the only one I kept and put in my desk, the one in which they appear comic and ridiculous. Why? I asked myself. I probably wanted to have comic and ridiculous parents in the photo I was going to keep, I told myself. I also wanted to have a photo of my brother that showed him not as he really was but as I wanted to see him, in a ridiculous pose on his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee — an undoubtedly good-looking man who was made to look ridiculous, insignificant, and unnatural, not to say foolish and helpless, so that he could not be taken seriously. I only ever wanted this one photo of my brother, in which he looks ridiculous, I told Gambetti. I wanted to have a comic, ridiculous brother, just as I wanted to have comic, ridiculous parents, and no sisters at all, only their mocking faces — that’s the truth, Gambetti. There is a devilish streak in us that manifests itself in such trifles, as we like to call them, in such trivialities as the photographs we collect, which reveal how base and despicable and shameless we are. And for no other reason than that we are weak, for if we are honest we have to admit that we ourselves are far weaker than those we wish to see as weak, far more ridiculous than those we wish to see as ridiculous, comic, and characterless. It is primarily we, not they, who are characterless, ridiculous, comic, and unnatural, Gambetti. By keeping only these photos of my family and no others — and, what’s more, in my desk, so that I can look at them whenever I wish — I am documenting my own baseness, my own shamelessness, my own lack of character. I have only to open the drawer of my desk in order to gloat over my impossible sisters, the ridiculous appearance of my parents, and the pathetic posture of my brother; I have only to take out these photos and look at them in order to fortify myself in an access of weakness and console myself with what I am bound to describe as my own baseness. This shows how low one can sink. We describe others as base and contemptible and adduce every possible argument in support of our case, yet the description applies even more alarmingly to ourselves. Instead of hiding ourselves in the desk drawer as we ought, in the form of some comic and ridiculous photo, we hide our family there, so that when the need arises we can misuse them for our own utterly base ends, I told Gambetti. Naturally, I said, there are people who keep photos showing their relatives in a good light, but I am not one of these: I keep only comic and ridiculous photos, as I am fundamentally a weak person, a thoroughly weak character. Although every photo is a vulgar falsification, there are some that we keep out of respect and affection for the persons they depict, and others that we put in our desks or hang on our walls for unworthy motives, out of hatred for the subjects. Unfortunately I have to own that my motives belong to the second category. At a certain age, I said, when we are about forty, we often manage to present ourselves as we really are, with all our contemptible traits — something we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing earlier. From then on we occasionally allow alarming glimpses of our inner selves. At my age, Gambetti, we have to a large extent drawn back the curtains that for decades were drawn so closely that we almost suffocated behind them. One day they’ll be fully drawn back, I said. How will my sisters react, I wondered, when I confront them as executor and heir? Will they receive me as insolently as ever? I dared not pursue this question and took care not to. The surviving beneficiaries, my sisters and I, I thought. The surviving beneficiaries are the very people whom no one thought of as survivors. They always thought I would soon die, a victim of what they called my breathlessness, somewhere or other, but not at Wolfsegg. It’s possible, even probable, I now thought, that they always expected to receive a telegram informing them that I had died. And my sisters have survived, the two people who didn’t matter at all in any serious sense, because according to my mother they were totally unimportant. But I never expected a telegram telling me that my parents were dead. Lots of people are afraid of receiving such a telegram, but I never was. Millions of people, I had often told Gambetti, live in daily dread of getting a telegram telling them that someone they love and respect has died. I’ve never been afraid of getting such a telegram. Seeing photographs like those on my desk, we think that the people depicted in them at least pose no danger to us, but they may in fact pose the utmost danger. Mortal danger. The people in the photographs, at most four inches high, don’t even contradict us. We attack them and they don’t defend themselves. We can say anything we like to their faces and they don’t move. This drives us to fury, to ever greater fury. We curse the figures in the photographs because they refuse to answer back or respond in any way, when there’s nothing we hope for, nothing we crave, so much as a response. Contending with microscopic dwarfs, as it were, we become demented. We lash out at microscopic dwarfs and drive ourselves utterly crazy. We let ourselves get so carried away that we hurl insults at heads only half an inch in diameter, Gambetti, and so make ourselves quite ridiculous. I look at my parents in the photo of them boarding the Dover train at Victoria Station in London and insult them. What ridiculous creatures you always were! I say, without realizing how ridiculous that makes me — far more ridiculous than my parents could ever be or ever have been, Gambetti. You idiot! I say to my brother, not quite four inches tall. You perverse creatures! I say to my sisters, who measure less than three inches on the terrace at Cannes. To take a photograph of a person is to mock him, Gambetti, and by the same token all who take photographs, even if they do it professionally and achieve the greatest artistry, are nothing but mockers of humanity. Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world. But today, I told Gambetti, there are a hundred times more people in photographs than there are in reality — than natural people, in other words. That should give us pause. Am I glad, I said to Gambetti two days ago on returning from Wolfsegg, to be back here, to have escaped from the north and its imbecilities for a while! From the clutches of my family, above all from my mother’s excited moods, my father’s constant carping, and the Austrian weather. For three-quarters of the year we have bad weather, and when we think spring has come it’s months before it’s really there, only to merge at once into summer, and the summers get shorter and shorter. And the fall, which is actually the most beautiful season, causes trouble for all who suffer from gout or rheumatism in Austria, where bad weather predominates, reminding them, with its frequent storms and the icy cold that comes even in October, that their existence is constantly threatened. To say nothing of the winters, which make everything unendurable for anyone over thirty. People here don’t appreciate the unique climate they live in but long for the cool north — the fir trees, the mountain lakes, and the refreshing Alps. You see, Gambetti, some people yearn for the south and others for the north, with the result that they’re all more or less equally discontented. But at present I enjoy this refreshing but warm air, these noisy but carefree people, I said. At Wolfsegg I wore my winter overcoat, but here I go around in an open-necked shirt with my sweater around my shoulders. That’s the difference. People are not weighed down here with pounds of clothing, heavy shoes, heavy jackets, and thick felt hats. They walk around in the lightest of clothes and eat out of doors nearly all year round. Not for a long time! I could still hear myself exclaiming, meaning that I would not be returning to Wolfsegg for a long time. But this telegram now compels me to return in the shortest possible time. Obvious though this was, I sought to delay the inevitable by doing nothing, by simply sitting at my desk and looking at the photographs. I continued to contemplate them and submit them to minute scrutiny. I spread the telegram out beside them, so that I would have its short message announcing the deaths in front of me all the time. I repeatedly spelled out the message until I felt I would go mad. My brother, unlike me, was a calm person: at Wolfsegg I had always been the restless spirit, but he was the soul of calm. My parents always referred to him as the contented one and to me as the malcontent.