he is our father. His gait, his posture, and his voice are getting more and more like my father’s. He’ll soon be an exact replica of my father in posture, gait, and temperament, and hence in mental attitude. The firstborn son is predestined, as it were, to be the father, and he soon will be, I thought — it’s only a matter of time, a very short time. Sometimes when my brother’s speaking, I thought, I have a feeling that it’s my father speaking; sometimes when I hear my brother’s step I have a feeling that it’s my father’s step; sometimes when my brother is thinking I have a feeling that it’s my father thinking. In Johannes my parents got the son they had wished for, I thought. They couldn’t have wished for a better or more suitable son. He got closer and closer to the ideal image they had always had of a son, at the same speed as I moved farther and farther away from it. This was why they came to love him more and more and increasingly despised, detested, and abhorred me, though they dared not acknowledge the truth to themselves, given the many self-protective devices that were built into their minds. The image is almost complete, I thought at Caecilia’s wedding, almost completely identical with the model they adopted as their ideal image, though admittedly only with hindsight, as they say. My brother let himself be brought up to become the ideal image, but I always resisted such an imposition. I had never been interested in embodying an ideal image conceived by my parents. I was unwilling to conform to any model and thus unable to embody any such image. Johannes could be molded and knocked into shape, as they say, but I could not. And they began this molding process very early; when the infant clay was no more than three or four years old they realized that it could be shaped into their ideal image, and so they proceeded to mold Johannes and knock him into shape. They met with no resistance from him, but from me they met with the utmost resistance. Right from the beginning I succeeded in evading the parental sculptors; I at once repulsed them and would not allow them near me. They molded Johannes to their liking and were delighted with the result, not realizing that this entailed his ultimate destruction and annihilation. They ruthlessly transformed his natural head into an ideal head and thus destroyed it in what seems to me the vilest and most shameless fashion, making of him what they were unable to make of me, an ideal blockhead, who in due course would become what they longed for, their own creature, who was entirely complaisant and acquiesced in their intentions right down to the minutest detail. My brother, I thought, is completely in thrall to my parents, above all to my mother, having offered no resistance and found it easier to yield than to defend himself against every parental enormity and indignity. Only behind the wheel of the Jaguar was he allowed to give free, rein to his thoughts. On these nightmare journeys, as my mother called them, he was free, but once out of the car, the poor man had to pay for this freedom a thousand times over, I thought. I’m sure that when he’s fifty there’ll be a proper wedding here. But a dead man can’t marry, I now reflected as I passed through the doorway. The entrance hall was empty. The lamps, as I expected, were decorated with laurel branches, each with two branches in conformity with the funeral plan. Silence reigned, the strange, sweetish silence characteristic of a house in mourning. The hall floor had been washed a few hours earlier, scrubbed by the housemaids on their knees. The oldest housemaid is seventy-four, but she still counts as a maid, and even on her deathbed, having reached a great age, like most of our maids, possibly over eighty, she will still be described as a maid. My mother maintained that the housemaids at Wolfsegg had always been happy, but she also said that they never had it easy. This is still true. They wear gray aprons, by which they can be recognized at a distance, made by our tailoress in the village, their hair is brushed back flat, and they wear no adornments whatever, which according to my mother was as it should be at Wolfsegg. That suits them best, she would say. They usually come to us at fourteen or fifteen and grow old in our service. They have nothing to laugh about, as they say, but — again according to my mother — they are highly regarded by everybody at Wolfsegg. Their numbers have been radically reduced in recent years. At one time there were twelve, including the kitchen maids, the oldest of whom is now over seventy, but now there are only five, all told. Most of them, according to my mother, were bornwith unpleasant voices, or they developed such voices in the course of time, for at Wolfsegg they were never allowed to speak in their natural voices. My mother trained them to speak in an unnatural tone, as quietly and deferentially as possible, she said, with the result that their natural voices were inevitably distorted. Nearly all the housemaids now come from the village, but at one time my mother preferred to take on girls from the Mühlviertel, where labor was cheap, she said, if possible from large peasant families, because such girls were well known for being satisfied with anything (my mother’s phrase), as well as efficient and generally hardworking. Recently, however, the supply from the Mühlviertel has dried up, as the girls there prefer to become factory hands rather than housemaids. To my mother this was evidence of the decline of the Mühlviertel, and not only of the Mühlviertel but of the world in general. The housemaids were naturally staunch Catholics and showed a becoming deference to both ecclesiastical and secular authority. The most favored housemaids always came from the Freistadt district and Aigen-Schlägel, where the borders of Bohemia, Bavaria, and Austria converge and there is no railroad. They were always the most devout girls, my mother said, the most decent girls. She recruited them herself by visiting the convents at Freistadt and Aigen-Schlägel to make known her requirements. The nuns or monks usually let her take two or three young, unspoiled girls back to Wolfsegg, where they were introduced to the job and put to the test. This introductory test involved scrubbing the entrance hall, which was a huge task, given the length and breadth of the hall, and required a superhuman effort. But the girls were so impressed by my mother’s bearing and by the estate itself, the like of which they had never seen in all their lives, that they thought nothing of scrubbing the hall, no matter what torment it cost them. Not all of them passed the test, but if a girl failed to scrub the whole of the hall at the first attempt and my mother imparted the dread news that she could not take her on, she always managed to complete the task at the second attempt. My mother was implacable, above all toward herself, and subjected those around her to at least the same degree of implacability. The housemaids worked themselves to death, as they say, but they were happy to be allowed to work at Wolfsegg, as they put it. My mother paid them next to nothing, but in witness, as it were, of the good treatment they received at Wolfsegg, they reached a great age, as I have said. They worked themselves to death and yet, absurdly, lived to a great age. None died young, or at any rate before the age of sixty. They were all given a fine funeral, as my mother put it, and their families were always grateful for the fact that one of their members was privileged to work at Wolfsegg. This attitude has not changed, I thought, as I entered the empty, freshly scrubbed hall with its broad larchwood floorboards. The spiders’ webs that normally darkened its corners had been removed for the wedding; the windows had been cleaned and the lamps smeared with oil to make them glisten. The gardeners had told me that my sisters were in the house, together with the new master, as they naively called the wine cork manufacturer. The three of them will be up on the second floor, I thought, not guessing that I’m already in the entrance hall and thus roughly underneath them. I did not want to go straight up and join them, however, but waited in the hall for a few minutes, standing at the foot of the stairs that lead to the second floor, in front of a picture of my great-great-great-granduncle Ferdinand, who is reputed to have saved the emperor’s life by throwing himself between him and a Hungarian traitor who was about to lunge at him. This act of heroism cost my great-great-great-granduncle his life, though it is rumored that he was