They were already puzzled about the whereabouts of the car in which the master and mistress had left for Styria the previous afternoon. Caecilia then informed the gardeners. Caecilia had told Amalia to send a telegram to Spadolini as well as to me, with the message Mother died. Caecilia, Amalia. They were sure that Spadolini would come to the funeral. At first they had thought of having Spadolini himself, Archbishop Spadolini, to celebrate the requiem mass, but then, feeling sure that I would approve, they had decided to ask the archbishop of Salzburg, with good reason, Amalia said. The burial service too would be conducted by the archbishop of Salzburg. Spadolini himself would be sure to stay in the background, they said. They would naturally never be able to forgive themselves for depriving their mother of having the mass celebrated by Spadolini, they said, but I at once saw that this was pure hypocrisy. It was of course right and proper that the archbishop of Salzburg should celebrate the mass and conduct the burial. Privately I thought it self-evident that Spadolini, having been Mother’s lover, should celebrate the mass and conduct the burial, but I kept this to myself. I could not put myself beyond the pale for the rest of my life by suggesting anything so outrageous. So I told my sisters that we should stick to the existing arrangements, that the archbishop of Salzburg should celebrate the mass and conduct the burial. It had already been decided in my absence and could not be altered. I gained a certain advantage by deferring to them and agreeing to what they had arranged. I said that in addition to the archbishop of Salzburg and Spadolini there were certainly at least three other bishops who would come to the funeral — the bishops of Linz, Innsbruck, and Sankt Pölten, with all of whom my father had been on friendly terms. He had gone to school with them and always kept in touch with them, even during the Nazi period, I thought. I told my sisters that these bishops had always had good relations with our parents, even during the Nazi period. I could not resist saying this, and it was well judged, ensuring that my conversation with my sisters did not become unduly sentimental and hence hypocritical. Basically I dreaded this funeral more than any other. All the local funerals I had attended in recent years were as nothing compared with this, and I suddenly realized what was in store for me on Saturday, the day of the funeral. How right I had been to tell Zacchi on the telephone that I had been overwhelmed by a calamity! My sisters meanwhile turned to my brother-in-law and instructed him to go across to the Farm to see whether there were not two more funeral sheets in the attic, as Caecilia maintained, in a big cardboard box marked Sunlicht. I nearly laughed out loud when I heard her say the word Sunlicht in that silly tone of hers. The box is marked Sunlicht, she told her husband, who at once went across to the Farm. I guessed that she wanted to be alone with Amalia and me and that this was her sole reason for dispatching her husband on his errand. She simply wanted to get rid of him. He’s an intruder, I thought, and she may have been thinking the same. She too, his own wife, feels that my brother-in-law is a foreign body related only by marriage, I thought. But the idea did not amuse me as much as it should have done — I found it embarrassing. The wine cork manufacturer has gone across to the Farm just so that Caecilia can talk to Amalia and me undisturbed, I thought. When he was no more than twenty yards away from us Caecilia said that her husband got on her nerves, that he was always clinging to her and never left her alone for a moment. This surprised me, for until then I had had the impression that it was she who clung to him. No,
he was the leech, she said. Only a week after the wedding she already regarded her husband as a leech and told us so. I saw that Amalia had difficulty suppressing a laugh. How easily one is affected by laughter, even in a dreadful situation like this! I thought. Indeed, such dreadful situations actually provoke laughter. Anyone caught up in a misfortune like ours quickly takes refuge in laughter, I thought. Amalia said that her brother-in-law had not helped them at all in their desperate plight. He had stood at his window and not done a thing. Several times they had asked him to help, for instance by calling the morticians at Vöcklabruck, whom they had engaged for the funeral, but he had done nothing to make himself useful. He had done nothing but go on about what a shock the accident had been for him, without considering how much more of a shock it had been for his wife and her sister, who unlike him could not lock themselves in their rooms and do virtually nothing. People like him can’t cope with such a misfortune, I said. It just lays them low, and they haven’t the strength to get back on their feet. Unlike us, I said, on whom such a misfortune has a far profounder and more devastating effect. We too are laid low, but we immediately get back on our feet and get over it. I immediately regretted saying this but could not take it back. It was actually I who said that we were able to get over our misfortune, not they. What I meant was that we were able to get to grips with misfortune, even the greatest and most appalling misfortune, while the petit bourgeois was not. Ofcourse I did not use the termpetit bourgeois, but kept it to myself. The petit bourgeois, I thought, is shattered by such a misfortune and makes an exhibition of himself with his sentimentality — we don’t. The petit bourgeois and the proletarian become accident victims themselves, as it were — we don’t. The petit bourgeois and the proletarian, unlike us, never have the strength to cope with such a devastating misfortune, I thought. I told my sisters that such a misfortune was too much for my brother-in-law’s resources, but they did not understand — they did not appreciate what I meant, or the implied contempt. People like my brother-in-law, I said, must be counted out after a devastating misfortune like ours. As I said this the wine cork manufacturer had not yet disappeared into the Farm but was still making his way toward it. People like my brother-in-law, I added, are by nature too indolent to cope with such misfortunes, because they are far too indolent in every way. They don’t take a cold look at the world, as we do when we have to. My brother-in-law isn’t one of us, I said. Amalia just grimaced. Caecilia turned away without a word, probably to see where her husband was, but by now he was inside the Farm. People like the honest wine cork manufacturer have a totally sentimental view of life, I thought to myself — we don’t. We are repelled by their sentimentality. This sentimentality is also a species of baseness, which they constantly employ to put others at a disadvantage. Their sentimentality makes life easy for them, while causing untold misery to others; they constantly parade their sentimentality, which only disgusts the likes of us. I told my sisters that at Wolfsegg my brother-in-law had landed himself on a slippery slope. Amalia found this amusing, but Caecilia did not. Saying nothing, she turned and looked me coldly in the face. This was tantamount to admitting that her absurd marriage had been a mistake. I was not deceived by the look she gave me. After barely a week, I thought, the scene is completely transformed. It couldn’t be worse. Only a madman could have married you, I told Caecilia, though this was not said with the acerbity that she read into it, and I was sorry I had said it. It was meant as a joke, but I saw that it cut her to the quick. Caecilia still hates me, I thought. She’s still the same old Caecilia. And Amalia supported her with her sisterly hatred. I have both of them to contend with, I thought, yet at the same time I was sorry for them, for although I did not know precisely what my sisters would have to go through in the immediate future, I had some idea, and the portents were not good. Caecilia suddenly felt that her husband was a nuisance — the husband whom she had brought to Wolfsegg from Baden to spite her mother, to punish her in the only way she knew how, the husband from Freiburg, the most Catholic of all Catholic strongholds. A week after the wedding she was already taking the wine cork manufacturer apart, so to speak, because the sole reason for her marrying him had evaporated and no longer existed. The reason had been my mother’s attitude to her daughters and their relations with men, and hence to their future. Now that she’s dead, the bottom has fallen out of the marriage, I told myself. The wine cork manufacturer was now redundant, though he was not yet aware of this. Not only Caecilia, I thought, but both sisters have begun to think about how to get rid of the wine cork manufacturer, who has lost his usefulness overnight. They dared not say so, of course, but it was obvious from their attitude to him.