fanatical obsession with tidiness. I undressed, threw my clothes on the floor, then went into the bathroom and took a shower. I wanted to shave but had no shaving cream, and so, naked except for a bath towel, I went across the hall to my father’s room to get his. He doesn’t need his shaving cream anymore, I thought. In my father’s bathroom everything was as he had left it, as though he were about to return at any moment. Nothing had been tidied there either. What are they thinking of? I wondered. To my knowledge they have precious little to do all day, yet they don’t even tidy my father’s bathroom; it’s not worth their while to tidy his bathroom, even when he’s dead. Is there no respect for the dead? I asked myself, but I dismissed the thought as distasteful, though it still seemed strange that, two whole days after my father’s death, they had not even tidied his bathroom. But it’s excusable in view of the mourning, I thought. At first unable to find the shaving cream, I rummaged in the bathroom cupboard until I found it. My father, like me, disliked electric shavers and preferred a wet shave. It’s not fair on the skin to use an electric shaver, I told myself, and returned to my bathroom with the shaving cream. In the hall, between my father’s room and mine, I ran into Amalia, who was startled to see me completely naked. Having discarded the bath towel in my father’s bathroom and forgotten to wrap it around me again, I found myself standing naked in front of Amalia, who took advantage of the semidarkness of the hall to stare at me in what seemed a far from sisterly manner. As she remained stock-still, showing no sign of making herself scarce upon seeing me, I walked up to her and asked her if she had never seen a naked man before. Now you can see what I look like — not bad, eh? I said, and stuck my tongue out at her, whereupon she turned on her heel and ran down to the entrance hall. I had not stuck my tongue out at Amalia in thirty years. Fully refreshed, and quite cheered by this incident, I set about shaving. As I did so I thought how badly my sisters had been reared, how my mother had turned them into a pair of ill-bred grown-ups, and not just physically: they were ill-bred and twisted both physically and mentally. Applying the shaving cream to my face and looking at myself in the mirror, I saw a joker; the joker immediately stuck his tongue out at himself and repeated the action several times, enjoying the joke at his own expense. There is nothing more enjoyable than shaving after a journey, even a short journey like mine, which had all the same been quite strenuous. Standing naked in front of the mirror and sticking my tongue out at myself, I no longer felt like a person with a less than normal life expectancy, as I had until now. I went into the bedroom and dressed. For some time I debated whether or not I should put on a black suit, but in the end I opted for a normal everyday outfit, an old brown-and-green Roman jacket and trousers to match. If my sisters were different, I thought, if they weren’t quite so silly, I might find it possible to live with them at Wolfsegg, but then I considered what it would be like without them. It was clear that they were not going to stay with me at Wolfsegg. Caecilia and Amalia will have to go. That’ll be best for all concerned, I thought. They’ve dug themselves in here for life, but now they’ll have to go — never mind where, just go, I thought, for their own good. The play’s more or less over, I thought. Now that the principal characters are dead, lying in state in the Orangery, the minor figures, my sisters, no longer have any business in the theater. The curtain has come down. But not quite, I thought: the satyr play has begun, the most difficult part of the whole show. When I met Caecilia down in the entrance hall, she asked me at least to put on a black tie. At first I refused, but then I conceded that she was right and went back to my room to put one on. I was now properly dressed. I went to the window and saw the wine cork manufacturer walking from the Farm to the Orangery with a large box. My brother-in-law’s actually found the box marked Sunlicht, containing the funeral sheets, I thought. And I thought it didn’t exist! But all the same my sister behaved atrociously, sending her husband, whom she can no longer stand, up into the attic at the Farm simply and solely so that she could be alone at last, as she put it, with Amalia and me. The wine cork manufacturer has an awkward, unpleasant gait, I thought, and when he’s carrying a weight like that it’s even more unpleasant, as it makes him bowlegged. He’s weighed down by the box, though it’s not all that heavy. He carries it in such a way that he seems to have a box on his shoulders instead of a head, I thought. It was a comic sight. In front of the Orangery one of the gardeners relieved him of the box; after that he just stood there, as if not knowing what to do next, the personification of helplessness. I could have gone over and helped him, but I refrained. Such people cannot be helped but remain comic figures, never knowing what to do. The gardeners who had come across from the Farm spoke to him briefly but then went away, as they had other things to attend to. Again I heard snatches of music floating up from the village; they had made some headway in their rehearsal of the Haydn piece. A ponderous piece, I thought. My brother-in-law walked up to the wall to get a view of the village. I watched him trying to make himself taller by getting a foothold on a ledge protruding from the wall, but he could not manage it and looked around, fearful lest someone had seen how clumsy and ridiculous he was. He could not see me, as I was standing behind the window of my room, and at that time in the afternoon the light conditions made it impossible to see in. At this time of day, I told myself, I can stand at the window and watch whatever is going on outside without being seen. Having failed in his attempt to get higher up the wall, the wine cork manufacturer wiped the dirt off his jacket and shoes and looked around again, in all directions. It struck me that his arms were too short. His suits, though tailor-made, are awkward and tasteless, with a provincial, South German cut, and the fabrics he chooses are of the hideous kind favored by the petit bourgeois who has an ambition to better himself and is wholly taken up with this ambition. This is the brother-in-law that our Titisee aunt has wished on us, I thought. The white-shirted wine buff from Baden. Caecilia’s earlier claim that she was married to the best husband in the world could only provoke derision, but such derision could not be given free rein that afternoon: it had to be confined behind the windowpanes. This man deserves no sympathy, I thought, because he was far from guiltless when he entered upon this relationship, of which my sister’s heartily sick only a week after the wedding, but it’s something that Caecilia will have to come to terms with by herself. I’m not going to get mixed up in it, though that doesn’t mean that I won’t go on observing, I thought, and drawing conclusions from what I observe. It was quite unbearable to contemplate having to spend evening after evening sitting with this man, and with my sisters, who never know what to say to me, just as I never know what to say to them. The shock of the accident will only tide me over the next few days until