too natural, unable to take their formalities seriously, though he did not hate them, as I did. They called him a fool only because they had bad consciences and did not understand his cast of mind, I thought. Alexander’s cast of mind is admittedly very hard to understand, above most people’s heads, and calls for ruthless intellectual probity. I was never equal to such ruthless intellectual probity, I thought, and was invariably worsted. My visits to Brussels, agreeable though they were, always resulted in spiritual discomfiture. Alexander would hold forth, but I would fail to understand him. For a minute or two I watched Alexander, who would of course be staying in the main house, I assumed, then I ran down to the entrance hall and out into the park to greet him. He had meanwhile entered the Orangery. I had not seen him for years. He never came to Austria, which he found intolerable, for the same political reasons as I did, and I did not go to Belgium because of the climate, though earlier, over two decades, I had regularly spent weeks, even months, in Brussels. During these enjoyable and rewarding visits I stayed on the fifth floor of a house in the Rue de la Croix, on which my cousin had a lease. Up on the fifth floor I wrote something about Pascal, who was then my favorite author, and about some poems by Maria, whom I had not yet met. I also wrote a short essay on Bohuslav Martinu, of whom I was very fond, but immediately threw it away. Alexander introduced me to Brussels society and took me for long walks in the glorious woods near Brussels. It was at that time that he suffered the first attacks of his later chronic disease, which he tried to combat not only with cortisone but with strenuous exercise. The exercise actually overtaxed his strength; twice a week he would go for a two-hour run on the beach at Ostend, and I often ran with him. But jogging on the beach in the salt sea air, though supposedly beneficial, did not have the therapeutic effect he had hoped for, encouraged by one of those Belgian doctors who are well known as the world’s worst. Belgian doctors are notorious as the most stupid in Europe, as I learned later. For twenty years my cousin was kept alive by cortisone and nothing else, he maintained. Before I went to Rome, my cousin Alexander was my philosophy teacher, along with Uncle Georg, though he was my age. Just as I was about to follow him into the Orangery he came out, having stayed inside no more than half a minute. He pressed my hand in his, and we walked up and down outside the Orangery, ignoring the others standing there, who probably knew him, though we paid no attention to them; they did not interest us. Alexander said he had left Brussels immediately and come alone as his wife was ill. He was glad to be able to walk up and down with me in front of the Orangery, as he intended to retire at once to the inn in the village that we had allocated to him, so that he could finish some work he had brought with him, a petition, he said, that I have to send to the Belgian government and the king about my refugees, whom the Belgian government treats like animals. The dreamer asked after my sisters and made a remark about the people standing next to us that amused me but was of course inaudible to them; had they heard it, they would have been deeply hurt, I thought. He did not mention our misfortune or the dead lying in state in the Orangery. Then he left, saying that he could find his own way and would be at the funeral the next day, but he would be returning to Brussels immediately, on the evening train. I did not have the chance to tell him that I had naturally wanted him to stay at the house, so that he could be near us. It was always his way to make an unceremonious exit, but on this occasion he set a new record. He hasn’t changed, I thought, he’s still my beloved dreamer. I now saw that the people who had been standing next to us were two families from Wiener Neustadt, relatives on my mother’s side. I naturally greeted them and even asked if they had had a pleasant journey, addressing them in a tone that seemed far too cordial and immediately displeased me, as they were so unlikable. They stood there as though expecting that I would now devote myself to them, as though they were the only people present whom I had to attend to. I’ll get away from these people as fast as possible, I thought, and apologized, again too profusely, for having to leave them, as there was something I had to attend to urgently. I quite simply abandoned the party from Wiener Neustadt and went over to the Farm, then to the Huntsmen’s Lodge, without knowing what I was looking for. I went into my father’s office, which houses all the documents relating to Wolfsegg, all the estate accounts. This office has always been a nightmare to me, like everything that remotely resembles an office. It had the typical office smell, which after a very short time inevitably makes me feel I shall suffocate if I do not leave immediately. But this time I actually sat down in the office— something I had never done before. I sat down at the desk, on which the previous day’s mail was lying, addressed to my father. Bills, business letters, brochures advertising agricultural machinery. I hate brochures. I hate business mail. I pushed the pile of mail far enough away to be able to place a sheet of paper on the desk. On it I wrote in capital letters ALEXANDER, MY DREAMER, exactly in the middle of the sheet, without knowing why I wrote the word ALEXANDER at all. For no reason, it seemed to me. I was in an extreme state of nerves, as they say. Sitting in the office chair, I suddenly became aware that I was sitting in my office, not my father’s. Suddenly overcome by fatigue, I gazed at the walls of the office and was sickened by them. By the hundreds of three-ring binder files on the shelves, marked only with the word Wolfsegg and, underneath it, the relevant year. I looked at them until I thought I would go mad. Father was a pedant, I thought. I was always repelled by his neat handwriting and the primitive way in which he expressed himself. He taught himself to write a fair hand, and he retained this hand, which is typical of an insufferably pedantic person, I thought. And all his life he tried to turn Johannes into an insufferably pedantic person. He never ceased working on his successor, trying to form him in his own image. He succeeded in forming Johannes in his own image, I told myself. But such formed images are repellent. My father’s fair hand was set down on paper by an atrophied brain, I thought. By the atrophied person my father became. Sometimes he wanted to break out of his atrophy, but he did not succeed: it was too far advanced. Father’s hand was of the type favored by schoolteachers, the neat, workmanlike hand used by small-town schoolteachers, bespeaking an anxious, suppressed character. Father was a suppressed character, I thought, relentlessly suppressed by Wolfsegg and by my mother. Nothing’s left of my father but his school-teacherly hand, I thought. These reflections were prompted by the discovery of an unfinished letter on his desk. It was addressed to a firm that produced artificial fertilizers at Lustenau in Vorarlberg, in response to an offer. But this is how a commercial assistant writes, I thought, not the master of Wolfsegg. I read my father’s unfinished letter several times; it did not get any less primitive. My father was no letter writer, but nobody should write like this, I thought. And the way he’s left the writing materials on the desk is depressing, I thought. This is how a schoolteacher or a commercial assistant leaves his writing materials, not a man of stature. Was my father a man of stature? I asked myself. My fatigue prompted a few more pointless questions about my father. What is stature after all? I asked myself. The sight of the three-ring binder files, going back to the early years of the century, profoundly depressed me. You escaped from this world, I thought, and now you’ve been pitched headlong into it again