it’ll all go off smoothly, I told myself, echoing the words that Caecilia had used several times in the last few hours. I can rely entirely on my sisters, I told myself, especially Caecilia. She’s not asleep; she’s lying in bed, watching the cortege pass before her mind’s eye and checking it all thoroughly. She won’t miss anything that’s out of place or even seems to be out of place, I thought. Her gift for combination and arrangement — what might be called her stagecraft — is inherited from Mother, I thought. She’ll stage the funeral as Mother would have staged it. And all the time she’ll have the feeling that Mother is watching to see that everything is staged as she would have wished, not otherwise. A funeral is about to be presented, I thought — the funeral of our parents and our brother, production by Caecilia. I could see the playbill announcing the details of the performance — the title, the actors, the producer, and so forth. The huntsmen did not lose control, nor did I. I stood for a while in front of the coffins, imagining tomorrow’s premiere, produced by my sister, and enjoying it. Suddenly I wondered what would happen if Mother’s coffin were opened and I were to compel Spadolini to inspect the contents. With an immense effort I forced myself to drop the thought, and to prevent its reemerging, I went out of the Orangery. The air outside was worse than before, almost unbearably oppressive. It occurred to me that if I went over to the Children’s Villa, this time alone, my frame of mind might improve. I walked across to the Children’s Villa, pausing on the way at the Farm. The animals were lying in their stalls as though dead. I was disgusted by the sight and could not endure the smell. I was not like Johannes, who was attracted by the smell of animals, who actually loved this animal smell. People always say that one can find peace with animals, but I never have; I am always agitated when I am with animals and forced to inhale their smell. I have never acquired what they call a love of animals and feel no affinity to animal lovers. I find animals disturbing. I have always dreamed of being attacked and devoured by animals; my childhood was full of such terrifying animal dreams. Unlike Johannes, I was always scared of animals, and even now I am haunted by dreams of animals attacking and devouring me. Time and again I have tried to find peace in the presence of animals, as others can, but I have never succeeded. Animals always make me uneasy, even the smallest and most insignificant animals. I am scared of any contact with insects, for example, to say nothing of fish, which my brother used to enjoy catching. He would seize them by the tail, bash their heads in, and throw them back in the water. To this day I have visions of the fish he killed, glinting in the sunlight as they float down the stream behind the Children’s Villa. Our servants’ children thought nothing of decapitating chickens on the chopping block. They got immense pleasure from this sport, and so did Johannes. His parents forbade it, but this only increased his enthusiasm for chopping off chickens’ heads. Even as a small child he could chop off the head of a hen with one blow and then watch as the headless bird flew twenty or thirty yards through the air in its death throes. Johannes enjoyed watching the sticking of pigs and the slaughtering of cows in the Wolfsegg slaughterhouse—for our beef broth, Father used to say. I too was enthralled by these activities and sometimes took part in them, but they never gave me the same pleasure as they gave Johannes; on the contrary, they horrified me, I thought. I am not Johannes. In the cowshed I took in at a glance ninety-two head of cattle—the ideal number, my father called it. Here at least the business is still intact, I thought. It occurred to me, because my mother had once impressed the fact on me, that the milk pipe over the cows’ heads had cost three hundred eighty thousand schillings. The milk-producing unit is naturally quite decent, I thought. I then went across to the Children’s Villa. They’ve actually left all the windows open, I thought, not because I said they were to stay open but because they’ve forgotten to shut them. There hasn’t been a storm, I thought, but there was certainly one in the air. You can’t go and look for Alexander now, I told myself. I sat down on the bench in front of the villa. If Alexander had been with us at supper, Spadolini would have been less expansive, I thought. Supper would have passed off quite differently, and Spadolini would have projected a quite different image of himself. Otherwise Alexander would have simply laughed out loud at his remarks and made him look ridiculous. In Alexander’s presence Spadolini would have had to resort to quite different tactics. It now seemed to me that Spadolini was the bad character and Alexander the good one. But to say that Alexander is the good character and Spadolini the bad one is not right either, I thought. Alexander’s goodness conceals much that is bad, such as the ruthless single-mindedness with which he forces his ideas on others and his way of punishing those who resist by refusing to talk to them for days, locking himself in his room and threatening suicide. This good character is a ruthless bully, I thought, who is capable of driving another person to desperation and even, in some circumstances, doing him to death in order to vindicate some undoubtedly ridiculous idea he has conceived. Yet this demonic Alexander is concealed beneath the popular Alexander, always lovable and unfailingly helpful. However lovable a person is, we have merely to consider him for a time — if only in our mind, in which case he can be as far away as we like — and little by little he is transformed from a good person into a bad person. We are not content until we have turned this good and lovable person into someone wicked and worthless, if it serves our turn. We are prepared to misuse him, to misuse anyone, in order to rescue ourselves from some dreadful mood that is tormenting us, some mood we have gotten into without knowing how. Just now, I thought, I have been misusing Alexander in order to rescue myself, probably because Spadolini and the others can no longer serve my purpose; I have simply seized on the good Alexander and gradually transformed him into someone wicked and malign, treating him no differently from all the others who seemed to lend themselves to such misuse. No longer able to make do with reading or pacing up and down or looking out the window, we have to resort to our dearest and closest friends in order to rescue ourselves from some dire mood, I thought. Time and again I have observed that when I am possessed by one of these dire moods, I seize upon all available persons, one after another, and tear them apart, denigrate them, demolish everything about them, and denude them of more or less all their virtues so that I can rescue myself and breathe freely again. When I’ve done with my parents, my sisters, Johannes, and all the others, I thought, because they can no longer serve my purpose, I set about myself with what can be described only as the utmost ruthlessness. At this moment the victim happens to be Alexander, because my sisters and Spadolini and my brother-in-law are no longer adequate. That’s the truth. In order to gain relief we walk on faces, I thought. In the Children’s Villa I looked for my childhood, but naturally I did not find it. I went into all the rooms in search of my childhood, but of course it was not there. What’s the point of restoring the Children’s Villa, I wondered, when there’s no longer anyone around to enjoy it and benefit from it? It would be senseless to restore the Children’s Villa, which is what I had intended to do until this moment, to restore it to what it had once been for