us children, I thought. It’s absurd even to think of it: I can’t restore my childhood by restoring the Children’s Villa, I thought. At first I had believed that if I had the Children’s Villa thoroughly restored — or renovated, as my sisters would say — I would be restoring or renovating my childhood. But my childhood is now as dilapidated as the Children’s Villa. Its rooms have been cleared out and plundered and their contents sold off as ruthlessly as those of the Children’s Villa. Unlike the Children’s Villa, however, my childhood was plundered not by my mother but by myself. I was even more ruthless in disposing of my childhood than she was in selling off the contents of the Children’s Villa. I’ve disposed of the finest pieces that furnished my childhood, just as my mother disposed of the finest pieces in the Children’s Villa. There’s no longer any point in opening the windows of my childhood, I thought; this would be as ludicrous as opening the windows of the Children’s Villa. My childhood became worn out and was sold for a song. I exploited it until there was nothing left to exploit. We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void. We go into a house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we’re revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a gaping void. Entering the Children’s Villa means nothing more or less than entering this notorious gaping void, just as going into the woods where we used to play as children would mean going into thisgaping void.Wherever I was happy as a child, there now appears to be agaping void.We dispose of our childhood as if it were inexhaustible, I thought, but it isn’t. It’s very soon exhausted, and in the end there’s nothing left but the notorious gaping void. Yet this doesn’t happen just to me, I thought; it happens to everyone. For a moment this thought consoled me: no one was spared the knowledge that revisiting our childhood meant staring into this uniquely sickening void. To this extent it was a good idea to go back to the Children’s Villa, thinking I was going back to my childhood and believing it was possible. It proved to be an error, but the error was wholly beneficial, for it cured me of the belief that in order to reenter my childhood I had only to reenter the Children’s Villa, or the woods or the landscape I had known as a child. I now knew that wherever I went I would find nothing but this gaping void. I won’t expose myself to it again, I thought. In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell myself that I have only to go back there in order to rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void. You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. You have to accept this. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood, but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of self-protection, I thought. Whenever you look back into the past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed. You wanted to go into the Children’s Villa in order to go back into your childhood, which you’ve spent years throwing out the window, believing it to be inexhaustible. And now it’s exhausted — you’ve spent it all quite thoughtlessly. Having used up all your other possibilities, you yielded to base sentimentality and conceived this plan for the Children’s Villa, which has now been revealed in all its horror: the Children’s Villa is a nightmare. When you first thought of restoring it and told your sisters of your plan, you actually thought that by doing so you could restore your childhood. You actually believed that your childhood could be repainted and redecorated, as it were, that it could be refurbished and reroofed like the Children’s Villa, and this in spite of hundreds of failed attempts at restoring your childhood, I thought. For this was by no means the first time you’d had the idea. You’ve often entertained it. You’ve even forced it on others and seen them come to grief when they’ve tried to realize this absurdest of all ideas. You’ve deliberately driven people to embrace it, knowing that it was doomed to failure; you’ve kept quiet about your own experience with this absurdest of all absurd ideas and left them to find out the truth for themselves. That was monstrous. I walked away from the Children’s Villa and went to the office. The Huntsmen’s Lodge was open, presumably so that the huntsmen could go in and out in order to relieve one another during their guard duty. I wouldn’t come to the office every day as Father had done, I thought. I wouldn’t take up residence there in order to deal with the business mail, to talk to the farm manager and other employees in this stifling atmosphere. Unlike my father, I wouldn’t have to treat this office as my natural habitat, I thought. My existence won’t be constricted, like my father’s, by the three-ring binders that finally crushed him. These binders at first constricted his existence, I thought, then one day fell on him and crushed him. That’s not just a vision, I thought, it’s stark reality. The business mail made Father a slave to the business. He subordinated his whole existence to the daily business mail, I thought. My grandparents stuck him in this office, by which in due course he was crushed. But it won’t crush me, I won’t let myself be crushed. The way the office is furnished is enough to crush anybody, I thought. I did not turn the light on, as I did not want to be discovered, though of course the huntsmen knew I was there. I’ll never enter this office as a farmer, I thought. I’m not a farmer, I’ve no interest in farming. One of the binders must contain details of the allowance that’s been paid to me all the years I’ve been away from Wolfsegg, I thought. I got up and looked for the relevant binder, but could not find one bearing my name. All sorts of names were inscribed on the various binders, but not mine. What was this immense sum to which my father always referred, with which my mother constantly reproached me, and which drew malevolent remarks from my sisters? They always maintained that I was kept by Wolfsegg, that I never hesitated to demand more and more from the Wolfsegg funds, that I subjected them to ever greater extortion. There must be a binder in which this immense sum was recorded, I thought, but I could not find it. I took down a number of them and leafed through them, but I could not find the one relating to me — the fatal binder, I thought, recalling that my mother had once said I would drop dead on the spot if I knew how much money they had expended on me. On the wastrel who exploited Wolfsegg for his