My name is Hans Traube.
I was born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944.
All my documents say my name is Hans Traube, and they say I was born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944. When someone says “Hans”, I look up. That’s what I’ve always been called: Hans. Ever since I can remember people have called me Hans. People I know well and people I do not know well call me Hans, for myself I am Hans, too, who else could I be but Hans, when I botch something, I say, Oh, Hans, Hans, what a mess you’ve made.
Oh, Hans, Hans, my mother said to me on her deathbed once you were called Antonio.
Ever since then, since the moment my mother Martha Traube moaned Oh Hans, Hans, and that was on 20 April, 1998, I have been searching, looking for this Antonio who has been lost, but who isn’t lost, who was in hiding for half a century, yet he wasn’t — all the while this Antonio has been crouching inside me watching, breathing with me yet listening to me breathe, dreaming with me while stealing my dreams, and I knew nothing about it until my mother Martha Traube, as she was dying, said, Oh Hans, you were born Antonio.
In Gorizia the search is over. After eight years I think the search is over. I believe I know the essential facts of my life, and since these essential facts are now known to me, I am convinced they will no longer matter, they will soon become completely unimportant and unnecessary facts, all those details I have been researching like a lunatic for eight years, digging frantically through archives in a number of cities, in a number of countries, examining countless details, now I see — utterly pointless details, that is why I actually know that soon, just as Thomas (Bernhard) said when I last photographed him in 1988, I believe I will say, Servus, now nothing matters.
I photographed Thomas in Gmunden, where he was living at the time, and where he died soon after we took some wonderful pictures of him, Thomas, and of Gmunden with the places where Thomas often walked. I am a professional photographer. I work for magazines and exhibit all over the world. Sometimes I write. That is why I went to Gmunden. Gmunden is a little town. It has about 13,000 inhabitants and very fresh air; since 1862 Gmunden has been known as a Luftbad. Today Gmunden is a tourist town through which tourists stroll in packs, passing thus by Bernhard’s house, too, though most of them who pass by his house have no idea who Bernhard is and probably will never read what he has written. Gmunden is located in a charming spot, on the northern shore of Traunsee, surrounded by woods. Today Gmunden also has a hospital, a small theatre, an observatory and the oldest electric tram in Austria (introduced in 1894). There are several secondary vocational schools in Gmunden, two gymnasiums and a Mädchenpensionat for the Sisters of the Holy Cross. Pottery from Gmunden is valued highly, as is Gmunden porcelain. Gmunden has several baroque and Gothic churches and monasteries and an interesting cemetery.
There are many paper mills in this area, Bernhard told me, and thus a lot of cripples because of the machines, he told me, which cut off their fingers or arms, or even their ears.
We walked by Schloss Oberweis and I took several pictures of the charming building, as Thomas called it, owned at one time by a Jewish family which disappeared, and today Oberweis is once again in private hands, Bernhard said, and it is inaccessible, he stressed, though this did not upset me, because I had no inclination to go inside anyway. Unlike Schloss Oberweis, which was designed to be grandiose, Bernhard said, my farmstead here was an ordinary barn, nothing but a ruin, rotten and in a state of utter decay, but I liked that, I liked bringing such a rotten state into some sort of acceptable order, he said, so I decided to restore this ruin as much as that was possible, although it remains questionable to what degree fundamental rot can be fully salvaged. I did all this with a man whose name was Ferdl and whom we buried the day before yesterday, said Bernhard then, in 1988. Ferdl was my dearest friend here, he said. A small, gaunt old man, he said, who died the day before yesterday of stomach cancer. For two years Ferdl had been saying: “Something’s eating me up, something from inside,” said Thomas, so one day I’ll write a book called Ferdl, he said.
From a polite distance we looked at that castle, that Schloss Oberweis, a large two-storey building surrounded by a well-tended lawn, surrounded by what are actually fields of dense, impassable grass, by what is actually a park with a fish pond. Why Bernhard didn’t tell me then, in 1988, the most important fact about Schloss Oberweis, I don’t know, but I suppose everything has its time and place. He said, It became apparent long ago that what they taught us was a deception. I couldn’t penetrate before into the everyday, lethal game of existence, I didn’t have the spiritual or physical wherewithal to do that, but today the mechanism moves forward on its own, he said. This is a daily alignment, a tidying of the mind: every day every thing must be set in its place, he said. And then, ten years later, when my mother Martha Traube said, as she was dying, We took you from Oberweis, I watched that lethal game of existence begin, I saw my game of existence begin, how just as it began, this game of my existence, it started moving in a downward trajectory towards its end. I watched how the mechanism sets itself in motion and how my life, of its own volition, is sliding into a one-way current, as if willingly heading for the gallows; how before it becomes extinct it is setting itself to rights, sprucing itself up, as if closing at one moment and opening the next like a fluttering figure of origami.
I sat in my hotel room in Gorizia surrounded by papers, archival documents, letters, photocopies, photographs, books, everything I had amassed over the eight years of searching and once again I arranged and rearranged my treasures, leafed through them, read them, repeated the facts as if I were preparing for an operation after which I would see once again. But games with eyes are deceptive games. The eye is a soft organ, which sees and does not see, depending on how you look at it. The eye is a sensitive organ, it wells often with tears; when it rebels, it calms quickly, it darkens, as if to say I won’t watch; it succumbs without a struggle to external and internal pressures, moreover the eye is easily destroyed and is particularly attractive for certain animals, which like to feed on it, on the eye, who knows why. There was once a woman whose eye was operated on and she convalesced in hospital with a bandage over the operated eye. This eye that you operated itches me terribly, said the woman to the doctors, but the doctors ignored her. The woman complained so bitterly — more each day, not only of the itch, but of unbearable pain — that the doctors decided to remove the bandage and inspect her eye. When they uncovered the woman’s eye they saw that the eye had become totally dead and useless, because inside it an ant colony had made a big hole and from the hole the ants were streaming out and crawling all over the woman’s face. Another woman complained of terrible headaches for months, but doctors found no medical anomalies. In the end she went to have her eyes examined. In one of her eyes medical experts discovered a twenty-centimetre-long worm that had coiled around her eyeball and was poised to enter the eye. The doctors drew the worm out of the woman’s head slowly and cautiously, so her eye wouldn’t be damaged, but the eye was already dead. I cannot say whether it is a coincidence that the victims of predators, which are largely benevolent, tame and docile creatures, not usually ocular predators, are in harmony with their natural environment, part of Nature, close to the ground, I cannot say whether it is a coincidence that the victims were women, or rather women’s eyes. Perhaps these horrors could have happened to two men’s eyes and may well have, but this is how the stories go.