by Frank Wynne
In part dismayed, in part megalomaniac, they noted, as he rapidly grew larger and healthier and more delicate and more intelligent and more ugly, that he, they really believed so, had not come out of their centuries’ old merchants’ substance and had remained stuck at home with them; after several still-births, they had presumably deserved one of their own, a straight—not crooked—piece of timber of merchant stock, who should support them one and all right from the very first moment, then later carry, raise even higher one and all, raise parents and sisters even higher up, than they already were; and what they got, where from seemed strange to them, because ultimately nevertheless by the father out of the mother, was a creature that, as they saw it, had been such a useless, ever deeper and deeper thinking beast, that even had a claim to clothing and to entertainment, and that one was supposed to support it instead of being supported, feed instead of being fed, pamper instead of being pampered; on the contrary, in his complete uselessness Georg was and perpetually remained a lump of flesh that was constantly in their way and lay heavily in their stomachs and who even wrote poems. Everything about him was different; they felt him to be the greatest disgrace in their family otherwise composed solely of reality and not in the least out of imagination. In the room in the Zirkusgasse in Vienna which we had rented after meeting in an inn in the Leopoldstadt district and joining forces, he talked again and again of his ‘child’s dungeon at Innsbruck’, and he flinched in front of his listener, in front of me, who for years, for eight semesters, was his only listener, when he thought he had to utter the always, for him, difficult word, ‘horsewhipping’. Cellars and hallway and attic stores far too big, far too huge for him, stone steps far too high for him, trapdoors that were too heavy, jackets and trousers and shirts (his father’s worn-out jackets and trousers and shirts) far too wide for him, whistles from his father, screams from his mother that were too shrill, the sniggering of his sisters, leaps by rats, the barking of dogs, cold and hunger, narrow-minded loneliness, schoolbags that were far too heavy for him, loaves of bread, sacks of Indian corn, sacks of flour, sacks of sugar, sacks of potatoes, shovels and steel wheelbarrows, incomprehensible instructions, tasks, threats and orders, punishments and chastisements, strokes and blows made up his childhood. Years after he had left home, he was still tormented by the cured sides of pork lugged by him down to the cellar and again lugged up out of the cellar (and lugged by him with what terrible pain). Even years later and four hundred and fifty miles away, in Vienna, he still anxiously crossed, head down, the parental Innsbruck shopkeeper’s yard, descended, shaken by fever, to the parental Innsbruck shopkeeper’s cellar. When, cuffed day in day out into the parental commercial arithmetic, he made a mistake, he was (not yet six the first time) locked into the cellar vault by his father or by his mother or by one of his sisters, and then for a while called only ‘criminal’; at first, only his father had called him a criminal, but later, as he remembered, his sisters, too, then even his mother had joined in. Completely ‘incapable of bringing up a child’, she, whom he now imagined, after years, in his time as a student in Vienna, he saw in a mellower light, because he was separated from her by many mountains, always completely yielded, when it came to Georg, to the stronger side of the family, that is, to his father and his sisters. With shocking regularity, father and mother had beaten him several times a week with the whip.
In his childhood, the sons screamed in the houses of the Innsbruck shopkeepers, as did the pigs in the houses of the Innsbruck butchers. In his home, everything had no doubt been worse. His birth, so they assured him at every opportunity, had led to their ruin. His father had constantly described him as ‘unconstitutional’, his father incessantly needled him with the word ‘unconstitutional’. His sisters took advantage of him for their plots, using their sharpening minds with ever greater perfection. He was everyone’s victim. When I saw into his childhood and into his Innsbruck, I saw into my childhood and my Innsbruck, with how much dismay simultaneously into my own, which had been dominated not by the same dreadfulness but by an even greater infamy, for my parents did not act out of bestial violence, as his did, but out of a radical philosophical violence coming from the head and from nowhere but the head and from heads.
Every day, early in the morning, an embitterment, saddening, deeper than by nature admissible, thrust our painful, incompetent heads together into one whole, hopeless, dull state of conjecture: everything in us and on us and about us suggested that we were lost, I just as much as he, whatever we had to look at and whatever we had to work out, whatever we had to walk and stand and sleep and dream, whatever it had to do with. For days Georg was often in the most remote Higher Imagination, as he called it, and at the same time he always walked, as I was continually forced to observe, back and forth in his desperations, which also overshadowed me, from a certain point in time we, both the laws and their makers, and the day-in-day-out coarse annihilators of every law, all at once went together and as if together forever through the whole great pathological schema of colours, in which nature had to express itself in each one of us as the most painful of all human pains. For years we lodged, even if on the surface of the capital, then nevertheless in a system of protective conduits created by us for us and only visible to us; but in these conduits we also uninterruptedly breathed in a deadly air; we walked and we crawled almost entirely only in these conduits of our youthful despair and youthful philosophy and youthful science always towards ourselves … these conduits led us out of our Zirkusgasse room, in which we sat in our chairs at the table, usually stricken by the power of judgement and by the monstrous excess of history, stricken by ourselves, over our books, dreadful bunglings, adulations and mockeries of our own and the whole geological genealogy, into the old, ancient body of the city and back out of it again to our room … Georg and I spent eight dreadful semesters together, had to spend them together, in this way that I’ve only hinted at, in the Zirkusgasse room; no pause of any kind had been permitted us; in all the eight semesters, in which I had sickened myself of jurisprudence, Georg no less of his pharmacy, we had not been capable of raising ourselves from our stooped posture, from both our deformities (I, too, had already been deformed), because, of course, as already indicated, we had always, in everything and everyone, to move in our conduits and hence stooped low, not capable of raising ourselves from this necessity into a less bent one, no matter by how little; in all the eight semesters we had not once had the strength to get up and leave … We had not even had the strength, because we didn’t feel like it, to open the window of our Zirkusgasse room and let in fresh air … still less had we had just one of the invisible powers … Our disposition, like our mind, had been so firmly sealed up that by human standards we should one day have suffocated in ourselves, we were not so far away from it, had not something that did not come from us, could not come from one of us, such a metaphysical intervention from outside in us or from deep inside us, produced an alteration in our condition out of two like conditions, Georg’s and mine … In the course of tremendously complicated proceedings against us, in the atmosphere of the capital, which to us remained atonic, our souls also shrunk together. As so many of our age we were without backing, had been deeply dug and deeply buried into the idea that says that there is nowhere, neither inside nor out, a possibility of fresh air and what it can produce, unleash or efface, and, indeed, for us in the Zirkusgasse room there was no fresh air; eight semesters long no fresh air.
We each of us had a name, one of many, which had come into existence in the mountains, many generations ago, one left of the Inn, one right of the Inn, countless generations in his case, had grown ever larger, but which now, as a destroyer of ourselves, at the end of parental curses and feats of arithmetical skill, had been transplanted to the shamelessly, as we were forced to see, self-pityingly decaying capital. Each of us was enclosed in his significant name and could not get out again. Neither knew the dungeon of the other, the guilt, the crime of the other, but each suspected that the other’s dungeo
n and the other’s guilt and crime were his own. Our mistrust for each other and of each other had over time increased in the same measure as we more and more belonged together, did not want to leave each other. Yet we hated each other, and we were the most opposite creatures one can imagine; everything of one shone from the other, indeed out of the other, but the two of us did not resemble each other in any way or any thing, in no sentiment at all, in nothing. And yet either of us could have been the other, everything of one could have come from the other … I often told myself, that I could be Georg, everything that Georg was, that meant, however, that nothing of Georg was from me … How other students, when they have been sent to the capital, enthusiastically find pleasure and refreshment in its possibilities of distraction, remained a mystery to us, nothing aroused our enthusiasm, nothing found favour with us, the spirit of the capital was a dead one, its entertainment apparatus too primitive for us.
From the beginning, we, he and I, operated with keen perception, in almost every case we subjected everything to our deadly criticism; finally, our attempts to break out failed, everything weighed on us, we fell ill, we constructed our conduit system. Already in our first weeks we had withdrawn from the silent megalomania of Vienna, from the city in which there was no longer any history, any art and any scholarship, in which there was no longer anything. But even before my arrival in Vienna, still on the train, I (as he also), we had both, independently of each other, been attacked by an illness, by a fever gradually making us sad, I by a distraction to the point of fatal over-sensitivity, moving logically from everything external into myself, in my subconscious just as in full consciousness and, sitting in one of our many dark express train compartments, which are drawn through the land at high speed, in awareness of myself and in awareness of what went with me always, was surprised by the first thoughts of suicide, the signs of suicide, for a long time. With what a grey and extraordinarily severe gloominess did I all at once have to cope with between the Melk Hills! On this journey, which I had been forced to make against my will, I had several times wished for my death, swift, sudden, painless, of which only a picture of peace is left behind; especially on the dangerous curves, as close by the Danube at Ybbs. The journey of young people from the provinces to the capital in order to begin a feared course of studies, for a course of studies which most of them don’t want, almost always proceeds to the accompaniment of the most dreadful state in the brain and mind and emotions of the person concerned and deceived and hence tortured. The thought of suicide in one apprehensively, and in all cases always less boldly than expected, approaching at twilight by train a secondary school or college or university in the capital, is most natural. How many and not a few whom I knew and with whom I grew up and who have been mentioned to me by name have already thrown themselves from the moving train shortly after taking leave of their parents at their local station … As far as Georg and I are concerned, we never revealed our suicide perspectives to each other, we only knew of each other that we were at home in them. We were enclosed in our thoughts of suicide as in our room and in our conduit system, as in a complicated game, comparable to advanced mathematics. In this advanced suicide game we often left each other completely in peace for weeks. We studied and thought about suicide; we read and thought about suicide; we hid away and slept and dreamed and thought about suicide. We felt abandoned in our thoughts of suicide, undisturbed; no one bothered about us. We were at liberty to kill ourselves at any time, but we did not. As much as we had always been strangers to each other, there were never any of the many hundreds of thousands of odourless human secrets between us, only the secret of nature as such, which we knew about. Days and nights were like verses of an infinitely harmonious dark song to us.
On the one hand, his family had already known from the start that he was unsuitable for his father’s business profession and so for taking over the shop on Anichstrasse which demanded someone like them, on the other hand they were far from giving up hope that Georg, the cripple, could become, almost overnight, possibly from one blow of the whip to the next, what they from the start wanted him to be: the successor to the grocer who was now already in his sixties! Finally, however, they had decided, as if by agreement, behind his, Georg’s back, overnight, for always, in favour of his older sister, and from that moment on they stuffed, whatever way they could, everything that they could, all their shopkeepers’ powers and all their shopkeepers’ knowledge into fat, ruddy, rustic Irma, a person who on her fat legs walked all day long through the shopkeeper’s house like a heavy cow; summer as winter in puffed sleeves, she, who was just twenty and engaged to a butcher’s assistant from Natters, her calves constantly discharging pus, grew into a pillar of the shop. At the same moment at which they had decided on the sister as successor (no doubt also in view of her fiancé!), they consented to Georg going to university. They had been afraid of losing face. But they didn’t permit him, as he had wished, to study pharmacy in Innsbruck, where, in addition to the commercial apprenticeship, he had completed the grammar school with a good record, or in nearby Munich, but only in distant Vienna far to the east, which he and all of them had always hated. They wanted him as far away from themselves as possible, to know him far away, and the capital really was at the end of the world. Every young person today knows what an exile there means! It had made no difference that he had tried to make clear to them that Vienna, the capital, had for decades been the most backward of all European university towns; there was no course of study in Vienna that could be recommended; he had to go to Vienna and, if he did not want to make do with the lowest of all allowances known to me, he had to remain in Vienna, the most dreadful of all old cities of Europe. Vienna is such an old and lifeless city, is such a cemetery, left alone and abandoned by all of Europe and all of the world, we thought, what a vast cemetery of crumbling and premodern curiosities!
As if he had been me, that’s what I always felt in the last period when we were together, and with especial intensity towards the end of the year when, before falling asleep, he hinted at everything of which we knew nothing at all… His inability, just once in his life to make himself intelligible, was also mine … His childhood, which had appeared to him endless, not a thousand years long, like that of the author of Moby Dick: the uninterruptedly vain attempt to win the confidence of his parents and of the other people around him, at least of those closest to him. He had never had a real friend—but who knows what that is—only people who made fun of him, secretly feared him; he was always someone, who disturbed the harmony of another or several others in his way, through his deformity, he was continually disturbing … Wherever he went, wherever he stayed, he was an ugly spot of colour on the beautiful calm background … People were only there (he thought) to set traps for him, no matter who or what they were, what they represented, there was nothing that did not set a trap for him, not even religion. Finally, he was darkened by his own feeling … His awakening had no doubt also been one into the madness of hopelessness … He had all at once, and I had already felt safe, torn open the door to my childhood with the brutality of the sick, oppressed, despairing … Every morning, he woke up in the firmly locked cell of a new age-old day.
Whereas for me, figures which are easily recognized as comic, indeed even as playful, again and again appeared in front of the gloomy backdrop of my childhood, something like that never happened to my friend; when he looked into the past, only terrifying occurrences were visible to him, and what had been put on there and was still being put on there was even more terrifying; he wanted, therefore, he said repeatedly, to look as little as ever he could, not look at all into the past, which was like the present and the future, which was present and future, not look at all; but that wasn’t possible; his childhood, his youth, his whole life had been a vast ice-cold stage, only there to terrify him, and the leading roles on this stage were always only taken by his parents and his sisters; again and again, they invented something new to upset him. Sometimes he wept, and when I asked him why, he repl
ied: because he couldn’t draw the stage curtain; he was too weak to do it; less and less often was he able to draw the stage curtain, he was afraid that one day he would be unable to draw it all; wherever he went, wherever he found himself, in whatever condition he was, he was forced to watch his play; the most terrible scenes took place again and again in his parents’ house in Innsbruck, in the shopkeeper’s house; father and mother as driving forces of its deadly scenery, he always saw and heard them. Often, in his sleep, he said the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ and the words ‘whip’ and ‘cellar’ or a ‘No no!’ finally hunted to death by one of his persecutors, which was to do with his many chastisements. In the early morning, his body, crippled, yet refined to the point of a chastity forbidden to nature (he had the skin of mortally ill girls), was wet, a fever, which couldn’t be measured, already weakened him before he had even got up. We usually did not eat breakfast, because eating and drinking disgusted us. The lectures disgusted us. The books disgusted us. The world to us was a perverse bestial and perverse philosophical plague and repulsive operetta. During the last February, Georg had been constantly sad and, in his sadness, always alone. He, who was one year younger, was forced to be afraid in the evenings under the conditions known to both of us, supported by hand movements, movements of his head, among all the names of deceased or of still living creatures and objects feared by him. The letters addressed to him, the few, contained, like those to me, only admonitions to recovery, nothing good-natured. Once he had pronounced the word ‘tactless’, he had meant the world was at least tactless. How different we both would have had to be, to turn our backs on this cemetery, which the capital had been, which the capital is. We were too weak to do it. In the capital, everyone is too weak. ‘This city is a cemetery which is dying out!’ is the last thing he had said; after this statement, which did not give me pause for thought, at first, which had the same standing as all the rest by him recently, I had, it was the fourteenth, half past ten in the evening, gone to bed. When I was woken, just before two by a noise, because Georg had been completely still, probably not least for the one reason, that under no circumstances did he want to wake me up (and now I know how agonizing that must have been for him), I made the dreadful discovery, which Georg’s parents now describe as their son’s crime against himself and against his family. Georg’s father had already arrived in Vienna from Innsbruck at ten the next morning and requested that I throw light on the matter. When I had returned from the hospital to which Georg had been taken, Georg’s father was already in our room, and I knew, even though it had still been dark because of the bad weather, there was no further change that day, that the man packing Georg’s things was his father. Although also from Innsbruck, I had never seen him before. Once, however, my eyes had got used to the darkness and were also able to take advantage of the darkness, and I shall never forget this keenness of my eyes, I saw that this man, who was wearing a black coat with a sheepskin lining, that this man, who gave the impression of being in a hurry and was throwing everything of Georg’s onto a heap, in order to remove it, that this man and that everything connected to him bore the blame for Georg’s misfortune, for the catastrophe.
