Correction

by Thomas Bernhard

  They said that Roithamer had willed me his papers. Everything seemed to me intent upon my destruction. I escaped to my father’s shack in the mountains.

  There I suddenly fell sick. Pure chance, I thought, still staring down into the Aurach from my window, that they found me up there. Most likely, I thought, suddenly conscious again that I was here in Hoeller’s garret, most likely I shall go back to England. Then I paced back and forth in Hoeller’s garret.

  Suddenly the mere idea of going back to England alone and without Roithamer felt horrible. I sat down at first on the chair beside the door, then got up and sat down at the desk. I took the yellow paper rose out of the top drawer and held it up to the light that had ceased to be a light, the twilight had already darkened everything, soon it will be pitch-dark, I thought, and laid the yellow paper rose back in the drawer. Was I right in going from the hospital, not to my parents’ house, but to Hoeller’s garret, I thought, and I kept going over it in my mind how deeply my parents’ feelings would be hurt when they found that I left the hospital and went directly to the Aurach and into Hoeller’s house. Even though they like Hoeller, I thought, they probably still won’t understand my going to Hoeller instead of to them. My father visits the Hoellers often, as a child I used to go along when he visited the Hoellers in their old house, the one on the lower Aurach which Hoeller suddenly sold in order to build the new house with the proceeds, plus a hefty bank loan. He had sold the old house on condition that, though the new owners had moved in long since, he and his family could stay in it another two years, or only as long as he needed to build the new house he had designed. The whole thing had been Roithamer’s inspiration for his Cone, Roithamer had quite unconsciously, as I now know, modeled his own plans and their execution for his Cone on Hoeller’s plans for Hoeller’s house and the building and finishing of Hoeller’s house. Hoeller, given his circumstances, had needed four years to plan and build and finish his house, while Roithamer had needed six years to plan and build and finish the Cone for his sister. If Hoeller had not built his house, the idea of building would probably never have entered Roithamer’s head and so today there would be no Cone, that unique instance in Europe of a cone built as a habitation, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. But Hoeller’s procedure had been the same as Roithamer’s, I thought, the one built himself a house ideal for his purposes, the other an ideal cone, as he believed, for his sister. On the one hand I thought: what audacity for Roithamer to build that Cone, on the other hand: what audacity for Hoeller to build his house in the Aurach gorge. After all, I thought, it is right here in Hoeller’s garret that the idea of building the Cone was worked out, so the Cone unquestionably comes from Hoeller’s house, from Hoeller’s garret. I had never yet been more conscious of this fact than at this moment, when I was summoned to come down to supper with the Hoeller family, by three brief knocks on the ceiling, that is, the attic floor, from below, with a hazel stick. I put on my jacket and went down at once. Hoeller and the children were already seated at the table, on which a large stoneware bowl full of dumplings was steaming, I could sit on the window side of the table, where I had a comfortable view of everything in the room which happened to be directly under the garret, conversely I was being most attentively watched by the Hoeller children and by Hoeller and his wife, each and every one had a stoneware plate and a fork in front of him, Hoeller’s wife had served a boiled smoked ham and put a pitcher of cider on the table. She sat down opposite me. She was the daughter of a roadworker from Steinbach on the Atterlake, raised, accordingly, in the humblest circumstances, dressed according to the Aurach valley custom, about thirty-six or thirty-eight years old, no more, and quietly took care of her family along fixed guidelines that had been in effect here for hundreds of years. Who, I’d wondered, will be the first to start eating, and it was Hoeller who started and invited me to start eating, then the children helped themselves and lastly Hoeller’s wife whom I have never yet heard speaking a single word in all this time I have now been in Hoeller’s house, she was the most self-effacing woman, self-effacing like all these women rescued from the worst poverty by the men who married them, always the daughters of roadmenders and woodcutters, sawmill workers or dirt farmers, taciturn women always absorbed in caring for their own families in a daily round of always the same chores, bed-making, cooking, farmyard chores and so on, women who never argued and whose matter-of-course attachment to their husbands and children was such as has already become unimaginable in a major part of our world today, but here along the Aurach we still had the same conditions and therefore the same relationships and therefore the same circumstances as existed two hundred or four hundred years ago, nature hadn’t changed and so the people in their natural setting were still the same, with all their malevolence and frightful fecundity, we have here a breed of men, I thought, actually the same breed we had at the dawn of history, progress has passed them by, they’re bone ignorant, with only a dim intuitive sense of everything which keeps them bound in trust to nature, a bond that, dangerous and painful as it may be, nevertheless guarantees their survival, and to which they have totally surrendered themselves, like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, because they never had an alternative, once born they had to cope with their native situation, circumstances, conditions, which are already unimaginable to the modern mind, and they did cope; if ever they bucked against it, if ever the discrepancy between their world and today’s world flashed on their minds, it was only for the briefest moment, after which they submitted again to the rules that have remained the same às they were half a millennium ago, and whatever they found incomprehensible when they thought about it, the Church made comprehensible to them, as it does wherever it is still influential. This woman had always been reserve personified, never a loud word, never the first to speak, everything in and about her was oriented toward taking care of things around her, she took care of her children, her husband, and her and her husband’s and her children’s house and the garden and the riverbank and everything under her care was always in order and, depending on the season, always kept in yellow or blue or red or white colors by her special love for flowers and plants, probably always her secret and surest refuge. All of Hoeller’s house was kept clean, though not oppressively clean, by this woman who scrubbed the floor boards regularly once a week with cold water, no spiderwebs on the walls, everything white, the few sticks of furniture, part of Hoeller’s inheritance from his parents, not hers, who’d had nothing, the whole house filled with an aroma characteristic of Hoeller’s house from the foods stored here and there, apples and pears atop the wardrobe or under the beds, it was an aroma I’d suddenly find myself breathing in often, sometimes on a street in the middle of London, and identifying as the Hoeller house aroma, all of a sudden there was this aroma, no matter where I happened to be, but at such moments I was always very far away from Hoeller’s house, abroad mostly, and it would start me off thinking about my so-called homeland and the things of home, so-called, seeing the images of home, for a longer or shorter time, depending on my state of mind or emotional state or both together, which these memories made bearable again. Roithamer too once told me that the aroma of Hoeller’s house would suddenly remind him of the Aurach and Hoeller’s house and Hoeller’s family and consequently of Altensam, and that this aroma had very often brought him back to life. Hoeller’s wife looked older than her years, what with taking a major part in building their house while at the same time taking care of the children born not long before they began building, all the worry about whether the house would be any good, as Hoeller once said, plus the worries about financing the house, all these inroads on her health had caused Hoeller’s wife to age rapidly, though in an incredibly attractive way.

  Watching this woman I could see how very comfortable Roithamer must have felt here in Hoeller’s rooms and up there in the garret, whenever he arrived from somewhere, anywhere, even from England, here at the Aurach and in Hoeller’s house and in Hoeller’s garret, coming out o
f the cold into a haven where there was someone who actually had so soothing an effect on a man as Hoeller’s wife did, under such conditions he could soon recover what he had lost, his love of life and, consequently, his love of work. The Hoeller children were well brought up by their parents, they were as unspoiled and open to everything as one might wish, incidentally I had noticed immediately that the girl took more after her father, the son more after his mother, what it was I didn’t know, they just reached up to their parents’ shoulders in height, they were full of curiosity and watching me all the time, they seemed wholly intent upon the new man so suddenly among them, they ate and drank exactly like their parents and were, while they ate, just as silent as their parents. They too would never have said a word to me unless I encouraged them, just like their mother, and for the longest time I found it impossible, for whatever reason, to say anything to the children, or to Hoeller’s wife, I probably wanted the experience of this meal taken in absolute silence to have its effect on me, I should have said something to Hoeller’s wife or to the children right at the start, I thought, but I said nothing and they did not dare to say anything, because Hoeller had not encouraged them to speak, Hoeller had come in from his workshop, had washed his hands and had sat down at the table, as I saw him doing when I walked in, the children were already seated at the table when I came in and was invited by Hoeller, not by his wife, to take the window seat from which I had the best view of the whole room and everything going on in it, this seat was probably Roithamer’s seat too, I thought, knowing Roithamer as I do, this very seat where I have just sat down must have been his seat, how often he had told me about the meals in Hoeller’s family room, suddenly not reported but told, it was the sort of thing that made a story, not a report, he told me how these meals were conducted, always the same way, always in silence, just as it was now in my experience, again I compared Roithamer’s story with my own observations made just now, and again Roithamer’s stories (about mealtime in Hoeller’s family room) and my observations coincided, and I thought that Roithamer always sat like this with his back to the wall in every room, it was characteristic of him, the moment he entered a room he looked for a seat where his back would be to the wall and never sat anywhere but where he could have his back to the wall and keep his eye on the whole room, I also had the same habit, I had not picked it up from Roithamer, this tendency always to sit back-to-the-wall especially in restaurants or coffee shops had been characteristic of me always and long before I noticed it in Roithamer, so I was now thinking that this window seat facing the door, opposite Hoeller’s wife, would have been the appropriate choice for Roithamer and I wanted to ask whether Roithamer had also sat where I had sat down, but I didn’t ask, the time for such a question had not yet come, everything in the room was already, at this time, against such a question and so I did not pose that question, nor any of the other questions that had suddenly arisen in my mind, I ate and drank and watched and was watched and I mean I was watched even if not openly watched, the children for example were watching me every minute even when they did not look at me directly, just as Hoeller’s wife was watching me every minute even though she did not look at me, she looked down at the table and watched me and Hoeller did exactly the same. Conversation at mealtimes is unknown in these homes, I thought, though just now it was probably my doing that no one said anything, all I had to do was to say something and they would speak up too, but the fact that they were all eating and drinking in silence and that this eating and drinking in silence could be prolonged by my own silence made me go on eating and drinking as silently as they, they were all waiting for a word from me, I thought, but I said not a word. One by one I rediscovered all the things I had seen the last time I was in Hoeller’s family room, years ago, with Roithamer. Suddenly I heard the Aurach and I thought how all this time I’d believed there was a perfect silence in Hoeller’s family room, while in fact one always hears the roaring Aurach here, even I had grown so accustomed to the incessant noise, especially loud at this particular spot in the Aurach gorge, that after a certain point I had ceased to notice it, so that I believed, while actually surrounded by the thunderous roar of the Aurach in the Aurach gorge, that here was perfect quiet, because I no longer heard the incessant roar of the Aurach, just as the Hoellers no longer hear it, except once in a while, when they suddenly become aware of it again, they hear it all the time without a break and because of that they no longer hear it, only for moments, when they think of it, just as I had ceased to hear it, although the most striking feature of the Hoeller house is undoubtedly the roaring of the Aurach, the arriving and the arrived are totally enclosed in this roar, actually it is always hard to communicate with those who live there, one has to scream to be heard, yet everyone gets used to it very quickly, probably because the Aurach roar is so deafening, and then it may be quite soon that one perceives as perfect stillness what is actually in uproar, as I have just experienced it myself. People passing by Hoeller’s house wonder how anyone can stand the uproar of the Aurach torrent, sure that no one can, they don’t realize that the hearing and then the whole being of anyone living in the midst of such an uproar gets used to the fact of living in such an uproar. Hoeller didn’t mind building his house in the midst of this uproar, he did it deliberately in fact, I am building my house right into the Aurach uproar, he once said to Roithamer, who couldn’t see how he could do such a thing, yet Hoeller could have done no better thing, I can see that the building of Hoeller’s house and everything involved turned out successfully. It is precisely the roaring of the Aurach which attracts me, or at least the roaring of the Aurach also attracts me, Roithamer once said, this roaring of the Aurach torrent, when I am in Hoeller’s garret, absolutely fascinates me. So it hadn’t been perfectly quiet in the room, as I had been thinking all this time, but actually very noisy because of the roaring of the Aurach, to which I had, however, already become accustomed during my several hours’ stay in Hoeller’s house. How else could the Hoellers sleep at night, hearing that uproar, they get used to the uproar and fall asleep and wake up and no longer hear the uproar of the Aurach at all. Houses on the banks of torrential rivers are absolutely fascinating, Roithamer had once said, of course the people in them live in constant anxiety of being wiped out by such a flood, from one minute to the next, everyone knows that even the smallest mountain streams may, under the right circumstances, especially when the high snow melts in spring or during those long-lasting storms in the fall, turn into enormous floods sweeping with them everything in their path. Every year we read or hear about rampaging rivers that have swept away many houses with their inhabitants. But Hoeller had so constructed his house, Roithamer said, that it could not be swept away, it is so situated that under no circumstances can it even be affected by the Aurach, he, Hoeller, had constructed his house at the Aurach gorge so that it was immune to all the violence of nature, the very idea of building a house at the most dangerous place on the Aurach, at the Aurach gorge, where no one would ever have built a house for himself, that idea had given Hoeller no peace, he kept thinking that’s where I must build my house, where no one else would build himself a house, right there, in the Aurach gorge, which everyone fears, that’s where I’ll build my house, I’ll build it right in there, and he naturally opened himself up to the greatest opposition, his persistence and intransigence in pursuing his plan, setting his house in the Aurach gorge just where the roar of the torrent is at its loudest and where the danger of being swept away and totally wiped out one day, lock, stock, and barrel, by the floods, is the greatest, Roithamer said, made Hoeller a laughingstock everywhere he went, but he didn’t give up his plan and he went on with his building and finished it. Today anyone can see and say that Hoeller’s house, built the way it is and placed where it is, can’t be swept away by the Aurach, Hoeller says. Yet the general mistrustfulness still lingers. Anyway Hoeller believes that his house can’t be swept away and can’t be destroyed by a mud slide (Roithamer). That it’s the first house on the Aurach that can
never be swept away by the Aurach and be destroyed by a mud slide brought on by catastrophic weather because, Roithamer said, all the houses hitherto built on the Aurach ended up being swept away by the Aurach or destroyed by a mud slide coming down the Aurach valley, again and again the Aurach valley people have built their houses by the Aurach and again and again these houses have been swept away by the rampaging Aurach, an Aurach gone suddenly crazy, usually in the night, and they’ve been destroyed in mud slides, but none of this ever prevented these Aurach valley people from building their houses by the Aurach again and again, however it’s a fact that Hoeller’s house is really the first, Roithamer once said, that can never be swept away by the rampaging Aurach and destroyed by a mud slide, because it was conceived and designed and built in full awareness of everything involved in the rising and the turbulence of the Aurach and all the destructive possibilities of the mud slides, and by a man like Hoeller at that, a man who built his house by the Aurach only because he is certain that this house of his cannot be swept away or destroyed and who took four years in all to design and build his house with all these destructive possibilities well in mind.