SCHUBERT
My brother Hans drowned himself in Chesapeake Bay. He was a musical prodigy who gave his first concert in Vienna at the age of nine. I never really knew him. My surviving brother Paul was also musically gifted, a brilliant pianist who was a pupil of Leschetizky and made his debut in 1913. I remember Paul saying to me once that of all musical tastes the love of Schubert required the least explanation. When one thinks of the huge misery of his life and sees in his work no trace of it at all — sees the complete absence in his music of all bitterness.
THE BANK
I had arranged with Ficker that I would be in the Österreichische Nationalbank on Swarzspanierstrasse at three o’clock. I was there early and sat down at a writing desk in a far corner. It was quiet and peacefuclass="underline" the afternoon rush had yet to begin and the occasional sound of heels on the marble floor as clients crossed from the entrance foyer to the rows of counters was soothing, like the background click of ivory dominoes or the ceramic kiss of billiard balls in the gaming room of my favorite café near the art schools …
Ficker was on time and accompanied by our poet. Ficker caught my eye and I gave a slight nod and then bent my head over the spectral papers on my desk. Ficker went to a teller’s guichet to inquire about the banker’s draft, leaving the poet standing momentarily alone in the middle of the marble floor, gazing around him like a peasant at the high dim vaults of the ceiling and the play of afternoon sunshine on the ornamental brasswork of the chandeliers.
Georg—, as I shall refer to him, was a young man, twenty-seven years old — two years older than me — small and quite sturdily built, and, like many small men, seemed to have been provided with a head designed for a bigger body altogether. His head was crude- and heavy-looking, its proportions exaggerated by his bristly, close-cropped hair. He was clean-shaven. He had a weak mouth, the upper lip overhung the bottom one slightly, and a thick triangular nose. He had low brows and slightly Oriental-looking, almond-shaped eyes. He was what my mother would have called “an ugly customer.”
He stood now, looking expressionlessly about him, swaying slightly, as if buffeted by an invisible crowd. He appeared at once ill and strong — pale-faced, ugly, dark-eyed, but with something about the set of his shoulders, the way his feet were planted on the ground, that suggested reserves of strength. Indeed, the year before, Ficker had told me, he had almost died from an overdose of Veronal that would have killed an ordinary man in an hour or two. Since his school days, it transpired, he had been a compulsive user of narcotic drugs and was also an immoderate drinker. At school he used chloroform to intoxicate himself. He was now a qualified dispensing chemist, a career he had taken up, so Ficker informed me, solely because it gave him access to more effective drugs. I found this single-mindedness oddly impressive. To train for two years at the University of Vienna as a pharmacist, to pass the necessary exams to qualify, testified to an uncommon dedication. Ficker had given me some of his poems to read. I could not understand them at all; their images for me were strangely haunting and evocative but finally entirely opaque. But I liked their tone; their tone seemed to me to be quite remarkable.
I watched him now, discreetly, as Ficker completed the preliminary documentation and signaled him over to endorse the banker’s draft. Ficker — I think this was a mistake — presented the check to him with a small flourish and shook him by the hand, as if he had just won first prize in a lottery. I could sense that Georg knew very little of what was going on. I saw him turn the check over immediately so as to hide the amount from his own eyes. He exchanged a few urgent words with Ficker, who smiled encouragingly and patted him on the arm. Ficker was very happy, almost gleeful — in his role as the philanthropist’s go-between he was vicariously enjoying what he imagined would be Georg’s astonishment. But he was wrong. I knew it the instant Georg turned over the check and read the amount: 20,000 crowns. A thriving dispensing chemist would have to work six or seven years to earn a similar sum. I saw the check flutter and tremble in his fingers. I saw Georg blanch and swallow violently several times. He put the back of his hand to his lips and his shoulders heaved. He reached out to a pillar for support, bending over from the waist. His body convulsed in a spasm as he tried to control his writhing stomach. I knew then that he was an honest man for he had the honest man’s profound fear of extreme good fortune. Ficker snatched the check from his shaking fingers as Georg appeared to totter. He uttered a faint cry as warm bile and vomit shot from his mouth to splash and splatter on the cool marble of the Nationalbank’s flagged floor.
A GOOD LIFE — A GOOD DEATH
I got to know Ficker quite well over our various meetings about the division and disposal of my benefaction. Once in our discussions the subject of suicide came up and he seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that scarcely a day went by when I did not think about it. But I explained to him that if I could not get along with life and the world, then to commit suicide would be the ultimate admission of failure. I pointed out that this notion was the very essence of ethics and morality. For if anything is not to be allowed, then surely that must be suicide. For if suicide is allowed, then anything is allowed.
Sometimes I think that a good life should end in a death that one could welcome. Perhaps, even, it is only a good death that allows us to call a life “good.”
Georg, I believe, has nearly died many times. For example, shortly before the Veronal incident he almost eliminated himself by accident. Georg lived for a time in Innsbruck. One night, after a drinking bout in a small village near the city, he decided to walk home. At some stage on his journey back, overcome by tiredness, he decided to lie down in the snow and sleep. When he awoke in the morning the world had been replaced by a turbid white void. For a moment he thought … but almost immediately he realized he had been covered in the night by a new fall of snow. In fact it was about forty centimeters deep. He heaved himself to his feet, brushed off his clothes and, with a clanging, gonging headache, completed his journey to Innsbruck. Ficker related all this to me.
How I wish I had been passing that morning! The first sleepy traveler along that road when Georg awoke. In the still, crepuscular light, that large lump on the verge begins to stir, some cracks and declivities suddenly deform the smooth contours, then a fist punches free and finally that crude ugly face emerges, with its frosty beret of snow, staring stupidly, blinking, spitting …
THE WAR
The war saved my life. I really do not know what I would have done without it. On 7 August, the day war was declared on Russia, I enlisted as a volunteer gunner in the artillery for the duration and was instructed to report to a garrison artillery regiment in Cracow. In my elation I was reluctant to go straight home to pack my bags (my family had by now all returned to Vienna), so I took a taxi to the Café Museum.
I should say that I joined the army because it was my civic duty, yet I was even more glad to enlist because I knew at that time I had to do something, I had to subject myself to the rigors of a harsh routine that would divert me from my intellectual work. I had reached an impasse and the impossibility of ever proceeding further filled me with morbid despair.
By the time I reached the Café Museum it was about six o’clock in the evening. (I liked this café because its interior was modern: its square rooms were lined with square honeycolored oak paneling, hung with prints of drawings by Charles Dana Gibson.) Inside, it was busy, the air noisy with speculation about the war. It was warm and muggy, the atmosphere suffused with the reek of beer and cigar smoke. The patrons were mostly young men, students from the nearby art schools, clean-shaven, casually and unaffectedly dressed. So I was a little surprised to catch a glimpse in one corner of a uniform. I pushed through the crowd to see who it was.