remained faithful to the hotel for over forty years. It was a so-called good hotel, in the center of town, I no longer remember the name, perhaps it was the Sunshine Inn, if I’m not mistaken, although it was located in the murkiest spot in town. The taverns in Chur served the worst wine and the most tasteless sausages. My father always had dinner with us in the hotel, ordered a so-called appetizer and called Chur a pleasant stopover point, which I never understood, for I had always found Chur particularly distasteful. Even more than the Salzburgers, the Churians struck me as despicable in their Alpine cretinism. I always felt as if I were being punished when I had to go to St. Moritz with my parents, sometimes only with my father, had to stop over in Chur, had to stay in that dreary hotel with windows looking out on a narrow, dank street. In Chur I had never been able to sleep, I thought, I had always lain awake in complete despair. Chur is actually the gloomiest place I’ve ever seen, not even Salzburg is as gloomy and, in the final analysis, as sickening as Chur. And the Churians are just the same. A person can be ruined for life in Chur, even if he spends only one night there. But even today it isn’t possible to go by train from Vienna to St. Moritz in a single day, I thought. I was spending the night outside Chur because, as mentioned, I had such a depressing memory of Chur from my childhood. I simply stayed on the train past Chur and got out between Chur and Zizers where I had seen a sign for a hotel. Blauer Adler, I read the next morning, the day of the funeral, as I left the hotel. Of course I hadn’t slept. Glenn wasn’t actually crucial for Wertheimer’s suicide, I thought, it was his sister’s moving out, her marriage with the Swiss. By the way, I had listened to Glenn’s Goldberg Variations in my apartment in Vienna before leaving for Chur, over and over again from the beginning. Had got up again and again from my chair and paced up and down in my study, obsessed with the idea that Glenn was actually playing the Goldberg Variations in my apartment; while pacing back and forth I tried to discover the difference between his interpretation in these records and his interpretation twenty-eight years earlier for Horowitz and us, that is Wertheimer and myself, in the Mozarteum. I couldn’t detect any difference. Glenn had already played the Goldberg Variations twenty-eight years before exactly as he did in these records, which by the way he had sent me for my fiftieth birthday, he gave them to one of my New York friends as she was leaving for Vienna. I listened to him play the Goldberg Variations and remembered how he thought he’d immortalized himself with this interpretation, perhaps he’s done it too, I thought, for I can’t imagine that there will ever be a piano player who plays the Goldberg Variations like him, that is with as much genius as Glenn. I was listening to his Goldberg Variations for the sake of my work on Glenn and suddenly noticed the deplorable state of my apartment, which I hadn’t entered for three years. Nor had anyone else entered my apartment in that time, I thought. I had been gone for three years, had withdrawn completely in the Calle del Prado, hadn’t been able to even imagine returning to Vienna in these three years and hadn’t thought about it either, never again to Vienna, that profoundly despised city, to Austria, that profoundly despised country. That was my salvation, to leave Vienna forever so to speak, take up residence in Madrid, which has become the ideal center of my existence, not in time but from the very first moment I arrived, I thought. In Vienna I would have been devoured bit by bit, as Wertheimer always said, suffocated by the Viennese and generally destroyed by the Austrians. Everything about me is such that it had to be suffocated in Vienna and destroyed in Austria, I thought, just as Wertheimer also thought that the Viennese had to suffocate him, that the Austrians had to destroy him. But Wertheimer wasn’t one to leave for Madrid or Lisbon or Rome at the drop of a hat, unlike me he wasn’t up to that. So he was always left only with the possibility of escaping to Traich, but in Traich everything was even worse for him. Alone so to speak with the human sciences in Traich, he had to lose out, had to perish. Together with his sister, yes, but alone with his human sciences in Traich, no, I thought. He finally so hated the city of Chur, which he didn’t know at all, hated the very name of the city of Chur, the word Chur, that he had to go there to kill himself, I thought. The word Chur just like the word Zizers finally forced him to go to Switzerland and string himself up from a tree, naturally from a tree not far from his sister’s house. Preordained was one of his expressions, the idea fits his suicide exactly, I thought, his suicide was preordained, I thought. All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it’s in my genes, as Wertheimer said, I thought. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless world in which everything is always devastating and deadly. That’s why he especially loved Dostoevsky and all his disciples, Russian literature in general, because it actually is a deadly literature, but also the depressing French philosophers. He most loved to read and study medical texts, and again and again his walks took him to hospitals and sanatoria, to nursing homes and morgues. He kept this habit to the very end. Although he feared hospitals and sanatoria and nursing homes and morgues, he always went into these hospitals and sanatoria and nursing homes and morgues. And if he didn’t go to a hospital because he couldn’t, he would read articles or books about sick people and diseases, and books or articles about the terminally ill if he didn’t have the opportunity to go to a sanatorium for the terminally ill, or read articles and books about old people if he couldn’t visit a nursing home, and articles and books about the dead if he hadn’t had the opportunity to visit a morgue. Naturally we want to have a practical relationship with the things that fascinate us, he once said, that is above all a relationship with the sick and the terminally ill and the old and the dead, because a theoretical relationship isn’t enough, but for long periods we depend on a theoretical relationship, just as we often depend on a theoretical relationship as far as music is concerned, so Wertheimer, I thought. He was fascinated with people in their unhappiness, not with people themselves but with their unhappiness, and he found it wherever there were people, I thought, he was addicted to people because he was addicted to unhappiness. Man is unhappiness, he said over and over, I thought, only an idiot would claim otherwise. To be born is to be unhappy, he said, and as long as we live we reproduce this unhappiness, only death puts an end to it. That doesn’t mean that we are only unhappy, our unhappiness is the precondition for the fact that we can also be happy, only through the detour of unhappiness can we be happy, he said, I thought. My parents have never shown me anything but unhappiness, he said, that’s the truth, I thought, and yet they were always happy, so he couldn’t say that his parents had been unhappy people, just as he couldn’t say they’d been happy, just as he couldn’t say of himself he’d been a happy person or an unhappy one, because all people are simultaneously unhappy and happy, and sometimes unhappiness is greater in them than happiness and vice versa. But the fact remains that people are more unhappy than happy, he said, I thought. He was an