I would kill myself. Wertheimer actually played better than all the other students at the Mozarteum, that has to be said, but after hearing Glenn that wasn’t enough for him. The level Wertheimer played at can be reached by anyone who sets himself the goal of becoming famous, achieving mastery over his instrument, if he spends the necessary decades of work at his piano, I thought, but when he comes across a Glenn Gould and has heard such a Glenn Gould play, he’s a broken man if he’s like Wertheimer, I thought. Wertheimer’s funeral didn’t even last an hour. At first I had wanted to put on a so-called dark suit for his funeral, but then I decided to go to the funeral in my traveling clothes, it had suddenly struck me as ridiculous to adapt myself to a sartorial mourning convention I’ve always hated, as I have all sartorial conventions, so I went to the funeral in the clothes I had on when I started my trip to Chur, in my usual suit. At first I had thought I would walk to the Chur cemetery, but then I got into a taxi and had myself driven to the main gate. I had carefully pocketed the telegram from Wertheimer’s sister, whose name is now Duttweiler, for it stated the exact time of the funeral. I’d thought that it was an accident, that Wertheimer had perhaps been run over by a car in Chur, since I wasn’t aware of Wertheimer having any acute or life-threatening illness I had considered every possible kind of accident, above all however traffic accidents, which are so common today, but it didn’t occur to me that he could have committed suicide. Although this thought, as I now see, I thought, would have been the most logical one. That the Duttweiler woman sent the telegram to my address in Vienna and not to Madrid surprised me, for how could Wertheimer’s sister have known that I was in Vienna and not in Madrid, I thought. It still isn’t clear to me how she knew she could reach me in Vienna and not in Madrid, I thought. Perhaps she did have some contact with her brother before his suicide, I thought. Of course I also would have come from Madrid to Chur, I thought, even if that would have been more difficult. Or perhaps wouldn’t have been, since Chur is a stone’s throw from Zurich. I again showed several people my apartment in Vienna, which I’ve wanted to sell for years without ever finding the appropriate buyer, the ones who showed up this time were also out of the question. Either they don’t want to pay the price I’m asking or they withdraw for other reasons. I had intended to sell my apartment in Vienna as it stands, that is everything in it, but for that all prospective buyers had to look me in the face and not one of them was able to look me in the face, as they say. I also wondered whether it wasn’t senseless to part with my Vienna apartment just now, in these difficult times, to give it up in a time of total uncertainty. No one is selling now if they’re not absolutely forced to, I thought, and I wasn’t forced to sell my apartment. I still have Desselbrunn, I had always thought, I don’t need the Vienna apartment, for I live in Madrid and I’m not planning to return to Vienna, ever, I had always thought, but then I saw the horrible faces of all those buyers and lost all idea of selling my Vienna apartment. And in the final analysis, I thought, Desselbrunn won’t be enough in time, it’s better to have one foot in Vienna and one in Desselbrunn, than to have just Desselbrunn, and I thought that in fact I wouldn’t return to Desselbrunn, but I won’t sell Desselbrunn either. I won’t sell the Vienna apartment and I won’t sell Desselbrunn, I’ll give up the Vienna apartment, which of course I’ve already given up, just as I’ll give up and have already given up Desselbrunn, but I won’t sell Vienna or Desselbrunn, I thought, I don’t need to. If I’m honest I actually have enough of a cushion not to have to sell Desselbrunn or Vienna, to sell nothing at all. I’d be an idiot to sell, I thought. And so I have Vienna and I have Desselbrunn, even if I don’t use Vienna or Desselbrunn, I thought, but in the background I have Vienna and Desselbrunn and as a result my independence is a much greater independence than if I didn’t have Vienna or Desselbrunn, or didn’t have Vienna and Desselbrunn, I thought. The funerals that aren’t supposed to be noticed are scheduled for five o’clock in the morning, I thought, and Frau Duttweiler as well as the cemetery officials in Chur had wanted to avoid any commotion with Wertheimer’s funeral. Wertheimer’s sister said several times that her brother’s funeral was merely provisional, she intended one day to transport her brother to Vienna, to have his remains put in the Wertheimer family grave in the cemetery in Döbling. At the moment, however, transporting her brother was out of the question, she didn’t say why, I thought. The Wertheimer crypt is one of the biggest in the Döbling cemetery, I thought. Perhaps next fall Wertheimer’s sister, Frau Duttweiler, had said, I thought. Herr Duttweiler had worn tails, I thought, and led Wertheimer’s sister to the grave, which had been dug completely at the other end of the Chur cemetery, that is at the edge of the garbage heap. Since no one said anything and the pallbearers lowered the coffin with Wertheimer into the grave with unbelievably quick and deft movements, the funeral didn’t last more than twenty minutes. A man dressed in black who apparently worked for the funeral home, was undoubtedly also the owner of the funeral establishment, I thought, had wanted to say something, but Herr Duttweiler had cut his speech off even before he had begun his speech. I hadn’t been able to buy flowers for the funeral, in my entire life I’ve never done that, the fact that the Duttweilers also hadn’t brought any flowers was all the more depressing, probably, I thought, because Wertheimer’s sister was of the opinion that flowers weren’t fitting for her brother’s funeral, and this opinion was correct, I thought, even if this fully flowerless funeral had a chilling effect on all present. Herr Duttweiler gave each pallbearer two bills while they were still standing beside the open grave, which seemed a crude gesture but nonetheless fit the whole funeral procedure. Wertheimer’s sister looked down in the grave, her husband didn’t, I didn’t either. I walked out of the cemetery behind Herr and Frau Duttweiler. Before the gate they both turned to me and extended an invitation to have lunch with them, which however I didn’t accept. That certainly wasn’t correct, I thought now in the inn. I probably could have learned something important and useful from both of them and particularly from Wertheimer’s sister, I thought, but I took my leave and suddenly stood there alone. Chur no longer interested me and I went to the station and left for Vienna with the next train. It is completely natural that we should think about the deceased intensively after a funeral, especially if he was a close friend, even more especially if he was an intimate friend with whom we have been linked for decades, and a so-called school friend is always an extraordinary companion in our lives and existences because he is so to speak a prime witness to our situation in life, I thought, and throughout the trip through Buchs and across the Liechtenstein border my thoughts circled obsessively around Wertheimer. That he was actually born into a giant fortune, all his life hadn’t had any use for this giant fortune, had always been unhappy with this giant fortune, I thought. That his parents had been unable, as they say, to open his eyes, that they were the ones who depressed the child, I thought. I had a depressing childhood, Wertheimer always said, I had a depressing adolescence, he said, I had a depressing period in college, I had a father who depressed me, a mother who depressed me, depressing teachers, an environment that constantly depressed me. That they (his parents and teachers) always wounded his feelings and equally neglected his mind, I thought. That he never had a home, I thought, still standing in the restaurant, because his parents didn’t give him a home, because they weren’t able to give him a home. That he had spoken of his family like no other because his kin hadn’t been a family. That finally he hadn’t hated anything more than his parents, whom he always characterized as his undoers and destroyers. That after the death of his parents, who had driven off a cliff in the area near Bressanone, he ultimately had no one but his sister because he had offended everybody else including me and had completely taken possession of his sister, I thought, in unscrupulous fashion. That he always asked for everything, never gave anything, I thought. That he went to the Floridsdorf bridge again and again to throw himself off without actually ever throwing himself off, that he studied music to become a piano virtuoso without becoming a piano virtuoso, that finally, as he himself always said, he fled into the human sciences without knowing what these human sciences were, I thought. That on the one hand he overestimated, on the other hand underestimated his possibilities, I thought. That he kept asking me for more than he gave me, I thought. That his demands on me, as on others, were always too high and that these demands of his could never be met and as a result he had to become unhappy, I thought. Wertheimer was born an unhappy person, he knew that, but like all unhappy people he didn’t want to admit that he