a welcome guest in her inn. But such refined gentlemen have no idea what it means to live the way she does, to run an inn like the Dichtel Mill. They (the refined gentlemen) always talked about matters she didn’t understand, didn’t have any worries and spent all their time thinking about what they should do with their money and their time. She herself had never had enough money and never enough time and hadn’t even been unhappy once, in contrast to those she called refined gentlemen, who always had enough money and enough time and constantly talked about their unhappiness. She was totally incapable of understanding how Wertheimer could always tell her he was an unhappy person. Often he sat in the restaurant until one in the morning, bemoaning his fate, and she took pity on him, as she said, took him up to her room because he no longer wanted to go back to Traich at night. That people like Herr Wertheimer had every opportunity to be happy and never even once took advantage of this opportunity, she said. Such a noble house and so much unhappiness in one person, she said. Basically Wertheimer’s suicide didn’t come as a surprise to her, but he shouldn’t have done that, hanged himself from a tree in Zizers right in front of his sister’s house, she wouldn’t forgive him for that one. The way she said Herr Wertheimer was moving and sickening at the same time. Once I went to him to ask for money, but he didn’t give me any, she said, I could have used some cash for a new refrigerator. But they zip their pockets shut, those rich people, she said, as soon as you ask for money. And yet Wertheimer had thrown millions out the window for the fun of it. She considered me to be like Wertheimer, well-to-do, in fact rich and inhuman, for she said spontaneously that all well-to-do and rich people are inhuman. But was she human then? I had asked her, to which she gave no answer. She stood up and went over to the beer-truck drivers who had parked their huge truck in front of the inn. I was thinking about what the innkeeper had said and for that reason didn’t get up right away to go to Traich but remained sitting in order to observe the beer-truck drivers and especially the innkeeper, who without a doubt was on more intimate terms with the beer-truck drivers than with any of her other customers. Beer-truck drivers have fascinated me since my earliest childhood, so too that day. I was fascinated by the way they unloaded the beer kegs and rolled them through the lobby, then tapped the first one for the innkeeper and sat down with her at the next table. As a child I had wanted to become a beer-truck driver, admired beer-truck drivers, I thought, couldn’t look often enough at beer-truck drivers. Sitting at the next table and watching the beer-truck drivers I again fell prey to this sentiment from my childhood, but I didn’t dwell on it for long, instead I got up and left the Dichtel Mill for Traich, not without having told the innkeeper that I would be back toward evening or even earlier, depending, and that I was counting on an evening meal. While going out I heard the beer-truck drivers ask the innkeeper who I was and since I have sharper ears than anybody I also heard her whisper my name and add that I was a friend of Wertheimer’s, the fool who’d killed himself in Switzerland. Basically I would have preferred to sit in the restaurant and listen to the beer-truck drivers and the innkeeper instead of going to Traich now, I thought while leaving, would have liked most of all to sit at the same table with the beer-truck drivers and drink a glass of beer with them. Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren’t the way we’ve pictured them and that we absolutely don’t belong with them, as we’ve talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion. Wertheimer often described how he always failed in his effort to fit in, to be together with so-called simple folk and thus with the so-called people, and he often reported that he went to the Dichtel Mill with the idea of sitting at the table of simple people, only to have to admit after the first such attempt that it was a mistake to think that individuals like him, Wertheimer, or like me could just sit down at the table of simple people. Individuals like us have cut themselves off from the table of simple people at an early age, he said, as I recall, have been born at quite a different table, he said, not at the table of simple people. Individuals like us are naturally drawn to the table of simple people, he said. But we have no business sitting at the table of simple people, as he said, as I recall. To lead a beer-truck driver’s existence, I thought, to load and unload beer kegs day after day and roll them through the lobbies of inns throughout Upper Austria and always sit down with these same decrepit innkeepers and fall into bed dead-tired every day for thirty years, for forty years. I took a deep breath and went as fast as I could to Traich. In the country we’re confronted with all the unresolvable problems of the world for all time and in a much more drastic manner than in the city, where, if we want to, we can completely anonymize ourselves, I thought, the hideousness and awfulness of the country hit us right in the face and we can’t get away from them, and this hideousness and awfulness, if we live in the country, are sure to destroy us in the shortest time, that hasn’t changed, I thought, since I’ve been away. If I go back to Desselbrunn I’ll definitely go to rack and ruin, a return to Desselbrunn is out of the question, not even after five, six years, I said to myself, and the longer I stay away the more necessary it is for me not to go back to Desselbrunn, to stay in Madrid or in another big city, I said to myself, just not in the country and never again in Upper Austria, I thought. It was cold and windy. The absolute madness of going to Traich, of having got out in Attnang-Puchheim, gone to Wankham, came to my mind. In this region Wertheimer had had to go crazy, indeed in the end lose his mind, I thought, and I said to myself that he always was exactly the loser that Glenn Gould had always spoken of, Wertheimer was a typical dead-end guy, I said to myself, he was sure to go from one dead end to another dead end, for Traich had always been a dead end, as was later Vienna, naturally Salzburg too, for Salzburg had been nothing but an uninterrupted dead end for him, the Mozarteum nothing but a dead end, just as the Vienna Academy, just as the whole business of studying piano had been a dead end, in general people like him have a choice only between one dead end and another one, I said to myself, without ever being able to extricate themselves from this dead-end mechanism. The loser was a born loser, I thought, he has always been the loser and if we observe the people around us carefully we notice that these people consist almost entirely of losers like him, I said to myself, of dead-end types like Wertheimer, whom Glenn Gould had pegged the moment he saw him as a dead-end type and loser and whom Glenn Gould had also first called the loser in his ruthless but thoroughly open Canadian-American manner, Glenn Gould had said out loud and without any embarrassment what the others