own imagination but also, to this day, in that of the people of Greifenstein who live at the foot of the cliff. I had first visited the castle in the late 1960s, and from the terrace of the restaurant had looked down across the gleaming river and the waterlands, on which the shadows of evening were falling. Now, on that bright October day when Ernst and I, sitting beside each other, savoured that wonderful view,
a blue haze lay upon the sea of foliage that reaches right up to the walls of the castle. Currents of air were stirring the tops of the trees, and stray leaves were riding the breeze so high that little by little they vanished from sight. At times, Ernst was very far away. For minutes on end he left his fork sticking upright in his pastry. In the old days, he observed at one point, he had collected postage stamps, from Austria, Switzerland and the Argentine. Then he smoked another cigarette in silence, and when he stubbed it out he repeated, as if in amazement at his entire past life, that single word "Argentine", which possibly struck him as far too outlandish. That morning, I think, we were both within an inch of learning to fly, or at least I might have managed as much as is required for a decent crash. But we never catch the propitious moment. - I only know that the view from Burg Greifenstein is no longer the same. A dam has been built below the castle. The course of the river was straightened,
and the sad sight of it now will soon extinguish the memory of what it once was.
We made our way back on foot. For both of us the walk proved too long. Downcast we strode on in the autumn sunshine, side by side. The houses of Kritzendorf seemed to go on forever. Of the people who lived there not a sign was to be seen. They were all having lunch, clattering the cutlery and plates. A dog leapt at a green-painted iron gate, quite beside itself, as if it had taken leave of its senses. It was a large black Newfoundland, its natural gentleness broken by ill-treatment, long confinement or even the crystal clarity of the autumn day. In the villa behind the iron fence nothing stirred. Nobody came to the window, not even a curtain moved. Again and again the animal ran up and hurled itself at the gate, only occasionally pausing to eye us where we stood as if transfixed. As we walked on I could feel the chill of terror in my limbs. Ernst turned to look back once more at the black dog, which had now stopped barking and was standing motionless in the midday sun. Perhaps we should have let it out. It would probably have ambled along beside us, like a good beast, while its evil spirit might have stalked among the people of Kritzendorf in search of another host, and indeed might have entered them all simultaneously, so not one of them would have been able to lift a spoon or fork again.
We finally reached Klosterneuburg by way of Albrecht-strasse at the upper end of which there is a gruesome building banged together out of breezeblocks and prefab panels. The ground-floor windows are boarded up. Where the roof should be, only a rusty array of iron bars protrude into the sky. Looking at it was like witnessing a hideous crime. Ernst put his best foot forward, averting his eyes from this fearful monument. A little further on, the children inside the primary school were singing, the most appealing sounds coming from those who could not quite manage to hit the right notes. Ernst stood still, turned to me as though we were both actors on a stage, and in a theatrical manner uttered a statement which appeared to me as if he had committed it to memory a long time ago: That is a very fine sound, borne upon the air, and uplifts one's heart. Some two years previously I had stood once before outside that school. I had gone to Klosterneuburg with Clara to visit her grandmother, who had been taken into the old people's home in Martinsstrasse. On the way back we went down Albrechtstrasse and Clara gave in to the temptation to visit the school she had attended as a child. In one of the classrooms, the very one where she had been taught in the early 1950s, the selfsame schoolmistress was still teaching, almost thirty years later, her voice quite unchanged — still warning the children to keep at their work, as she had done then, and also not to chatter. Alone in the entrance hall, surrounded by closed doors that had seemed at one time like mighty portals, Clara was overcome by tears, as she later told me. At all events, when she came out she was in such a state of distress as I had never seen her in before. We returned to her grandmother's flat in Ottakring, and neither on the way there nor that entire evening did she regain her composure following this unexpected encounter with her past.
The St Martin's home is a large, rectangular building with massive stone walls dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Clara's grandmother, Anna Goldsteiner, who was afflicted with that extreme kind of forgetfulness which soon renders even the simplest of everyday tasks impossible to perform, shared a dormitory on the fourth floor. Through the barred, deeply recessed windows there was a view down onto the tops of the trees on the steeply sloping ground to the rear of the house. It was like looking upon a heaving sea. The mainland, it seemed to me, had already sunk below the horizon. A foghorn droned. Further and further out the ship plied its passage upon the waters. From the engine room came the steady throb of the turbines. Out in the corridor, stray passengers went past, some of them on the arm of a nurse. It took an eternity, on these slow-motion walks, for them to cross from one side of the doorway to the other. How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time. The parquet floor shifted beneath my feet. A low murmuring, rustling, dragging, praying and moaning filled the room. Clara was sitting beside her grandmother, stroking her hand. The semolina was doled out. The foghorn sounded again. A little way further out in the green and hilly water landscape, another steamer passed. On the bridge, his legs astride and the ribbons on his cap flying, stood a mariner, signalling in semaphore with two colourful flags. Clara held her grandmother close as they parted, and promised to come again soon. But barely three weeks later Anna Goldsteiner, who in the end, to her own amazement, could no longer even remember the names of the three husbands she had survived, died of a slight cold. At times it does not take much. For weeks after we learned of her death I could not put out of my mind the blue, half-empty pack of Bad Ischi salt under the sink in her council flat in Lorenz Mandi Gasse and which she would never now be able to use up.
Footsore from our walk, Ernst and I emerged from Albrechtstrasse onto the town square, which sloped slightly to one side. For a while we stood irresolute on the curb in the dazzling midday sun before trying, like two strangers, to cross the road amid the infernal traffic, almost being run down by a gravel truck. Once we were on the shady side of the street we dived into a bar. At first the dark that enveloped us as we entered was so impenetrable for eyes accustomed to the glare outside that we were obliged to sit down at the first table we came to. Only gradually and partially did our sight return and other people become apparent in the gloom, some of them bent low over their plates, others sitting curiously upright or leaning back, but all of them without exception on their own, a silent gathering, the shadow of the waitress threading among them, as if she were the bearer of secret messages between the several guests and the corpulent landlord. Ernst declined to eat anything, and instead took one of the cigarettes I offered him. A time or two he appreciatively turned the packet with its English wording in his hands. He inhaled the smoke deeply, with the air of a connoisseur. The cigarette, he had written in one of his poems, is a monopoly and must be smoked. So that it goes up in flames.
And, putting down his beer glass after taking a first draught, he observed that he had dreamed about English Boy Scouts last night. What I then told him about England, about the county in East Anglia where I live, the great wheatfields which in the autumn are transformed into a barren brown expanse stretching further than the eye can see, the rivers up which the incoming tide drives the sea water, and the times when the land is flooded and one can cross the fields in boats, as the Egyptians once did — all of this Ernst listened to with the patient lack of interest of a man who has long been familiar with every detail he is being told. I then asked if he would write something in my notebook, and this he did without the slightest hesitation with the ballpoint which he took from his jacket pocket, resting his left hand on the open page. His head to one side, his brow furrowed in concentration, his eyelids half-closed, he wrote: