England. England, as is well known, is an island unto itself. Travelling to England takes an entire day. 30 October 1980. Ernst Herbeck. — We left. It was not far now to the St Agnes home. When we parted, Ernst, standing on tiptoe and bowing slightly, took his hat from his head and with it, as he turned away, executed a sweeping motion which ended with him putting the hat back on; a performance which seemed to be, at the same time, both childishly easy and an astonishing feat of artistry. This gesture, like the manner in which he had greeted me that morning, put me in mind of someone who had travelled with a circus for many years.
The train journey from Vienna to Venice has left scarcely any trace in my memory. For what may have been an hour I watched the lights of the southwestern metropolitan sprawl pass by, till at length, lulled by the speed of the train, which was like an analgesic after the never-ending tramping through Vienna, I fell asleep. And it was in that sleep, with everything outside long since plunged into darkness, that I beheld a landscape that I have never forgotten. The lower portion of the scene was almost immersed in the approaching night. A woman was pushing a pram along a field track towards a group of buildings, on one of which, a dilapidated pub, the name Josef Jelinek was painted in large letters over the gabled entrance. Mountains dark with forests rose above the rooftops, the jagged black summits silhouetted against the evening light. Higher than them all, though, was the tip of the Schneeberg, glowing, translucent, throwing out fire and sparks, towering into the dying brightness of a sky across which the strangest of greyish-pink cloud formations were moving, while visible between them were the winter planets and a crescent moon. In my dream I was in no doubt that the volcano was the Schneeberg, any more than I doubted that the countryside, above which I presently rose through a glittering shower of rain, was Argentina, an infinitely vast and deep green pastureland with clumps of trees and countless herds of horses. I awoke only as the train, which for so long had been threading the valleys at a steady pace, was racing out of the mountains and down to the plains below. I pulled down the window. Swathes of mist were ripping past me. We were hurtling onwards at breakneck speed. Pointed wedges of blue-black rock thrust up against the train. I leaned out and looked upwards, trying in vain to make out the tops of the fearful formations. Dark, narrow, ragged valleys opened up, mountain streams and waterfalls threw up white spray in a night on the edge of dawn, so close that their cold breath against my face made me shiver. It occurred to me that this was the Friaul, and with that thought came naturally the memory of the destruction which that region had suffered some few months before. Gradually the daybreak revealed landslides, great boulders, collapsed buildings, mounds of rubble and piles of stones, and here and there encampments of people living in tents. Scarcely a light was burning anywhere in the entire area. The low-lying cloud drifting in from the Alpine valleys and across that desolated country was conjoined in my mind's eye with a Tiepolo painting which I have often looked at for hours. It shows the plague-ravaged town of Este on the plain, seemingly unscathed. In the background are mountains, and a smoking summit. The light diffused through the picture seems to have been painted as if through a veil of ash. One could almost suppose it was this light that drove the people out of the town into the open fields, where, after reeling about for some time, they were finally laid low by the scourge they carried within them. In the centre foreground of the painting lies a mother dead of the plague, her child still alive in her arms. Kneeling to the left is St Thecla, interceding for the inhabitants of the town, her face upturned to where the heavenly hosts are traversing the aether. Holy Thecla, pray for us, that we may be safely delivered from all contagion and sudden death and most mercifully saved from perdition. Amen.
When the train had arrived in Venice, I first went to the station barber's for a shave, and then stepped out into the forecourt of Ferrovia Santa Lucia. The dampness of the autumn morning still hung thick among the houses and over the Grand Canal. Heavily laden, the boats went by, sitting low in the water. With a surging rush they came from out of the mist, pushing ahead of them the aspic-green waves, and disappearing again in the white swathes of the air. The helmsmen stood erect and motionless at the stern. Their hands on the tiller, they gazed fixedly ahead. I walked from the Fondamenta across the broad square, up Rio Terrà Lista di Spagna and across the Canale di Cannaregio. As you enter into the heart of that city, you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment. Scarcely has someone made an appearance than he has quit the stage again by another exit. These brief exhibitions are of an almost theatrical obscenity and at the same time have an air of conspiracy about them, into which one is drawn against one's will. If you walk behind someone in a deserted alleyway, you have only to quicken your step slightly to instill a little fear into the person you are following. And equally, you can feel like a quarry yourself. Confusion and ice-cold terror alternate. It was with a certain feeling of liberation, therefore, that I came upon the Grand Canal once again, near San Marcuola, after wandering about for the best part of an hour below the tall houses of the ghetto. Hurriedly, like the native Venetians on their way to work, I boarded a vaporetto. The mist had now dispersed. Not far from me, on one of the rear benches, there sat, and in fact very nearly lay, a man in a worn green loden coat whom I immediately recognised as King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He had grown somewhat older and rather gaunt, and curiously he was talking to a dwarfish lady in the strongly nasal English of the upper classes, but otherwise everything about him was right: the sickly pallor of the face, the wide-open childlike eyes, the wavy hair, the carious teeth. Il re Lodovico to the life. In all likelihood, I thought to myself, he had come by water to the città inquinata Venezia merda. After we had alighted I watched him walk away down the Riva degli Schiavoni in his billowing Tyrolean cloak, becoming smaller and smaller not only on account of the increasing distance but also because, as he went on talking incessantly, he bent down deeper and deeper to his diminutive companion. I did not follow them, but instead took my morning coffee in one of the bars on the Riva, reading the Gazzettino, making notes for a treatise on King Ludwig in Venice, and leafing through Grillparzer's Italian Diary, written in 1819. I had bought it in Vienna, because when I am travelling I often feel as Grillparzer did on his journeys. Nothing pleases me, any more than it did him; the sights I find infinitely disappointing, one and all; and I sometimes think that I would have done far better to stay at home with my maps and timetables. Grillparzer paid even the Doge's Palace no more than a distinctly grudging respect. Despite its delicately crafted arcades and turrets, he wrote, the Doge's palace was inelegant and reminded him of a crocodile. What put this comparison into his head he did not know. The resolutions passed here by the Council of State must surely be mysterious, immutable and harsh, he observed, calling the palace an enigma in stone. The nature of that enigma was apparently dread, and for as long as he was in Venice Grillparzer could not shake off a sense of the uncanny. Trained in the law himself, he dwelt on that palace where the legal authorities resided and in the inmost cavern of which, as he put it, the Invisible Principle brooded. And those who had faded away, the persecutors and the persecuted, the murderers and the victims, rose up before him with their heads enshrouded. Shivers of fever beset the poor hypersensitive man.