Thomas Bernhard
Woodcutters
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Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them
While everyone was waiting for the actor, who had promised to join the dinner party in the Gentzgasse after the premiere of The Wild Duck, I observed the Auersbergers carefully from the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation. I had not seen the couple for twenty years, and then, on the very day that our mutual friend Joana had died, I had met them by chance in the Graben, and without further ado I had accepted their invitation to this artistic dinner, as they described the supper they were giving. For twenty years I had not wanted to know anything about the Auersbergers; for twenty years I had not seen the Auersbergers, and in these twenty years the very mention of the name Auersberger had brought on third-degree nausea, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And now this couple is bringing me face to face once more with the life we led in the fifties. For twenty years I’ve avoided the Auersbergers, for twenty years I haven’t even met them, and then I have to run into them in the Graben, I thought. It had been a piece of monumental folly not only to go to the Graben in the first place, but to walk up and down the Graben several times, as I was in the habit of doing, at least since returning to Vienna from London: it was a street where I might have known I would be sure to meet the Auersbergers one day, and not only the Auersbergers, but all the other people I had been avoiding for the last twenty or thirty years, people with whom I had had close ties in the fifties, what the Auersbergers used to call close artistic ties, ties which I had severed a quarter of a century ago, when I got away from the Auersbergers and went to London, breaking,as they say, with all my Viennese acquaintances of that period, not wanting to see them again or have anything more to do with them. Going for a walk in the Graben, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, means nothing more nor less than walking straight into the social hell of Vienna and meeting the very people I have no wish to meet, people whose sudden appearance brings on all kinds of physical and mental strains. Hence in recent years, whenever I came over from London to Vienna, I had chosen different routes for my walks, avoiding not only the Graben, but also the Kohlmarkt and, of course, the Kärntnerstrasse. I had avoided the Spiegelgasse, the Stallburggasse and the Dorotheergasse too, not to mention the dreaded Wollzeile and the Operngasse, where I have so often been trapped by the very people I most detest. But in recent weeks, I reflected as I sat in the wing chair, I had suddenly felt an urgent need to go to the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse, because the air there was healthy, and because I suddenly found it pleasant to mingle with the morning crowds, both in the Graben and in the Kärntnerstrasse, and no doubt also because I wanted to escape from the months of solitude in my Währing apartment, to get away from the isolation that had begun to deaden my brain. In recent weeks I had always found it relaxing, both mentally and physically, to walk along the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben, then back along the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. Walking back and forth like this was as beneficial to my mind as it was to my body, and in recent weeks I had walked up the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben and back every single day,as though there were nothing I needed so much as just to walk up and down the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. It was in the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben that I suddenly recovered my vitality and became myself again, after months of what I can only describe as mental and physical debility; walking along the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben and back I felt refreshed. AllI needto do is to walk up and down like this, I would think to myself, though that was not all I needed. Just to walk up and down, I kept on telling myself. And in fact it did enable me to start thinking again, even to philosophize, to take an interest once more in philosophy and literature, which had for so long been suppressed, even killed, within me. It was a mistake, as I now realize, to spend the winter in Vienna and not, like previous winters, in London, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. It was this long, sickening winter that killed off everything literary and philosophical there was inside me, and now I’ve made it all come back by walking up and down the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. And I actually attributed my Viennese mental condition, my restored mentalcondition, as I now felt able to call it, to the therapy I had first prescribed for myself in the middle of January, this Graben and Kärntnerstrasse therapy. This dreadful city of Vienna, I thought, having plunged me yet again into profound despair and utter hopelessness, has suddenly become the motor that enables my mind to function again as a living mind and my body as a living body; day by day I observed the progressive revival of mind and body, of everything inside me that had been dead during the whole of the winter; having blamed Vienna throughout the winter for my mental and physical atrophy, it was to Vienna that I now owed my restored vitality. I sat in the wing chair and silently paid tribute to the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben, ascribing my mental and physical recovery solely to my Kärntnerstrasse and Graben therapy; and I told myself that I naturally had to pay a price for this therapy, and meeting the Auersbergers in the Graben, I thought, was the price of its success. It’s a very high price, I thought, but it could have been much higher; after all I could have met much worse people in the Graben, for the Auersbergers aren’t the worst people in the world, at least not the very worst. All the same it’s bad enough to have met the Auersbergers in the Graben, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. A strong person, with strength of character to match, would have declined their invitation, I thought, but I’m not strong and I’ve no strength of character: on the contrary I’m the very weakest person, with the very weakest character, and that’s what makes me more or less everyone’s victim. And again I reflected that it had been a grave mistake to accept this couple’s invitation: having resolved to have nothing more to do with them for the rest of my life, I cross the Graben, only to be accosted by them; they ask me whether I’ve heard about Joana’s death, about her hanging herself, and then I go and accept their invitation. I momentarily gave way to the most shameful sentimentality, I thought, and the Auersbergers immediately took advantage of it; they took advantage of the suicide of our mutual friend Joana, I thought, to issue their invitation, which I at once accepted, though it would have been wiser to turn it down. But I didn’t have the time, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: they came up on me from behind and told me what I already knew — that Joana had hanged herself at Kilb, at her parents’ home — and then they invited me to dinner, to a veryartistic dinner, they stressed—all our friends from the old days.They’d actually begun to walk on ahead of me when they issued their invitation, I thought, and they were already a few yards in front when I said yes,accepting their invitation and saying I’d come to their dinner party in this hideous apartment in the Gentzgasse. They were carrying a number of parcels, paper-wrapped parcels from various well-known shops in the center of the city, and they were wearing the same English overcoats they had worn thirty years before for shopping expeditions to the city center. Everything about them was what is called shabby-genteel.