Naturally you were a naked princess,I said to Joana as she lay in bed. Andyou were a naked king,she replied. She tried to laugh, but could not. There was nothing touching about this last visit of mine, nothing sentimental, I thought, sitting in the wing chair — I found it simply nauseating. There were signs of a companion about the apartment — a pack of cigarettes here, an old tie there, a dirty sock, and so on. She told me several times that I had let her down. She could hardly sit up in bed; she tried several times, but each time she fell back. Youletme down, you letme down,she kept on saying. For the last few years, she said, she had lived by selling off the tapestries her husband had left behind. She had not heard from Fritz. And she had not heard from the others either — she meant the artistic crowd—she had heard nothing from anyof them. She asked me to go down to Dittrich’s and get two two-liter bottles of white wine. Go on! she said, just as she always had, Go on! Go on! She ordered me down to the liquor store, and I obeyed, just as I had done twenty or twenty-five years before. When I got back I put the two bottles by the bed and took my leave. There would have been no point in having any further conversation with her, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair. At the time I thought she was finished, yet she went on living for several years, and that was what amazed me most. I can truthfully say that until I learned of her death I had assumed that she must have been dead for years. Not having seen her or heard from her for so many years, I had simply forgotten about her, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. The truth is that at times we are so close to certain people that we believe there is a lifelong bond between us, and then suddenly they vanish from our memory overnight, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. It’s the way with actors, I told myself, sitting in the Auersbergers’ wing chair, that they don’t dine much before midnight, and those who keep company with actors have to pay for this dreadful habit of theirs. If we go to a restaurant with actors the soup is never served until half past eleven at the earliest, and the coffee stage isn’t reached until about half past one. The Wild Duck is a relatively short play, I told myself, but then it takes at least half an hour to get from the Burgtheater to the Gentzgasse, and after the performance the actors have to take their curtain calls — and since The Wild Duck is such a great success, there’ll have been fairly prolonged applause — so it’ll be at least half an hour before the actors have taken off their makeup. So if the performance finished at ten thirty it’ll take the actor, who after all is the person for whom this artistic dinner is being given, at least until twelve thirty to get to the Gentzgasse. The Auersbergers invited their guests for half past ten — that’s monstrous, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair: they must have known that The Wild Duck went on till ten thirty and that consequently their Ekdal couldn’t be in the Gentzgasse before half past twelve. If I’d thought carefully about when this artistic dinner was actually going to start, I certainly wouldn’t have come, I thought. I go to the Graben to look for a tie, which naturally I don’t find, I thought, and at the most inauspicious moment I run into the Auersbergers. It’s as though time had stood still, I thought: all the guests at this artistic dinner are people who were their closest and most intimate friends thirty years ago, back in the fifties. Clearly none of these friends had ever severed their relations with the Auersbergers; throughout the twenty or thirty years in which I had had no contact with the Auersbergers, all these people had kept up with them, as they say. I suddenly felt like a deserter, a traitor. It’s as though I’d betrayed the Auersbergers and everything I associate with them, I thought, and the same thought must have occurred to the Auersbergers and their guests too. But that did not worry me — quite the contrary, for even now, sitting in their wing chair in their apartment, I found the Auersbergers utterly repugnant, and their guests equally so; indeed I hated all of them, because they were in every way the exact opposite of myself. And now, as I tried to sit it out in the Auersbergers’ apartment, anesthetized by a few glasses of champagne, I felt that my dislike of them had in fact always amounted to hatred, hatred of everything to do with them. We may be on terms of the most intimate friendship with people and believe that our friendship will last all our lives, and then one day we think we’ve been let down by these people whom we’ve always respected, admired, even loved more than all others, and consequently we hate and despise them and want nothing more to do with them, I thought as I sat in the wing chair; not wanting to spend the rest of our lives pursuing them with our hatred as we previously pursued them with our love and affection, we quite simply erase them from our memories. In fact I succeeded in evading the Auersbergers for more than two decades and avoiding any risk of meeting them, having devised a deliberate strategy for avoiding any further contact with these monsters,as I could not help calling them privately, and so the fact that I had evaded them for over twenty years was in no way fortuitous, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Joana’s suicide alone is to blame for the fact that, in spite of everything, I quite suddenly ran into them in the Graben. Their abrupt invitation to their dinner in honor of the Wild Duck artist and my equally abrupt acceptance were a classic illustration of the irrational way one reacts under stress. After all, even though I’d accepted the invitation, I didn’t have to act upon it, especially as I’ve never been punctilious about keeping my promises to visit people, I thought. In fact during the whole of the interval between being invited to this artistic dinner and the dinner itself I had kept on wondering whether I would really go to it. At one moment I thought I would, at another I thought I wouldn’t; now I told myself I’d go, now I told myself I wouldn’t go. I’ll go, I won’t go — this word game went on in my head day after day, almost driving me insane, and even this evening, shortly before I finally set off for the Gentzgasse, I still wasn’t sure whether I would go to the Gentzgasse. Only a few minutes before I finally decided to go I said to myself, Since you’ve just seen all over again, at the funeral in Kilb, that the Auersbergers are as repulsive as ever, you naturally won’t go. The Auersbergers are repulsive people; it was they who betrayed you, not you who betrayed them, I kept thinking as I tried to freshen up in the bathroom, running ice-cold water over my wrists and at one stage trying to cool my face by holding it under the tap. Over the past twenty years they’ve run you down and denigrated you wherever they could, perverting the truth about everything connected with you and taking every opportunity to assassinate your character, I thought; they’ve told stories about you that aren’t true, they’ve spread lies about you, vicious lies, more and more lies, hundreds and thousands of lies in the last twenty years, telling everybody that it was you who exploited them at Maria Zaal, not they who exploited you, that it was you who behaved outrageously, not they, that it was you who defamed them,not they who defamed you, that