I said Ekdal,whereupon, in a hysterical outburst, she shouted the name Ekdal across the room in a way that embarrassed everyone. She kept on shouting Ekdal, Ekdal, Ekdal, right, Ekdal, until her husband told her to calm down. Auersberger, little paunchy Auersberger, was of course drunk as usual. He had been drunk during the funeral service, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. He’s been drunk almost continuously for as long as I’ve known him — it’s a miracle that he’s still alive; twice a year he goes to Kalksburg for a drying-out cure, I thought, and that’s apparently enough to keep him alive. He had the same bloated face he had had twenty years earlier — hardly any wrinkles, the characteristic gelatinous gray complexion, the same glassy blue eyes as before, I thought. Ekdal, Ekdal, his wife kept screaming, though nobody in the room knew what she was screaming about. Finding her so repellent as she shouted out Ekdal, Ekdal, I became very rude and asked, Which Ekdal? What do you mean — which Ekdal? she asked. To which I replied, Old Ekdal or Young Ekdal? There was a pause, during which everyone stared at her; she saw that I was needling her — in the most despicable fashion, I am bound to admit — and without looking up from her goulash she said, Old Ekdal. At that point she really hated me, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I could have slapped her face. Then her husband, who by now seemed totally drunk, suddenly pushed his goulash to the middle of the table and shouted toward the kitchen door, Thisfood’sabominable! He shouted these words in a voice of purest upstart viciousness. I had had the same goulash before the funeral and found it quite excellent, and all the others who had ordered goulash were of my opinion, not his. For as long as I have known him Auersberger has always found fault with the food served at any inn or restaurant, even the choicest. At least it was ill-mannered to make such a scene, especially at an excellent establishment like the IronHand,which I know to be generally well run, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For as long as he’s been married to his wife, who provides the financial support, Auersberger has always behaved atrociously in restaurants. Having yelled these words in the direction of the kitchen, he leaned back in his chair and stuck his tongue out at his wife. During the course of their marriage she had become so accustomed to her husband’s tasteless foolery that she was not at all surprised when he stuck his tongue out at her. She merely lowered her head and tried to finish the goulash, for which he had wanted to destroy her appetite. Her manner of eating, while hardly the acme of refinement, was not inelegant, whereas her husband’s had always been simply comic, I suddenly thought, sitting in the wing chair. This parvenu had wanted to acquire aristocratic table manners, but never progressed beyond a grotesquely comic use of his knife and fork. He was always ridiculous at table, I now thought, sitting in the wing chair, just as he was ridiculous in everything he did, and he became more ridiculous as time went on, because he constantly endeavored to do everything in an increasingly refined fashion, to make himself more refined, to apply whatever knowledge he acquired about so-called aristocratic manners in every sphere, and this in time made him seem not only increasingly comic and grotesque, but increasingly repellent, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. After he had hurled his insult in the direction of the kitchen, leaned back in his chair and stuck his tongue out at his wife, a pause intervened. Then he said suddenly, I don’t like Strindbergat all, and looked around at the assembled company. At this point I jumped up and ostentatiously went to sit with John and the woman from the general store, thinking to myself, No, I don’t want to have anything to do with this party. After joining John and the woman from the general store at their table, I heard Auersberger’s wife say, The Wild Duck is by Ibsen. From then on I simply ignored the artists’ table and ordered a glass of beer. I wanted to get more information out of John than he had already vouchsafed, not only about the transfer of the body, but about everything connected with Joana, and the woman from the general store was just as keen as I was to get him to tell us what his life with Joana had really been like. He told us that he had first met her in her apartment in the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, which she had converted into what she called a movement studio in the mid-sixties. A girl friend of his, who had taken lessons from Joana for some time, took him along with her one day to Joana’s apartment in the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse so that he could see what a good sport Joana was, or, as John put it, what an artistic nature she had, as I recalled, sitting in the wing chair. He had paid a second and then a third visit to Joana’s with his girl friend, and then he had started going alone, without his girl friend, with whom he split up overnight because of Joana. He had not taken lessons from her, he said, but found security with her, and she had found security with him. Basically he had no time for the movement studio,as Joana called it; right from the start he had been convinced that Joana used the movement studio simply as a means to keep herself above water from a personal point of view,as he put it, since there was nothing in it for her from an intellectual or financial point of view. The only people who went there were people with virtually no means, young hopefuls in the acting profession and older theatrical people who at the age of fifty or sixty had not yet given up hope of a career, though naturally they no longer had the slightest prospect of making one. After he had slept with her several times he moved in as her lodger. His real name was Friedrich,but Joana disliked the name, and so from the beginning she had called him not Friedrich, but John,and ever since then he had been John to everybody. He came from Schwarzach Sankt Veit, a rail junction I knew well, in the Salzburg province. His father had been a railroad worker among other things. He had gone to school at Sankt Johann, then to a technical college in Salzburg. At the age of twenty-three he had gone to Vienna, and to make ends meet he had worked for a film company in Sievering, where he had got to know his previous girl friend, the one who introduced him to Joana, I recalled in the wing chair. At first he had pretended to Joana that he was interested in her movement lessons, though in fact he did not have the least interest in them, and to prove how great his interest was he had hopped around a few times,as he put it, with his girl friend, but then he had abandoned the pretense, giving Joana to understand at a fairly early stage that he was interested in her and not in her movement lessons. According to John she was not at all put out by this, I recalled in the wing chair. Joana earned no money, and by now more or less all her possessions had been sold. She got no support from her tapestry artist, not having heard from him since he had left her; all this time she had no idea whether or not he was still living in Mexico, or whether he was still with her friend who had gone with him to Mexico (according to John she used to speak of her friend’s being abducted). He therefore took it upon himself to provide for her. She had continued to give lessons for another two years after he moved in with her, but finally, on his orders, she gave up the movement studio, which had brought nothing but unhappiness, vexation and dissension into their lives. Wanting to wean her off drink, he had paid for her to have seven periods of treatment at the KalksburgClinic