,but all to no avaiclass="underline" no sooner had she returned from Kalksburg than she started drinking again, until in the end she became a complete lush,as he put it. But he did not desert her. He said he had really loved her,I recalled, sitting in the wing chair and looking into the music room; he said he had wanted to carefor this unhappy girl,as he described her in the Iron Hand. Joana was always an unhappygirl,he said, as I now recalled, sitting in the wing chair; he repeated these words several times. I did not see it that way, for the Joana I had known was a happy person — at least she was happy in the fifties, I thought, and up to the mid-sixties, at any rate until the time when she was deserted by the tapestry artist. It was only then that unhappiness and misfortune closed in on her, I thought. John, however, had known her only as an unhappy girl whom he wanted to make happy, though he had not succeeded, I thought. He said several times, I wanted to make Joana happy, but I failed. The whole helplessness of his situation was summed up in this sentence, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. He told us that she often went to Kilb, not always with him; she often went back home, only to return to Vienna disillusioned. At first he’d tried to do it by gentleness and then by firmness (these were his own words), I recalled. But finally he realized that Joana could not be saved. On the evening before she killed herself she had said good-bye to him, as she always did when she went to Kilb. It was six in the morning when the woman from the general store had called him. She had told him straight out, without beating about the bush, that Joana had hanged herself, whereas with me she had behaved quite differently, not telling me straight out, but only gradually as I began to press her for details. She told John at once that Joana had killed herself, that she had hanged herself, but she did not tell me at once. I mulled this fact over for some time in the wing chair. She’s more familiar with John than she is with me, I had thought as I sat with them in the IronHand,and immediately confided in him. To John she says directly what she thinks, but not to me: she speaks to me in a stilted and roundabout manner, as country people do when talking to people from the city, as so-called uneducated people do when talking to so-called educated people, as people who consider themselves inferior do when talking to their so-called betters. It had not surprised him, John suddenly said, turning to the woman from the general store, with whom he must have had fairly close contacts for some time, I reflected in the wing chair. He had put his winter overcoat on, slung his black bag over his shoulder, and come out to Kilb. What happened after that, he said, had been utterly depressing. If there was one person in Kilb today who truly mourned Joana and was genuinely shattered by her suicide, I thought, it was John, who is not at all as degenerate as I had thought all along. As I thought about this man I suddenly became aware that he had many good qualities and decided that, even though Joana had ultimately killed herself, he had been the saving of her, her refuge,somebody she could believe in, at any rate for seven or eight years, for without such a refuge she would probably have killed herself much earlier, I now reflected in the wing chair. Joana had wanted to achieve something special in Vienna, but according to John she couldn’t break loose from Kilb, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I cannot remember how she met Fritz, the tapestry artist. When I met her she had been married to him for some years, and I always believed that they were very happily married: at least this was the impression I always had when I visited them in the Sebastiansplatz. At times I actually thought of the apartment in the Sebastiansplatz, this big studio where I could do more or less as I pleased, as my home. Fritz and his wife Joana, née Elfriede, were a focal point of Vienneseartistic life,where the so-called dramatic and the so-called plastic arts had entered upon a seemingly ideal marriage, and where all art — or what I then considered to be art — could come together. At this studio in the Sebastiansplatz, in the mid-fifties, I met more or less all the significant Viennese artists and scholars who were well known at the time, though not necessarily famous — as well as all the pseudo-artists and pseudo-scholars — and it was among such people and through contact with them that I came to see myself as a writer in the making, even as a fellow artist. I had lodgings in the Nussdorferstrasse, in the Eighteenth District, where I spent my time sleeping, but it was in the Sebastiansplatz, in the Third District, that I had my temple of art,which I would enter at about five o’clock in the afternoon and not leave until about three in the morning. Fritz’s looms, worked by two or three female assistants, were set up in enormous rooms, eighteen or twenty feet high; it was on these looms that he created his tapestries, which were already much sought after, at least by experts, all over Europe. It was quite by chance, Fritz said simply, that he had become a tapestry artist, having previously been a painter working in oils. He always gave the impression of being a quiet man who did not parade his intelligence and for whom a precise program of work was the be-all and end-all of existence: all the time I knew him he could never be deflected by anything or anybody from his eight-hour working day, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. He smoked a short English pipe, which he never removed from the corner of his mouth, not even when he was talking to you, which he was always reluctant to do when weaving, but always did without losing his cool, as they say. The English pipe remained in his mouth even when it had gone out and was completely cold. His brother was a highly esteemed Viennese architect, who built what are called major residential apartments on the outskirts of the city and whom his brother always referred to as that brilliant urban vandal. Despite having grown up in a well-to-do family with a town house and a more or less princely estate in the wine-growing district of Baden, Fritz was a thoroughly modest man,or so it appeared right up to the time when, as already mentioned, he bolted to Mexico. It was not only artists who gathered in the apartment in the Sebastiansplatz, but so-called important people from every walk of life, whom Joana would seek out and invite to visit them, on the one hand to satisfy her already pathological need for company, and on the other to ensure that her husband’s tapestries became increasingly well-known and increasingly expensive. And so naturally newspaper critics and politicians were always being invited to the Sebastiansplatz; this, it now strikes me, was precisely the kind of social ambience I craved more than anything as a young man in search of wider horizons. In the Sebastiansplatz I found, as it were, an ideal cross-section of Viennese society, which was necessary, indeed indispensable, to the up-and-coming artist, and above all to the up-and-coming writer I fervently believed myself to be, and I can say without hesitation that the Sebastiansplatz suddenly afforded an important foundation for my intellectual development, the course of which was charted, as they say, once and for all in the early fifties. Joana had all the attractiveness that beautiful women from Vienna and its environs can possibly have, and her taste served her purposes ideally, exercising a powerful magnetism over the artistic, intellectual and political society of Vienna. When she received her guests in the Sebastiansplatz, she would wear long dresses of her own design (though not of her own making), now in the Indian style, now in the Egyptian, now in the Spanish, now in the Roman. At all these receptions she displayed a gaiety of temperament which was enhanced by a highly individual intelligence, embodying as it were the artistic spirit of Vienna, and naturally captivated everyone who visited the Sebastiansplatz. Having attended two or three of her receptions, I suddenly became her favorite regular guest, so to speak. In those days no other address in Vienna exercised such a pull over me as the Sebastiansplatz, for I loved the studio, I loved Fritz the tapestry artist, and I loved Joana. Before I went to the Sebastiansplatz I had never seen a studio like this, such a large