Actually she did all the talkingin the Graben: her husband, a composer in the Webern tradition as he is described, didn’t say a word to me, wishing to offend me by not speaking to me, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. They had said that they had no idea when Joana’s funeral at Kilb would take place. I had been informed that day by a childhood friend of Joana’s, just before I left home, that Joana had hanged herself. This friend, who runs a general store in Kilb, did not want to tell me over the telephone that Joana had hanged herself; she simply told me that she had died,but I told her outright that Joana had not died, but killed herself. She, as her friend, must know how she had done it, I said, but she simply would not tell me. Country people are more inhibited than townspeople about saying openly that somebody has killed himself, and they find it hardest of all to say how. I guessed at once that Joana had hanged herself; in fact I said to the woman from the general store, Joana hanged herself, didn’t she? She was taken aback and simply said Yes. People like Joana hang themselves, I said. They don’t throw themselves in the river or jump out of fourth-floor windows: they get a piece of rope, deftly tie a noose in it, attach it firmly to a beam, then let themselves drop into the noose. Ballerinas and actresses hang themselves, I told the woman from the general store. The fact that I had not heard from Joana for so long, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, had for some time struck me as suspicious, and I had often wondered lately whether Joana, a woman who had been deeply wounded, who had been cheated, deserted and scorned, might one day commit suicide. But in the Graben I had pretended to the Auersbergers that I knew nothing of Joana’s suicide, feigning utter astonishment and shock, even though by eleven o’clock in the Graben I was no longer astonished or shocked by the tragedy, having heard about it at seven o’clock that morning; after walking up and down the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse several times I found I was able to endure Joana’s suicide, that I was able to bear it, in the bracing air of the Graben. Actually it would have been better had I not appeared utterly astonished by the Auersbergers’ announcement of Joana’s suicide; I should have told them that I had known about it for some time and that I even knew how she had killed herself. I ought to have told them the precise circumstances, I thought, and so deprived them of their triumph, which they were actually reveling in and savoring to the full, as I noted at the time while we were standing in front of Knizes’; for by pretending to know nothing whatever about Joana’s death, by acting as though I had been stunned and shattered and dumbfounded by the terrible news, I had allowed the Auersbergers the thrill of being the sudden bearers of ill tidings, which naturally had not been my intention, though this was what I managed to achieve by my ineptitude, by claiming to know nothing whatever about Joana’s suicide at the time of our meeting. All the time I was standing there with the Auersbergers I feigned ignorance, while knowing more or less everything about Joana’s suicide. I did not know how they came to know that Joana had hanged herself, but the likelihood was that they too had been told by the woman from the general store. She would certainly have told them what she told me, I thought, though not as much; otherwise the Auersbergers would have told me more than they did about Joana’s suicide. Of course they would be going to the funeral at Kilb, Auersberger’s wife said, and she said it in a way which suggested that it would not be a matter of course for me to go to Joana’s funeral; it was a kind of reproach, implying that I might possibly not go to Joana’s funeral, that I might even find it convenient to avoid going to the funeral of our mutual friend, even though, like them, I had been on terms of the most intimate friendshipwith her for so many years, indeed for decades. The way she said it, I thought, was actually insulting, as was the fact that, after saying she would see me at Joana’s funeral, she immediately went on to invite me to come to their so-called artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse the following Tuesday, that is, today, the day of Joana’s funeral. It was in fact through Auersberger that I had first met Joana thirty years before, at a birthday party given for her husband in the Sebastiansplatz, in the Third District, a so-called studio party attended by nearly all the well-known artists of Vienna. Joana’s husband was a so-called tapestry artist, a carpet weaver in other words, who had originally been a painter, and he had once won the first prize with one of his carpets at the Bienal in São Paulo in the mid-sixties. That Joana should commit suicide was the last thing they would have expected, the Auersbergers had said in the Graben, and before rushing off with all their parcels they told me that they had bought everything by LudwigWittgenstein, so that they could immerse themselves in Wittgenstein during the coming weeks. They’ve probably got Wittgenstein in the smallest parcel, I thought, the one dangling from her right arm. And again I reflected that it had been a grave error to accept the Auersbergers’ invitation, considering how I detest all such invitations, and how for so many years I had avoided invitations to artistic dinners of this kind, having attended so many of them until I was well into my forties. I was thoroughly familiar with what they were like — and I know of scarcely anything more repugnant. Actually these Auersberger invitations haven’t changed, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: they’re just the same as they were in the fifties, when they not only bored me to death, but drove me half demented. For twenty years you’ve detested the Auersbergers, I told myself, sitting in the wing chair, and then you run into them in the Graben and accept their invitation, and you actually turn up in the Gentzgasse at the appointed time. What’s more, you know all the others who’ve been invited to this dinner party, and still you turn up. And it struck me that I would have done better to spend this evening — or rather this whole night — reading Gogol or Dostoevski or Chekhov, rather than to come to this hateful dinner party in the Gentzgasse. The Auersbergers are the people who destroyed your existence, your very life, I told myself, sitting in the wing chair; they were the people who, in the early fifties, drove you into such an appalling mental and physical state, into what amounted to an existential crisis, into a state of such complete helplessness that you ended up in the Steinhof mental clinic, yet you still had to come here tonight. If you hadn’t turned your back on them at the crucial moment you’d have been annihilated. First they’d have destroyed you, then they’d have annihilated you. If I’d stayed with them only a few days longer at Maria Zaal, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, it would have been certain death. They’d have squeezed you dry, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair, and then discarded you. You run into your ghastly destroyers and murderers in the Graben, and in a momentary access of sentimentality you let yourself be invited to the Gentzgasse — and you actually turn up, I said to myself as I sat in the wing chair. And again it struck me that I would have done better to read my Pascal or my Gogol or my Montaigne, or play some Satie or Schönberg on the piano, even though my old piano is so badly out of tune. You walk to the Graben, to get some fresh air and recoup your vitality, and run straight into the arms of your former destroyers and annihilators, and you even tell them how much you’re looking forward to the evening, to their artistic dinner, which can’t be anything but dreary, like all their dinner parties, like all the evenings you can recall spending with them. Only a half-wit devoid of all character could accept an invitation like that, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. It’s now thirty years since they lured you into their trap and you let yourself be caught. It’s thirty years since these people subjected you to daily indignities and you abjectly submitted to them, I thought as I sat in the wing chair — thirty years since you more or less