gratitude. Like me, all these people standing or sitting around in the music room were guests of the Auersbergers at Maria Zaal for years, letting themselves be used by their hosts, helping them cope with their rural boredom, and joining in their rural extravagances for days, weeks, months and years, without realizing that they were being violated, exploited and abused by the Auersbergers. They were invited in order to be abused, they weren’t invited out of friendship or affection or whatever other absurd motive the Auersbergers alleged, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. The Auersbergers invited me to Maria Zaal to paper over the cracks of their ramshackle marriage, not, as they pretended, to give me a holiday. They thought I would be able to disentangle the knots in their marriage — though of course they didn’t say anything about this. They made out that they wanted to spoil me for a few weeks or months, even for a whole year or for twoyears,but this was by no means all they wanted. The first time they invited me to Maria Zaal I may have seemed run down, neglected and half starved, but they did not invite me there to nurse me back to health: they quite unscrupulously lured me into their trap at Maria Zaal to make their matrimonial hell endurable — not because I was an undernourished youth in need of care and affection, but because they saw me as a means to an end, a Salzburg clown they had discovered who would rescue them from the hell of their marriage. And I was too naive to recognize the trap they set for me, and so I groped my way into it and at once started playing the Salzburg fool for them in their frightful Styrian retreat — and I went on playing the fool more and more, I now reflected as I sat in the wing chair. I remember how, when I left the Mozarteum, I screwed up my diploma into a sticky ball with both hands and stuffed it in my trouser pocket, and then at Fritz’s birthday party in the Sebastiansplatz they invited me to Maria Zaal, I recalled in the wing chair, and I accepted their invitation because I did not know I was being invited to their matrimonial hell. They pounced unscrupulously on the naive youth from Salzburg and invited him to their residence at Maria Zaal. And I accepted their invitation, only later realizing that it had been madness to do so. People like the Auersbergers tell us that they have money and a beautiful big estate, an enormous estate with a beautiful big house on it, an enormous house, and as we ourselves have none of these things, we walk into their trap, I thought. We let ourselves be impressed by their wealth and walk into their trap. Seeing only the facade and taking all they say at its face value, we walk into their trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They tell us about a big, old house with fine vaulting, about long walks in grounds that all belong to them, about delicious meals in their garden and daily car trips from one castle to another, and, being impressed, we walk into their trap. They describe a rustic life of absolute luxury, and, being impressed, we walk into their luxurious rustic trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Again and again they talk about the things they own, about their endless wealth,though not in so many words, and we let ourselves be impressed and walk into their trap. They talk about their well-furnished kitchens and their well-stocked cellars and the thousands of volumes in their libraries, and, letting ourselves be impressed, we walk into their trap. They tell us about their stock ponds and their water mills and their sawmills, but not about their beds, and we are impressed by them and fall into their trap — and into their beds, I thought. And if we have more or less come to the end of the road, as I had in the early fifties, and don’t know where to go next, we allow ourselves to be profoundlyimpressed by them and are only too glad to walk into their trap. I had been at a loss to know what to do when I left the Mozarteum, and so I went to Vienna, but Vienna offered me no escape — only cold, brutal hopelessness — and so naturally I walked into the Auersbergers’ trap, and it proved almost fatal, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Their instinct was unerring, I thought, in the early fifties: I was the best possible bet for the Auersbergers, whom I first met at that time, though suddenly I don’t know how or where I met them. I know I met Joana in the Sebastiansplatz through Jeannie Billroth, I now recalled, but I no longer know where I met the Auersbergers. I suddenly asked myself, Where did I meet them? But I no longer knew — I had forgotten. I kept trying to remember, but it was no good. I’ve often had such momentary spells of debility recently, spells of mental debility, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and it was hardly surprising in view of all my illnesses, all my nervous illnesses — and after what I had been through that day, I thought. And I told myself that this year alone, which was not a very long time, I had attended the funerals of five of my friends. They’re all dying off one after the other, I thought, most of them by taking their own lives. They rush out of a coffeehouse in a state of sudden agitation, and are run over in the street, or else they hang themselves, or suffer a fatal stroke. When we’re over fifty we’re constantly going to funerals, I thought. I’ll soon have more friends in the cemetery than in the rest of the city, I thought. People who were born in the country go back to the country to kill themselves, I thought. They choose to commit suicide in their parents’ home, I thought. All of them, without exception, are basically sick. If they don’t kill themselves they die of some illness that they’ve brought on through their own negligence. I repeated the word negligence to myself several times; I kept on repeating the word — it was as if the word gave me pleasure as I sat in the wing chair — until the people in the music room noticed, and when I saw them all looking in my direction I stopped repeating it. They were all friends of mine thirty years ago, I thought, and I could no longer understand why. For a time we go in the same direction as other people, then one day we wake up and turn our backs on them. I turned my back on these people — they didn’t turn their backs on me, I thought. We attach ourselves to certain people, then suddenly we hate them and let go. We run after them for years, begging for their affection, I thought, and when once we have their affection we no longer want it. We flee from them and they catch up with us and seize hold of us, and we submit to them and all their dictates, I thought, surrendering to them until we either die or break loose. We flee from them and they catch up with us and crush us to death. We run after them and implore them to accept us, and they accept us and do us to death. Or else we avoid them from the beginning and succeed in avoiding them all our lives, I thought. Or we walk into their trap and suffocate. Or we escape from them and start running them down, slandering them and spreading lies about them, I thought, in order to save ourselves, slandering them wherever we can in order to save ourselves, running away from them for dear life and accusing them everywhere of having