artistic dinner, probably by Auersberger, to represent artistic intellectual youth at the dinner table—as a counterpoise to the two technological youths from Styria — they took no active part in it. But what, after all, can young writers have to say? I thought. They imagine they know everything, yet can only find everything ridiculous, without being able to say why it’s ridiculous. This is something they don’t discover until much later, I thought. At first they find everything ridiculous, without knowing why, then later they know why, but don’t tell anybody, because they’ve no reason to do so. This is the stupid, hollow, mindless laughter that’s typical of today’s youth, the youth of our own age, the perverse, mindless, dangerous eighties, I thought. They burst into peals of laughter and find everything ridiculous and haven’t published a single book, I thought — just like you thirty years ago. They’ve got nothing but their laughter, nothing, and they’re content with it. All they have is their laughter: the catastrophe of life still lies ahead of them, I thought. They have only their laughter, and no way of justifying it. And I recalled how I, as just such a young writer, had sat at parties like this and spent all my time laughing, finding everything laughable, but never giving a reason, and taking no part in the proceedings apart from drinking and eating and laughing. I found the two young men so uninteresting — just as uninteresting as I had been — that I made no approach to them, just as no one had made any approach to me when I was their age, I told myself. We don’t learn anything of interest by talking to the youth of the eighties: we talk and talk and talk, without understanding what we’re talking about, and they talk and talk and talk, and we don’t understand a word of what they say, nor do we want to understand, I told myself. Talking to young people gets us nowhere, I thought, and anyone who asserts the contrary is a hypocrite, for young people have nothing to say to their elders, to old people — that’s the truth. What the young have to say to the old is of absolutely no interest, none whatever, I thought, and to assert the contrary is gross hypocrisy. It’s always been fashionable to say that the old should talk to the young because they’ve so much to learn from them, but the opposite is the truth: the young have nothing whatever to say to the old. Of course the old would have something to say to the young, but the young don’t understand what the old have to say to them, and, being unable to understand, they’ve no wish to understand. Auersberger always had young writers in his entourage and in his bed, I now recalled; I was one of the first to be invited to Maria Zaal — one of the first to walk into his trap, one of the first to play the fool for him. Someone to paper over the marital cracks, I said to myself, the marital cracks on bothwalls,I added, looking at the two young writers and the two trainee engineers. Auersberger was not content to take just any young men to bed with him, I thought — they had to be young writers. He never invited a young painter or a young sculptor to go to Maria Zaal and share his bed: only a young writer would do. He would invite him to go to Maria Zaal and then invite him to share his bed, intending to devour him, I now thought. He would pay his fare to Maria Zaal, no matter where from, pick him up from the station, and show him to the room that had been prepared for him, and on the very first day he would try to devour him. This thought had sickened and tormented me for years, indeed for decades, but all at once it no longer did. Auersberger, the lecherous literary Moloch, I thought, and had I not been so tired I could have laughed out loud at this formulation of mine. Auersberger and the young writers, I thought — I could write a short essay on the subject, or even a long essay—an essay and a half, as they say. I’ll certainly play Ekdal another fifty times or so, the actor said suddenly. He was now leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. If only I’d had someone better to play Gregers! I ought to have played Gregers myself, but that’s an absurd idea — playing both Ekdal and Gregers simultaneously! That’s absurd! Quite absurd! said the actor. Meanwhile Auersberger’s wife had put on a record of Ravel’s Bolero, which had been Joana’s favorite piece. She’s chosen the Bolero on purpose to remind us of Joana, I said to myself. And no sooner had I heard the opening bars than I began to think of Joana again, and above all of her funeral. At first I thought it tasteless to play a record of the Bolero, but perhaps it was not. Possibly it was a good idea, however contrived, to turn this more or less frightful supper, this artistic dinner, into an act of remembrance for Joana. Before she put the record on I had already made up my mind to get up and leave, but now I was quite happy to go on sitting there, suddenly feeling pleasantly indifferent to everything, letting the images of the funeral float through my mind. I had a clear vision of the scenes in the IronHand, the face of the woman from the general store, and John’s face, and Kilb, the beautiful, restful little market town in Lower Austria. The agitation I had felt throughout this dreadful evening and night in the Gentzgasse suddenly gave way to a sense of calm.I have always enjoyed listening to the Bolero, which Joana always played in her movement studio when she was working with her more gifted pupils. Actually the whole of her art of movement and the whole of her teaching was oriented to the Bolero, I thought, as I listened to the music with my eyes closed. How good it feels to be sentimental now and then, I thought. I could now see Joana quite clearly, the movement artist who had had every chance of happiness but whose life had ended in utter misery. I could hear her voice and take delight in the things she used to say, in her laugh, in her responsiveness to everything beautiful. For Joana had the gift of always seeing the beauty which exists beside the terrible, unending ugliness that destroys and annihilates — a gift which very few possess, but which she possessed to a higher degree than anyone I have known in my whole life. But even this gift did her no good, I thought. She came to Vienna and let Vienna devour her; then she fled from Vienna and went back home, only to hang herself, I thought. And I recalled how Joana’s neighbor, who always looked after the house for her when she was away, had found her just before six o’clock in the morning, hanging from a rope that she had tied in a noose and attached to a roof beam with her own hands. The woman from the general store had broken down in the IronHand. She told me that the neighbor had at first seen only Joana’s feet swinging above the stairs in the entrance hall; going closer she had seen the legs, and finally the whole heavy body, completely bloated from years of drinking, hanging in the noose and set in motion by the opening of the door. It had been a grotesque sight, and at the same time horrible, said the woman from the general store. The neighbor had not screamed, she said, but stayed quite calm and come straight over to her to tell her of her discovery, knowing her to be Joana’s best friend. It was not yet light at the time. At seven o’clock Joana’s friend had called me in Vienna; I was not the first person she called, but she informed me only an hour after the body was discovered. The