choreographer, and arranged appearances for herself in a number of plays based on fairy tales, which were staged in various small Viennese theaters. She got extremely favorable press notices and finally succeeded in putting on a deportment class at the Burgtheater. It was utterly futile, of course, to imagine that she could teach deportment to the actors at the Burgtheater: they could no more be taught how to deport themselves than they could be taught how to speak. In the mid-fifties, however, through the good offices of a senior official in the Burgtheater management, she was engaged to coach the actors in the art of deportment. This was a failure because the actors showed absolutely no interest and because in the end she lost interest too. Yet for a whole year she got a decent fee for her efforts. Basically she could never make up her mind whether she wanted to be an actress or a ballerina; and so she had danced and acted throughout her childhood, and when she went to Vienna she actually studied drama at the Reinhardt Seminar, where she finally qualified, though no theater ever engaged her. At the height of her indecision, which she constantly referred to as her artistic crisis, she married the carpet designer, the tapestry artist as she used to call him, I recalled, sitting in the wing chair. For over ten years Joana and her tapestry artist lived in the Third District, in a patrician house in the Sebastiansplatz that had been built in 1880. Here they occupied a penthouse studio with a thousand square feet of floor space under three enormous glass domes. It was beneath these domes that he wove the tapestries that made him famous — and not just in Europe. Coming from an old Jewish family and having started out as a painter, he always averred that the art of weaving, in other words tapestry making, had been the saving of him. He ran into Joana at just the right moment, for it was her freshness and beauty that very soon turned the studio in the Sebastiansplatz into one of the artistic centers of Viennese society. He wove the tapestries and she sold them. It was Joana’s charm that made the works of her tapestry artist famous, first in Vienna, then in Europe, and finally in America, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and at once I recalled that it was at the height of his fame (which he undoubtedly owed to Joana!) that he bolted, as they say, with his wife’s best friend and ended up in Mexico. They married in Mexico City, but he divorced his new wife only a year later to marry a Mexican (the daughter of a Mexican minister!), to whom he is still married. Joana really was an unlucky creature, from the day she was born until the day she died, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And it was on the very day Joana killed herself that I went to the Graben and ran into the Auersbergers — I don’t believe that was pure chance, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For ten years I didn’t bother about Joana, I thought; I completely lost sight of her for years and didn’t hear anything more of her. And today at Kilb I learned that during the last few years of her life she had had what is called a constant companion, a second companion in other words; I saw this man for the first time at the IronHand, I thought, a Carinthian from the Gail Valley, who made a continual effort to speak standard German, though it came across as the most pathetic variety of standard German I’ve ever heard. This man had put on an ankle-length black coat for his friend’s funeral, as well as a broad-brimmed black hat, a so-called slouch hat of the kind that has recently come back into fashion, especially among provincial actors. Of course we can’t judge people by their clothes, I thought — that’s a mistake I’ve never made — but at first everything about Joana’s companion, with whom she’s said to have lived for eight years, struck me as revolting — the way he spoke, what he said, the way he walked, and above all the way he ate his food in the Iron Hand. I was shattered to discover that Joana had in the end landed up with someone so seedy, who, after a spell as an actor at a small theater in the Josefstadt, had become a commercial traveler, hawking cheap earrings manufactured in Hong Kong; even for a commercial traveler he made a shabby impression, reminding me rather of a market trader — and the humblest kind of market trader at that. The way he pronounced the words potato salad to the waitress in the Iron Hand almost made me want to vomit, I thought, sitting in the wing chair and watching the guests in the music room. They somehow seemed like figures on a distant stage; it was rather like watching a moving photograph through the haze of cigarette smoke that had formed as a result of everyone’s smoking. The Auersbergers suddenly announced they would hold supper only for another quarter of an hour. We’ll wait till halfpasttwelve at the latest, the hostess said to the writer Jeannie Billroth, to whom she had been talking for some time, naturally about Joana. This woman, who was now fat and gross and ugly, fancied herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, though everything she wrote was the most dreadful kitsch, and in her novels and short stories she never rose above a kind of loquacious, convoluted sentimentality. This woman, who had come to the Gentzgasse in a black home-knitted woolen dress, had also been a friend of Joana’s. She lived in the Second District, not far from the Praterhauptallee, and had for years actually imagined herself to be Austria’s greatest writer, its greatest literary artist. This evening — or rather night — in the Gentzgasse she had no compunction in telling Auersberger’s wife that in her latest novel she had gone a step further than Virginia Woolf (I was able to hear her say this because I have such acute hearing, especially at night). Her new book far surpassed The Waves, she said, whereupon she lit a cigarette and crossed her legs. She said she intended to go and see The Wild Duck again. In Ibsen there’s so much beneath the surface, she remarked to Auersberger’s wife. She had been unable to buy a copy of the play at any Viennese bookshop; not one bookshop in the city center had The Wild Duck in stock, she said — she had not even managed to find a paperback edition. But naturally she knew The WildDuck; she loved Ibsen, especially PeerGynt, she said, speaking through a smoke screen of her own making. She was a heavy smoker and consequently had a raucous voice, and her face was bloated from overindulgence in white wine. In the days when I had close ties with the Auersbergers I used to spend a good deal of time with Jeannie Billroth — far too much time, as I now realize — in her municipal apartment, where she lived for more than ten years with a chemist called Ernstl, who never got around to marrying her — or whom she never got around to marrying. Ernstl earned the money, and Jeannie contributed her reputation, attracting artists and pseudo-artists, scientists and pseudo-scientists, and — as Joana used to say—bringing color into their drabmunicipal apartmentwith its utterly petit bourgeois atmosphere. Jeannie herself was nothing if not petit bourgeois and had become set in her petit bourgeois ways over the years, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. After the death of my friend Josef Maria, who hanged himself just as Joana did later, and who edited Austria’s first official literary magazine, entitled Literature in OurTime, in the early fifties, Jeannie took over the editorship, with the result that the magazine became unreadable. It became a thoroughly dreary publication, utterly worthless and witless, subsidized by our dreadful, disgusting and benighted state, and carrying only the most fatuous and inane contributions, pride of place being given time and again to poems by Jeannie Billroth herself, who was convinced that she was not only the successor, even the surpasser, of Virginia Woolf, but also a