artistic dinner in honor of the actor, is in fact only a requiem for Joana, I said to myself: the smell of that afternoon’s funeral was suddenly present in the Gentzgasse, the smell of the cemetery at Kilb was here in the Auersbergers’ apartment. This so-called artistic dinner is really a funeral feast, I thought, and at once it occurred to me that to my certain knowledge the actor we were waiting for was the only supper guest who had not known Joana. The date for this artistic dinner had already been agreed, first of all with the actor from the Burgtheater, before Joana killed herself; the Auersbergers had said more than once that it was intended as a belated celebration of the premiere of The WildDuck, which had just opened at the Burgtheater. Joana’s death had intervened in their dinner arrangements; they told the guests that it was a dinner in honor of the actor, but then intimated — though not in so many words — that it was in memory of Joana. The actor’s convinced that this artistic dinner is being given for him, and that’s enough to satisfy the Auersbergers, though of course they are giving it more for Joana, since it’s taking place on the day of her funeral, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. At that moment I recalled that on the previous day I too had intended to read The Wild Duck, in order to be able to keep up with the actor, thinking that I needed only to open my bookcase and get out the text. But I was wrong: I had no copy of The WildDuck, though I had been convinced that I had one. I’m bound to have a copy of the play, I had thought as I opened my bookcase. I’ve read it several times during the course of my life, I had thought, and I can even remember what the editions look like. But I really did not have a copy, and so, like Jeannie Billroth, I decided to buy myself one in town, but was unable to find one. However, sitting in the wing chair, I remembered that one of the characters in the play was called OldEkdal,and that he had a son, Young Ekdal, who was a photographer. And I remembered that the first act took place at the home of a manufacturer called Werle. Ekdal has a studio in the attic, I reminded myself; gradually it all came back, and so I no longer had to exert my memory. Can this production of The Wild Duck be any good, I wondered, sitting in the wing chair, if it’s being put on by actors from the Burgtheater? And again I thought of the IronHand,where I had taken the woman from the general store, who was dressed all in black, after arriving at Kilb. I entered the store only for a moment, to let her know that I had arrived. She immediately put on a black coat and accompanied me to the IronHand,the operations room, so to speak, for Joana’s funeral. We both ordered a small goulash and waited for Joana’s companion to arrive. He arrived at about half past eleven and joined us at our table. When people are dressed in black they appear unusually pale, and this companion of Joana’s (the woman from the general store insisted on calling her Elfriede) was so pale that he looked as though he were about to vomit at any moment. He actually did feel like vomiting when he approached our table, as he had come straight from the mortuary chapel next to the church, where he said he had been shattered by what they had shown him: without any prior warning he had had to endure the sight of Joana’s body in a plastic bag. It appeared that the mortician, who as usual was the local carpenter, had been given no precise instructions about how the deceased was to be buried and had simply put Joana’s body in a plastic bag pending the arrival of her companion that morning — this being the cheapest way of dealing with it — and left it on a trestle support in the mortuary chapel. He told us that on seeing the plastic bag he had felt sick and instructed the sexton to cover the body in a shroud and put it in a beech coffin; these instructions had been carried out with his assistance. While we all ate our goulash he told us that he simply could not describe what it had been like to pull Joana’s body out of the plastic bag and cover it with a shroud — it had all been so gruesome. Finally he had chosen the most expensive coffin the carpenter had in stock. Having eaten half his goulash he went out into the corridor to wash his hands; when he returned I could see tears in his eyes. There were no relatives left, he said; they’d all died on her long ago, as he put it, and so all the funeral arrangements fell to him. He had expected that the woman from the general store would have seen to Joana’s body and everything arising from her suicide, but at this she shook her head and said that she could not have left her shop even for an hour and had assumed that he had all the arrangements in hand. Be that as it may, Joana’s companion ate his goulash so quickly that he had already finished it when I was only halfway through mine. He accidentally splashed some of the gravy on his white starched shirt — or rather on his white starched shirtfront, for I noticed that he was not wearing a shirt, only a shirtfront over a woolen undervest, I recalled in the wing chair. This starched shirtfront spotted with gravy more or less confirms my impression that Joana’s companion was completely down and out, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. Having finished his goulash he waited impatiently for us to finish ours, but neither of us could eat any faster. In the end I left nearly half of mine, but the woman from the general store managed to force down the rest of hers. If there’s nobody around to pay the expenses, said Joana’s companion, they simply put the body in a plastic bag. And then he said that there had been a frightful stench in the mortuary chapel. Looking out of the window of the inn, I saw several cars go past with people I knew in them; they had clearly come to Kilb for the funeral and were making for the cemetery. What a good thing I’ve brought my English umbrella with me, I thought, when it began to rain. The street outside grew dark, and the inn parlor even darker. Jeannie Billroth, the writer, walked past with her retinue, all of them young people under twenty. It was actually in the high-rise that I last saw Joana, I now recalled saying to myself in the IronHand;her face was bloated and her legs swollen. She spoke in what anybody would have described as a drunken voice. Over the bed hung one of her husband’s tapestries, thick with dust, a reminder of the fact that she had once been happy with this man. The apartment was full of dirty laundry and stank abominably. The tape recorder by the bed, where I could see she spent virtually the whole day, was out of order. On the floor were dozens of empty white wine bottles, some standing, some knocked over. I wanted to hear a particular tape we had made four or five years before this surprise visit of mine, a tape of a sketch in which I had played a king and Joana a princess, but the tape was nowhere to be found. Even if we had found it there would have been no point, as the tape recorder was broken.