My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page A

the harsh light of the evening sun, a car swung into my lane from the left, slamming heavily into the near side of my car and staving it in. It hurled me right out of the car but I just stood there and didn’t feel any pain. The car belonging to the Yugoslavian was completely demolished too. The driver had jumped out and run off screaming, pursued by a woman who kept screaming
Idiota! Idiota! Idiota!
after him. There was a pile of metal in front of me in the middle of the road and all the traffic coming out of the shipyards was blocked. The
Idiota! Idiota! Idiota!
faded away and I was standing there alone. Suddenly I saw people running toward me and screaming and I saw that my whole body was covered in blood. I had a head wound, the bleeding was so severe I thought I’d lost my scalp, but I still felt no pain whatever. Then someone who’d leapt out of a little Fiat 500 grabbed hold of me and put me in his car. He gunned the engine and raced me along the coast road to the hospital and he raced so incredibly fast that I thought this was when the real accident would happen. During this whole race I kept holding my head because I thought all the blood would pour right out of it. I also had the feeling I should atleast write down my name on a piece of paper, for otherwise no one would know who was involved if I did actually bleed to death. And of course I also didn’t want to dirty the man’s car with my blood and I tried to keep directing the blood flow just onto me and between my knees. Soon I’m going to lose consciousness, I thought, and then that will be that. Once at the hospital, I was immediately put flat on a gurney by a nurse and taken away. In a washroom the nurse shaved half my skull. Then I immediately found myself in an operating room and I was in luck, for the surgeon spoke German and promptly asked me all the relevant questions in German—vomiting or no vomiting, et cetera. Then they gave me an anesthetic, only a so-called local anesthetic, and worked on me and sewed my head back together again. What I had thought was an enormous wound was only a laceration, after two days I was allowed to go back to Eugenia. Before, I had already been able to see my wreck at the police station right near the hospital. And to my amazement the police had been able to sketch an exact reconstruction of the accident. The Yugoslavian was one hundred percent responsible, and this was also stated in the report. The person who had kept screaming
Idiota!
as he ran away was his wife, whoto her misfortune was a nurse at the hospital and, as I learned later, was instantly fired from her job in the nursing service because instead of helping me she had run away with her husband. I was sorry about this, but there was nothing I could do about it. My Herald was a lump of metal, I walked around it several times and I thought about how I’d only driven it for seven hundred and fifty miles. A shame. With a white turban around my head and my aunt and all her considerable luggage I set off on the journey home to Vienna. Not at all depressed, because finally I had by some miracle escaped with my life, but still very disappointed over the end to my automobile happiness. At the Heller car dealership they put me in touch with a Nobel-class lawyer who lived in the Heinrichshof. He would pursue the case with his renowned thoroughness, the lawyer said, while the people whom I told about my accident thought I’d never see so much as a cent from Yugoslavia, it was well known that they never paid a thing in such cases, even when the other party was one hundred percent guilty. I got angry that I’d taken on this, so it seemed to me, very expensive lawyer, I was furious over my own stupidity. Now I’ve not only lost my Herald, but I’m also paying the lawyer, who was set up like a prince in three or fourenormous rooms with a direct view of the Opera. I’m really stupid, I told myself, a completely unrealistic person.
Amras
was typeset and I walked