Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online

and he was spared nothing of what such an office requires. But it did not break him. Most of the time he made light of it, and when he felt inclined to describe and joke about conditions in the
city insurance company
, his imagination took flight. With these stories alone he could entertain a party all evening, saying how glad he was to be among ordinary folk at last and suddenly see what life was really like, what really went on. I thinkit was only because his relatives had some influence with the director that they were able to get him a job in the insurance company, for without such a connection he would not have been taken on, as no firm hires someone like him at the age of nearly sixty. Having to earn his living and support himself was a completely new experience for him, and everyone predicted that he would be a failure. But they were wrong, for until shortly before his death, when it was quite simply impossible for him to go on working for the insurance company on the Schottenring, Paul went to work punctually and left punctually, as was proper.
I’m a model employee in every way
, he often said, and I never doubted this. It was in Berlin, I believe, that he met Edith, who was his second wife—presumably before, after, or during a visit to the opera. She was a niece of the composer Giordano, who wrote
Andrea Chénier
, and most of her relatives lived in Italy, where she went every year to regenerate herself, with or without Paul (who was her third husband) but usually without him. I was extremely fond of her, and I was always glad when I came across her having coffee at the Bräunerhof. I had the most agreeable conversations with her; she not only belonged to
one of the best families
, but was a woman of more than average intelligence and charm. She was also very elegant, which for Paul Wittgenstein’s wife went without saying. In what were for her unquestionably the bitterest years, when her husband’s sickness was rapidly worsening and his death could be foreseen, when his attacks were becoming more and more frequent and he was beginning to spend more time in Steinhof or the Wagner-Jauregg Hospital in Linz than in Vienna or bythe Traunsee, she never complained, although I know precisely under what difficult conditions she had to exist. She loved Paul, and she never deserted him, although she was separated from him most of the time, for she went on living in their little turn-of-the-century apartment in the Stallburggasse while her husband more or less vegetated in Steinhof or the Wagner-Jauregg Hospital in Linz (which had formerly been called simply the Niedernhart), wearing a straitjacket and sharing some horrible ward with others like him. His attacks did not come on suddenly, but always announced themselves weeks in advance. His hands would begin to tremble and he would be unable to finish his sentences, though he would go on talking incessantly, for hours on end, and could not be interrupted. His gait would suddenly become completely irregular: when one was walking with him he would suddenly take ten or eleven very fast steps, then three, four, or five very slow steps. He would address strangers in the street for no obvious reason, or he would order a bottle of champagne at the Sacher at ten in the morning and then leave it to become warm, without drinking it. But these are trifles. Far worse were the occasions when he ordered breakfast and then, when the waiter brought the tray to his table, seized it and hurled it against the silk-covered wall. On one occasion, as I happen to know, he got into a taxi in the Petersplatz and uttered the one word
Paris
, whereupon the driver, who knew him, actually drove him to Paris, where an aunt of Paul’s who lived there had to pay the fare. Several times he took a taxi to Nathal in order to spend half an hour with me—
just to see you
, he would say—and then immediately drove back to Vienna, whichis after all a distance of one hundred and