Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page B

relatives, on whom he had no legal claims whatever. His money having vanished overnight, he simply took down the paintings from his walls and sold them for a song to unscrupulous dealers in Vienna and Gmunden. Most of his valuable furniture also disappeared, in various trucks belonging to smart secondhand dealers who would give him only derisory sums for his treasures. For a Josephine commode he was paid no more than the price of a bottle of champagne, which he immediately consumed with the dealer who had
bought
the piece. In the end he repeatedly expressed a wish to go to Venice at least, in order to
have a good night’s sleep at the Gritti
, but it was too late for any such wish to be realized. He gave me incredible accounts of his spells at Steinhof and the Wagner-Jauregg Hospital, which would be well worth relating, though there is no space for them here.
I was on good terms with the doctors as long as I had money, but when you run out of money they treat you like a pig
, he often said. The attendants would lock up the
Herr Baron
in one of their cages, that is to say in one of the hundreds of beds that are barred not only at the sides but on top; here he would be confined until he was broken, until he was finished—after weeks of shock therapy. The day came at last. Between lunch and visiting time, when the HermannPavilion was completely quiet, I woke up to feel his hand on my forehead. He was standing by my bed and asked if he could sit down. He sat on my bed and was at first seized by a paroxysm of laughter, because it suddenly struck him as so funny that he was with me on the Wilhelminenberg.
You’re where you belong
, he said,
and I’m where I belong
. He stayed only a short while. We agreed to pay each other frequent visits: I was to go over to Steinhof to see him, and he was to come over from Steinhof and visit me on the Baumgartnerhöhe—I was to go from the Hermann Pavilion to the Ludwig Pavilion, and he was to come from the Ludwig Pavilion to the Hermann Pavilion. But the plan was put into effect only once. We met halfway between the Hermann Pavilion and the Ludwig Pavilion and sat on a bench just inside the chest patients’ territory.
Grotesque, grotesque!
he said, and began to weep uncontrollably. For a long time his whole body was convulsed with weeping. I walked him back to the Ludwig Pavilion, where two attendants were waiting for him by the door. I returned to the Hermann Pavilion in a state of deep despondency. This meeting on the bench, with each of us wearing his appropriate uniform—I that of a lung patient, he that of a Steinhof lunatic—had the most shattering effect on me. We could have met again, but we never did, because we did not want to expose ourselves to a strain that was almost unendurable. We both felt that this meeting had made any subsequent meeting on the Wilhelminenberg impossible, and there was no need to waste a single word over the matter. When I was finally discharged from the Hermann Pavilion—without having died, contrary to allpredictions—and had returned to Nathal, I heard nothing from my friend for some time. I had the greatest difficulty in
normalizing
myself, and there was no question of my starting on a new work, but I did make an effort to tidy up the house, which had been somewhat neglected during my absence. Don’t rush things, I told myself. It’ll take time to get back to the kind of conditions that will one day make it possible to start work on a new book. When a sick person returns home after a long absence, he finds everything strange, and the process of familiarizing himself with it again, of resuming possession of everything, is long and arduous. Having lost everything, he has to rediscover it. And because a sick person is always deserted—to say anything else would be a gross lie—he must try to develop a quite superhuman energy if he wants to carry on from where he left off months before (or even years