Concrete by Thomas Bernhard Page A

had the opportunity. It’s eighteen months since you last left Peiskam, she said a number of times. I was furious because she never let up in her attempt to get me away from Peiskam. No one is as fond of travelling as you, yet you’ve been sitting around here for eighteen months and are dying. She said this quite calmly, like a doctor, as it now strikes me. If you stay here you’ll never be able to start on your Mendelssohn Bartholdy, that I’ll guarantee. You’re determined to remain unproductive. For one thing Peiskam is a morgue, for another it’s a dungeon in which your life is in constant danger, she said. Whereupon she went on for a long time enthusing about the Timeo, which she had once visited with me fifteen years earlier. Can’t you just see the bougainvillaeas? she said. But everything she said annoyed me. She went on and on at me with no thought of leaving. Until in the end she got fed up because she had to recognise that I was not to be persuaded to leave Peiskam again in order to save myself. And so she left. But now she had her triumph.
    Now I was following her suggestion and suddenly taking decisive action. I’m actually leaving, I thought. But for me to arrive at this decision, and finally get myself to Palma, it was necessary for her to have left first. I was now pretending to her that it was my idea, my brainwave, my decision, to go to Palma. In doing so I was lying not only to her — which of course was impossible, because she could see through me — but most of all to myself. You’re mad and always will be, I thought. On the day of my departure there were still twelve degrees of frost at eight in the morning. On the previous day Frau Kienesberger had been, and I had discussed all that was necessary with her, telling her above all that she mustn’t let the house get cold. She was to put the heating on three times a week, though not too high, I told her, for there was nothing so dreadful as returning to an old house that was completely cold. I didn’t know when I should be back, I said. I thought I should be back in three months, two months, four months, but I told Frau Kienesberger three or four weeks. I gave her instructions to clean the windows at last when the cold had become less severe, to polish the furniture, do the washing and so on. I particularly asked her to tidy up the yard and to clear away any snow that fell as quickly as possible so that people would think I was at home and not away. For this purpose I had fitted a so-called timeclock to a lamp in the top room on the west side so that it would be on for several hours in the morning and evening. This is always my practice when I go away. I had been lecturing Frau Kienesberger to such an extent that I was suddenly horrified by myself, for although I had actually broken off my dreadful torrent of words I could still hear myself telling her how my shirts were to be ironed and placed one on top of the other, how she was to stack the mail, which the postman always throws in through the open window on the east side, in the small room next to the right of the entrance, how the stairs were to be polished and the carpets beaten, and how she was to remove all the cobwebs behind the curtains and in the folds of the curtains and so on. She was not to tell the neighbours where I had gone, as that was nobody’s business. I told her I should possibly return the next day, and in any case I might return at any time. She was to strip the beds and air the mattresses and put fresh linen on them all and so on. And she must never under any circumstances touch anything on my desk, but I had said that thousands of times and she had always obeyed this instruction. Frau Kienesberger is really the only person I’ve spoken to for years, I tell myself, even though that’s a gross exaggeration which can be immediately disproved, but I feel that she is the only one with whom I have any extensive verbal contact over long periods, indeed very long periods,