often months on end. She lives with her husband, a deaf mute (!), in a little one-storey house at the edge of the wood, not far from the village, and she only has a ten-minute walk when she comes to me. She herself has a speech impediment, which ensures that she doesn’t gossip, but she’s not a gossip by nature. She’s been coming to me for fourteen years, and in these fourteen years there has never been any disagreement between us. Everybody knows how important that is. And I often think she’s the one reliable person I have — there’s nobody else. And perhaps she senses this or even knows it. Not that I am continually giving her orders or telling her how to conduct herself: on the contrary I seldom have any particular wishes; most of the time I leave her entirely alone, and if she makes a noise while she’s working, because she can’t help making some noise, I leave the house for hours, or simply withdraw to the huntsman’s lodge. It would be a calamity, I reflect, if Frau Kienesberger failed to turn up one day for whatever reason, and at any moment a reason might suddenly crop up; but she probably knows as well as I do what I am to her and what she is to me, and so we have the most favourable relationship, in which we can both say we benefit equally from each other. She has three children and sometimes tells the story of their lives as she stands in the hall - how they are developing, what illnesses they have, what torments they have to endure at school, what they wore when they went sledging, when they go to sleep and when they wake up, what they get to eat on Tuesday and on Saturday, and how they react to everything. On such occasions 1 can’t help reflecting that mothers observe their children intensely if they are mothers like Frau Kienesberger, and they cosset them neither too much nor too little. She brings her children up by never thinking about their upbringing; she practises to perfection what others have to work out in their passion for theorizing, and where they are bound to fail she never does. By contrast with all my earlier domestic helps, who without exception were nothing but clumsy sluts, she has the gentlest manner. Where is that still to be found, I wonder? Looking out of the window, I am forced to conclude that I must wear my fur coat on the journey, together with warm underclothing and long woollen socks, for nobody catches cold and immediately becomes ill as easily as I do. Since my sarcoidosis developed I can’t afford to catch a cold, although I get a heavy cold three or four times a year, and so my life is always in danger. As a result of the prednisolone my resistance is virtually nil. When once I’ve caught a cold it takes me weeks to throw it off. And so there’s nothing I dread so much as catching cold. Even a slight draught is enough to make me take to my bed for weeks, and so at Peiskam I live most of the time in fear of catching cold. This fear almost verges on madness and is probably one of the reasons why I find it so hard to begin any protracted intellectual work; when so many fears are concentrated in one person, everything about him constantly breaks down. I’ll wear my fur coat and the warmest underclothes and the warmest socks, because I have to get to the station, and in Munich I have to get from the station to the airport, and who knows, I said to myself, what it will be like in Palma? When I had left Palma eighteen months before, in November, there had been driving snow, and I had been frozen through and through. When I got back to Peiskam I spent two months in bed, and the effect of going to Palma to recuperate was cancelled out at a stroke by my catching cold. Instead of coming back to Peiskam refreshed and fortified as I had hoped and expected, I came back looking like death. The people who saw me at the time didn’t know me, in the worst sense of the phrase, not in the sense that I looked much better and more normal than when I had left for Palma. The fur coat
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