Altensam, and he may have thought, I’m leaving Altensam to my middle son, who has the least use of anybody for Altensam, and so I can be sure that he, my middle son, will make an end of Altensam and that, in whatever way he does it, it will be over with. On the other hand, no one can expect a man who inherits something he doesn’t want to inherit, doesn’t want to own, to preserve this inheritance he didn’t want in the first place, the logical thing is for him to get rid of this inheritance and Roithamer did get rid of his Altensam inheritance, he got rid of it in his own characteristic way, namely by ordering that the proceeds from the sale of Altensam should go to aid ex-convicts on their release from prison. Quite possibly, I suddenly thought as I stood at the attic window, he had gone to Austria and to Altensam already determined to kill himself, but there is no evidence for such an assumption, none, the fact is that he meant to go straight back to England immediately after his sister’s funeral, without any detours whatsoever, not by way of South Tyrol, nor France nor Belgium, but straight back to Cambridge, I can still hear him saying by plunging at once back into work I shall save myself from this worst of misfortunes , this is word for word what he said, I believe it was his last spoken statement to me, I’d accompanied him to the station, he traveled as always by rail and ship because he shrank from setting foot in an airplane, loathed it, in fact, for myself I’d intended to spend the brief interval, so I thought, of his absence, on correcting a paper of my own, but was distracted by a peculiar uneasiness which I could find no way of understanding, from doing this, and went instead to Reading to visit a mutual friend, a teacher, who was busy with the construction of some machine, what kind of a machine it was I don’t know to this day, even though I had been briefed on this construction by its constructor for years now, nor did Roithamer know what kind of machine this Reading machine, as we called it, was, anyway I spent two days in Reading waiting for news from Roithamer, we had agreed that he would send me word every second day, what I mainly wanted to hear was when he would be coming back, but there was no word at all for fourteen days, then suddenly there was a message, not from Altensam but from Hoeller, that Roithamer was dead, I left for Austria that same day, at home they told me all about Roithamer’s suicide, he had hanged himself in the aforementioned clearing between my father’s house and Altensam. Meanwhile Roithamer, who had wished to be buried in the village graveyard, not up in Altensam, that is, but in our village graveyard in Stocket, had been buried. My parents gave me a full account of the funeral, and later on I heard about it from Hoeller too. I made a brief visit to Altensam to see Roithamer’s brothers but there was no one in Altensam, at least I thought there was no one home since all the window shutters were closed and nothing stirred, which incidentally suited me very well, because now I would be able to say that I had been to Altensam after my friend’s death to look up his brothers, but nobody was home. Actually Roithamer’s death, his suicide so soon after the death of his and their sister, must have come as a severe shock to those left in Altensam, and I supposed that they had all left Altensam for once, for a long time, at least until things settled down and the problems arising first from the sister’s and then the brother’s death would be solved. When I got there, Altensam actually looked extinct to me, as if everything in Altensam were dead. I had also gone to the cemetery in Stocket, it was a simple grave, a few wreaths, a few flowers. Roithamer had once told me that he wanted only a simple wooden cross. Several days went by as I grew more and more depressed, with absolutely nothing to do, I wandered forlornly about the landscape that suddenly looked all empty
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