Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard Page B

inane remarks. Museum guides invariably treat their charges as dimwits, invariably as the worst dimwits, whereas in fact they never are such dimwits, they explain to them chiefly those things which can, of course, be seen perfectly clearly and therefore do not need to be explained, yet they explain and explain and point and point and talk and talk. The museum guides are nothing but conceited twaddling machines, switched on for the duration of a group's tour through the museum, such twaddling machines utter the same words year after year. The museum guides are nothing but conceited art twaddlers who do not have the faintest idea about art but unscrupulously exploit art with their distasteful twaddle. The museum guides rattle off their art twaddle all year long and collect a pile of money for it. I had been pushed into the corner by the Russian group and saw nothing but those Russian backs, that is to say nothing but heavy Russian winter coats, all of them exuding a penetrating smell of naphthalene, since the Russian group had evidently had to make their way straight from their bus to the picture gallery in a drizzle. As I have suffered from respiratory problems for many decades and in any case feel, several times a day, that I am about to choke, even out of doors, those moments, which in fact were minutes, behind the Russian group were repulsive to me, pressed against the wall of the Bordone Room I was all the time inhaling air reeking of naphthalene, air much too heavy for my weak lungs. After all, I find it difficult enough to breathe in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, let alone under such conditions as the arrival of the Russian group. The Ukrainian guide talked to the Russian group in what is known as classical Muscovite Russian and I understood most of it, but she had a terrible, positively painful, pronunciation if she said anything in German, the way she said the word Engelskopf was quite ghastly. I was unable at first to say whether the interpreter had come from Russia with the Russian group or whether she was one of those Russian émigrées who had come to Vienna after the war and who are still coming to Vienna, those Russian Jewish émigrée women who are highly intelligent and who have always set the fashion behind the scenes in Vienna, which has invariably been of advantage to Viennese intellectual society. These Russian Jewish émigrée women are the real intellectual seasoning of Viennese society life, they have always been just that, without them Viennese intellectual life would be uninteresting. Admittedly these people, if, as it were, they turn megalomaniac and try to dominate absolutely everything, also soon get on your nerves, but then this woman interpreter was not exactly a prime example of the kind of Russian women émigrées I have in mind, if indeed she was such a Russian émigrée; she looked to me more as if she had come to Vienna from Russia with her Russian group, the way she spoke to the Russian group in their Russian argued against the assumption that she was a Russian émigrée and in favour of her having come to Vienna with the Russian group, and quite possibly arrived in Vienna from Russia only that very day, at least that is what I immediately thought when I had taken a closer look at her clothes, in particular her boots, there was in fact nothing Western about her, she probably was a communist who had been trained as an art historian, I thought as I scrutinized her from head to toe, as it were, the moment I had an opportunity to do so. The Russian women émigrées I have mentioned, after all, dress in a predominantly Western manner, albeit not as Western as real Westerners, but in a Western manner all the same. No, that interpreter is not a Russian émigrée, I thought, she crossed the frontier with the Russian group last night and did not even sleep last night, any more than the Russian group in her charge, the group has come to the museum straight from Russia, as it were, and straight from