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emphasized more than once. The very idea of having to live with my sister in Vienna sickened me. And even if she’s one hundred per cent right, I’ll never do it. I detest Vienna. Just walking up and down the Karntner Strasse and the Graben a couple of times and having a look at the Kohlmarkt is enough to turn my stomach. For thirty years the same sights, the same people, the same imbecilities, the same baseness, meanness and mendacity. She had built a new luxury penthouse, she had told me, with a thousand square feet of floor space, on the top floor of her own house (on the Graben!). I must come and see it. I wouldn’t dream of it, I told myself as I chewed the stale bread. She came here, I told myself, not only, as she would have me believe, to look after a sick man, possibly a mortally sick man — which in fact I probably am — but to look after a madman, though she couldn’t bring herself to say it outright. She treats me just like a madman — only a madman, someone demented, is treated like that, I was forced to tell myself as I chewed my bread. In the end, however, she did say quite clearly, My visit hasn’t done any good, I see. All the same, I’ve done a few good deals with your neighbours. Those were her very words. Brazen, cold, calculating. You can’t be helped, no one can help you, she said during our last lunch together. You despise everything, she said, everything in the world. Everything that gives me pleasure you despise. And above all you despise yourself. You accuse everybody of every possible crime. That’s your misfortune. That’s what she said, and at first I didn’t appreciate the full enormity of it. Only now do I realize that she’d hit the nail on the head. I enjoy life, she said, though I have my sufferings too.
    Everybody suffers, my dear little brother, but you despise life. That’s your misfortune, that’s why you’re ill, that’s why you’re dying. And you soon will die if you don’t change, she said. I could hear it clearly now, more clearly than when the words were uttered in that cold, unfeeling manner of hers. My sister the clairvoyant — absurd! She’s probably right though, that it would be a good thing to get away from Peiskam for a while, but I’ve no guarantee of being able to start my work anywhere else, let alone get on with it. Several times during dinner she exclaimed, Mendelssohn Bartholdy! as if to give herself some particularly intense amusement, probably because she knew precisely that each time it was bound to cut me to the quick. The fact is that well over ten years ago I told her I was thinking of writing something -1 didn’t say a book or an article, but something - on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At that time she’d never heard of Mendelssohn Bartholdy. It now drove her mad to hear me mention the name at every end and turn. She couldn’t bear to hear it any longer, at least from me. She forbade me ever to utter the name again in her presence. If Mendelssohn Bartholdy was to be mentioned at all, then it must be by her: that gave her pleasure because she knew, after trying it out for ten years, that it was bound to make me look ridiculous. Besides, she hates Mendelssohn’s music — that’s just like her. How can one love Mendelssohn when there’s Mozart and Beethoven! she once exclaimed. There would never have been any point in my explaining why I had chosen to work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. For years the name Mendelssohn Bartholdy has carried an emotive charge for both of us, bringing us into collision and sparking off all our dreadful, unhealthy and hence agonizing conflicts. You only love Mendelssohn Bartholdy because he’s a Jew, she said scornfully. She came out with this remark for the first time on her last visit, quite out of the blue, and perhaps it was true. She had turned up, ruined my work, and in the end almost ruined me. Women turn up, get you in their toils and ruin you. But hadn’t I sent for her? Hadn’t I suggested that she should