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everything much more distinctly than I did then,” she said.
    “I have been thinking whom to leave my clothes to. They’re in the wardrobe, all in good condition.… I made my house over to my son long ago, though I haven’t let him know.”
    She could not say he was not concerned about her, she added, but he did no more than was his duty. Her daughter-in-law had always hated her. It had started as spontaneous dislike at their first meeting and had grown ever strongerover the years. “My son doesn’t dare to love me any more because of the way his wife hates me.” And by now, Frau Ebenhöh said, she was “crushed” by the more and more revolting stories her daughter-in-law concocted about her. The fact was that with her husband’s death she had become all too vulnerable to the ill will of her son and her daughter-in-law. Her daughter-in-law had thrust her into the outer darkness of hopeless solitude, and her son had done nothing but look on. He’d entered into marriage much too soon; he’d been immature and regarded that girl from Köflach as a way to escape from his parents, and had gone downhill instantly. He was now employed as a helper to a tanner in Krottendorf, and worked even on Sundays. His clothes reeked when he came on a visit; they gave out a frightful odor of cadaver, and so did his wife’s clothes and the grandchildren’s clothes. Whenever they came, the whole house was filled with that odor of cadaver. After they left, she had to keep the windows open for hours or she couldn’t bear it. But they themselves never noticed they smelled so awful.
    Her son, she said, was “huge,” with unusually long arms and “coarse” hands, but in the past he had always been good-natured. His father had been unhappy about the boy from the earliest years, for as soon as the child began to talk it became apparent that he’d never be very bright. And in fact his father had twice kept him back in his own elementary school. There’d never been any chance of his going to high school. Because of this son her husband had drifted more and more into a terrible depression. Tormented by doubts about the whole process of education, he’d found no peace, let alone any more satisfaction in his work. A psychiatrist he went to see in Graz did not help, merely cost a lot of money.The two of them still kept hoping that the boy’s sad condition, which cast a blight on both their lives, would end some day. But they had waited in vain for some sign of improvement. If her husband had not fallen to his death he would probably have been destroyed “slowly and miserably” by their son’s feeble-mindedness, she thought Then her son from one moment to the next, like an animal leaping up after crouching a long time, had suddenly gone after that Köflach girl, whose family went around with traveling exhibits to fairs and markets. He had to marry her because he made her pregnant right away.
    At first her family had taken him along to the fairs in Styria, Lower Austria, and the Burgenland. But then, because that wasn’t working out, his wife arranged for him to have that job with the Krottendorf tanner.
    Frau Ebenhöh often imagined her son standing in the steaming tannery, stripped to the waist, dully stirring the vats with a wooden paddle, stirring hour after hour while his wife, “unwashed and undressed” in a “greasy housecoat,” sat in her kitchen reading novels. She kept imagining her grandchildren’s home getting more and more filthy and stinking, she said, and brooded over the riddle of how out of the union with a husband from such a good family she could have borne a son who increasingly seemed to her a beast. However far she went back in both families, her own as well as her husband’s, she could see only “fine-nerved, decent people.” Among them all her son stood alone, “a kind of monster.” For her brother, the murderer, had also been one of the fine-nerved, kind, decent, intelligent, intellectually receptive,