My Prizes: An Accounting Read Online Free PDF Page B

the money finally to be real liquid cash. When my eulogist had finished and the schoolchildren, or so it seemed, clapped the most enthusiastically of all, I was signaled to go up to the podium. On the podium the prize was then presented to me, and I no longer remember what it looked like, I no longer have it, just as I no longer have any of the other prize documents, they have gotten lost over the years. Now I had the document and the check in my hand and I went to the lectern and read out my notes on the clarity that increases in the cold. Just as the audience was beginning to prepare for my speech, it was already over. That was the shortest speech a Bremen prizewinner has ever given, I thought, and after the ceremony this was confirmed to me. So there I stood and had to shake hands with the mayor again for the photographers. Outside in the corridor my old friend the editor suddenly appeared totally unexpectedly, the one who had accepted
Frost
within three days, and said, knowing himself to be totally alone with me, confidentially so to speak: Please lend me five thousand marks, I need them desperately.Yes of course, I said, without thinking through the consequences, and I said as soon as it’s two o’clock and the banks in Bremen are open again, I’ll go to a bank with you and cash the check and give you the five thousand marks. How often he’s lent me money, I thought, again and again and again and it wasn’t long ago that he rescued me out of one of my fatal financial catastrophes. Immediately after the ceremony there was a lunch in a prominent Bremen restaurant, which I left at two o’clock to go with my friend to the bank and cash the check for
Frost
. Anyhow, I thought, I’m going to Giessen after Bremen to give a reading in a so-called evangelical educational institute and I’ll be paid two thousand marks. That’ll give me seven thousand marks again. This thought immediately made me happy again. The next day I visited another friend in Bremen who lived there in an attic room and with whom I had a terrific conversation about theater over good tea and a view over the pewter-colored river Weser, most of all we talked about Artaud. Right after this conversation I went back to Vienna. And of course I could no longer expect to move into my newly purchased walls in Nathal. How I eventually got control of it and altered and rebuilt it more or less with my own hands and financed it all over the course of the yearsdoesn’t belong here. But the Bremen prize was the impetus for my walls, without it everything would probably have taken a different turn for me and unfolded in another way. In any case I made a second trip to Bremen in connection with the so-called Bremen Literature Prize and I don’t want to conceal what happened to me on this second trip to Bremen. I was a so-called member of the jury to select the next prizewinner and I had gone to Bremen with my mind already made up that I would vote for Canetti who, I believe, had not until that time received a single literary award. For whatever reason, anyone but Canetti was out of the question for me, I considered any other choice to be risible. There was this long table, I believe, in a Bremen restaurant where the jury was meeting, and sitting at it was a whole row of gentlemen who were the so-called voting jurors, among them the famous Senator Harmsen, with whom I had a very warm relationship. I think they had all named their own candidates, none of whom was Canetti, when it came to my turn and I said,
Canetti
. I wanted to give Canetti the prize for
Auto-da-Fé
, the brilliant work of his youth which had been reissued a year before this jury met. Several times I said the word
Canetti
and each time the faces around the long table grimaced in a self-pitying sortof way. Many of the people at the table didn’t even know who Canetti was, but among the few who did know about Canetti was one who suddenly said, after I had said
Canetti
again, but he’s
also
a Jew. Then