The Loser Read Online Free PDF Page A

this is our last chance to see Glenn. I actually was expecting his death and I had absolutely wanted to see him again, hear him play, I thought as I stood in the inn and inhaled the inn’s fetid aroma, which was all too familiar. I knew Wankham. I always stayed in this inn when I was in Wankham, when I visited Wertheimer, since I couldn’t stay with Wertheimer, he couldn’t tolerate overnight guests. I looked for the innkeeper, but everything was still. Wertheimer hated having guests stay overnight, abhorred them. Guests in general, of any kind, he received them and paid them compliments, they were barely in the door before they were out again, not that he would have complimented me out the door, I knew him too well for that, but after a few hours he preferred me to disappear rather than stay and spend the night. I’ve never spent the night at his house, it never would have occurred to me, I thought, keeping a sharp lookout for the innkeeper. Glenn was a big-city person, like me incidentally, like Wertheimer, at bottom we loved everything about big cities and hated the country, which however we exploited to the hilt (as we did the city, incidentally, in its own way). Wertheimer and Glenn had finally moved to the country because of their sick lungs, Wertheimer more reluctantly than Glenn, Glenn on principle, since he finally could no longer put up with people in general, Wertheimer because of his continuous coughing fits in the city and because his internist told him he had no chance of surviving in the big city. For over two decades Wertheimer found refuge with his sister at the Kohlmarkt, in one of the biggest and most luxurious apartments in Vienna. But finally his sister married a so-called industrialist from Switzerland and moved in with her husband in Zizers bei Chur. Of all places Switzerland and of all people a chemical-plant owner, as Wertheimer expressed it to me. A horrendous match. She left me in the lurch, blubbered Wertheimer over and over. In his suddenly empty apartment he appeared paralyzed, after his sister moved out he would sit for days in a chair without moving, then start running from room to room like the proverbial chicken, back and forth, until he finally holed himself up in his father’s hunting lodge in Traich. After his parents’ death he nonetheless lived with his sister and tyrannized this sister for twenty years, as I know, for years he kept her from having any contact with men and with society in general, umbrellaed her off so to speak, chained her to herself. But she broke loose and ditched him along with the old, rickety furniture they had inherited together. How could she do this to me, he said to me, I thought. I’ve done everything for her, sacrificed myself for her, and now she’s left me behind, just ditched me, runs after this nouveau-riche character in Switzerland, Wertheimer said, I thought in the inn. In Chur of all places, that ghastly region where the Catholic church literally stinks to high heaven. Zizers, what a godawful name for a town! he exploded, asking me if I’d ever been in Zizers, and I recalled having passed through Zizers several times on my way to St. Moritz, I thought. Provincial cretins, cloisters and chemical plants, nothing else, he said. He worked himself up several times to the claim that he had given up his piano virtuosity for love of his sister, I called it quits because of her , sacrificed my career, he said, gave away everything that had meant anything to me. This was how he tried to lie his way out of his own desperation, I thought. His apartment at the Kohlmarkt extended over three floors and was stuffed full of every conceivable artwork, which always oppressed me when I visited my friend. He himself confessed to hating these artworks, his sister hoarded them, he hated them, couldn’t care less about them, blamed his entire misfortune on his sister, who had ditched him for a Swiss megalomaniac. He once told me quite seriously that he had dreamed of