THE ASCENT

I am standing on the balcony of a small hotel in the Salzkammergut in Austria. It is a small hotel, because a big one would be too vulgar. In fact, it does not even look like a hotel. The brass plate at its gate says simply Lake View. On the other hand, it is not a private villa. Owning a villa, all for oneself, would also be too vulgar. It would be a tying down and a definition. It would reveal one’s character, or lack of it. A villa demands guests to fill it. One is judged by whom one invites, one is judged by whom one does not invite. One is exposed, whatever one does. That is not my choice. Everyone would know how big the villa was, how many people it could accommodate. Filling it would be extravagance, not filling it would be meanness. There is nothing between a miser and a spendthrift. Those you invite speak ill of you, those you do not invite speak ill of you. Best, therefore, to invite no one at all, because you do not actually have a villa you can call your own. Instead, you hire one, or part of one, no one is quite sure which, and your friends (for I do have friends, at least I think I do, and I am sure my wife has friends, at least she believes they are) your friends come at the same time and also take rooms in the villa, and nobody enquires about who actually pays the bills, and even if they were to enquire, they would not be told. Lake View is a private house, available for hire, and has the attributes of a private house, not least privacy and a degree of exemption from public judgement.

Another of these attributes is a pleasing air of not too shabby gentility. The outside is painted every seven years, not every five, or, Heaven forbid, every three! At the moment the gentle silvery graininess of weathered wood shows through the standard dark green paint of the shutters, and the standard yellow of the stuccoed walls is just beginning to speckle and peel away. Lake View clearly belongs here and is part of the community, even part of the landscape. It does not stand out by being too new and intrusive, nor by being in decline and passé. The house martins and swallows clearly approve, and return each year to make their nests. Splashes of mud from their construction, and the minor mess which is inevitably associated with rearing a family, contribute to the speckling of the walls.

If you do not know about the Salzkammergut, then I have to tell you. I am concerned to be clear about things, about what and where and when, and how and why and who. The last two categories give me trouble, as you will discover, particularly where I am concerned. The Salzkammergut, however, is susceptible of description, even if, as with all natural phenomena, description falsifies experience. No. That was unjust of me. That was prejudice. Description modifies experience. Knowing what you are seeing while you see it is clearly different from simply seeing it and trying to work out afterwards what it was you saw. But repeatedly seeing the same thing will inevitably build up patterns, imperceptibly you will develop habits of perception which will become, without your realising it, the rudiments of interpretation.

I remember, when I first came here, many years ago, a city-dweller, ignorant of nature, I confused swallows and house martins and swifts. Frau Gruber, the housekeeper, and her husband who was then still alive, and their son, Ferdinand, all tried to explain the difference to me, and they did so in the simplest of ways, for which I was very grateful. Had I asked one of the experts from Vienna University, I would have been none the wiser, but these people said, ‘If the bird looks clean, it’s a martin, if it looks dirty, it’s a swallow, and if it screams, it’s a swift.’ Only then did I realise that the birds I had seen in Venice on those rare occasions when I visited it in late spring or early summer, before the stench of the lagoon became excessive, had been swifts and not swallows. Venice, of course, is best visited for Carnival, that marvellous masked and misty occasion when everyone conspires openly and simultaneously to hide their identities and reveal their true selves – or perhaps vice versa. It all depends.

Now that I have undertaken to describe the Salzkammergut to you, I am not entirely sure whether I shall be describing its true self or its identity, or whether, in fact, they coincide. It is an area of lakes and mountains, running from Upper Austria through part of the Province of Salzburg down into Styria. What links this area is partly visible and partly invisible. The visible aspect is the River Traun, often a rich green, sometimes blue, sometimes brown. Its valley is narrow, not always leaving room for a road or a railway. Occasionally there are rapids, or a lake. Other rivers join it, linking it with side-valleys, saddles and passes that can be crossed, if not with ease, then at least with a modicum of healthy exertion, particularly in the summer. The invisible link is the salt that gives it its name. Deep within the rocks are the ancient salt mines. Most mines are dirty, damp and dangerous. These are dry, and seem to be clean and safe, otherwise the tourists would never venture into them, sliding down on mats as if they were on a helter-skelter at a fun-fair. To be sure, the salt is now extracted as brine, dissolved in water and pumped along large pipelines, but the upper galleries, where men chipped away for millennia at a substance intended to preserve corruptible flesh, retain their pure and crystalline quality. The air is said to be good for those with chest troubles, being abnormally dry.

Is it the healthy aspect which makes Jews like it so much? Ah – perhaps you think that this judgement of mine is also prejudice, like my earlier one? Far from it. Though it does, I must confess, derive more from knowledge than experience and observation. That is to say, I have to know that someone is a Jew. I cannot simply guess by looking at them. There are many Gentiles who are doctors, lawyers, bankers, journalists, novelists, dramatists, nouveaux riches and consummate vulgarians. For these last categories in particular there are no racial qualifications, whatever Herr von Schönerer would like to believe, and would like everyone else to believe. (Though the question of what Herr von Schönerer himself actually believes would, in my opinion, be better explored by the doctors in the asylum at Steinhof than by the voters in any kind of election.). The fact remains, and it is a fact, unlike many other things which go by that name, that the Salzkammergut is a very popular summer resort for a large number of the more distinguished Jewish citizens of Austria-Hungary. Shall I name some of them? Why not? After all, they are none of them my guests, let me correct myself, they are none of them living in the same private house in which I have rented an apartment with my wife, so no vanity can be involved, not even a pardonable one.

Schnitzler, Freud, Hofmannsthal. There they are. A triumvirate? Hardly. Though on reflection they do complement one another: a doctor, who is also a writer, though given the nature of his specialism, most people, however uncultured they are, would prefer it to be thought they visit him for literary reasons; a doctor who peers inside people’s heads with less sentimentality, more perspicacity, and a more incisive literary style than his colleague; and a writer who passes off psychological realities as fantasies by giving them a sugar coat made out of the costume of bygone ages. Schnitzler and Freud are clearly Jewish in the present-day sense, while Hofmannsthal has it in his ancestry.

What draws them here, I wonder? Is it what draws me? Is it what drew me at first, some fourteen years ago? In the last year of the old century. No one expected the world to end. Most felt that it already had, and a new one had failed to begin. That was what I read in Hofmannsthal’s poems, back in ’92. The pity of it! An eighteen year-old, still at grammar school, and writing like the weariest of old men. Beautiful, beautiful – and dead. Beautiful because dead. The beauty of cut flowers, which will slowly become desiccated without losing their shape, their colour mellowing gradually, not exposed to rain that will stain them brown, or insects that will serrate their leaves or perforate their petals, no, they will slowly dry up indoors, and only if somebody actually touches them will they crumble into dust, except that they were never made to be touched, only to be looked at.

Of course, Hofmannsthal knew that, which was why he wrote about the problem himself. A clever man. A pity! If he’d been less clever, he wouldn’t have noticed, and might have just carried on. If he’d been a bit cleverer, he might have solved the problem, or else he might have seen that it couldn’t be solved, and simply stopped writing. But just talking about it, and pretending it was happening to somebody else! Freud thinks that talking about it will make it go away. But you have to admit that you’re the one that has it. And you have to talk to a qualified person. And you have to pay for the privilege, too, otherwise the treatment won’t work. But since Hofmannsthal’s problem was that words had lost their meaning for him, just talking wasn’t ever really going to help. From then on, everything was merely an ironic game.

As it is for me, I suppose. My grandfather and great-grandfather did the work. My father had the money and made a lot more of it. All that was left for me to do was to spend it. Oh, I had choices. I could spend it fast or spend it slow. I chose the latter. In the long run, if there’s no one for me to leave it to, I’ll give it away. Until then, I’ll enjoy it. I can enjoy things, you know, provided they don’t want to possess me, provided they know their place. I don’t mean subservience by that. I mean independence. For example, I enjoy the Salzkammergut.

Mahler, now, the composer, the Jewish composer, two years dead, not long enough to become a classic, he spent his holidays in Carinthia. Why? Because it was intense. Because he was intense. They have lakes there. Everywhere. Each little hole in the ground fills up and becomes a lake. In the summer, they grow warm and embrace you. Don’t try that with the lakes round here. In the shallows, maybe. Or if you’re a very strong swimmer. Carinthia is more southerly, not much, but enough. Enough to have those summer days that begin with mist, which the sun burns off, the sun that burnishes the sky to blazing blue, calls up the clouds that tower on high and burst in rain and thunder, hail and lightning, so the hot earth steams, and then the re-emergent sun dissipates the final wisps of nebulous obscurity and at last the weary serenity of night descends like a peaceful benediction on the hills and the lakes and the forest-covered mountains. Just like a Mahler symphony.

You wouldn’t find that here. Nor in Tirol, for that matter, where they’re all peasants, even, and perhaps especially, the hoteliers. Subtlety is not a Tirolean vice, only cunning, the other side of the coin of their famed forthrightness and obstinacy. What does the Salzkammergut have? Inwardness. Even Franz Joseph, our old Emperor, has things inside him that he doesn’t show, which is why he comes to Ischl every year.

It was in Ischl that I met my wife. A marriage made in – Ischl. I brought the money. She brought the breeding. An old Austrian family – though if you go far enough back in old Austrian families you soon discover that they’re really French or Italian, or Bohemian or Moravian or Slovenian, or Irish soldiers of fortune that came over for the Thirty Years’ War and never went home, and why should they, after they’ve been given the titles and lands of Czech Protestant nobility who lost their heads on the Old Town Square?

What attracted us to each other was our indifference. Indifference, that is, to the opinions of others. That, and our privacy, a privacy maintained under all circumstances. I saw no reason to ask my wife about any possible liaisons prior to our marriage, but that epigram of Karl Kraus’s, spoken in the person of a woman, ‘Sleep with him, yes – but no intimacy!’ might have been coined for her. Kraus? Who is Kraus? Oh, just another Jewish writer who used to spend his summers in Ischl, but since he bought his nice new motor-car – his father’s money, of course, like mine – he’s always off in Italy or Switzerland, or seeing that Sidonie woman in Janovice.

When people say they have an understanding, it usually means they don’t. One of them believes what they want to believe and the other lets them. My wife and I, I should like to think, represent an exception to this rule. The understanding lies somewhere between us. It links us without being the possession or the responsibility of either one. If you don’t ask, then you won’t be told any lies. As the Marquis de La Rochefoucauld put it, ‘Our lack of trust justifies others in deceiving us.’ What my wife and I mutually and absolutely accept is the impossibility of understanding even one’s own motives adequately, let alone explaining them to someone else. Without an account of the motives, a mere bald description of the actions could not fail to be completely misleading.

There remain, of course, the consequences of these actions. In contrast to the obscurity of motives, most consequences tend to be all too evident. The fact that they are evident means they can be foreseen and prepared for. Indeed, in many instances they can be so clearly foreseen and so well prepared for that they never occur, and the actions themselves remain without consequence. Some actions, of course, are only worth performing because of their consequences. Others, on the other hand, are only worth performing if they have none. It is a matter for judgement in each individual case, though it must be admitted that this approach does tend to stress the aesthetic approach to life in general: if a thing is not worth doing in and of itself, then it may well be excluded from the range of actions to be considered.

My wife’s great passion has contributed not a little to these formulations. She climbs. Rock-faces for preference. She says there is a purity about the technique which is missing when one has to wade through melting snow and slush or leap crevasses on unpredictable glaciers. ‘I know where I am with rock, just as I do with you’ she has said to me on more than one occasion. ‘If it is going to crumble and give way, you should be able to see and feel that possibility, and take steps to avoid disaster.’ Her maxim is simple and elegant: Never make a move that you cannot reverse.

I prefer to keep my feet firmly on the ground, but I can imagine her sizing up her next move, stretching to grip almost invisible irregularities, measuring distances, never entrusting her weight entirely to one resting-place, not moving until she is absolutely secure, and always retaining the possibility of return, in case of an unforeseen consequence, a fragment of rock that flakes away, a handhold that turns out to be no more than a patch of lichen masquerading as the shadow of a tiny ledge. Her eyes search the face above and below, projecting and evaluating, seeing where the route she is about to choose will take her, identifying crucial turning-points where she must make a decision, or to which she will have to return in order to take a different course.

In this respect, her memory is so absolute that I feel sure she could reconstruct any climb she has ever done, move by move. When she tells me about it, I watch her body tense, the muscles in her legs bunch with imagined effort, her arms stretch as they reach out and contract as they balance the push of the legs and ease her into a position of precarious yet safe equilibrium, held between earth and sky. Never stay anywhere too long is another of her maxims, by which I feel in no way threatened, since a relationship, particularly ours, is not a static location, but derives its nature from the metaphorically spatial interaction between the persons who constitute it.

I have never enquired about the extent to which her passion for climbing is a cause or a consequence of her indifference to others, and more especially her open defiance of her parents (not least in marrying me). In the long run, establishing the priority of one thing over another in such an abstract sphere only gives an illusory and misleading sense of understanding. On the rock-face, it is vital to know what comes first and what comes second, because the physical order can only be reversed and not transposed. In the case of human characteristics, the association is the important thing. What looks like cause and effect may be no more than the chance of circumstance that led to the one being openly expressed before the other.

Winter and summer alternate, after all, but nobody would claim that one came first and the other second. Spring and autumn, those seasons of looking forward and looking back, can also be enjoyed in isolation, for their respective moods, and not because of what is to come or what has gone before. That, certainly, is my way of thinking. But then I do not want to remember my great-grandfather’s dubious business deals in Arad, my grandfather’s factories, or my father’s manipulation of the markets, and I have no interest in the future because I am content with my present. I savour the moment as one savours a sip of wine, a mouthful, a glassful, maybe the second or the third glass – and then something different. Different, but not better or worse.

There are those, not always among the moneyed classes, who set themselves goals, who become collectors. It doesn’t really matter what they collect: objects, titles, achievements. To my mind, they have taken happiness and put it outside themselves. Wherever it may be (and I cannot claim that I can always find it) it is out there. Their life becomes a search. A search for meaning. But they will never find what they are actually looking for. If they think they have, then you must ask what becomes of their life up to that point. It only served an end, which is now achieved. Where is the value in the scaffolding, after the building is built? And if they do not reach their goal, their life, directed to that single aim, remains equally meaningless. In both cases, they have failed to learn the art of enjoying the moment, and lacking that art they cannot even enjoy the moment of achievement, because it is only a moment, however long it lasts.

Does that sound paradoxical? Perhaps. But it’s true, nevertheless. The moment of achievement cannot lead on to anything else, because an achievement is a closure, a completeness. I am not surprised when I read in the newspapers that this or that collector has sold his or her entire collection, and turned their attention to collecting something entirely different. They are the lucky ones. They have seen through the illusion that happiness is connected with the finite. Of course, I may be wrong about that. It may be that they were simply disillusioned, that they had their illusion taken away without seeing that it was an illusion, that they are now seeking in thirteenth-century altarpieces what they sought in vain in fifteenth-century embroidery or eighteenth-century peasant furniture. But perhaps they have decided to concentrate on the pursuit, the hunt and not the kill. That, at least, would be something. They may be learning to savour the moment, the moment of receiving the sales catalogue, the moment of entering the back room of the frowsty little antique shop in Pressburg or Brünn, the moment of glimpsing a well-turned leg peeping out from under a tarpaulin at the back of the stacked-up furniture in the dripping outhouse. The art consists in excising, with the skill of a surgeon who removes neither too little nor too much, these moments from the context in which they are embedded.

It is something of which I am capable, as far as my own affairs are concerned. Life would be too easy if you could hire someone else to do it for you, say a surgeon like Billroth, though the writer, Peter Altenberg – another Jew who likes the Salzkammergut – wields a nifty literary scalpel. Young girls are his specialism. No, don’t worry about what they were doing before you saw them, nor which drink-smelling, cigar-puffing middle-aged man will be pawing them in a chambre séparée afterwards. For now, for this moment, they encapsulate youth and beauty and every male fantasy, both virgins and harlots. He also writes well about scenery. And autumn. And fountain pens. And gramophone records. Is there a danger here, that one may collect moments, as if they were objects? Of course. But there is danger everywhere in life. Only death offers some kind of security, though that is like describing zero as a nice round sum.

There is a question I have never asked my wife because I am afraid to hear the answer: whether she climbs to get to the top. Of course, it may be only an addiction. An addiction to the emotional state of climbing. Freud, I understand, was very taken in his comparative youth by the stimulation he derived from coca, and commended its use enthusiastically, for the way it transformed perceptions and gave insight and energy. After a while, he began to notice its other effects, and discontinued his involvement with it in a less public fashion than he had begun. I do not know how difficult he found it. I know that I would find it difficult to spend my summers anywhere other than the Salzkammergut – at the moment. That may change. I do not encourage dependence in myself or others, but I recognise the value of routine and the importance of certain states of mind and body. You could say I am addicted to warm showers and freshly laundered sheets, since the absence of these things disrupts my functioning to a considerable degree. Yet I do not think about them until they fail to be present. The same is true of coffee and fresh rolls. They induce a mood in me to which I am accustomed. Remove them, and I am ill at ease. In the winter, in Vienna, I sometimes notice that my wife is impatient for the rock-climbing season to begin again. I see her reading the publications of mountaineering clubs, or studying photographs of cliffs. Overall, it does not seem to prevent her enjoying the opera or the concerts or the occasional soirée that we attend. She does not reduce the winter to nothing, to an emptiness that must be endured, a void through which one must pass, blind and deaf.

In the season, though, there is nothing else that will interest her. She plans, she prepares, and then she undertakes. The weather, of course, is crucial, and the Salzkammergut is notorious for its damp unpredictability. English visitors say they feel so much at home. Lenau, one of our Austrian national poets, born in Hungary, but died in Vienna with syphilis rotting his brain, Lenau even wrote a protesting poem to the sky over Ischl in 1836. He, too, an addict of the Salzkammergut, however much it may have disappointed him, though America, as his poems tell us, disappointed him more. Would anywhere not have disappointed him? The Salzkammergut is a refuge for the disappointed. Austria, a Catholic country, once had sizeable Protestant minorities, all expelled by the Emperor Ferdinand, set marching away with wife and child, twenty thousand of them, as the nights grew long and cold. Some though – who knows when and from where? – fetched up in the Salzkammergut, mostly at Goisern, where nobody bothered to persecute them any more. And the same was true of the Celts. A whole cemetery of them at Hallstatt, full of fine metalwork. And bodies, of course. Not quite so fine. And the living Celts? Dissolved. Melted away into thin air and other people. How easy! Not so easy for us Jews, though. Here I am, a member of a club I never asked to join, and always being reminded of it, asked for my subscription by people whose major source of pride is that they are not qualified for admission. Sometimes it seems to be their only source of pride. So there is a use for the Jews after all: to make the Pan-Germans feel better about themselves. They can look down on us as an earlier, lower stage in the Ascent of Man. You can tell how naïve they are because they believe that from here on the only way is up. My wife could tell them otherwise.

Indeed, this summer she has had many opportunities to do so. It may be that climbing mountains gives people the habit of looking down on others, or it may be that those who like looking down on others are not only drawn to climbing mountains, but particularly to forming clubs concerned with it. There are French mountaineers and Italian mountaineers. There are Tibetan mountaineers for whom it is clearly nothing special, but an ordinary way of life – one is amazed that they do not simply laugh at the obsessed Europeans who come to invade their sacred realms with crude paraphernalia, but perhaps there are some among the Europeans who also worship the deities of the heights in a way which transcends language. And then there are the German mountaineers of the Alpenverein. The mountains they climb are German mountains, wherever they may lie and whatever language the people who live on their slopes may speak.

You think that this is prejudice? I know otherwise. This is the summer of my wife’s determination to scale the Trisselwand, the wall of rock that rises sheer from the lake. You can see it very well from here. The selection of this place to stay was no accident. Or perhaps it was, since I had already chosen it as my summer abode long before I met my wife.

Staying here, we both pursue our passions. No. I cannot use that word for what I do, even though it means a great deal to me and affords me very great pleasure. I sit and read and look at the world about me. Sometimes I walk and continue looking at the world about me, though of course that world has changed. Sometimes I walk to a place from which I can look at the world beyond me. The Salzkammergut has many mountains, of different kinds. I choose the ones to look at according to my moods. Sometimes, indeed, I look at the Trisselwand over there and observe the changes of light on its otherwise blank face. Sometimes I look to my left to see the Loser, which is more of a long walk than a climb, though the clouds can hide it, and sometimes I take a lengthy stroll around the lake to the meadow from which I can see, on a clear day, the Dachstein with its caves of ice. That is, for me, one of the miracles of the mountains: how they part to give glimpses of distance. How I can be in a hay-meadow on the shores of the lake, and also on the Dachstein. Sometimes I simply stand here on the balcony and look over at the Totes Gebirge and the Höllengebirge – such grim names! The Mountains of Death and the Mountains of Hell! – and watch them flare pink in the sunset while the lake in front of me is long since dark, brooding and mysterious. The sun that sheds its light on them has long since gone away to pious peoples that still honour him, and only those who rise so high above the common ground still have the right to be touched by his rays.

My wife, I imagine, does not think about mountains in the same way as I do. Her acquaintance with them is closer, more intimate, more tactile. I play the role of a teenage lover, admiring from afar, attributing qualities which are only present because I want to see them, although they could be logically deduced from the plain facts. The plain facts are what I read.

I read the works of Adalbert Stifter, because they suspend time. They are, after all, Austrian classics, and a classic, as we all know, is something that transcends the demands of the day and will last forever. With some classics, a single page feels as though it will last forever. That would be the verdict of many a schoolboy, I feel sure, who would be happier reading Karl May’s accounts of the Wild West or distant Kurdistan, rather than Stifter’s descriptions of Alpine valleys.

They are facts and they are plain. But it is so rare for anyone to say these things so simply that they have the freshness and novelty of cold spring water for someone who is used to choosing between beer, wine, coffee and fruit juice. Consider what he says about marriage: Not all these relationships, not many of these relationships, are happy. Stifter, the classic, Stifter, the creator of the ‘wholesome world’, Stifter, the school-text, the preacher of the gospel of nature, should not be making statements like that!

Ah! But they misunderstand him. They do not see that all these step-wise descriptions, these accounts of making bread, of cleaning floors, of every petty household task in all its sequential details, with an explanation of why it must be done in just this way and just this order – that all this recital of the familiar and self-evident is a barricade against the violent incursion of the chaotic, the irrational, the destructive that lies in every one of us just beneath our social surface. Some keep it at bay by constantly washing their hands, or counting the cracks in the pavement, by pulling their ears or rubbing their nose, a set of harmless gestures that add up to an obsessive-compulsive pattern of behaviour. Stifter converts a neurotic tic into a celebration of the laws of the universe.

My favourite work of his is Bergkristall, Rock-crystal, the tale of two children who get lost on a mountain and survive by simply being themselves, following paths and looking at what they see. On the mountain there is snow. In the valley there are people From the valley you can see the mountain. The reverse is not always true. When the church bell rings in the valley, it cannot be heard on the mountain, because there is no message to be proclaimed there. I do not try to persuade my wife to read these things, though I leave the books lying around to be picked up by anyone who cares.

The Pan-German members of the Alpenverein did not care. They smoked. They drank. They laughed. They boasted about their conquests. In all spheres. They clearly had courage. They all believed they had skill. They showed their comradeship, insofar as that quality can be or needs to be shown. They stayed up late at night, planning, discussing. My wife, naturally, was with them. She wanted to be the first woman to climb the Trisselwand.

I have never needed to worry about being accepted. My money has always enabled me to do what I wanted without being dependent on the permission or goodwill of others. Perhaps that was one reason why I was so upset about what went on. Another reason may have been the anti-semitic tone of much of the conversation. It was not clear to me whether they were offensive out of choice or ignorance. Nor was it clear to me whether that distinction made any difference as far as my response was concerned. Where I could not share my wife’s enthusiasms, I always refrained from disrupting them by my presence. Feigned involvement is as bad as open indifference. I sat on the uppermost balcony, and when their braying voices rose even that high I went for a walk in the woods. Later, I asked Frau Gruber to have the peasant-farmer who was our neighbour mow the grass in the grounds, so that the Germans could have a picnic away from the immediate vicinity of the house. Frau Gruber told me Alois had said he was glad of the extra hay for his cows, and I told Frau Gruber it was a pity he had not said so before, otherwise I would have let both sets of cattle eat together. She appreciated my anti-German gibe, all the more so because I delivered it with a straight face.

In this way, I regained the use of my balcony, at least for a while, and when rain set in for a week I was happy to sit on it under cover at the top of the house and read while the clouds swirled about and the geraniums dripped in their window-boxes. I read another favourite of mine, also by Stifter: Abdias, the tale of a Jew from North Africa who lost his wife and came to Austria, cherishing his blind infant daughter. Here, as he became part of the landscape, distinguished only by his reverence for the water whose abundance in this land contrasted so sharply with its scarcity in the land from which he had come, his daughter experienced, during a thunderstorm, a strange electrical phenomenon which restored her sight, only to die, serenely and gently, from a similarly inexplicable manifestation of static electricity shortly afterwards. Abdias continued living, habitually, following his wonted round, so much part of the scene and the scenery that his neighbours found it hard to recall when he had ceased to be visible and been absorbed quite literally into the land. I read the story again and again, every day for a week, marvelling at Stifter’s ability to explain nothing while describing everything.

I speak as if these things were in the past, and yet they are in the present. Today is the day of the attempt on the Trisselwand.