Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard Page B

up from his seat and shook his fist in my face. Snorting with rage, he called me a
curr
in front of the whole assembly and then left the chamber, slamming the glass door behind him with such force that it shattered into a thousand fragments. Everybody present jumped up and watched in astonishment as the minister stormed out. For a moment complete silence reigned, as they say. And then the strangest thing happened: the whole assembly, whom I can describe only as an opportunistic rabble, rushed after the minister, though not without shouting curses and brandishing their fists at me as they went. I clearly remember the clenched fist that Herr Henz, the president of the Art Senate, brandished at me, and all the other marks of respect I was shown at that moment, as the whole assembly, consisting of a few hundred keptartists, most of them writers—colleagues of mine, one might say—together with their hangers-on, raced through the shattered glass door in pursuit of the minister. I will refrain from mentioning names, as I have no wish to appear in court over such a ludicrous matter, but they were the best known, most celebrated, and most respected names in Austrian letters. They all raced out of the audience chamber and down the stairs after the minister, leaving me standing there with my companion. Like a leper. None of them stayed behind with us; they all rushed out, past the buffet that had been prepared for them, and followed the minister down the stairs—all except Paul. He was the only one who stayed with me and my companion, horrified, yet at the same time amused, by the incident. Later, when they could safely do so, a few of those who had at first disappeared slunk back and joined me in the audience chamber. This little group finally got around to discussing where to go for a meal in order to choke down the whole ridiculous episode. Years later Paul and I would go through the names of those who had raced after this brainless Styrian politician in their unscrupulous subservience to the state and its ministers, and we knew why each of them had done so. The following day the Austrian newspapers carried reports of how
Bernhard the nest fouler
had insulted the minister, when in fact the opposite was the case: the minister Piffl-Per?evi? had insulted the writer Thomas Bernhard. However, the event drew fitting comment abroad, where people do not have to rely on the Austrian ministries and their involvement in artistic subventions.
Accepting a prize is in itself an act of perversity
, my friend Paul told me at the time,
butaccepting a state prize is the greatest
. Visiting our
musical
friend Irina in the Blumenstockgasse had become one of our favorite habits, and it was nothing short of a disaster when one day she moved to the country, to a remote village in Lower Austria that could be reached only after a two-hour drive, as it did not even have a rail connection. We could not imagine what a city dweller like Irina hoped to find in the country. Year in, year out, she had gone to a concert or the opera or the theater every evening, yet now she suddenly took a lease on a one-story farmhouse, half of which was used as a pigsty, as Paul and I discovered to our horror, and where not only did it rain in but damp rose from floor to ceiling, there being no cellarage. Suddenly there she was, sitting with her musicologist, who for years had written for Austrian newspapers and periodicals, leaning against an American cast-iron stove, eating her own home-baked farm bread, wearing shabby old clothes, extolling the country life and inveighing against the city, while I had to hold my nose against the stench from the pigsty. The musicologist no longer wrote articles on Webern and Berg, Hauer and Stockhausen, but spent his time chopping wood outside the window or clearing out the blocked cesspit. Irina talked no longer about the Sixth or the Seventh but only about the smoked pork she hung in the chimney with her own hands, no longer about