Gargoyles

On the drive home my father told me that young Krainer had been in the Steinhof asylum for four years. Throughout that time his sister had rented a tiny room in Ottakring in order to be near him. At first it had looked as if he would never get out of the mental hospital; the doctors always used the word “hopeless” when they spoke of him. But suddenly, after four years at Steinhof, after he had spent four years in the largest and most terrible of all European insane asylums, the doctors had suddenly told the girl she could take her brother home.

“At your own risk,” they had said, while simultaneously declaring that he was not dangerous. For a while she had kept him in her room in Ottakring and shown him the capital. Whenever they walked in Vienna, they had created a great stir, for his deformity in conjunction with his madness had struck people as funny. But by then the Krainer girl no longer minded when people gawked at her brother. She showed him the Prater and took him to the opera and the Burgtheater. They also went to the Rebernigg circus. For a whole week they went about the city, visited St. Stephan’s Cathedral several times, went to the Naschmarkt, even attended a concert by the famous cellist Casals, who was playing the Beethoven sonatas. But soon their dragging around the city tired him; after a week it bored him; and she regretted spending the money Prince Saurau had given her (the Prince had also paid for the stay in Steinhof) on seeing a city that by now only aroused disgust in her. They gave up the room in Ottakring and went back to Hochgobernitz. At first he had enjoyed taking long walks. He enjoyed the countryside. Nature meant a great deal to him. The two of them loved to walk to the cliff and look down into the gorge. Standing there, his sister explained to him the villages in the valley. During that period he had been more receptive than ever before. Soon he resumed playing the cello, the violin, and the piano. She took longer and longer walks with him. But once, when she had walked with him as far as the oaks, from where you can look directly down upon the Frochlers’ mill, he had suddenly come up behind her and struck her on the head with a branch. When she came to, her brother was sitting beside her, weeping. They went home. That night, when she was sure he was asleep, she brought the grating from the attic and placed it over his bed. From then on she had the feeling that her brother hated her. But she loved him.

She seldom had a chance nowadays to go out of the house alone, to walk a bit toward the castle, into the castle yard, or on the castle walls. Whenever she did go out, she would always have to recount her adventures as soon as she got home. But it was a long time since she had seen or experienced anything, she said. “Yet if I don’t tell him things, he threatens me.” she said. Now and then he insisted that she powder his face to hide the redness of his constant fever.

The examination had been difficult but had taken only half an hour.

My father had actually made this totally insane and crippled young Krainer put out his tongue at the end of the examination. While he was filling out a prescription, I made a curious discovery: On the four walls of the room, which horribly enough had to serve as the bedroom for both the children because the house was so small, hung a number of large engravings — probably the property of Prince Saurau, I thought — representing the great men of music. At first I had not realized that all these engravings were of composers. But then I noticed that young Krainer had written on all of them in red ink. Above the head of Mozart he had written: “Very great!” and above Beethoven’s head: “More tragic than I!” and above Haydn’s head: “Swine,” and above Gluck’s: “Don’t like you.” Across Hector Berlioz’s face he had written: “Horrible,” and for Franz Schubert: “Womanish!” I could not see the two engravings above his bed so clearly, nor decipher their inscriptions. Young Krainer had been watching my efforts to decipher the inscriptions all the while, and when he saw that I could not make out those on the two engravings above his bed, he laughed at me. On Anton Bruckner’s face was a contemptuous “Music-hall stuff”; on Purcell’s, “Stop it, Scotty!” Beneath a large photograph of Béla Bartok he had written: “I am listening!” In the corner where I had been sitting all the while, I discovered before we went out three violins with their necks broken; the broken necks were bunched together with a cord. Young Krainer’s restiveness had given way, now that the examination was over, to exhaustion. He let his sister lay his head back on the pillow without protest. He asked for water, and his sister brought him some in a tin cup. Probably, I thought, he often hurled drinking vessels against the wall after he had drunk.

Such deformity is always joined by the corresponding insanity, my father said when we were outside. “The physical disease leads directly to the mental disease.”