Gargoyles

He would visit Bloch at least once a week for a longish talk, my father said, a discussion that he or Bloch took turns at leading. I might find it hard to believe, my father said, considering the general tenor of things in Stiwoll, but the two of them conducted “autopsies on the body of nature” as well as “on the body of the world and its history.” They discussed “comparative political science, applied natural history, literary criticism,” and dealt “unsparingly with society and the state.” But in general the main theme in Bloch’s house was politics, and they tended to talk about people more in regard to their political than their private beings. Meeting in a first-floor study, they conducted an analysis of the world on the most stringent intellectual principles, and left no margin for any illusions whatsoever. Most of the time the arts were rather scanted, my father said, but occasionally they would turn to them out of courtesy to Bloch’s wife.

Bloch was sitting in an office to the right of the vestibule, separated from it only by a glass partition, and dictating with obvious excitement to his secretary. As he later mentioned, he was addressing a letter to the Voitsberg surveyor, whom I also knew. My father tapped on the office window, and Bloch came out. He greeted us pleasantly and led us at once into the study on the second floor. The fact is that nowhere in a rural area have I ever seen so many books all together as in Bloch’s library. Moreover, as I observed, they were all well used, and were not here for their so-called bibliophilic value, which people in German-speaking countries set such ridiculous store by — aside from a Latin edition of the Nuremberg physician Schedel’s world history, of which there are only a few copies in the whole world.

Bloch asked what had brought my father to Stiwoll at this unusual morning hour. My father said he wanted to return Kant’s Prolegomena and Marx’s Dissertation, both of which he had finished. He took the two volumes out of his medical bag and put them down on the table. Then he mentioned the books he would like to borrow: Nietzsche’s lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a French edition of Pascal’s Pensées, and Diderot’s Mystification. He had to call on a woman named Ebenhöh on Piberweg, he said. Bloch did not know her.

Since he had nothing else in the house, Bloch poured us glasses of white wine, Klöscher. Early that morning, he said, he had again suffered from one of his “frightful” headaches, but it had vanished after he began working intensively on his business correspondence. He was taking more and more of the headache remedy my father had prescribed for him, he said. And he had not slept the past four or five days. My father warned him against overdoing it with the medicine, which was dangerous to the kidneys.

Recently, Bloch said, he had managed to buy a sizable property in the vicinity of Semriach. “It took me two years to put over the deal,” he said. A week earlier it had been plow-land, but he saw it as a prime building parcel that could be divided into more than a hundred lots. That way he would be able to dispose of the property quickly. “You have to be able to wait it out,” he said. This was his biggest deal of the year, he added. He asked for a better sedative; my father wrote a prescription. “Naturally I’m not liked,” Bloch said, and my father stood up. They arranged to meet the next Wednesday. For the past two years my father had been seeing Bloch every Wednesday.

We went to Frau Ebenhöh on foot.