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unfortunate thing is that she has the right, whenever she wants, to come and live in my house. This fatal clause in my father’s will I find intolerable. Usually she doesn’t announce that she’s coming, but suddenly arrives and walks round my house as though she owned it entirely, though she only has right of domicile in it, yet this right of domicile is for life and is not restricted to specific parts of the house. And if she cares to bring any of her dingy friends with her I can’t stop her. She spreads herself in my house as if she were sole owner and takes over from me. And I haven’t the strength to resist. To do so I should have to be an entirely different character, an entirely different person. And then I never know whether she’s going to stay two days or two hours, four weeks or six weeks, or even several months, because she doesn’t like city life any longer and has prescribed herself a cure of country air. It sickens me when she addresses me as my dear little brother. My dear little brother, she says, I’m in the library now, not you , and she actually demands that I leave the library immediately, even when I’ve only just entered it or have been there for some time before her. My dear little brother, what good has it done you studying all that rubbish? It’s made you sick, almost crazy, a sad, comic figure. That’s what she said on the last evening in order to hurt me. For a year now you’ve been wittering on about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Where’s your great work? she said. You associate only with the dead. I associate with the living. That’s the difference between us. In the society I mix with there are living people, in yours there are only dead people. Because you’re afraid of the living , she said, because you’re not willing to make the least commitment, the commitment that has to be made if one wants to associate with living people. You sit here in your house, which is nothing but a morgue, and cultivate the society of the dead, of mother and father and our unfortunate sister and all your so-called great minds. It’s frightening! In fact she’s right, it now seems to me; what she says is true. Over the years I’ve got completely stuck in this morgue, which is what my house is. In the morning I get up in the morgue, all day I go to and fro in the morgue, and late at night I go to bed in the morgue. Your house! she shouted in my face, you mean your morgue! She’s right, I now told myself, everything she says is true. I don’t associate with a living soul. I’ve even given up all contact with the neighbours. Unless I have to shop for groceries I no longer leave the house at all. And I hardly get mail because I no longer write letters. When I go out for a meal I flee from the restaurant almost before I’ve entered it or eaten my nauseating food. The result is that I hardly speak to anyone any longer, and from time to time I get the feeling that I can’t speak at all, that I’ve forgotten how to. Incredulously I practise speaking, to see whether I can still produce a sound, because most of the time I don’t even talk to Frau Kienesberger. She does her work, but I don’t give her any instructions, and sometimes I don’t even notice her before she’s gone again. Why did I in fact turn down my sister’s suggestion that I should go and stay with her in Vienna for a few weeks? I reacted brusquely as if to parry a malignant insult. What sort of person have I become since my parents died? I asked myself. I had sat down on the hall chair, and suddenly I felt frozen. The house wasn’t just empty, it was dead. It’s a morgue, I thought. But I can’t stand it at all if there are other people in it apart from myself. Again I saw my sister in a bad light. She had nothing but scorn and contempt for me. She made me look ridiculous wherever she could, every moment, and, when the occasion presented itself, in front of all the others. Thus, about a week ago, on Tuesday, when we visited the