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my Sunday afternoon for hour after hour, until my sister discovered where I was and, darting out from the bushes with a yell, snatched the volume of Novalis from me. Our younger sister was entirely different, but she’s been dead for thirty years, and it’s senseless to compare her now with my elder sister, to compare one who was always ailing and ill and finally died with one who is always healthy and dominates all around her. Even her husband put up with her for only two and a half years, after which he fled from her stranglehold and went to South America, to Peru, never to be heard of again. She’s always destroyed whatever she’s touched, and all her life she’s tried to destroy me. At first unconsciously, then consciously, she’s set out to annihilate me. Right up to this day I’ve had to protect myself against my elder sister’s savage desire to annihilate, and I really don’t know how so far I’ve managed to escape her. She turns up when she feels like it, she leaves when she feels like it, and she does what she feels like doing. She married her husband, who was a real estate broker, in order to drive him to Peru and get complete control of his real estate business. She’s a business woman. Even as a very small child she was that way inclined, towards the persecution of the intellect and the closely concomitant pursuit of money. That we should have had the same mother is something I’ve never been able to understand. She’d now been out of the house for almost twenty-four hours, yet she was still in control of me. I couldn’t escape her. I tried desperately but didn’t succeed. I’m horrified by the thought that to this day, when she travels by sleeper, she makes a principle of sleeping only in her own sheets. For the third time I flung open the windows and aired the whole house, until the cold air had turned it into an ice-box in which I was in danger of freezing to death. At first I’d been afraid of suffocating; now I was afraid of freezing to death. And all this because of my sister, under whose influence I’ve been in danger of either suffocating or ran to the window and shouted out this diabolical statement several times. Now I’ve ruined your essay! Now I’ve ruined your essay! I was no match for such hideous surprise attacks. At table she destroyed every conversation as it was just beginning, merely by laughing suddenly or interjecting some impossibly stupid remark which had no bearing on the incipient conversation. My father was best at keeping her under control, but my mother she victimized mercilessly. When our mother died and we were standing at the graveside, my sister said to herself, with the utmost callousness, She killed herself. She was simply too weak to live. As we were leaving the cemetery she said, Some are strong and others are weak . But I must break loose from my sister, I said, and went out into the yard. I drew a deep breath, which at once brought on a fit of coughing. I went straight back into the house and had to sit down on the chair under the mirror to stop myself fainting. It was only slowly that I recovered from the rush of cold air into my lungs. I took two glycerine tablets and four prednisolone pills in one go. Calm down, calm down, I said, and as I did so I observed the graining in the floorboards, the life-lines in the larch-wood. Observing them restored my balance. I stood up cautiously and went back upstairs. Perhaps now I shall be able to make a start on my work, I thought. But just as I was sitting down it occurred to me that I hadn’t had breakfast, so I got up and went down to freezing to death all my life. In her apartment in Vienna she actually stays in bed until half-past-ten and doesn’t go for lunch at the Imperial or the Sacher until about half-past-one. There, as she dissects her boiled fillet of beef and sips her vin rose, she does business with her effete princes and with imperial highnesses of every possible and impossible kind. I’m nauseated