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to achieve by my lifestyle and my way of thinking. They referred to a few newspaper articles I had published recently, which naturally did not suit the writers because they had been directed against all such people—people in Austria, of course, whose hatred pursued me as far as Rome. I have been getting such letters for years. The writers are not madmen, as I had at first believed, but individuals who are legally responsible—fit to plead, so to speak—yet who react to my publications in various newspapers and magazines, not only in Frankfurt and Hamburg but in Milan and Rome, by threatening me with, among other things, prosecution and death. I am always dragging Austria in the dirt, they say, denigrating my own country in the most outrageous fashion and crediting the Austrians withbase and despicable Catholic and National Socialist opinions whenever and wherever I can, whereas according to the writers, no such base and despicable opinions exist in Austria. Austria is not base and despicable, they say; it has
never been anything but beautiful
, and the Austrians are decent people. I always throw these letters away, as I had done that morning. I had kept the letter from Eisenberg, a college friend who is now a rabbi in Vienna, telling me that he had to be in Venice at the end of May and inviting me to meet him there. He intended to take me to the Teatro Fenice—not to see anything like Stravinsky’s
Soldier’s Tale
, which we had seen the previous year, but to see Monteverdi’s
Tancredi
. I’ll naturally accept Eisenberg’s invitation, I thought. I’ll write to him at once, but
at once
means
after I get back from Wolfsegg
. It’s always been a delight to walk through Venice with Eisenberg, I thought. It’s a delight just to be with him. Whenever he comes to Italy, if only for a few days in Venice, he lets me know in advance, I thought, and he always invites me to what he calls an
artistic treat
, which a performance of
Tancredi
in the Fenice is bound to be, I thought. I had also been sent a copy of the
Corriere della Sera
containing my short article on Leoš Janáček. I opened the newspaper expectantly, only to find that my article was not printed in a prominent place—which immediately put me in a bad humor. Moreover, a cursory glance revealed a number of unpardonable printing errors—which is the worst thing that can happen to me. I threw the
Corriere
away and reread the note that Maria had dropped in my letter box. My great poet wrote that she wanted to have dinner with me on Saturday,
just with you
, she wrote, adding that she had also written some poems—
for you
. My great poet has been quite productive recently, I thought. I opened the drawer in which I kept a few photographs of my family. I looked intently at a picture of my parents at Victoria Station in London, boarding the train for Dover. I had taken it myself, without their knowledge. They had visited me in London in 1960, when I was a student there. After spending two weeks in England and traveling as far as Glasgow and Bristol, they went on to Paris, where my sisters were waiting for them. My sisters had traveled to Paris from Cannes, where they had been staying with my uncle Georg. In 1960 I was still on tolerable terms with my parents, I thought. I had wanted to study in England, and they had not opposed the idea, as they must have assumed that afterstudying in England I would return to Vienna and ultimately to Wolfsegg, in order to fulfill their wish that I join my brother in managing the estate. But even at that time I had no intention of returning to Wolfsegg. I had in fact left Wolfsegg for England and London with the sole thought of never returning to Wolfsegg. I hated agriculture, to which my father and brother were passionately devoted. I hated everything connected with Wolfsegg, where the only thing that mattered was the economic well-being of the family. Nothing else mattered. For as long as Wolfsegg was in my family’s hands, no one