Extinction Read Free Page A

had time for anything but maximizing the profits from its production units—its farmland, which even today covers twelve thousand acres, and its mines. They thought of nothing but how best to exploit their property. Of course they always pretended to be taken up with activities other than profitmaking, to be interested in culture and the arts, but the reality was depressing and embarrassing. True, they had thousands of books in their libraries at Wolfsegg—the house has five libraries—and the books were dusted three or four times a year with absurd regularity, but they were never read. The family kept the libraries sparkling in order to be able to display them to visitors without feeling ashamed, to show off and boast about their treasures, but they never made any practical or personal use of these treasures. The five libraries at Wolfsegg, four in the main house and one in an adjacent building, were founded by my great-great-great-grandparents, and my parents never added a single volume to the collections. It is said that our libraries, taken together, are as valuable as the world-famous monastery library at Lambach. My father never read a book. Occasionally my mother would leaf through old scientific works, enjoying the finely colored engravings that adorned their pages. My sisters never visited the libraries at all, except to show them to visitors who expressed a wish to see them. The photograph of my parents taken at Victoria Station shows them at an age when they still traveled widely and were not yet afflicted by illness. They were wearing the raincoats they had just bought at Burberrys, and carrying umbrellas on their arms, also from Burberrys. Like typical continentals, they tried to be more English than the English, and the consequent impression was grotesque rather than refined and elegant. I had to laugh every time I saw this photograph, but now my laughter was gone. My mother’s neck was rather too long to be consideredbeautiful, and at the moment when I took the photo—as she was getting on the train—it was stretched forward an inch or two more than usual, which made the picture doubly ridiculous. My father’s posture was always that of a man who could not hide his bad conscience from the world and was consequently unhappy. When I took the photo he had his hat pulled down lower than usual over his forehead—which made him look more gauche than he really was. I’ve no idea why I’ve kept this particular photo of my parents, I thought, but one day I’ll discover the reason. I put it on the desk and looked in the drawer for the one I had taken of my brother on the shore of the Wolfgangsee. It showed him on his sailboat, which he kept all year round at Sankt Wolfgang, in a shed rented from the Fürstenbergs. The figure in the picture is an embittered man, ruined by living alone with his parents, and the sporty attire only partly conceals the illnesses that have already taken possession of him. He has a forced smile, as they say, and only his brother—only I—could have taken the photo. When I gave him a copy, he tore it up without saying a word. I now placed the photo of my brother beside that of my parents boarding the Dover train and studied them for a long time. You loved these people as long as they loved you, I told myself, and hated them from the moment they hated you. Naturally I never thought I would outlive them. In fact I always imagined that
I
would be the first to die. The present situation is the one situation I’ve
never
envisaged, I thought. I had considered every other possible situation time and again, but never this. I had often dreamed of dying and leaving them behind, of leaving them alone without me, of freeing them from me by my own death, but never of being left behind by them. The fact that
they
were now dead and I was alive was not only utterly unforeseen, but quite
sensational
. It was this sensational element, this overwhelming sensation, that I found shattering, not the