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placed on a pedestal, I stood next to it and waited, and at a harmonium in an alcove sat an elderly man with the face of a drinker playing a psalm tune, and then in the middle section of the wall a sliding door suddenly opened, and imperceptibly the pedestal with the coffin set itself in motion and slid slowly onalmost invisible rails sunk in the floor into the bare, rectangular chamber behind the door, which noiselessly shut again. Two hours later I collected the urn with the ashes of my father’s body. I carried the urn container, which had a crown on it and widened out at top, amid looks of consternation past hotel staff and guests up to my room, where I placed it first on the table, then on the windowsill, then on the floor, then on the dressing table, and finally in the wardrobe. I went down into town to buy paper and string in a department store, then wrapped the box in it and spent the night in the hotel with the remains of my father hidden in the wardrobe. Next day I reached my parents’ house, where my stepbrothers and their wives, my brother and his wife, my sister and her husband awaited me for the burial, the reading of the will, and the apportioning of property. In the days that followed, the final disintegration of the family was completed. A desecration and crushing underfoot took place, full of the undertones of envy and avarice, although outwardly we tried to preserve a friendly and considerate tone of cordial agreement. Even for us, although we had long since become alienated from them, all the articles collected there had their value, and suddenly a wealth of recollections attached itself to each item. The grandfather clock with the sun face had ticked its way into my earliest dreams, in the mirror of the huge wardrobe I had caught sight of myself in the moonlight during my nocturnal excursions, in the diagonal supports beneath the dining-room table I had built dens and dugouts, and had crept behind therotting velvet curtains to escape the savage pine marten, and many of the books on the high, wide bookshelves contained secret, forbidden things to read. We pushed and shoved around the chairs, sofas, and tables, violently we disrupted the order that had always been unassailable, and soon the house resembled a furniture warehouse and the objects that had been afforded a lifetime’s care and protection at my mother’s hand lay piled up in various rooms in five huge heaps, some to be taken away, some to be sold. The carpets were rolled up, the pictures lifted down from the walls, the curtains torn from the windows, the cupboards ransacked of crockery and clothes, and the women ran up and down between the attic and the cellar, seizing here an apron, there a wooden spoon, here a box with worn-out dusty shoes, there a coal bucket or a rake. The urns of Father and Mother stood side by side in wet, black cemetery earth, and we brothers and sisters crouched among the fragments of a dismembered home, we drained the bottles from my father’s wine cellar and broke open his bureau to sort out his correspondence and documents. In accordance with his last will, mountains of paper were piled up to be burned. Secretly I took some yellowed pages in my father’s hand and a few diaries with notes by my mother. The naked bulbs shone harshly in all the rooms and were reflected in the black windowpanes. I had a feeling that the door opened, that my mother had appeared, to stare open-mouthed at her children’s ghos tly activity. Something died in each of us during these days. Now, after the plundering, we saw that thishome from which we had been thrust out had nevertheless embodied a security for us, and that with its going the last symbol of our unity disappeared. At the deepest level of the changes this house had gone through lay rooms, spaces in which I had emerged from mythic darkness into first consciousness. I stood in the first-floor vestibule looking first through one of the red, then through one of the blue panes of