Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

she longed for nothing so much as a speedy breakup of Caecilia’s marriage to her awkward husband, who probably has no idea what he has done to deserve it all. She had never been fastidious. It may well be, I think, that our aunt in Titisee fixed up her niece Caecilia with the wine cork manufacturer in order to avenge herself on my mother, for it is abundantly clear that our aunt is to blame for this grotesque marriage. She could never stand my mother, and now she had her triumph. While my mother was putting on that distasteful act of hers during the wedding festivities, she was, I believe, already turning her mind to the question of how to destroy this unwelcome marriage as soon as possible. As she projected the image of the deliriously happy mother to the wedding guests, the mechanism of destruction was already at work in her mind. How sad that Uncle Georg couldn’t have lived to see this day! she exclaimed. My father behaved with a good deal of indifference during these days of celebration, attending to his business and spending most of his time at the Farm or in the woods. He had always disliked such festivities and put up with them only to please his wife and because she forced him to do so. All the time he was calmness itself, as they say. It struck me that he had suddenly become old, weak and quite apathetic. But I cannot say that I felt sorry for him. In childhood I had what seems to me a normal, though not especially good, relationship with my sisters, but when we grew up it was always a bad relationship, and now, with my parents and Johannes dead, I was afraid of having to face them. They’ll cause me the greatest difficulties, I thought. I won’t be able to endure their mocking and by now embittered faces, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they dress, and the way they constantly hurl unfounded accusations at me. They had always reproached me for having rejected Wolfsegg and dealt my parents a cruel and more or less mortal blow, and now that our parents were dead their reproaches were bound to be even more shameless. They won’t shrink from the basest and most absurd accusation, I thought. It’ll be no good restraining myself and trying to keep out of their way: they’ll be there all the time, blaming me for the whole disaster. And Uncle Georg too, in spite of his having been dead for so long. They won’t miss a single opportunity of saying that I drove my parents crazy, that I drove them insane and wounded themmortally. Even though it has nothing to do with me. During their lifetime I was always to blame for their misfortune; not just our parents’, but theirs too. They had a theory according to which my leaving Wolfsegg and turning my back on Wolfsegg was the reason for their being chained to Wolfsegg and forced to languish there, unable to develop, unable to marry, and so forth. I was to blame for the fact that the whole atmosphere of Wolfsegg had darkened in the last twenty years, from the moment I moved to Rome. For the fact that their father and Johannes became ill and their mother started to suffer stomach and kidney disorders in addition to her lifelong migraines. For the fact that the health of all of them had deteriorated so much. For the fact that nothing had been renovated at Wolfsegg. Even for the fact that no repairs had been done to the roof. I was to blame when it rained in and they had to rush to the attic with their cloths and buckets to mop up the water. Earlier, before I left for Rome, Wolfsegg had always been fun, but not since. There was suddenly no music at Wolfsegg, for instance. Wolfsegg had become silent, Amalia once told me, because of me, because of my big-headedness, which had driven me to Rome, because I had no sense of responsibility, because I lacked all filial affection and had
always hated
my parents, whereas they had
always loved
them. My parents, they said, spent all their money on me and in doing so deprived
them
, because they had a claim on it too. According