It was after this conversation that he began to treat me a bit condescendingly, my brother Cousin Wolfgang. Every so often, I saw that his high forehead under the blond German adolescent’s shock of hair (the steeple head that he had inherited from Uncle Helmuth along with his slightly short legs) had become more arrogant by a few dozen important books, his eyes more and more bewildered, more and more tormented. At such times, I felt sorry for him in his emptiness, in his terrible indifference, which was filled only with himself and the great thoughts from six thousand years of history. My pity was so deep that I yelled at him, shouted some obscenity at him, which provoked him into pouncing on me. He was a lot stronger than I, with his gymnast’s muscles, but I always managed to get the better of him with cunning tricks and dodges. And I was anything but a generous victor, thrashing him without mercy and then being treated accordingly by the rest of the family (“He shows an outright sadistic vengefulness against anything better than him; it would be no surprise if this soon turned into genuine criminality!”). But why didn’t he too occasionally stare into space, my brother Cousin Wolfgang? Why did he always have the rim of a helmet shadowing his helpless gaze? . . .

Whenever he realized that along with all the great thoughts of six millennia he had also absorbed all the great doubts, he would get nervous (“jumpy,” Miss Fern would have said). Something of the bewildered fidgitiness of Aunt Selma the cart horse came over him. He made faces as if cobwebs were sticking to his nose . . . granted, that too reveals a kind of inner life: the inner life of people with shining, watchful eyes that never deviate from the object and the purpose and the meaning. A truly lovable, fabulously decent, warmhearted, magnanimous, even intelligent fellow, my cousin Wolfgang, God rest his soul! He lies in the Central Graveyard in Vienna. Not exactly a soldier’s grave, but the stone says that he died a “Hero for the Führer and the Fatherland.” (Aunt Hertha, who “isn’t as quick to switch sides” as Uncle Helmuth—he inadvertently sobbed, “They’ve got my boy on their conscience”—was supposedly the one who insisted on this inscription. But then he did himself believe so strongly in what was written.)

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