On one occasion as we were approaching Großgmain, where we often used to go with our parents on the weekends, in a so-called landau that dated from the last century and had been built in a workshop in Elixhausen famous for the building of landaus, we saw, in the middle of the forest, a man of about forty or forty-five who tried to stop us as we were traveling fairly fast downhill so as not to be late for our visit to an uncle who was very ill and was living in the hunting lodge that our grandfather had bought from a Prince Liechtenstein at the turn of the century and that he had enlarged for, as he always put it, his philosophical purposes; the man had placed himself in the middle of the road and had had the audacity to grab at the horses’ harness in order to force our landau to stop—which, naturally, he did not succeed in doing. The man had in fact only managed to jump aside at the last moment and, as I could indistinctly ascertain in the gathering darkness, escape after turning several somersaults. The fact was, we thought we had come upon one of those characters who do their mischief here along the Austro-Bavarian frontier and who had escaped from one of our numerous penal establishments—as legalese will have it—which was another reason for our not stopping. In fact, we would even have run over this stranger who suddenly popped up in front of us, to avoid, as we thought, becoming the victims of a crime. The following day, a forest worker who was employed by my uncle called our attention to the fact that a man had been found frozen to death, after sustaining severe injuries, in the forest through which we had traveled in our landau the previous evening—a man who was, as it transpired, the best workman and the most loyal man that my uncle had ever had. In the nature of things, we did not breathe a word about our adventure of the previous evening, and we expressed our sympathy for the widow of the man who had met such a tragic end.

Suspicion

SUSPICION