The husband returned alone, after about four hours, from a boat trip that the couple had taken one evening from Traunkirchen to Rindbach; on the Tuesday evening at about nine o’clock he arrived at the fisherman Moser’s in a state of great agitation and stated that during the storm that had suddenly arisen his wife had been thrown out of the boat, one of the old skiffs that are still to be found on the Traun lake, and had drowned. He had done all in his power to save her. His wife had suddenly gone down. Finally, he stated, he had feared for his own life and had turned back and had managed with the greatest difficulty to reach the shore. A search undertaken on the following day yielded no results. Three days later, after all hope had been abandoned, the husband had held a service in the parish church, and a year later he installed a black marble tablet to the memory of his drowned wife in the wall of that same church that was closest to the lake. Shortly afterwards he got married. That was in 1973. Two years later, divers discovered a body on the lake bed and, as the weather was favorable, brought it up onto the shore; the body had a cord around its neck, and attached to the cord was a boundary stone from Altmünster parish. The body was that of the woman alleged to have drowned.

Two Brothers

TWO BROTHERS

The lives of two brothers had developed in a way that in the nature of things was appropriate to their dispositions, and they had gone their opposite ways and had, in the course of time, grown completely apart from one another. We liked both of them and had, in fact, for decades carefully observed their capabilities, those of the philosophical one and those of the one who was in business, and we were alternately attracted by these capabilities and repelled by them, at times more by the philosophical capabilities of the one brother, at others by the commercial ones of the other. When we were all over thirty, we suddenly could no longer count on our relationships being restored to their old intimacy, and we lost sight of the two brothers. Eventually, however, we learned of the importance and the fame of our former friends and of the circumstance that it was precisely this importance and fame that had driven them apart and, as time went by, totally isolated them. The one brother now lived for nothing but his philosophy, the other only for his business dealings. When one of them died, his relatives said he had worked himself to death. A year later, when the other one died, they said he had read himself to death. At the crucial point in their lives, each had gone his own separate and, of necessity, opposite, way to his death.

Natural

NATURAL