It was for the same artist whose story I have just told that my great-grandfather built a large and, by the standards of the day, sensationally equipped studio at a spot that the artist himself had been allowed to select, an eminence overlooking the Wallersee, where, for a painter, the most favorable of all light conditions prevail. With the money that the studio alone cost, as my relatives kept reiterating, they could have bought and modernized several farms. Shortly after the studio was finished, the person for whom it was built left, as I have already reported, for South America and disappeared and was declared dead, and the studio lost its true purpose. As I have often been told, it was—being an outstanding attraction in this uncultured peasant area—always marveled at, but in the end it was nonetheless allowed to fall into total disrepair. For a long time the farmers in the area, who were all related to us in one way or another, found a use for the paintings by the painter who had, for whatever reason, emigrated to South America—gigantic canvases on which he painted only his idiosyncratic notion of Jesus Christ—as tarpaulins, for which purpose, as one can well imagine, they were exceptionally well suited. Of course, these canvases were only used as tarpaulins by the farmers with the image of Christ on the inside.

Double

DOUBLE

A man from Terbinje who looked so much like the Yugoslavian president that the two could easily be mistaken for one another offered to place himself at the disposal of the administration in Belgrade for physically demanding duties that the president of Yugoslavia had to undertake, not without submitting a precise list of those duties that he, as he believed, could easily carry out in the president’s stead and which the then president seemed to him to be already much too weak physically to undertake. It would, he said, be an honor for him to undertake, in place of the president of the so-called People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, duties that the president was not absolutely bound to perform, and he asked nothing for the services he was offering. Since the man who had made Belgrade the offer three years previously has not been seen again from that day to this, many people, not only in Trebinje and environs but now in the whole of Yugoslavia, believe he has already taken up his duties in the Yugoslavian capital. The people who give voice to this supposition are labeled slanderers. Those who claim to know that the man is in prison or in a lunatic asylum or has long since been liquidated are similarly labeled slanderers. This would make all Yugoslavians slanderers.

Luck

LUCK