Our uncle, who owned a tobacco factory in Innsbruck and a so-called summer house in Stams and whom, for this reason, we called our Innsbruck uncle, had, on New Year’s Day 1967, asked at the main station in Innsbruck for a round-trip ticket to Merano and, as we were told by witnesses, had actually boarded a train bound for Merano with an unusually large amount of luggage. He never arrived in Merano, however, and no one has ever heard anything more of him, although the investigation was abandoned only after two years’ intensive search. Meanwhile, the tobacco factory has been closed and the summer house sold because the investigation has consumed all the so-called fortune that our Innsbruck uncle had left behind. No buyer has yet been found for the tobacco factory, in which three hundred workers had been employed, who, in the meantime, have all had to be dismissed because the demand for tobacco has fallen in recent years and our uncle’s factory is, in fact, out-of-date. We are told, however, that it must be sold if the lawyers who involved themselves in the search for my uncle demand their customary high fees. Each spring we think of how we used to go to Innsbruck and spend the night with our uncle and then go with him next day, at the crack of dawn, to Stams to spend several days in his summer house, reading and going for walks in the surrounding forests. We are convinced that the good health we have enjoyed for so many years is to be attributed first and foremost to the fact that we went to see our uncle, in Innsbruck and in Stams, twice a year, in spring and in autumn. To the accident that our uncle met with on the journey to Merano we attribute the fact that when we now go on a trip, we never buy a round-trip ticket, but always ask for a one-way.

Inner Compulsion

INNER COMPULSION