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pall on the rest of us.
    I keep trying to approach her, in letters from Leoben, but in vain.
    It is not improbable, my father said, that her psychic illness is more and more affecting her organic state. “I’m always frightened for her.”
    He had once taken her to Zeitschach, my father said, and stayed at an inn for two days. For the whole two days she did not speak to him. And yet it had been a lovely vacation spot, the countryside beautiful and the weather perfect. She had got up late and gone to bed early, as if distraught over the place and its surroundings. She had been unable to treat the stay there as a holiday, which he had meant it to be, but only as an ordeal.
    Another time he had driven down to Laibach with her, and then on to Trieste and Fiume—all in all a six-day vacation,during which he had arranged with another doctor to take his place at home. But he had not been able to alter her mood. She was visibly growing more depressed all the time. In general he had observed that her spirits sank even more whenever she moved into the light.
    Among cheerful people who take life easily she was wretched. Pleasant surroundings irritated her. A bright day plunged her into still deeper melancholia.
    When visitors came to the house, she withdrew and stayed in her room until they were gone, my father said. The kind of amusements that are customary in the country simply baffled her. She had no girl-friends either. Sometimes she would go out of the house in the middle of the night and wander around the village.
    Her sleeplessness reminds me of my mother’s sleeplessness.
    When she leaves for what is supposed to be a longish stay in the Tyrol, in Salzburg, in Slovenia, she returns next day.
    In spite of all this, my father said, she is attached, with a fondness she herself does not always understand, to us, to her father and brother.
    Everything is easier for me, my father said; for her everything is difficult. We have been living together for so long and don’t know one another.
    Each of us is completely isolated, although we are so close.
    All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.
    I thought I had never heard my father speak so emotionally about us.
    He could already see me finishing my studies and launching on a career that would not disappoint him, he said.
    At this point he noticed that Frau Ebenhöh had fallen asleep. He stood up and looked to see whether I was still there. He felt embarrassed that I had been listening to him.
    We looked out into the garden and saw a woman, the neighbor, I thought, coming toward us through the grass in rubber boots. She took off the rubber boots at the door and entered. She had bought all sorts of provisions for Frau Ebenhöh, as well as a bottle of red wine, which she placed on the table. My father knew her, and she him. Frau Ebenhöh awoke. Did we know about the murder in Gradenberg? the neighbor asked. Grössl had not yet been apprehended. This was the fourth crime this year in these parts, she said, and reminded Frau Ebenhöh of the strangled potter, the throttled schoolmistress, both from Ligist, and Horch, the Afling furrier, who had been shot. Unpacking the bread and butter, she said: “It’s the sultry weather.”
    My father admitted that he had been to see the innkeeper’s wife that morning. She had died in Köflach, he said.
    The neighbor straightened Frau Ebenhöh’s bolster, turned her, tautened the sheet. The sick woman had fallen asleep again when we took our leave.
    Walking back across the Stiwoll marketplace to our car, we talked about my forthcoming examinations, about the relationships among the students in Leoben, about their boredom and their general weariness with life. About the frequent suicides precisely among the most capable students. It was remarkable, my father said, that it should be the wealthy who incline to suicide; first they succumb to boredom, the worst disease anyone can fall prey to in this world.
    The Mining Academy