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Vienna. Don’t leave any traces behind was of course one of his sayings. If a friend dies we nail him to his own sayings, his comments, kill him with his own weapons. On the one hand he lives on in what he said to us (and to others) all his life, on the other we kill him with it. We’re the most ruthless (toward him!) as far as his comments, his writings, are concerned, I thought, if we don’t have any more of his writings, because he prudently destroyed them, we go after his comments in order to destroy him, I thought. We exploit his unpublished papers in order to destroy even more the one who left them to us, to make the dead man even deader, and if he hasn’t left us the appropriate instructions to destroy his papers, we invent them, simply invent declarations against him, etc., I thought. Heirs are cruel, the survivors don’t have the slightest consideration, I thought. We’re searching for testimony against him, for us, I thought. We plunder everything that can be used against him in order to improve our situation, I thought, that’s the truth. Wertheimer had always been a candidate for suicide, but he overdrew his account, he should have killed himself years before his actual suicide, long before Glenn, I thought. This way his suicide is an embarrassment, above all mean-spirited, since he killed himself right in front of his sister’s house in Zizers, I thought, above all in reaction to my bad conscience, which was still troubled by the fact that I hadn’t answered Wertheimer’s letters, had more or less ignominiously abandoned him, that I couldn’t get away from Madrid had been a mean lie I used not to give myself up to my friend who, as I now see, had hoped to receive from me his last chance of survival, who before committing suicide had sent me four letters in Madrid that I didn’t answer, I answered only the fifth, saying I absolutely couldn’t budge, couldn’t destroy my work merely for a trip to Austria, no matter for what reason. I had put About Glenn Gould first, that bungled essay which, as I now thought, I’ll throw in the stove the minute I get back to Madrid because it doesn’t have the slightest value. I ignominiously abandoned Wertheimer, I thought, in his greatest need I turned my back on him. But I vehemently repressed the thought of my own guilt in his suicide, I wouldn’t have been able to help him, I told myself, I couldn’t have saved him, he was of course already ripe for suicide. It must have been his school, I thought, which was a music school to boot! At first we thought we’d become famous and indeed in the easiest and fastest way possible, for which of course a music conservatory is the ideal springboard, that’s how the three of us saw it, Glenn, Wertheimer and I. But only Glenn succeeded in doing what all three of us had planned, in the end Glenn even misused us for his own purposes, I thought, misused everybody in order to become Glenn Gould, although unconsciously, I thought. The two of us, Wertheimer and myself, had had to give up to make room for Glenn. At the time I didn’t find this thought as absurd as it now seems to me, I thought. But Glenn was already a genius when he came to Europe and took Horowitz’s course, we were already failures then, I thought. In reality I hadn’t wanted to become a piano virtuoso, everything at the Mozarteum and everything connected with it had been only a pretext for me to save myself from my actual boredom with the world, from my very early satiety with life. And in reality Wertheimer behaved as I did, that’s why nothing came of us, as they say, since we hadn’t even been thinking of becoming somebody, in contrast to Glenn, who wanted to become Glenn Gould at all costs and who only needed to come to Europe to misuse Horowitz to be the genius he had longed and wished to be as he had wished for nothing else, a pianistic world flabbergaster so to speak. I took pleasure in this term world flabbergaster , while still standing in the