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was located in the murkiest spot in town. The taverns in Chur served the worst wine and the most tasteless sausages. My father always had dinner with us in the hotel, ordered a so-called appetizer and called Chur a pleasant stopover point , which I never understood, for I had always found Chur particularly distasteful. Even more than the Salzburgers, the Churians struck me as despicable in their Alpine cretinism. I always felt as if I were being punished when I had to go to St. Moritz with my parents, sometimes only with my father, had to stop over in Chur, had to stay in that dreary hotel with windows looking out on a narrow, dank street. In Chur I had never been able to sleep, I thought, I had always lain awake in complete despair. Chur is actually the gloomiest place I’ve ever seen, not even Salzburg is as gloomy and, in the final analysis, as sickening as Chur. And the Churians are just the same. A person can be ruined for life in Chur, even if he spends only one night there. But even today it isn’t possible to go by train from Vienna to St. Moritz in a single day, I thought. I was spending the night outside Chur because, as mentioned, I had such a depressing memory of Chur from my childhood. I simply stayed on the train past Chur and got out between Chur and Zizers where I had seen a sign for a hotel. Blauer Adler , I read the next morning, the day of the funeral, as I left the hotel. Of course I hadn’t slept. Glenn wasn’t actually crucial for Wertheimer’s suicide, I thought, it was his sister’s moving out, her marriage with the Swiss. By the way, I had listened to Glenn’s Goldberg Variations in my apartment in Vienna before leaving for Chur, over and over again from the beginning. Had got up again and again from my chair and paced up and down in my study, obsessed with the idea that Glenn was actually playing the Goldberg Variations in my apartment; while pacing back and forth I tried to discover the difference between his interpretation in these records and his interpretation twenty-eight years earlier for Horowitz and us, that is Wertheimer and myself, in the Mozarteum. I couldn’t detect any difference. Glenn had already played the Goldberg Variations twenty-eight years before exactly as he did in these records, which by the way he had sent me for my fiftieth birthday, he gave them to one of my New York friends as she was leaving for Vienna. I listened to him play the Goldberg Variations and remembered how he thought he’d immortalized himself with this interpretation, perhaps he’s done it too, I thought, for I can’t imagine that there will ever be a piano player who plays the Goldberg Variations like him, that is with as much genius as Glenn. I was listening to his Goldberg Variations for the sake of my work on Glenn and suddenly noticed the deplorable state of my apartment, which I hadn’t entered for three years. Nor had anyone else entered my apartment in that time, I thought. I had been gone for three years, had withdrawn completely in the Calle del Prado, hadn’t been able to even imagine returning to Vienna in these three years and hadn’t thought about it either, never again to Vienna, that profoundly despised city, to Austria, that profoundly despised country. That was my salvation, to leave Vienna forever so to speak, take up residence in Madrid, which has become the ideal center of my existence, not in time but from the very first moment I arrived, I thought. In Vienna I would have been devoured bit by bit, as Wertheimer always said, suffocated by the Viennese and generally destroyed by the Austrians. Everything about me is such that it had to be suffocated in Vienna and destroyed in Austria, I thought, just as Wertheimer also thought that the Viennese had to suffocate him, that the Austrians had to destroy him. But Wertheimer wasn’t one to leave for Madrid or Lisbon or Rome at the drop of a hat, unlike me he wasn’t up to that. So he was always left only with the possibility of