The last time things got really hard, I prayed to Saint Barbara to lead me out of the underground and back into the light. For my troubles, she prescribed Shakespeare. I decided I’d better steer clear. Because once I plunged back in, there would be no end to it – with everything I know and understand now, I’d probably be reading him until the day I die.

I’ll build another ten apartment buildings before that, I told myself, and settled the matter by deciding that from now on, I’d rather pray to Saint George. He is every bit as deft with monsters as Barbara is with darkness. But before I managed to switch tracks, I opened – O God, how recklessly – a collection of stories by Borges, and there, right at the beginning of one of them, a trap lay in wait for me:

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space…”

Hamlet, II, 2

Of course I remember that! But I’m not entirely sure, so I have to get up, haul out my 3,017-gram Complete Works, open it and find out exactly how the sentence continues, and I can already see where this is going: nothing else done today because I’ll have to read and live through the whole play all over again.

That’s at least one apartment building down, I catastrophize silently.

Yes. Exactly. Page 1031.

“… were it not that I have bad dreams.”

So, all together:

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams.”

I used to know that even at midnight, but preparations for blinds, tiles and air-conditioning have driven it from my mind. And this despite having spent the night in the midst of a monstrous battle, begging my uncle to let me hunt down the villain, because I knew, unwaveringly, that I – and I alone – could find him!

Now, back to “bounded in a nutshell.”

When I was driving across Slovakia on Saturday, tracing my ancestors, I was inside just such a nutshell – alone with my infinite inner space, filled with imaginary and living characters. Most beautiful of all was the way the living intertwined with the imaginary, while my dead mingled among them.

All of this was happening at once, in different languages, different weathers, different seasons. A magnificent universe in which I, and I alone, was queen! Well, all right, there was also the Bird King, a new character from one of my dreams who is currently making his way into one of my as-yet-unwritten books, but at this stage I can tell you nothing – really, nothing – about him.

I wandered across the countryside, stopping at cemeteries – where my ancestors live – washing their gravestones, decorating them with tasteful wreaths of strawflowers and pinecones, and tactfully removing weather-beaten angels, faded artificial flowers and half-decayed grave lanterns.

Eventually I reached Leonding, on the outskirts of Linz, once a solitary farmstead surrounded by fields, where my great-grandmother used to go for seasonal work. My great-grandfather wanted them to stay there, but she said no: she would rather take the money she had earned back home and buy land with it. She did. Then the Communists took it all away, and to this day my great-grandfather rests in peace knowing that he was right.

What a blessed life they could have had there in Leonding.

And I would wear a dirndl and keep my affairs in merciless Ordnung. Instead of Shakespeare, I would read pastoral ballads – which I read anyway, because I love sheep – but I still don’t have a tractor licence, which in Upper Austria I would certainly have acquired long ago.

And would live with it happily ever after.

“were it not
that I have
bad dreams.”