Free Correction: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard

of Cambridge. As may be expected this music festival was just the thing to bring us release from our scientific obsession, and we’d instantly and most eagerly seized upon this chance to relax completely at this music festival, to take our minds completely off the subjects of our intellectual obsessiveness upon which we had naturally been concentrating to a really dangerous degree. In itself that music festival was nothing special, these music festivals in our country are all alike, performing a most useful function especially for all those people who are chained to their labors, year in and year out, so naturally everybody comes flocking to the two or three music festivals per year, with their actual and their so-called amusements and distractions, these affairs are called music festivals because unlike the usual so-called country fairs they feature a band, an enormous attraction to the populace, that’s all it is, but the organizers know that they can draw a much larger crowd by calling it a music festival rather than a country fair , so it has become the custom to call these events music festivals even if they are nothing more than country fairs, everybody attends these music festivals which usually begin early on Saturday night and end late on Sunday morning. In Altensam, where nobody had remembered even Roithamer’s birthday and none of Roithamer’s siblings were home, we soon turned the possibility of going to the music festival into an actuality, after dressing suitably for the occasion. We immediately got into the swing of it, drinking several glasses of beer and schnapps in quick succession, we quickly got ourselves into the necessary high spirits for such an occasion, both of us naturally meeting lots of familiar faces of schoolmates and their sisters and wives, with whom we soon got involved in all sorts of conversations, but these conversations mostly consisted of our, Roithamer and me, having to explain why we had gone off to England and what we were doing there and what had become of us in England, and why we hadn’t stayed at home and made something of ourselves here, at home, as they had. At first these conversations, consisting basically of questions addressed to us both, had not bothered us and we readily answered all these questions put to us, such as whether we were now English, no longer Austrians, whether we were living in London or if not, where, whether we had become scientists, known experts, whether we were thinking of returning home and most of all, again and again, how much we were making, in Austrian schillings not in English pounds, it was evidently too much trouble for them to convert English pounds into Austrian schillings, and was it true that it was always raining in England and that everything was always shrouded in fog there, had we ever seen the Queen, had we met her personally, had we ever spoken with her, the questions came at us in an endless stream and a constantly growing number of people had so questioned us and we had to keep on answering more and more, they kept asking and we kept answering questions until we could no longer stand it and finally made our way through these hundreds of people, drunk as they’d been for some time, to a shooting gallery. Both of us were astonished at finding ourselves, suddenly, standing in front of a shooting gallery , since neither I nor Roithamer had ever been to a shooting gallery for any reason whatsoever, we had apparently never in our lives had any business at a shooting gallery, in contrast to Roithamer’s brothers, who did not merely claim to be but actually were excellent proven marksmen who had of course always taken part in all the shooting matches and hunting shoots, and had on display in their rooms hundreds upon hundreds of trophies attesting to their prowess, they were known and respected far and wide as brilliant marksmen, in fact as fanatical hunters and great shots, in contrast to me and my friend Roithamer, who not only