In the exclusive residential district on the edge of the city, the photographer Anton Diabelli and his sister Johanna lived in an elegant house with a spacious park-like garden that stretched to the nearest foothills, and, once a year, on the hottest days, the siblings had their summer garden party, to which, in addition to members of the political middle class, they invited several artists and above all many of the people variously involved in the further development of intellectual life, together with all their attendant staff, and as someone not exactly unfamiliar with the house, I had dropped by that afternoon to help if necessary with the final preparations, and in the process have a few drinks before the beginning of the festivities, so that I would seem more tolerable to myself later in those restrictive surroundings.

I came at just the right time to be able to help Johanna hang the oil paintings on the trees—a cycle of garden pictures done especially by the painter Florian Waldstein for this park and the summer garden parties held in it—precision work whose complexity could hardly be grasped by an outsider: the individual pictures portrayed exactly those parts of the garden that were covered by the surfaces of the respective pictures, and the portrayals were so lifelike that they were constantly being confused from every angle with the respective parts of nature itself, which is why it was absolutely necessary to take the utmost care in hanging the exhibits in their intended places to the smallest fraction of an inch if the works were to achieve their full effect as planned by the artist. We were just hanging a picture whose surface was to cover the view of the gate opening onto the garden, on which exactly this garden gate had been painted—when you stood in front of it you could really be tempted to leave the garden not by going around the painting in the direction of the garden gate but by stepping into the picture, opening the door represented in the picture, disappearing behind it into the picture—when we heard a radio playing somewhere announce that we would next hear the promising contemporary poet Kalkbrenner; then we heard Kalkbrenner give one of his popular lectures, theoretically for the common man, and this time he really took it all the way, talking about different paintings of the natural world, saying that we recognize paintings of the world because the things represented on or in them are usually things that are directly or indirectly connected with the world, and they are usually hung on the walls of the world, although in principle it’s possible to put them somewhere else; however, if a picture of the world is hung on a wall of the world, and if the picture exactly represents the world in which it hangs, then it can easily happen that the world in which the attentive viewer finds himself is perhaps not a world at all but rather a picture of the world within a world or within a picture of the world, etc.

Anton Diabelli was going through the park with a Polaroid camera hung around his neck, inspecting the servants’ preparations for the coming evening.

My brother is one of the most peculiar people I know, said Johanna, and sometimes I have the impression that reality only becomes believable to him when he’s taken pictures of it with one of his cameras, has them lying in front of him, can let them disappear into his pockets and files and then can bring them to light again; as a result, there are many things he only experiences long after they have happened, they’ve simply escaped him until then. Before he can experience something, he often has to sit through many hours of development in his darkroom.

Diabelli was photographing nonstop in the garden and comparing the finished pictures coming out of his camera with photos that he was fishing out of his jacket pockets.

What’s your brother doing? I asked.

He’s comparing the photos he took of last year’s party, Johanna answered, with the positions of things as they have been laid out for this evening.

Why?

So there aren’t any mistakes.

What mistakes?

Everything should be exactly as it was at last year’s party, answered the photographer’s sister. Whispering so that I wouldn’t understand, she consulted with her brother, who was passing by, after which he looked at me sternly, sizing me up; and with an expression that showed he was aware of the great responsibility weighing on him he said in his most serious voice, as if he were entrusting me with managing the empty coffers of the City Council: If you promise not to talk with anyone about it and not to give anything away, we can tell you something important, albeit confidentially.

What’s going to take place here this evening, said Johanna, is not supposed to be one of our usual summer parties, but rather an exact reflection, no, much more than a reflection: a REPETITION OF THE PARTY that we had last year on the same day at the same time.

It’s supposed to be exactly the same party again, added Diabelli.

You mean, I said, the people last year didn’t quite understand the party correctly, so you want to offer it to them again?

The same guests, said Johanna, are going to have the same conversations at the same time and tell the same stories they did last year, with the same movements, the same gestures, same looks, same sentimentalities.

You’re confusing the course of our lives, I said, with the photographic paper that lets your brother copy the same picture over and over again as often as he wants.

We haven’t explained our intentions to anyone, said the photographer, so we aren’t influencing the normal course of events.

I don’t know if this is going to work, said Johanna, but it’s worth a try.

We have to see if it’s possible to establish a congruity of chronologically sequential feelings, sensations, thoughts, relationships, inferences, and insights, explained Diabelli—possibly not just congruity, but identity. Don’t you see what we’re after? Whether people can still feel, sense, think, experience, and discover exactly the same things one year later.

You’re trying to change memories back into the present moment, I said, but the laws of nature won’t allow that.

The laws of nature, Johanna replied, are you really talking about the laws of nature? Isn’t it a law of nature that not only has next to nothing changed in the past year, but in fact that everything has remained just the same, and is exactly as unbearable, unjust, and miserable now as then? And isn’t it a law of nature that we’ve managed to preserve all the monotony surrounding us and the prevailing untenable relationships so well that our attempted repetition of the party ought to be child’s play?

What do you hope to achieve with this? I asked.

My brother, replied Johanna, has an admittedly completely lunatic and academic interest in whether the guests—none of whom can have any idea of how we’ve prepared things—will unknowingly and, as it were, somehow correctly slip and slide into exactly the same enactment of their feelings, relationships, thoughts, and insights as they did a year ago. For my part, said Johanna, I’m above all curious as to whether these people are really as unimaginative and lifeless as they seem, in which case they will once again happily and contentedly amuse themselves with the same nonsense that dominated the party last year, without noticing what’s going on in the slightest.

And that’s just the sort of mindlessness I don’t want to be involved in, I replied, especially not so knowingly and helplessly.

I said: I would rather not be present.