Gargoyles

by Thomas Bernhard

  Such deformity is always joined by the corresponding insanity, my father said when we were outside. “The physical disease leads directly to the mental disease.”

  I asked my father if he had read the inscriptions on the engravings. He said he had. Young Krainer had once carefully explained to him what all these legends meant. Incidentally, he wrote over or smeared over every piece of paper that came into his hands, my father said; he had scribbled thousands of curious remarks on the scores in the chests. “A person like young Krainer can live on to be terribly old,” my father said. He was taking me with him for the sake of my studies, my father said. He repeated that again and again: “For the sake of your studies.”

  THE PRINCE

  IT actually was a view for hundreds of miles in every direction.

  Up to now I had only heard of Hochgobernitz—the castle. Now I was seeing it in reality.

  Because we were expected, the gate was opened at once for us, and we were told that the prince was either on the outer or the inner wall. We saw him on the outer one.

  On the way there my father explained that aside from the prince only his two sisters and two of his daughters were living in the castle. The prince’s only son was studying in England. Finally we came upon Prince Saurau on the inner castle wall, walking and talking to himself.

  He greeted my father and me casually. He had been having all sorts of curious thoughts about the events of the morning, he said. When he greeted us, he had not paused in his walk; we joined him. Our presence seemed not to disturb him. From here, I thought, you probably had the finest view of the entire country.

  Prince Saurau said that he had evidently overestimated the difficulty of finding a new steward after the old one’s death. Just this morning, the very day his advertisement had appeared in the newspaper, three men had already presented themselves: a man of thirty-four, named Henzig, who at first seemed to him too young; another of fifty, named Huber, who seemed to him too old, and a man of forty-two, named Zehetmayer, who knew nothing at all about forest management, a poor madman, who came originally from farm stock in the Puschach Valley and was a former schoolteacher. Zehetmayer had appeared shortly after eight o’clock to apply for the post of steward at Hochgobernitz. He was a man equipped with numerous talents, but all of them ultimately disastrous for him. And considering his age of forty-two he was in a shameful physical state (heart, lungs, and so on). The prince had quickly made it clear that this post of steward would be far beyond his strength, and that it would be helpful neither to the prince nor himself if he hired him. “Not even on probation,” the prince had said. “No, I won’t hire you even on probation!” The two others had turned up immediately afterward, Henzig at ten, Huber at eleven. “I dealt with them in the office,” the prince said. “There was no need of my convincing Zehetmayer that it was pointless for him to enter my service, that this post as steward entailed the very highest demands and the most difficult conditions. But in general, I said—and it was ridiculous to have to say it—in general, I said, I had the impression that the man was overestimating his strength. You overestimate your strength by far! I said, and Zehetmayer, naturally enough, because he isn’t stupid, Zehetmayer did not say a word in protest to what I said to him, and I said nothing but remonstrances. Of course, every objection I had to make against him,” the prince said, “had the greatest impact. Indeed I felt that at once: This is a man I can speak to with complete honesty. Although he is weak, although his whole constitution is weak, the weakest imaginable, I need not handle him with kid gloves; I can tell him straight out everything I think, and I thought (at first) nothing good about the man, for I instantly saw through him, yes in the very moment he entered the room, like a tragedy that suddenly steps straight into my room. It was as if I saw a life-size and then a more than life-size stereotype of a primordial human tragedy whose name is Zehetmayer, Augustine Zehetmayer.” The prince said: “This whole man in his comfortable but cheap clothes is nothing but the stereotyped image of all human poverty and inadequacy. What I said and what he said, everything I did and everything I thought and what he did, pretended to do, what I pretended to do and what he thought, it was all this stereotype, this stereotyped idea of the inadequacy, poverty, frailty, inferiority, deathly weariness of human existence, and I instantly had the impression that a sick man had entered my house, that I was dealing with a sick man, with someone in need of help. Whatever I said was spoken to a sick man, Doctor, and what I heard, Doctor, came from the lips of a sick man, from an extremely submissive, morbid brain which is filled with the most fantastic but embarrassingly derailed notions that in themselves reveal him for what he is.… The man had no idea of what he wanted, and I made him aware of this in the most forceful way; I said that what he was doing was morbid, that his whole life was a morbid life, his existence a morbid existence, and consequently everything he was doing was irrational, if not utterly senseless. Irrational for him to apply for the position as steward. A kind of mysterious megalomania was clearly expressed by that act on the one hand, since he lacked all the prerequisites for the post, did not have the slightest qualification for it, I said. But I could well imagine what had prompted him to follow up my advertisement. Irrational, I said,” the prince said. “A person reads a newspaper notice offering a position which this person knows he will never obtain because, as I said, he completely lacks the prerequisites for this position, but the notice haunts him, he can no longer tear himself away from it, he simply can’t escape it, he applies for the post, he knows it is absurd to apply for the post, he recognizes that everything he does in connection with the newspaper notice is absurd, everything, and yet he follows it up. I can well imagine, I said to Zehetmayer,” the prince said, “that a person reads a notice and thinks that this notice has been inserted for no one but himself (certainly!) and that the person is completely captivated by the notice and applies for the opening, no matter how irrational that may be. Since he, Zehetmayer, was fully aware that he had not the slightest prerequisite for the steward’s position I advertised, since he is aware, has always been aware, that he is a schoolteacher and knows nothing about forestry in practice let alone as a science, that he doesn’t understand nature because he believes in the simplicity of nature as a helpless victim of nature, because he is always inside nature, therefore it is nothing but morbidity to apply for the steward’s position. It was, as I said to Zehetmayer,” the prince said, “a piece of trickery, more so of himself than of me, for that I am being tricked when he applies for the advertised position of steward was quite clear.… I did not say,” the prince said, “that everything within which and by which Zehetmayer exists and has always existed up to now is deception, even though that is true, but I did say that a deceptive element has already been his downfall. I imagine the most disastrous family situations in connection with him,” the prince said. “I tell Zehetmayer: I suppose you had an overwrought, abnormal childhood. But the man doesn’t understand me. I think he comes from the Puschach Valley where they speak that awful dialect and doesn’t understand me, and then I realize at once as I speak the sentence ‘I suppose you had …’ and so on,” the prince said, “that the man doesn’t understand me and not only because he comes from the Puschach Valley. I realize that when you’re talking to such a man (and to such people, of course!) you have to speak simply, you must not voice anything complex, anything that strains the mind. With such a man as Zehetmayer you must not commit the crime of your own nature, I mean the crime of thrusting him into your own thoughts, into your vast and endless labyrinth of numbers and figures and ciphers, the maze of your own nature. The greatest crimes,” the prince said, “are committed in words by superiors against inferiors, I think, crimes committed in thoughts and in words. In his first few sentences vis-à-vis me Zehetmayer began to perceive that his presence in my house [The prince did not say: in my castle] is nonsense. Sitting opposite me, with mechanical apathy he keeps moving his immobility the whole while. Whenever he opened his mouth to say something that he after
all did not say, didn’t dare to say, I was able to study what was grotesque about him. I studied the grotesqueness of his very presence, not only in connection with him and with him as a human being, but also in connection with me, in connection with everything between him and me, me and him—in connection with everything. He said he had read my notice at breakfast and all at once innumerable images all related to my notice had come to him; images that all had their source in my notice, had been projected from it into his brain. He said that in different words,” the prince said, “but in any case it was a projection. Zehetmayer did not say: A film suddenly flashed through my brain, its sequences all related to the newspaper notice, translated into excitement. Instead, he said, in keeping with his nature: I could think of nothing else but that notice in the newspaper. And he said: My wife discouraged me from coming here; she wants me to apply for a position but she thought this one a bad idea. She said he wasn’t fitted for this post, that he was a teacher. She said to him: You’re a teacher; and she said, as she invariably did: A bad teacher. Zehetmayer said: I dressed and came here. After Zehetmayer said the words came here,” the prince said, “after Zehetmayer had spoken the words and left them hanging in the air, I repeated them, I had to take them out of the air, bring them down to earth again, clear the atmosphere for what followed. Zehetmayer said,” the prince said, “that at this moment it was a mystery to him why he was applying for the position. But we do so many things which remain a mystery, he said. You see, my dear Doctor, he said: I don’t know why. He reads the newspaper every day and he always reads all the ads; Zehetmayer reads them under pressure from his wife. His wife works and earns money. He finds reading employment ads a bore and he had never before reacted to any of them as he reacted to my notice. I wondered,” the prince said, “whether my notice might not have been written in a remarkable way. But I didn’t think so. (Steward for large forestry enterprise wanted … Saurau … and so on.…) My ad is composed in a wholly uninteresting tone. There’s nothing stimulating or enticing about it or in it. I wrote it quickly and sent it to the newspaper, and I was surprised myself at how impersonally, how unattractively, it is written, although originally, of course, I’d intended to compose an individualized, attractive advertisement, or at least an interesting one, not an uninteresting one.… I sent it in and thought: Your advertisement is pointless, not a soul will respond to it. And so on.… And then,” the prince said, “Zehetmayer called on me early this morning, and right after him these two other applicants appeared, Henzig and Huber, and I think still more applicants will be coming up here to see me, for it is hardly likely that these will be the first and the last. After all, I think, my advertisement must be fascinating, to judge by the effect. I have a very definite notion of a fascinating ad, I think, but suppose this one happens to be particularly fascinating just because it’s not fascinating.… To think that things have come to such a pass, Doctor, that a Saurau has to insert an advertisement,” the prince said. And then: “I said: Herr Zehetmayer, can it be that you sincerely think that you know anything about forestry? To that he replied: No, I don’t know anything about it, really, I don’t know the slightest thing about it, for the fact that I grew up in the country, he said, doesn’t mean that I know anything about forestry. Naturally not. I poured him a glass of whisky (I myself haven’t drunk anything for weeks, Doctor, since you’ve told me I mustn’t) and asked the man, for the question seemed perfectly natural, why he was no longer a teacher. It was after all unusual, I said, no longer to be a teacher at forty-two for a man who is a teacher. My thoughts, Doctor, the language itself, Doctor, have suddenly become all strange to me again! He said that he had been discharged from the educational system ten years ago. His pension rights canceled, he said. He said he had been accused of a crime (rape?) that he hadn’t committed and for which he had spent two years in prison and three years in the Garsten Reformatory. It was impossible for him to tell me the nature of the crime, he said. (Rape?) He said he had enjoyed teaching, had above all appreciated the freedom that the profession of teaching permitted, the daily cleanliness in which a teacher was able to move, his lovely world of possibilities in the country. (Yes, to be a teacher! he exclaimed.) No,” the prince said, “he lived on his wife’s earnings, granted, on her strength, and was basically without hope. So this morning he had read the notice and followed it up. Zehetmayer, he said, and actually, Doctor, he said it ironically, which astonished me. I could look it up, he said, the name of Zehetmayer was that of an old Styrian family of cattle dealers and weavers, come down in the world.” The prince laughed. “The name doesn’t amount to anything any more, Zehetmayer said. Suddenly,” the prince said, “Zehetmayer was explaining everything. One of these mountain intellectuals gone to seed, I thought. Undoubtedly, I thought, crazy. A man who has simply let himself fall into the easygoing apathy of his begetters, simply because it is too great an effort to save himself. It’s foolish, Zehetmayer said, but as I read the notice.… He took pleasure in the sentence he had begun but abandoned, tossed away unfinished,” the prince said. “Yes, no desire, no, no desire, no desire, Zehetmayer said. He stood up as if he felt himself in that accursed relation with nature for a moment even more ridiculous than he had so far been able to be. By the way he stood up,” the prince said, “and went out of my office, he emphasized this ridiculousness. Does he enjoy misery? I thought. Foolish, Zehetmayer said once more and went away, with an absolute mania for self-torment. I thought, here a man turns up who says his name is Zehetmayer, and the man’s no use to me at all. Pointless,” the prince said. “Immediately I observed several already advanced diseases in the man, probably venereal diseases as well, such as are typical of this region. The people of northeastern Styria have one unmistakable characteristic, an infinite tendency toward inbred mysticism, a special clotted rhythm of language and movement. I say the words Puschach Valley and the man is ready to tell me a long story about an experience of his on Puschach Lake,” the prince said. “In general I am struck by how readily people react to specific words, to sentimental words to which they immediately attach a sad tale that they once experienced and that once made a deep impression on them. Now Zehetmayer,” the prince said, “once fell out of a boat on Puschach Lake. You know Puschach Lake, don’t you, Doctor?” My father said, “Yes.” The prince said: “His elder brother tried to pull him up over the side of the boat, but couldn’t manage it. Zehetmayer spent five hours in the water until his father came along in another boat and pulled him out. The site of the accident is six hundred feet deep, but even if it had only been twenty-five or thirty feet deep, and so on.… Zehetmayer said he couldn’t have stayed above water by his own strength another five minutes. He’s a type who is extraordinarily susceptible to certain conceptual words that are all more or less connected with frightful personal experiences. The two words beautiful view, which I said remembering a beautiful view, instantly led him to another though shorter story, but one no less unfortunate than the one about Puschach Lake. He related, or rather sketched,” the prince said, “how in the vicinity of the Bellevue Inn in Salla he was attacked by an escaped convict, and that only two weeks after he himself had been released from the Garsten Reformatory.… The man attacked Zehetmayer from behind and stole his wallet. He had had only twenty schillings in the wallet, but unfortunately it also contained the one photograph he possessed of his mother. The robber was caught, tried in Linz, and sentenced to twelve years in jail. Probably, according to Zehetmayer,” the prince said, “he’s out again by now, after serving four years. I know what justice is like in this country, Zehetmayer said,” the prince said. “Actually I should have taken care not to use exciting words in his presence, and not only in his, incidentally. Zehetmayer is another of those innumerable persons who react to certain words, possibly those that have some permanently horrible association for them, in an absolutely shattering manner. With my father, for example,” the prince said, “I always had to avoid the word aslant, and the words sausage, Auschwitz, S.S., Crimean wine, Realpol
itik. For everyone there are certain words that must be avoided. My sisters, my daughters, my son, all suffer from this kind of reaction; there are certain words which cause them hopeless torment. It occurred to me that to Zehetmayer I probably must not mention the word mole. But suddenly I found myself saying, probably in order to test him, That’s a terrible place for moles, the Puschach area. And I observed that his whole person was instantly plunged into a state of torment. I had actually had the feeling right from the start that I must not confront Zehetmayer with the word mole. (With his native place!) I confronted him with it, and my assumption that it pained him when I said the word mole (reminding him of his native place) was confirmed. I also must not, it became clear to me, say such words to him as puke, Bundscheck, linen, miners, nor mine, nor the word reformatory. But I must admit,” the prince said, “that all the time Zehetmayer was there I felt constantly tempted to use precisely these words he found so dreadful. For instance,” the prince reminded himself, “you kept saying the word turnips. I did not spare him,” the prince said, “I certainly did not spare him, not for a moment. Zehetmayer is the type of person who should be spared, just as most people should be spared, Doctor, but I did not spare him, right from the start I saw all his weaknesses and ailments and for that very reason I used no consideration toward him. I do not have to be considerate of this man, I told myself for just one moment, the crucial moment. It won’t do him any good, no good at all, and so on.… Why? My dear Doctor, I keep falling into such utterly foolish questions,” the prince said, “questions that aim at an explanation, at illumination. But there is nothing to explain, nothing to illuminate. At the name Stainz,” the prince said, “the name Rassach came to Zehetmayer’s mind (not mine!), and in connection with Rassach another story. You will have to hear this story,” the prince said. “Zehetmayer’s existence apparently depends solely on the stories connected with those special words, which stories he is obliged to tell whenever such a word is mentioned. In Rassach,” the prince said, “Zehetmayer has relatives, and one day as a child he was playing in their hayloft. It was afternoon, Doctor, and in that airless hayloft there was that stifling heat which children think might kill them with no parents around to save them. You know that terrible hayloft heat. Suddenly Zehetmayer, then four years old, was called to supper by his uncle. He started and turned around, and started once more, for he saw a man’s body hanging from a beam. A hanged man, Zehetmayer says. He called out to the hanged man, told him to jump down from the beam, because at four he imagined that the man could jump easily from the beam. Supper time, the child kept saying, supper time, again and again. The dead man was the first totally naked person Zehetmayer had ever seen. Suddenly the four-year-old became aware that the man hanging from the beam was dead, and he let out a scream that brought the whole family rushing into the hayloft. Someone they did not know had hanged himself from the beam, probably the night before, according to Zehetmayer. In a state of agitation. (Zehetmayer today.) Zehetmayer then described how his uncle, in order not to have to cut the rope, worried the head of the corpse out of the noose, how the family puzzled over who the suicide might be. They searched the pockets of his clothing, which was lying on the floor (nothing but shirt and jacket), but found nothing. Again and again,” the prince said, “they looked alternately at the corpse and at the boy who had discovered it, little Zehetmayer. Then the uncle suddenly said: The poor kid! And at that Zehetmayer, terrified, ran off, ran from the hayloft into the house and out of the house into the woods where he lost his way, cried … and so on. While Zehetmayer was telling this story which was bound up with the name Rassach (Stainz, and so on) I realized that the man was not entirely sober. The whole time it had not occurred to me that Zehetmayer might be drunk. I thought: Possibly he was drunk at the time he left the house, and then I thought: Zehetmayer is drunk continually. There are quite a number of other oddities to tell in connection with this man Zehetmayer,” the prince said. “But I’ll forbear. I watched him as I have never yet watched anyone else leaving the place, until he was outside the walls. Until he simply disappeared from sight.