The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

  The following day, and it’s noted down in my diary, the toothache started. My tooth hurt so terribly that the diary entry doesn’t surprise me. Never before and never again have I had so much pain from a tooth. I had never given that tooth a thought, probably because I was too aware that there was something far from right about it. It had been drilled, and there was a filling in it, and the dentist had told me to come back in three days, without fail. The three days had turned into three months. I used up a huge number of Hugo’s painkillers and felt so depressed on the third day that it was only with the greatest effort that I could do the work I had to do. Sometimes I thought I must be going mad; it was as if the tooth had grown long, thin roots that were now boring their way through my skull. On the fourth day the tablets stopped working at all, and I sat at the table, my head on my arms, listening to the raging racket in my skull. Lynx lay gloomily beside me on the bench, but I wasn’t able to say a kind word to him. I sat at the table all night, because the pain was even worse in bed. On the fifth day I got an ulcer, and in an attack of despair and rage I cut my gums open with Hugo’s razor. The pain that came when I cut myself was almost pleasant, because it extinguished the other pain for a moment. The wound oozed badly, and I was so miserable that I groaned and cried, and I thought I was going to faint.

  But I didn’t faint; it’s not something I do, I’ve never fainted in my life. Finally, while I still had my senses about me, I stood up shakily, washed the blood, pus and tears off my face and lay down on the bed. The hours that followed were the purest bliss. I went to sleep with the hut door wide open, and slept until Lynx woke me in the evening. Then I got up, still quite shaky, drove Bella to her byre, fed and milked her, doing everything very slowly and carefully, because I stumbled if I had to make a sudden movement. Later, after I’d drunk a bit of milk and fed Lynx, I went to sleep straight away, sitting at the table. Since then the boil has come to a head every so often, burst and healed again. But I no longer have any pain. I don’t know how long a thing like that can go on without causing me any problems. I desperately want some false teeth, but I still have twenty-six of my own teeth in my mouth, including some that should have been taken out long ago, but which were crowned for reasons of vanity. Sometimes I wake up at three o’clock in the morning, and the thought of those twenty-six teeth enfolds me in a cold despair. They’re fixed in my jaw like time-bombs: I don’t think I’ll ever be capable of pulling one of my own teeth. If pain comes, I shall have to bear it. It would be funny if, after years of never-ending troubles in the forest, I were to die from an abscess on my tooth.

  I recovered very slowly from the business of the tooth. I think it was because of all the tablets I’d taken. When I went for my next roebuck I used up too much ammunition because my hands were shaking. I was hardly eating anything, but I drank a lot of milk, and I think the milk finally cured me of the poison.

  On the tenth of June I went to the potato-field. The green leaves were very high, and almost all the tubers had grown. But the weeds had shot up as well; and since it had rained the previous day I started hoeing straight away. I realized I would also have to protect my field. I don’t think deer eat potato leaves if they can find the fmest plants round about, but there was still a possibility that some other animal would go for the delicious tubers. So I spent the next few days fencing off the field with strong branches, weaving them together with long brown vines. It wasn’t particularly hard work, but it called for a certain amount of skill that I had to learn.

  Once this work was done, my little field looked like a fortress in the middle of the forest. It was protected on all sides; there were just the mice I couldn’t do much about. Of course I could have filled their holes with petrol, but I couldn’t bring myself to waste it like that; in any case, the potatoes might have tasted of petrol. I have no idea, of course, but I can’t allow myself all that many experiments, for obvious reasons.

  Only half of the beans near the stable had grown. Maybe they’d been too old. But here too, if the weather stayed promising, I could hope for a little harvest. In fact it was pure chance that I’d planted the beans, on a whim more than from serious thought. It was only later that I realized how important the beans were for me, as they had to take the place of bread. Today I have a great big bean-garden.

  I fenced off the bean-garden as well, because I could imagine that Bella, in an unsupervised moment, would not have turned her nose up at the bean-leaves. If I had a little time over from my work, on rainy days, for example, I immediately lapsed into a state of worry and anxiety. Certainly, Bella was still giving just as much milk, and had become decidedly rounder. But I didn’t yet know if she was expecting a calf.

  And if she did have a calf? I sat at the table for hours, my head in my hands, and thought about Bella. I knew so little about cows. What if I wasn’t capable of helping the calf into the world, if Bella didn’t survive the birth, if she and the calf both died, if Bella ate poisonous grass in the meadow, broke a leg or got bitten by an adder? I dimly remembered hearing gruesome stories about cattle during my summer holidays in the country. There was an illness for which you had to stick a knife into the cow’s body at a particular point. I didn’t know where that point was, and even if I had I would never have been able to stick a knife into Bella’s body. I’d rather have shot her. There might be nails or bits of glass in the meadow as well. Luise had always been careless about that. Nails and bits of glass could tear open one of Bella’s countless stomachs. I didn’t even know how many stomachs a cow has; you learn things like that for your exams and then forget them again. And it wasn’t only Bella, even if she was my biggest headache, who was in that kind of danger; Lynx might get stuck in an old trap, or adders might bite him. I don’t know why I was so afraid of adders in those days. In the two and a half years that I’ve been here, I haven’t even seen a single snake in the clearing. What might happen to the cat was beyond thinking about. I couldn’t protect her either; she ran into the forest at night and escaped me entirely. The owl could catch her, or the fox, and she was more likely to get caught in a trap than Lynx was.

  However hard I tried to get away from these ideas I never really succeeded. I don’t think they were fantasies either, since it was far less likely that I could help the animals to survive in the middle of the forest than that they would die. I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theatre and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in our eyes. Each of us knew about it, and that’s why we never discussed it. That was the price we paid for our ability to love.

  Later I told Lynx about it, for no particular reason, just so that I wouldn’t forget how to talk. For every ill he knew only a single cure, a nice little race in the forest. The cat listens to me attentively, but only as long as I don’t get at all excited. She mistrusts even the merest hint of hysteria, and simply wanders off if I let myself go. Bella responds to everything I have to say by simply licking my face; that’s a comfort, certainly, but it’s no solution. In fact there is no solution, even my cow knows that, but I keep on arming myself against suffering.

  At the end of June the cat changed in a very suspicious way. She grew fat and ill-tempered. Sometimes she crouched for hours in an ugly and brooding posture on a single spot, and seemed to be listening to something within her. If Lynx went near her he got a good clout around the ear, and with me she was either exaggeratedly unfriendly or more tender than before. Since she wasn’t ill and was eating, her condition seemed to me quite unambiguous. While I’d only ever thought about the calf, tiny kittens had been growing in the cat. I gave her a lot of milk, and she was thirstier than before.

  On the twenty-seventh of J
une, a stormy day, I heard a faint whimpering from the cupboard. I’d left the cupboard open when I went to the stable, and there were a few of Luise’s old magazines in it. It was on these that the cat had chosen to go into labour, on the front page of Elegant Lady.

  The cat was purring loudly, looking up at me, proud and happy, with big, moist eyes. I was even allowed to stroke her and look at her young. One of them had grey tiger-stripes like its mother, and one was snow-white and tousled. The grey one was dead. I took it away and buried it beside the stable. The cat didn’t seem to miss it, and devoted herself entirely to caring for the white tousled thing.

  When Lynx poked his head inquisitively into the cupboard he was furiously hissed at, and fled outside, scared and indignant. The cat stayed in the cupboard, and refused to be moved to any alternative accommodation. So I left the door open and tied it with a piece of string so that it wouldn’t open wide, and the kitten lay protected in the semidarkness.

  The cat turned out to be a passionate mother, and only went out for a short time at night. She didn’t have to go hunting now, since I fed her enough meat and milk.

  On the tenth day the cat introduced us to her offspring. She carried it into the middle of the room by the scruff of its neck, and put it on the floor. It looked very pretty already, white and pink; but it was still more tousled than any other cat I had ever looked after. Whimpering, it escaped back to the warmth of its mother, and the introduction was over. The cat was very proud, and any time she brought the cat out of the cupboard after that I had to stroke and praise her immediately. She was, like all mothers, filled with awareness of having created something unique. And that was how it was, because not even two young cats are as alike as peas in a pod: not outwardly, and certainly not in their independent little souls.

  Soon the little cat was crawling out of the cupboard by itself, and running under our feet, first mine, then Lynx’s. It showed not the slightest sign of fear, and Lynx watched it and sniffed it interestedly as soon as the cat had left the vicinity. But the cat was almost always around, and observed the incipient relationship through suspicious eyes.

  I called the little cat Pearl, because she was so white and pink. You could even see the blood shimmering through the skin of her little ears. Later great tufts of hair grew on them, but when she was still quite small you could see the skin gleaming through the fluffy fur in many places. At that time I still didn’t know that she was a female, but something in her gentle, rather flat face looked somehow feminine to me. Pearl was very attracted by Lynx, and began lying with him in the stove door playing with his long ears. But at night she slept in the cupboard with her mother.

  In a few weeks I realized that Pearl, a scruffy little thing, was on the point of turning into a beauty. She grew quite long, silky hair and was, judging by her appearance, an angora cat. Only judging by her appearance, of course; some long-haired ancestor had been reincarnated in her. Pearl was a little miracle, but even then I knew that she’d been born in the wrong place. A long-haired white cat, in the middle of the forest, is condemned to an early death. She hadn’t a chance. A new burden of worries had been laid on my shoulders. I shuddered to think of the day when she would go outside. That didn’t take long, and she played in front of the hut with her mother or with Lynx. The old cat was very concerned for Pearl, perhaps feeling what I knew, that her child was in danger. I ordered Lynx to keep an eye on Pearl, and when we were at home he didn’t let her out of his sight. The old cat, finally worn out by the strenuous duties of motherhood, was happy that Lynx assumed the role of Pearl’s protector. The little one’s nature was rather different from other house-cats; more peaceful, gentle and tender. She would often sit for ages on the bench in front of the house watching a butterfly. Her blue eyes had turned green after a few weeks, and glowed like jewels in her white face. Her nose was blunter than her mother’s, her neck embellished with a magnificent ruff. I was always put at my ease when I saw her sitting on the bench, her front paws on her bushy tail, staring alertly into the light. Then I would reassure myself that she would turn into a house-cat though the most she would ever do, as now, was to sit under the verandah leading a contemplative life.

  If I think back to the first summer, it is shadowed more by the concern for my animals than by my own desperate situation. The catastrophe had relieved me of a great deal of responsibility yet, although I failed to notice it straight away, placed a new burden upon me. When I was finally able to assess the situation a little, I had long ceased to be able to change anything about it.

  I don’t think my behaviour was due to any weakness or sentimentality - I was simply following an instinct that had been implanted in me and which I could do nothing to fight against if I didn’t want to destroy myself. Our freedom is in a sorry state. In all probability it’s only ever existed on paper. External freedom has probably never existed, but neither have I ever known anyone who knew inner freedom. And I have never found this fact shaming. I can’t see what should be dishonourable about bearing, as all animals do, this burden that is laid upon us; in the end, we die as all animals do. I don’t even know what honour is. It isn’t honourable to be born and to die, it happens to all creatures and has no meaning beyond that. Even the wall’s inventors didn’t obey a free decision of the will, but simply followed their instinctive curiosity. They should only have been prevented, in the interest of the greater order, from making their invention a reality.

  But I would rather turn to the second of July, the day I realized my life depended on the number of matches I had left. That thought struck me, as all disagreeable thoughts do, in the early hours of the morning.

  Until then I had lived very recklessly in that respect, without considering that every burned-out match could cost me a day of my life. I jumped out of bed and fetched my supplies from the storage space. Hugo, who was a heavy smoker, had thought of matches, and had even bought a box of flints for his lighter. Unfortunately I could never get that table lighter to work. But I still had ten boxes of matches, about four thousand altogether. According to my calculations I could last five years with these. Today I know I calculated more or less correctly; my supplies will last another two and a half years, if I’m very economical. Back then I heaved a sigh of relief. Five years seemed an impossibly long time. I didn’t think I would use up all the matches. Now the day of the last match seems palpably close. But even today I still tell myself it will never come to that.

  Two and a half years will pass, then my fire will go out, and all the wood that surrounds me will not be able to save me from starving or freezing. And yet I still nurture an insane hope. I can only smile upon it indulgently. With the same stubborn independence, as a child I had hoped that I should never have to die. I see this hope like a blind mole, crouched within me, brooding over his delusion. As I can’t drive him from me, I have to endure him.

  One day the final blow will fall upon both of us, and then even my blind mole will know, before we both die. I’m almost sorry, I would have granted him a little success for his persistence. On the other hand he is insane, and I shall be happy if I can keep him under control.

  There is, incidentally, another crucial question, the question of ammunition. I can last another year with what I have. With Lynx’s death, a lot less meat is needed. In the summer I’ll catch trout now and again, and also hope for a good potato and bean harvest. If necessary I could even live on potatoes, beans and milk. But there will only be milk if Bella has another calf. In any case, I’m much less afraid of hunger than I am of cold and darkness. There’s no point in brooding so much about the future, I just have to make sure that I remain healthy and adaptable. Actually I haven’t been very worried for the last few weeks. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad sign. Maybe everything would be different if I knew that Bella was expecting a calf. Sometimes I think, too, that it would be better if she didn’t have one. It would only put off the inevitable end, and load me with a new burden. But it would be nice if there was something new, something youn
g here again. Above all it would be good for poor Bella, who now stands waiting so forlornly in her dark byre.

  In fact I enjoy living in the forest now, and I’ll find it very difficult to leave it. But I shall come back, if I stay alive over on the other side of the wall. Sometimes I imagine how nice it would have been to bring up my children here in the forest. I think that would have been paradise for me. But I doubt whether my children would have liked it that much. No, it wouldn’t have been paradise. I don’t believe that paradise has ever existed. A paradise could exist only outside nature, and I can’t imagine that kind of paradise. It bores me even to think about it: I have no desire for it.

  On the twentieth of July I started to harvest the hay. The weather was summery and warm and the grass in the meadow by the stream was tall and lush. I carried my scythe, rake and fork to the barn, and from then on I left the tools there, since there was nobody who could have taken them.

  When I was standing by the stream like this, looking up at the mountain pasture, I had the feeling that I would never be able to get my task completed. I learned to scythe as a young girl, and then it had been enjoyable, after sitting for ages in stuffy classrooms. But that was more than twenty years before, and I was sure I had forgotten how to do it long since. I knew that you can only scythe in the early morning, or in the evening, when there is dew on the ground, and so I’d set off from the hut at four o’clock. As soon as I’d cut the first few swathes I realized that the rhythm hadn’t left me, and relaxed my cramped muscles. The work went very slowly, of course, and was excessively exhausting. On the second day I managed much better, and on the third day it rained, and I had to take a break. It rained for four days, and the hay was rotting in the meadow; not all of it, only the part that lay in the shade. Back then I didn’t know the various signs from which I can now predict the weather to a certain degree. I never knew whether it was going to be fine, or whether it would rain the next day. All through the hay-harvest I had to fight against changeable weather. Later I always managed to recognize the most promising time to work, but that first summer I was entirely at the mercy of the weather.