The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

  It took me three weeks to harvest the meadow. This wasn’t only the fault of the changeable weather, but also of my clumsiness and physical weakness. When the hay was finally dry in the barn in August, I was so exhausted that I sat down in the meadow and wept. I was overcome by a wave of despair, and for the first time I understood quite clearly the hard blow that had hit me. I don’t know what would have happened if responsibility for my animals hadn’t forced me at least to do the most necessary things. I don’t like remembering that time. It lasted for fourteen days, before I was finally able to pull myself together and start living again. Lynx had suffered deeply from my bad moods. He was entirely dependent on me. He kept trying to cheer me up, and if I didn’t respond he grew completely helpless and crept away under the table. I think I was so sorry for him in the end that I started feigning a good mood until I finally slipped back into a peaceful equanimity.

  I’m not moody by nature. I think it was simply the physical exhaustion that left me with so little resistance back then.

  In fact I had every reason to be pleased. The heavy work of the hay-harvest was behind me. What did it matter that it had cost me too much strength? To make a new start I hoed the potato-field and then set about cutting wood for the coming winter. I went about this work quite sensibly. It was probably simply my weakness that forced me to do so. A big pile of timber, exactly seven cubic yards, stood just above the hut at the side of the road. It was the winter supply of a certain Herr Gassner, as blue chalk markings attested. Herr Gassner, whoever he might have been, had no more need of firewood.

  I placed the timber on a sawing-horse from the garage, and immediately discovered that I had a lot of difficulty with the saw. It kept sticking in the wood, and I had to slave away to get it out again. On the third day I finally got the hang of it, that is, my hands, arms and shoulders got the hang of it, and suddenly it was as if I’d spent my whole life doing nothing but sawing wood. I worked slowly, but consistently. My hands were soon covered with blisters, which suddenly came to a head and wept. Then I stopped for two days and treated them with deer-fat. I enjoyed working with the wood, because I could do it close to the animals. Bella stood in the forest meadow, and sometimes looked over at me. Lynx always ran about not far away, and Pearl sat on the bench in the sun, watching the hornets through half-closed eyes. And inside the house the old cat slept on my bed. For the time being everything was fine, and I had nothing to worry about.

  Sometimes I brushed Bella with Hugo’s nylon brush. She was very partial to that, and stood quite still. Lynx was brushed too, and the cats were examined for fleas with an old dust comb from the hunting-lodge. Like Lynx, they always had a few fleas and were grateful for the treatment. Fortunately they were fleas that didn’t seem keen on human blood, big yellowish-brown creatures that looked almost like little beetles and were very bad at jumping. Hugo hadn’t anticipated them and hadn’t laid in any flea-powder. He probably didn’t even know his own dog had fleas.

  Bella was free of vermin. She was, incidentally, a very clean animal, and was always careful not to lie down in her own cowpats. Of course I kept her byre painstakingly clean as well. The dungheap slowly grew beside the byre. I intended to spread it on the potato-field in the autumn. Huge nettles grew around the dungheap, an ineradicable nuisance. On the other hand I always needed young nettles to cook as spinach. They were the only vegetable I had. But I didn’t want to use the nettles from the dungheap. I think that was a stupid prejudice; even today I can’t rid myself of it.

  The young tips of the spruce-trees were now dark green and tough, and didn’t taste as good as they had done in the spring. But I still chewed them. My hunger for greens was insatiable. Sometimes, in the forest, I found pleasantly sour-tasting wild sorrel. I don’t know what its real name is, but I enjoyed eating it when I was a child. My diet was very monotonous, of course. I had only a few supplies left, and waited with longing for the harvest. I knew that the potatoes, like everything in the mountains, would ripen more slowly than in the open countryside. I was very stingy with the rest of my supplies, and lived chiefly on meat and milk.

  I had grown very thin. I sometimes looked with amazement at my new appearance in Luise’s dressing-table mirror. As my hair had grown a great deal, I had cut it short with the nail-scissors. Now it was quite flat, and bleached by the sun. My face was thin and tanned, and my shoulders angular, like those of a half-grown boy. My hands, always covered with blisters and calluses, had become my most important tools. I had taken off my rings ages ago. Who would decorate their tools with gold rings? It struck me as absurd, even laughable, that I had done so before. The womanliness of my forties had fallen from me, along with my curls, my little double chin and my rounded hips. At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman. My body, more skilful than myself, had adapted itself and limited the burdens of my femininity to a minimum. I could simply forget I was a woman. Sometimes I was a child in search of strawberries, or a young man sawing wood, or, when sitting on the bench holding Pearl on my scrawny lap watching the setting sun, I was a very old, sexless creature. Today the peculiar charm that emanated from me back then has left me entirely. I am still scrawny, but muscular, and my face is crisscrossed with tiny wrinkles. I’m not ugly, but neither am I attractive, more like a tree than a person, a tough brown branch that needs its whole strength to survive.

  If I think today of the woman I once was, the woman with the little double chin, who tried very hard to look younger than her age, I feel little sympathy for her. But I shouldn’t like to judge her too harshly. After all, she never had the chance of consciously shaping her life. When she was young she unwittingly assumed a heavy burden by starting a family, and from then on she was always hemmed in by an intimidating amount of duties and worries. Only a giantess would have been able to free herself, and in no respect was she a giantess, never anything other than a tormented, overtaxed woman of medium intelligence, in a world, on top of everything else, that was hostile to women and which women found strange and unsettling. She knew a great deal about many things, and nothing at all about many others; all in all her mind was governed by terrible disorder, a reflection of the society in which she lived, which was just as ignorant and put-upon as herself. But I should like to grant her one thing: she always had a dim sense of discomfort, and knew that all this was far from enough.

  For two and a half years I have suffered from the fact that this woman was so ill armed for real life. I still can’t hammer a nail in properly to this very day, and the idea of the doorway I want to break open for Bella sends shivers down my spine. Of course nobody had anticipated that I would have to make a doorway. But I know practically nothing else either, I don’t even know the names of the flowers in the meadow by the stream. I learned them in science lessons, from books and drawings, and I’ve forgotten them again like all the other things I couldn’t get into my head. I did sums with logarithms for years, and have no idea what they’re for or what they mean. I found it easy to learn foreign languages, but for want of opportunity I never learned to speak them, and I’ve forgotten their spelling and grammar. I don’t know when Charles IV lived, and I don’t know exactly where the Antilles are, or who lives there. Nevertheless I was always a good pupil. I don’t know; there must have been something wrong with our educational system. People from an alien world would see in me the idiocy of my age. And I’m pretty sure that most of my acquaintances fared no better.

  Never again shall I have the opportunity to make up for these losses, for even if I manage to find the many books stacked up in the lifeless houses, I will never be able to retain what I read. When I was born I had a chance, but neither my parents, my teacher nor myself was able to spot it. It’s too late now. I shall die without having used the chance that I had. In my first life I was a dilettante, and here in the forest, too, I shall never be anything else. My only teacher is as ignorant and untrained as I am, for my only teacher is myself.

  Over the last few days I have realized that I still hope
someone will read this report. I don’t know why I wish that, it makes no difference, after all. But my heart beats faster when I imagine human eyes resting on these lines, and human hands turning the pages. But mice will eat the report long before that. There are so many mice in the forest. If I didn’t have the cat, the house would have been overrun with them long ago. But one day the cat will have ceased to be, and the mice will eat my supplies and finally every last scrap of paper. They probably like eating paper with writing on just as much as blank sheets. Perhaps the lead of the pencil will disagree with them; I don’t even know whether it’s poisonous or not. It’s a strange feeling, writing for mice. Sometimes I simply have to imagine I’m writing for people, which is a bit easier.

  August brought fine, steady weather. I decided to put off the harvest a little longer the following year, and that later proved sensible. I remembered finding a patch of wild raspberries on one of my hunting expeditions. It was a good hour away from the house, but back then the prospect of something sweet would have sent me on a two-hour walk. As I’d always heard that raspberry-patches were the ideal playground for adders, I left Lynx at home. He obeyed only reluctantly and slunk, downcast, back to the house. Over my shoes I pulled on some old leather leggings that had belonged to the huntsman and which, since they reached above my knees, slowed me down a lot. Of course I didn’t see a single adder among the raspberries. I’m not at all afraid of them today. Either there are very few snakes here, or they avoid me. They probably find me just as dangerous as I do them.

  The raspberries had just ripened, and I picked a big bucket full of them and carried it home. As I had no sugar and couldn’t make preserves, I had to eat the berries straight away. I went to the patch every other day. It was the purest joy; I was bathed in sweetness. The sun warmed the ripe berries, and a wild aroma of sun and maturing fruits enveloped and intoxicated me. I was sorry that Lynx wasn’t with me. Sometimes, if I got up from a bush and had a stretch, I was struck by the knowledge that I was alone. It wasn’t fear, just apprehension. In the raspberry-patch, quite alone among thorny plants, bees, wasps and flies, I understood how much Lynx meant to me. Then I couldn’t imagine living without him. But I never took him with me to the raspberry-patch. I was still plagued by the idea of adders. I couldn’t expose Lynx to such a danger just to feel comfortable myself.

  Only much later, up in the pasture, did I actually see an adder. It lay sunning itself on a scree slope. From that point on I was never afraid of snakes again. The adder was very beautiful, and when I saw it lying there like that, entirely devoted to the yellow sun, I was sure it had no intention of biting me. Its thoughts were remote from me, it didn’t want to do anything but lie in peace on the white stones and bathe in sunlight and warmth. I was still happy that Lynx had stayed behind that time. But I don’t think he would have gone near the snake. I never saw him attack a snake or a lizard. He would sometimes dig for a mouse; but in the stony ground he rarely managed to catch one.

  The raspberry harvest lasted ten days. I was lazy, sat on the bench and popped one raspberry after the other into my mouth. I was amazed that my flesh hadn’t turned into the flesh of raspberries. And then, quite suddenly, I had had enough. I wasn’t sick, I had just had enough of the sweetness and the smell of raspberries. I strained the last two bucketfuls of berries through a cloth, poured the juice into bottles and put the bottles into the trough at the spring, where the water stayed ice-cold even in summer. Sweet though the berries were, the juice tasted sour and refreshing, and I was sorry that it wouldn’t keep for an unlimited time. I never tried it, but without sugar the juice would probably have started fermenting even in the spring. As I had no tight stoppers I couldn’t steam it, either. At first my hunger for sweet things was assuaged for a bit, and over the course of the next few months it remained within bearable limits. Today I no longer suffer from it. You can live very well without sugar, and over time the body loses its addictive desire for it.

  When I was in the raspberry-patch for the last time the sun was particularly hot on my back. The sky was still clear, but also leaden, and the air lay hot and dense like a thick paste over the bushes. It hadn’t rained for a fortnight, and I had to expect a storm. I had been spared violent storms until then, but I was a little afraid of them, knowing how wild they could be in the mountains. My life was quite difficult and arduous enough without natural disasters.

  At about four o’clock in the afternoon a black bank of clouds suddenly rose behind the spruce-trees. My bucket wasn’t quite full, but I decided to stop there. The wasps and flies had been bothering and tormenting me all day, and circled my head buzzing poisonously. There were also a few hornets in the patch, but they had always kept themselves to themselves; today they too became intrusive, and shot through the air like furious shuttles on a loom. They looked as if they were made of pure gold. Although the hornets were so beautiful, I thought it safer to leave the raspberry-patch to them.

  The wasps pursued me into the forest for a while, and only then did they leave my raspberries alone. The heat hung beneath the spruce-trees and beeches as if trapped under a big green bell-jar. The bank of clouds came menacingly closer, and the sun was veiled. I almost ran the last part of the way. All I wanted was to get home, lead Bella to the byre and then barricade myself in the house.

  Lynx came whining to welcome me, and looked up at the sky, worried and concerned. He could sense the coming storm. Bella trotted along immediately, drank at the stream and then willingly allowed herself to be led to the byre. The flies and horseflies had been annoying her all day, and she seemed happy to get to her byre. I milked her, closed the shutters and turned the key in the lock; the bolt didn’t strike me as secure enough in a storm.

  Then I went to the hut, fed Lynx and the cats, strained the berries and poured the juice into bottles. But I didn’t put the bottles into the spring just yet, lest they be broken in a storm. By now it was six o’clock or half-past. The sky was completely dark, and its greyish black was showing an ugly hint of sulphurous yellow. That could mean hail or a storm; it looked worrying. Although the sun now cast only a diffuse light on the valley, the terrible bell-jar of heat still hung over the clearing. It was hard to breathe. There wasn’t the slightest breath of air. I drank a little cold milk and, quite without any appetite, ate a piece of rice-cake. Then there was nothing more I could do. So I went upstairs and tried the shutters in the rooms. Then I fastened the window in the bedroom too. The kitchen window was still open, as was the door, but there wasn’t the slightest draught.

  The old cat had gone into the forest after being fed. Pearl was sitting on the windowsill staring into the black and yellow sky. She had drawn back her ears and hunched her shoulder-blades, and her whole posture expressed discomfort and fear. Lynx lay in the doorway with his tongue hanging out, panting loudly. I stroked Pearl, and her white fur crackled and sparkled under my hand. My hair crackled too, if I ran my hand through it, and I felt as if ants were running over my arms and legs. I decided to stay quite still, and sat down on the bench in front of the hut. I was sorry for poor Bella in her gloomy, dark prison, but she would have to put up with it; there was nothing I could do. The storm could break at any minute. But it was still quiet.

  It’s never entirely silent in the forest. You only imagine it’s silent, but there is always a whole host of noises. A woodpecker taps in the distance, a bird calls, the wind hisses through the grass in the forest, a big branch knocks against a tree-trunk, and the twigs rustle as little animals scurry around. Everything is alive, everything is working. But that evening it really was almost silent. The silencing of the many familiar noises frightened me. Even the splashing of the stream sounded restrained and muted, as if the water too was only moving lethargically and unwillingly. Lynx stood up, jumped miserably up on the bench beside me and nudged me gently, intimidated by the terrible silence.

  I couldn’t understand what was stopping the storm from finally breaking. It was as dark as it is late in the evening, and it occurred t
o me how harmless and almost cosy the storms in the city had been. It had been so comforting to watch them through thick panes of glass. Usually I had barely noticed them.

  Then, with no transition, it grew as black as night. I stood up and went into the house with Lynx. I was somewhat at a loss, and didn’t know what to do. So I lit a candle. I didn’t want to light the lamp, probably because of the old superstition that light attracts lightning. I locked the door, but left the window open and then sat down at the table. The candle was burning vertically and quietly, not stirred by a breath of air. Lynx went to the stove door, stopped hesitantly, turned around and jumped back up beside me on to the bench. He didn’t want to leave me alone with this danger, although everything encouraged him to creep into the stove door, into the security of that cave. I too would have liked to creep into a secure cave more than anything else, but I didn’t have one. I felt the sweat running over my face and collecting in the corners of my mouth. My shirt stuck to my skin. Then the first clap of thunder broke the silence. Pearl jumped terrified off the windowsill and fled for the stove door. I closed the window and the shutters, and it grew suffocatingly close. Then a thundering arose among the clouds. Through the slats of the shutters I saw the lightning jerk down, gleaming yellow. The old cat emerged again from the darkness, stopped in the middle of the room, her fur soaking, uttered a plaintive cry and crept under my bed. From there I saw her eyes gleaming yellowish-red in the weak candle-light. I tried to calm the animals, but the next clap of thunder drowned my voice. The drawn-out deep rumbling above us lasted ten minutes, perhaps, but it seemed endless to me. My ears hurt, right inside my head, and even my teeth started to ache. I have always been very bad at putting up with noise, and it felt like a physical pain.