The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

  The sky was pale grey, turning rosy in the east, and the meadow was thick with dew. A fine day was dawning. It was strange to be able to survey a wide area, unimpeded by mountains and trees. And it wasn’t immediately pleasant and liberating. My eyes had to get used to the distance first, after a year spent in the narrow basin of the valley. It was disagreeably cool. I grew chilly and went into the house to put on some warm clothes. The cat’s continued absence depressed me a great deal. I knew straight away that she wasn’t anywhere nearby, but had run back to the valley. But had she actually managed to get there? I had betrayed her trust, which was not yet very well established in any case. Her disappearance cast a gloomy shadow over the dawning summer day. I couldn’t do anything about that, and so I went about my work as I did every day. I milked Bella and drove her and the bull to the meadow. Tiger showed no signs of running away, he was still young and adaptable. Perhaps he didn’t yet feel strong enough to stand on his own two feet.

  That morning I drowned my anxiety in tea (I like to remember the time when I still had tea). Its aroma cheered me up, and I began to persuade myself that the old cat would spend the summer in the hunting-lodge and greet me happily when I returned in the autumn. Why should that not be possible? She was, after all, a crafty female, familiar with every danger. For a while I sat quite peacefully at the dirty table, watching the sky grow red through the little window. Lynx was taking a look about his surroundings, Tiger had interrupted his game and dragged himself off to the cupboard for an extended snooze. It was quite quiet in the hut. Something new was beginning. I didn’t know what it would bring me, but my homesickness and worries about the future gradually left me. I saw the expanse of the alpine meadows, behind them a strip of forest and above them the great, curved bow of the sky, the moon hanging, a pale circle, at its western edge while the sun rose in the east. The air was sharp and I breathed more deeply. I began to find the pasture beautiful, strange and dangerous, but, like everything strange, full of mysterious enticement.

  Finally I tore myself from the bewitching view and set about cleaning the hut. I lit the stove for hot water, and then rubbed the table, the bench and the floor with sand and an old brush that I’d found in the bedroom. I had to repeat the process twice, and great streams of water flowed to that purpose. Afterwards the hut was still not especially inhabitable, but at least it was clean. In places I had to scrape off the dirt with a knife. I don’t think the floor had ever come in contact with water before, at least not during the time of the pin-up-worshipping dairyman. I left the picture hanging on the wardrobe, incidentally. As time passed I even grew quite fond it. It reminded me a little of my daughters. Cleaning the hut was a task that I liked. I left the door and window open and let the clean air pass through the house. When the floor dried in the course of the morning it began to take on a reddish sheen, and I was proud of this success. I had laid the pallet on the meadow, and Lynx immediately made his bed there. When I chased him from it, he withdrew, disgruntled, behind the hut. He disliked domestic cleaning work, because I had forbidden him to march about on the wet floor. After the water and air baths the hut lost its sour smell, and I started to feel a bit better. There were milk and potatoes for lunch, and I realized that I would have to get hold of some meat for Lynx’s sake. I decided, since it had to be done, to do it as soon as possible, particularly since the area was still unfamiliar to me and I couldn’t count on immediate success. It was only on the second day, after four futile hunting expeditions, that I managed to shoot a young stag, and a very disagreeable problem arose. I didn’t have a spring here to cool the meat, so I had to use up the perishable parts promptly and store the rest either boiled or fried in the cool bedroom. Consequently we spent the whole summer alternating between lean and very fat times, and I was forced each time to throw away a part of the meat because it had gone off. I left it far from the hut in the forest, and it regularly disappeared overnight. Some wild animal must have had a very good summer. The food situation was not at all good, as I had only very few potatoes left; but we never really had to starve. During my time in the Alm I wrote no diary entries. I had taken the diary with me and dutifully ticked off each day, but I didn’t even enter such important events as the hay-harvest. The memory of that time has remained fresh, however, and it isn’t hard for me to write about it. I shall never forget the fragrance of summer, the rainstorms and the evenings glittering with stars.

  On the afternoon of the first day I sat on the bench in front of the hut warming myself in the sun. I had tied Bella to a post. The little bull never wandered far from his mother. Only a week later I abandoned this precautionary measure. Bella was by nature agreeable and even-tempered and never caused me the slightest trouble, and her son was at that time a happy and impetuous calf. He grew considerably larger and stronger, and I still hadn’t found a name for him. Of course there were lots of names for a bull, but I didn’t like them, and they all sounded a bit silly. In any case he was already used to being called Bull, and followed me about like a big dog. So I left it at that, and in time I stopped even thinking about giving him another name. He was an innocent, trusting creature, and, as I could clearly see, considered life to be one long pleasure. Even today I’m glad that Bull’s youth was spent so happily. He never heard an angry word, was never pushed or beaten, was allowed to drink his mother’s milk, eat tender plants in the pasture and sleep at night in Bella’s warm aura. There is no finer life for a little bull, and that’s how well he lived for a while. Born at another time and in the valley he would long since have been sent to the slaughterhouse.

  After the first week spent working in the byre and the stable and collecting fallen wood, I wanted to have a little look at the surrounding region. The hut in the pasture nestled in the broad green trough of the meadows between two steep mountain ridges, which I couldn’t climb because I had a touch of vertigo and didn’t feel up to clambering along the paths of the chamois. I visited the vantage point again, and surveyed the countryside with the binoculars. I never saw any smoke rising or any movement in the roads. In fact the roads only looked hazy now. They must have been overgrown with weeds in places. I tried to find my bearings with Hugo’s road map. I was at the northern end of an extended massif that stretched towards the south east. I’d visited both valleys that led from my hut to the foothills of the Alps; I lived in one of them, after all. But that area was only a small part of the massif. I had no way of finding out how far the free area extended towards the south east. I couldn’t stray too far from the house, and even with Lynx such an undertaking would have struck me as dangerous. If the whole massif was free, it could only contain hunting-grounds, all of them leased and not freely accessible, for otherwise right on the first of May a load of tourists would have arrived and happened upon me long ago. For hours I studied the mountain ridges and valley clefts that lay before me, but I could detect no trace of human life. Either the wall crossed the mountains diagonally or I was the only person in the whole massif. The latter possibility sounded a little unlikely, but it wasn’t unthinkable. On the eve of a holiday all the woodcutters and hunters could well have stayed at home. In any case it struck me that new stags which I hadn’t seen before kept appearing in my hunting-ground. Before, all stags had looked the same to me, but in the course of a year I’d learned to tell my stags from strangers. These strangers had to come from somewhere. At least a part of the mountain must have been free. In the chalk cliffs I sometimes saw chamois, but not many, since the mange had gained ground.

  I decided to make little reconnaissance expeditions, and found a slope in the pine-forest that I dared to climb. If I took a break after early milking at six o’clock I would be able to go out for four hours into the mountains and still come back in daylight. On days like that I tethered Bella and Bull, but concern for them followed me wherever I went. I invaded entirely unfamiliar hunting-grounds, and found a few hunting-lodges and woodcutters’ huts from which I took things that were still serviceable. The luckiest find was a little sack o
f flour that had stayed miraculously dry. The hut I found it in was in a very sunny clearing, and in any case the flour had been kept shut up in a cupboard. I also found a little packet of tea, tobacco, a bottle of paraffin, old newspapers and a mouldy, flyblown side of bacon that I left behind. All the huts were overgrown with bushes and stinging nettles, and the rain had come through some of the roofs, leaving them in a bad state.

  There was something ghostly about the whole endeavour. Mice rustled in the pallets where men had slept a year before. They were now the masters of the old huts. They had gnawed and eaten all the supplies that hadn’t been kept shut away. They’d even nibbled at old coats and shoes. And there was a smell of mice; a disagreeable, sharp smell that filled every hut and had driven away the old familiar smell of smoke, sweaty men and bacon. Even Lynx, who had set off on these reconnaissance expeditions very eagerly, seemed depressed the minute we went into a hut, and hurried to get outside again. I couldn’t overcome my resistance to the idea of eating in one of the huts, so we had our modest, cold meals on a tree-trunk, and Lynx drank from the streams that always flowed near the huts. Very soon I had had enough. I knew I would never find anything but a wilderness of nettles, the smell of mice and sad, cold fireplaces. One hot, still day I spread out the flour, that precious discovery, on a cloth in the sun. It wasn’t damp, but it seemed to me that the smell of mice hung about it, too. After it had lain in the sun and air for a day I found it edible. That flour helped me make it through to the next potato-harvest. I used it, with milk and butter, to bake thin dough-cakes in an iron frying-pan, the first bread I had had for a year. It was a holiday; Lynx too seemed to remember past pleasures as the scents arose, and of course I couldn’t let him go hungry.

  Once, when I was sitting at the vantage point, I thought I could see smoke rising from the spruce-trees a long way off. I had to put down the binoculars because my hands started to tremble. When I had got a grip on myself and looked again, there was nothing to be seen. I stared through the binoculars until my eyes watered and everything flowed together into a green mist. I waited for an hour, and went back there for the next few days, but I never saw the smoke again. Either I had conjured something up for myself or the wind - there was a foehn that day - had blown the smoke down. I will never know. In the end I went home with a headache. Lynx, who had waited beside me all afternoon, must have thought I was a boring fool. He didn’t like the vantage point at all, and always tried to persuade me to go on different walks. I say persuade, because I can’t think of a better word for what he did. He would get in front of me and push me in a different direction, or temptingly run a few steps ahead and look back at me encouragingly. He would keep on until I gave in or until he understood that I wasn’t to be persuaded. He probably didn’t like the vantage point because he had to sit still there and I didn’t pay him any attention. It’s also possible that he noticed the gloomy mood I sank into when I looked through the binoculars. Sometimes he sensed my mood before I was aware of it myself. He certainly wouldn’t have liked to see me now, sitting at home every day, but his little shade no longer has the strength to push me on to new paths.

  Lynx lies buried in the Alm. Beneath the bush with the dark green leaves that exuded a faint fragrance when I rubbed them between my fingers. The very place where he had his first nap when we arrived at the pasture. Even if he had no other choice, he couldn’t have laid down more than his life for me. It was all he owned, a short and happy dog’s life: a thousand stimulating scents, the sun’s warmth on his fur, cold spring water on his tongue, breathless hunts for deer, sleep in the warm stove door when the winter wind blew around the hut, a caressing human hand and a beloved, wonderful human voice.

  After I had abandoned the expeditions into unfamiliar hunting-grounds I sank very slowly into a sort of paralysis. I stopped worrying and tended to sit on the bench in front of the hut, simply gazing into the blue sky. All my energy and competence slipped from me, making way for a peaceful lethargy. I knew that this state could become dangerous, but even that didn’t matter much to me. It no longer disturbed me that I had to live on a kind of primitive summer holiday; the sun, the high and distant sky above the meadow, and the fragrance that rose from it, gradually turned me into a stranger. I probably didn’t make any entries about this in my diary because it all struck me as a little unreal. The Alm lay outside of time. Later, during the hay-harvest, when I returned from the underworld of the damp gorge, I seemed to be coming back to a land which mysteriously released me from myself. All my fears and memories stayed behind beneath the dark spruces, to attack me every time I went down there. It was as if the big meadow exuded a mild narcotic called oblivion.

  After I’d been living up at the Alm for three weeks I roused myself to pay a visit to the potato-field. It was the first cool and dull day after a long period of fine weather. I left Bella and Bull in the stable with green fodder and locked Tiger in the hut. To be on the safe side I’d filled his little box with earth and left meat and milk for him. Lynx came with me, as always. At around nine o’clock I reached the hunting-lodge. I don’t know what I’d hoped or feared. Everything was quite unchanged. The nettles had grown and engulfed the dungheap. When I went into the house, I immediately saw the familiar little hollow on the bed. I went around the house and called the cat, but she didn’t come. Neither was I sure that the impression hadn’t been left in May. So I carefully brushed the bed smooth and left a little meat in the cat’s bowl. Lynx sniffed at the floor and the cat door. But he might have been following old scents. I opened all the windows, including the one in the store cupboard, and let the fresh air sweep through the house. I did the same in the byre as well. Then I investigated the potato-field. The potatoes had grown beautifully, and the ones that hadn’t been fertilized were actually a little smaller and not such a dark green. Thanks to the long drought the field wasn’t very overgrown, and I decided to wait for a fall of rain before hoeing. The beans, too, were already twisting up the sticks. The grass in the meadow by the stream wasn’t as lush as it had been the previous year, and desperately needed rain. But there were still a few weeks left before the harvest, and a chance that it might recover quickly after a fall of rain. While I looked at the big, steep meadow I grew quite despondent. The idea that I would get it done was inconceivable, with a long walk on top of everything else. The previous year, when I hadn’t had a long journey to get there, the meadow had almost finished me off. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t even thought about that in the Alm. It was strange; as soon as I was in the valley I thought about the Alm almost with fear or revulsion; but from the pasture I couldn’t imagine living in the valley. It was as if I consisted of two quite different people, one of whom could exist only in the valley, while the other was beginning to flourish in the Alm. It all scared me a little, because I couldn’t understand it.

  I looked through the wall. The little house was completely covered with shrubs. I couldn’t see the old man; he must have been lying behind a wall of nettles that covered the stream. The world, it seemed to me, was slowly being swallowed by nettles. The stream had grown quite small in the drought. There were a few trout in the ponds, barely moving. That summer they were having a honeymoon period, and might recover.

  The gorge was as gloomy and damp as ever; nothing had changed. It was drizzling a little, and light mist hung in the beech-trees. Not a single salamander showed its face; they were probably sleeping under the damp stones. I hadn’t seen any so far that summer, only green and brown lizards in the pasture. Once Tiger had bitten one to death and laid it at my feet. He had the habit of laying all his trophies at my feet: enormous grasshoppers, beetles and gleaming flies. The lizard had been his first big success. He looked up at me expectantly, the light reflecting golden yellow in his eyes. I had to praise and stroke him. What should I have done? I’m not the god of lizards, nor the god of cats. I’m an outsider, who shouldn’t get involved. Sometimes I can’t help it, and play Providence a little;

  I save an animal from certain
death or shoot a deer because I need meat. But the forest copes easily with my confusion. A new deer is born, another runs headlong to its doom. I’m not a troublemaker worth taking seriously. The nettles beside the byre will go on growing, even if I exterminate them a hundred times, and they will survive me. They have so much more time than I do. One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.

  Back then, in the second summer, I hadn’t reached that point. The demarcation lines were still rigidly drawn up. I find it hard to separate my old self from my new self, and I’m not sure that my new self isn’t gradually being absorbed into something larger that thinks of itself as ‘We’. It was the Alm’s fault. It was almost impossible, in the buzzing stillness of the meadow, beneath the big sky, to remain a single and separate Self, a little, blind, independent life that didn’t want to fit in with a greater Being. Once my major source of pride had been that I was just such a life, but in the Alm it suddenly struck me as pathetic and absurd, an overinflated Nothing.

  From my first expedition to the hunting-lodge I brought the last rucksack full of potatoes and Hugo’s flannel pyjamas back to the pasture. The nights were bitterly cold, and I missed my warm quilt. I got to the hut at about five o’clock; there it was in front of me, grey and glistening with rain. Suddenly I had the uncomfortable feeling that I didn’t really belong anywhere, but after a few minutes it went away, and I was quite at home in the pasture again. Tiger cried furiously at me, and whisked past me into the open. The box of earth was untouched, and he had turned his nose up at the food. He must have been in terrible torment. When he came back he was still profoundly annoyed, sat down in a corner and showed me his rounded backside. His mother used to express her contempt for me in the same way. But Tiger was still a child, and after ten minutes he yielded to the temptations of companionship. Once he was well fed and placated he would finally walk to the wardrobe. I did the work in the byre, drank a little milk with my dough-cakes, and crept into bed in Hugo’s colossal pyjamas. I had been pleased to see that everything was in good order in the valley. The hunting-lodge was where it had always been, and there was even cause to hope that the old cat was still alive. As a child I had always suffered from the foolish fear that everything I could see disappeared as soon as I turned my back on it. No amount of reason could completely banish that fear. At school I would think about my parents’ house and suddenly I would be able to see nothing but a big, empty patch where it had previously stood. I was later prey to nervous anxieties when my family wasn’t at home. I was only really happy when they were all in bed or when we were all sitting around the table. For me, security meant being able to see and touch. And that’s how it was for me that summer. When I was in the Alm I doubted the reality of the hunting-lodge, and when I was in the valley the Alm dissolved to nothing in my imagination. And were my anxieties really so idiotic? Was the wall not a confirmation of my childhood fears? Overnight my former life, everything I was fond of, had been mysteriously stolen from me. If that had been possible, then anything could happen. In any case, I had been taught so much reason and discipline at an early age that I fought against every such impulse the minute it showed its face. But I don’t know whether that kind of behaviour is sane; perhaps the only sane reaction to all the things that have happened would be madness.