The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

  I dug a runnel in the garage to allow the waste to flow away, and covered the floor with boards and straw, then I fetched the two bedsteads from the byre, which had always served as Bull’s feeding racks, and as I couldn’t stand the darkness I sawed a window out of the timber wall and, with strips of wood, nailed a window-pane from one of the bedrooms over the opening. Now at least there was a little light in the garage. Then I smeared the cracks in the walls with earth and moss, stuffed hay into the hay-rack and put in a water-tub. And then I fetched Bull. He wasn’t happy about the move, and neither was I. He stood, with his great head sadly bowed, staring dumbly in front of him, and put up with it all. He hadn’t broken anything; he was just being punished for being fully grown. I went into the forest with Lynx so as not to have to hear the roaring of mother and son any more. I was left with two lots of work in the byres, and the sense of having committed some atrocity. The poor animals had nothing but each other and the endless, secret dialogue of their warm bodies. I hoped that Bella had conceived a calf and would soon be lonely no longer. I saw no hope at all for Bull.

  Three weeks later it proved that Bull wasn’t yet mature enough after all, or else that Bella, after such a long wait, was no longer able to conceive. I still don’t really know for certain. When Bella started to roar again, I led Bull to her, and he trailed along delightedly behind me. The whole time I was beside myself with fear that Bull might injure or even kill his frail little mother. He was behaving like a wild thing. But Bella seemed to have other ideas, and that calmed me down a little. Three weeks later she was roaring once more, and the terrible business happened all over again. When things proved unsuccessful this time too I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Perhaps Bull shouldn’t even have been acting that way. I decided to wait another few weeks. Before, I’d found Bella’s roaring more bearable, whereas now, when I could have satisfied it, I couldn’t bear to hear it. Every time it happened I had to go as far as possible into the forest with Lynx. On top of that, Bull was in a terrible state of excitement as well, and I barely dared go near him. At times he would turn back into a big, well-behaved calf and would be playful and affectionate towards me. Often enough over the next few months I cursed the cycle of procreation and conception that had turned my peaceful mother-and-child byre into a hell of loneliness and fitful madness.

  Bella’s roaring stopped long ago. Either she’s actually expecting a calf, or else she’s stopped being fertile, and all she has left is the tepid warmth of the byre, eating, chewing the cud and the occasional vague memory slowly fading. After all we’ve been through together, Bella has become more than my cow, a poor, patient sister who bears her lot with more dignity than I do. I really wish her a calf. It would extend the term of my imprisonment and burden me with new worries, but Bella ought to be allowed to have her calf and be happy, and I won’t question whether it fits in with my plans.

  November and the beginning of December were entirely taken up with work on the new byre and concern about Bull and Bella. There could be no question of a peaceful winter. I have always been fond of animals, in the slight and superficial way in which city people feel drawn to them. When they were suddenly all I had, everything changed. There are said to have been prisoners who have tamed rats, spiders and flies and begun to love them. I think they acted in accordance with their situation. The barriers between animal and human come down very easily. We belong to a single great family, and if we are lonely and unhappy we gladly accept the friendship of our distant relations. They suffer as we do if pain is inflicted on them, and like myself they need food, warmth and a little tenderness.

  Incidentally, my affection has very little to do with understanding. In my dreams I bring children into the world, and they aren’t only human children; there are cats among them, dogs, calves, bears and quite peculiar furry creatures. But they emerge from me, and there is nothing about them that could frighten or repel me. It only looks off-putting when I write it down, in human writing and human words. Perhaps I should draw these dreams with pebbles on green moss, or scratch them in the snow with a stick. But I can’t yet do that. I probably won’t live long enough to be so transformed. Perhaps a genius could do it, but I’m only a simple person who has lost her world and is on the way to finding a new one. That way is a painful one, and still far from over.

  On the sixth of December the first snow fell, welcomed with joy by Lynx and with disapproval by the cat, and marvelled at by Tiger, with childlike curiosity. He clearly saw it as a version of the paper-ball game, and approached it trustingly. Pearl had behaved the same way, but more cautiously and with less spirit. She hadn’t had time to learn. Back then I still had no inkling of how little time Tiger had left. I set about my work as before, fetched hay from the barn and went in search of fresh meat. The roe deer seemed to sense the approach of winter, for they now came to the clearing often and grazed in the light of dawn or as dusk fell. I avoided shooting them there, and sought out their more distant trails. I didn’t want to drive them from the forest meadow, where it was easiest for them to scratch out their fodder. I also enjoyed looking at them. Lynx had long ago understood that roe deer in the clearing were not fair game, but a kind of distant fellow-lodger, who were under my protection and consequently under his as well, rather like the crows, who visited us again every day from the end of October.

  Back then my legs suddenly began to give, and ached painfully, particularly in bed. My excessive efforts were making themselves felt, and in future they were to become a constant source of pain.

  On the tenth of December I find a strange entry: ‘Time is passing so quickly’. I can’t remember writing it. I don’t know what happened on that tenth of December that led me to write, beneath ‘Bella with Bull’, ‘New-fallen snow’, and ‘Fetched hay’: ‘Time is passing so quickly’. Was time passing particularly quickly back then? I can’t remember, and can’t give any account of it at all. And it isn’t true. Time only seemed to be passing quickly. I think time stands quite still and I move around in it, sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate.

  Since Lynx died I feel that clearly. I sit at the table and time stands still. I can’t see it, smell it or hear it, but it surrounds me on all sides. Its silence and motionlessness is terrible. I jump up, run out of the house and try to escape it. I do something, things race ahead and I forget time. And then, quite suddenly, it surrounds me again. I may be standing in front of the house looking across at the crows, and there it is again, incorporeal and silent, and it holds on to us, the meadow, the crows and myself. I shall have to get used to it, its indifference and omnipresence. It extends into infinity like an enormous spider’s web. Billions of tiny cocoons hang woven into its threads, a lizard lying in the sun, a burning house, a dying soldier, everything dead and everything living. Time is big, yet it has room for new cocoons. A grey and relentless net, in which every second of my life is captured. Perhaps that’s why it seems so terrible to me, because it stores everything up and never really allows anything to end.

  But if time exists only in my head, and I’m the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I’m owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for a meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself. If I casually stand on a beetle, it will not see this event, tragic for the beetle, as a mysterious concatenation of universal significance. The beetle was beneath my foot at the moment when my foot fell; a sense of well-being in the daylight, a short, shrill pain and then nothing. But we’re condemned to chase after a meaning that cannot exist. I don’t know whether I will ever come to terms with that knowledge. It’s difficult to shake off an ancient, deep-rooted megalomania. I pity animals, and I pity people, because they’re thrown into this li
fe without being consulted. Maybe people are more deserving of pity, because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable. All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished for ever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know it’s too late.

  After the tenth of December it snowed quietly and evenly for a week. The weather was just as I liked it, windless and calming. Nothing makes me feel more peaceful than the silent falling of the flakes or a summer rain after a storm. Sometimes a patch of the greyish-white sky would turn pink, and the forest sank behind delicate, luminous veils of snow. The sun, one sensed, hung somewhere behind our snowy world, but it didn’t reach us. The crows sat motionlessly for hours in the spruce-trees, waiting. There was something about their dark, fat-beaked outlines against the greyish-pink sky that touched me. Strange life, yet so familiar, red blood beneath black plumage, they symbolized stoic patience to me. A patience that has little to hope for and simply waits, ready to take the rough with the smooth. I knew so little about the crows; if I had died in the clearing they would have hacked and torn me to bits, in accordance with their task of keeping the forest free of carrion.

  It was so lovely to go walking through the forest with Lynx on those days. The little flakes fell gently on my face, the snow crunched under my feet, I could barely hear Lynx behind me. I often considered our tracks in the snow, my heavy heels and the dog’s dainty pads. Human being and dog reduced to the simplest formula. The air was clean but not cold, and it was a pleasure to walk and breathe. Had my legs been stronger, I could have walked for days like that through the snowy forest. But they were not strong. In the evening they ached and burned, and I often had to wrap them in damp towels so that I could go to sleep. In the course of the winter the pains eased a little, and didn’t set in again until the summer. It irks me to be dependent on my legs. I paid them no attention for as long as that was possible. Up to a certain point one can get very used to pain; as I couldn’t make my legs better, I got used to the pain.

  Christmas was drawing ever closer, and everything presaged a glittering Christmas forest. I didn’t like that much. I still didn’t feel secure enough to think about Christmas without fear. I was susceptible to memories, and had to be careful. It snowed until the twentieth of December. The snow was now almost three feet deep, a fine-grained, blue-white layer under a grey sky. The sun no longer tried to break through the clouds, and the light stayed cold and white. I still didn’t have to fear for the deer. The snow hadn’t frozen, and the animals were able to scratch out the grass in the clearing. If there was a frost, a layer of frozen snow would form and the snow would become a dangerous trap. On the afternoon of the twentieth it grew a little warmer. The clouds turned slate-grey, and the snow fell in watery flakes. I didn’t like thaws, but it was a boon to the deer. I slept badly at night, and heard the whistling of the wind blowing down from the mountains and rattling the tiles. I lay awake for a long time, and my legs were more painful than ever before. In the morning the snow had already fallen away in places. The stream was high, and in the gorge, too, the meltwater streamed into the road. I was happy for the deer. Wrongly, perhaps, because if a freeze followed the thaw it would be impossible to scratch up the hard ground. Nature sometimes struck me as one great trap for its creatures.

  For the time being the weather was fine; the forest meadow lay almost free of snow in the sun, which suddenly broke from a purple sky between black clouds. The Christmas atmosphere had vanished, and I was now ready to deal with the foehn. I had pains in my heart, and the animals grew restless and irritable. Tiger had a new attack of the torments of love. His topaz-coloured eyes grew dull, his nose was hot and dry, and he rolled plaintively around at my feet. Later he ran into the forest.

  From all I’ve seen, being in love can’t be a pleasant state for an animal. They can’t know, after all, that it’s a temporary thing; as far as they’re concerned every moment is an eternity. Bella’s gloomy calls, the laments of the old cat and Tiger’s despair, nowhere a trace of happiness. And afterwards exhaustion, dull coats and cadaverous sleep.

  So poor Tiger had run crying into the forest. His mother crouched suddenly on the floor. She had hissed at him again when he tried to be affectionate. I took a good look at her and found that she had quietly grown plump under her winter coat. And her moody state on top of that. I could add two and two. Mr Ka-au Ka-au had pre-empted his son long ago. The cat allowed me to examine her and gently feel her belly, and suddenly she caught my hand and carefully bit my knuckles. She looked as if she was laughing at my blindness.

  Right then I was worrying less about Tiger. He had come back once before, after all, and he was fully-grown and strong. But Tiger didn’t come back, not that night, not ever. On the twenty-fourth of December I sent Lynx out to look for him. I took him on the leash, and he eagerly followed Tiger’s trail. There were, of course, a lot of other trails in the forest, and Lynx sometimes became uncertain. For an hour he dragged me hither and thither, and suddenly he got very excited and almost pulled the leash from my hand. Then we were suddenly standing by the stream, far above the hunting-lodge. Lynx looked up at me and barked softly. Tiger’s trail ended here. We crossed the stream, but Lynx couldn’t seem to find the trail again, and kept going back to the spot on the opposite bank. If Tiger had fallen in the stream, something I was at pains to explain, the meltwater would have carried him off long before. I shall never know what happened to Tiger, and it still torments me today.

  In the evening I sat by the lamp reading one of the diaries, but with my eyes alone; my thoughts were outside in the black forest. I kept looking to the cat door, but Tiger didn’t come back. The foehn died down the next day, and it started snowing again. It snowed for days. I knew I would simply have to bear the new loss, and didn’t even try to repress my anxiety about Tiger. The wall of snow by the hunting-lodge grew larger, and I had to shovel the paths to the byres free of snow every day. I did my work and walked rather numbly around in the snowy desert. In the end I stopped waiting for Tiger every evening. But I didn’t forget him. Even today his grey shade flits across my path in my dreams. Lynx and Bull have joined him; Pearl had gone on ahead. They have all left me, they have gone reluctantly, they would so much have liked to live out their short and guiltless lives. But I couldn’t protect them.

  The old cat is lying by me on the table, staring through me. Back then, a week after Tiger’s disappearance, she withdrew into the cupboard and, whimpering terribly, gave birth to four dead kittens. I took them from her and buried them in the meadow beneath earth and snow. They were two tiny, beautifully-marked little tigers, and two strawberry blondes. Everything about them was perfect, from their ears to the tips of their tails, and yet they hadn’t been able to live. The cat was so ill that I was afraid of losing her, too. She had a fever, refused to eat, and kept uttering little cries of pain. But I still don’t know what she needed, and can’t imagine what it could have been. For days she could only lick milk from my fingers. Her coat was dead and unkempt, and her eyes were gummed up. And every night she dragged herself into the open and crept back wailing a few minutes later. She wouldn’t befoul her bed or the hunting-lodge at any price. I did what I could for her, made her drink camomile tea with a tiny little piece of aspirin, which she swallowed only because she was too weak to spit it out. It was only then that I realized the cat had become a part of my life. Since her illness she seems to have grown more fond of me than before. A week later she started eating, and after four days more she resumed her old life. But something in her seemed to be broken. For hours she would crouch on the spot, and if I stroked her she would cry quietly and push her nose into the palm of my
hand. She wasn’t even up to hissing at Lynx when he sniffed at her inquisitively. She only lowered her head submissively and closed her eyes. During her illness she had had quite a strange smell, strong and rather bitter. It was three weeks before she lost that sick smell entirely. But then she quickly recovered, and her coat grew gleaming and thick once more.

  Scarcely had the cat returned halfway to health than I fell ill. I had been pulling hay up the gorge for two days, and had come home exhausted and drenched in sweat. It wasn’t until I came in from the byre and was on the point of changing my clothes that I noticed I was cold and trembling. The fire had gone out, and I had to light it again. I drank some hot milk, but it didn’t make me feel any better. My teeth were chattering, and I could barely hold on to the bowl. I immediately realized that I was seriously ill, yet that struck me as extremely funny and made me laugh aloud. Lynx came by and prodded me reproachfully with his nose. And I couldn’t stop laughing, unnaturally loud and long. But deep within me lay a very cold and clear awareness, observing what was happening. And I obediently did everything that this wakeful awareness commanded. I fed Lynx and the cat, laid fresh wood in the stove and went to bed. But first I took some more anti-fever tablets and drank a glass of Hugo’s brandy. I had a high temperature, and tossed restlessly back and forth. I heard voices and saw faces, and someone pulled at my blanket. Sometimes the noise ebbed away, and I saw the darkness and felt Lynx moving by my bed. He hadn’t gone into the stove door but now lay, as I had once hoped he would, on Luise’s sheepskin. I was terribly worried about the animals, and wept inconsolably.