The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

  Towards morning the moments of daylight increased, and when the dawn of the snowy day entered the room I got up, put my clothes on, shivering, and went to the byre. I could think quite clearly, and hoped I would be able to milk Bella at least once a day. I climbed the slope and fetched hay for Bella and Bull, enough hay for two days. Then I filled their tub of water. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, and I had violent pains in my side. Then I went back into the house, put out meat and milk for Lynx and the cat and laid fresh wood on the embers. I had left the door of the hunting-lodge half open so that Lynx could get out. If I were to die he would need his freedom. Bella and Bull would easily be able to knock down their doors, the bolts were weak and the ropes were tied around their necks in such a way that they couldn’t pull tight and strangle them if they tried to break them. And they weren’t strong ropes. Even so, none of that would be any use to them because only cold and hunger awaited them outside the byre doors. I swallowed some more pills and brandy, and then sank dizzily into bed. But I had to struggle to my feet again. I went to the table and wrote in the diary: ‘Fell ill on the twenty-fourth of December’. Then I carried a jug of milk to the bed and finally put out the candle and collapsed.

  The fever beat hard in my veins, and I swam away on a hot, red cloud. The hunting-lodge started filling up with people, but then it was no longer the hunting-lodge but a dark, high-ceilinged hall. There was a constant coming and going. I had never known there were so many people. They were all unfamiliar to me, and behaved very weirdly. Their voices sounded like cackling; it made me laugh, and immediately I swam off again in my hot, red cloud and woke up in the cold. The big hall had turned into a cave, and was full of animals, enormous, furry shadows tapping along the walls, crouching in every corner and staring at me with red eyes. In between there were moments in which I lay in my bed and Lynx licked my hand, whining quietly. I wanted to comfort him, but all I could do was whisper. I knew too well that I was ill, and that I alone could save myself and the animals. I decided to keep that resolution in mind and not to forget it. I quickly swallowed pills and drank milk, and set off on my fiery journey once again. And they came, people and animals, enormous and very strange. They cackled and tore at my blanket, and their fingers and claws stuck into my side. I was abandoned to them, salt on my lips, sweat and tears. And then I woke up.

  It was dark and cold, and my head ached. I lit the candle. It was four o’clock. The door was wide open, and the wind had blown snow into the middle of the hut. I put on my dressing-gown, closed the door and lit the stove. It took a long time, but finally a quiet fire was burning and Lynx practically bowled me over and barked with joy. At any moment the fever might strike me again. I put on warm clothes and tapped my way to the byre. Bella greeted me plaintively. I suddenly suspected that I had been lying in fever for two days. I milked the poor beast and fetched hay and water. I think it took me an hour, I was so weak. I still had to attend to Bull, and it was dusk by the time I dragged myself back to the house. At least it had warmed up in the meantime. I put milk and meat on the floor for Lynx and the cat, and I drank a little milk, which tasted terrible. Then I fastened the door to the bench with a piece of string so that Lynx could only open it a crack. It was the best I could think of. I already felt the fever coming back. I put on some more wood, swallowed tablets and brandy, and new terrors engulfed me. Something lay heavy upon me, and suddenly they were clutching at me from all sides and trying to drag me down, and I knew I musn’t let them. I thrashed around and cried out, or thought I was crying out, and suddenly they were all gone and the bed stood still with a jolt. A figure bent over me, and I saw my husband’s face. I could see it very clearly and stopped being frightened. I knew he was dead, and I was happy to see that face again, a good and familiar human face that I had touched so often. I reached out my hand and it dissolved. It was untouchable. A new wave of heat overwhelmed me. When I came to, the light of dawn was at the window. My temperature felt normal, and I felt weary and hollow. Lynx was lying on the little sheepskin rug, and the cat was lying asleep between me and the wall. She woke up although I hadn’t moved, stretched out her paw and laid it slowly, toes spread, on my hand. I don’t know whether she knew I was ill, but every time I awoke from the fever later on she lay beside me and looked at me. Lynx whined with joy the minute I spoke to him.

  I wasn’t alone, and I couldn’t leave them. They were waiting for me so patiently. I drank milk with brandy and took more tablets, and when my temperature felt normal I got up and crept to the byre to attend to Bella and Bull. I don’t know how often I did this, because every time I drifted into a restless half-sleep I dreamt I was going to the byre to milk Bella, and immediately afterwards I was lying in bed again, aware that I hadn’t been to the byre. Everything grew inextricably muddled. But I must have managed to get up and do my work, or else the animals would not have got through my illness so well. I have no idea how long I spent in that twilight state. My heart danced great leaps in my breast, and Lynx kept trying to wake me up. At last he managed to get me to sit up and look around.

  It was broad daylight and cold, and I knew I was no longer ill. My head was clear again, and the stitches in my side had stopped. I knew I had to get up, but it took me a long, long time to get out of bed. My watch and my alarm-clock had stopped, and I knew neither what day nor what time it was. Stumbling weakly, I lit the fire, went to the byre and relieved the bellowing Bella of her burden of milk. I had to drag the water-tub behind me in the snow because I couldn’t pick it up, and when I was fetching the hay from the bedroom I sat down on the stairs three times. I did my work and somehow got back to the house after what seemed like an infinite length of time, Lynx constantly at my heels, licking my hands, pushing me, concern and joy in his reddish-brown eyes. Then I fed him and the cat, who were both very hungry, forced myself to drink warm milk and fell on to my bed. But Lynx wouldn’t let me sleep. With indescribable difficulty I had undressed and crept under the blanket. I heard the fire crackling in the stove, and for a muddled heartbeat I became a sick child, waiting for my mother to bring me an eggnog in bed. Immediately afterwards I went to sleep.

  I must have slept for a very long time, since I was awoken by Lynx’s whining, and felt quite well but very weak. I got up and, still stumbling a little, set about my usual tasks. The crows fell shrieking into the clearing and I set my watch at nine o’clock. From that moment it showed crows’ time. I didn’t know how long I had been ill, and after lengthy consideration I struck off a week from the diary. Since then the diary hasn’t been right either.

  The next week was very wearing and difficult. I didn’t do a stroke more than I needed to, but I was still very tired. Fortunately I had frozen half a deer and had no need to go far from the house. I ate apples, meat and potatoes and did everything I could to regain my strength. I had been seized by a terrible craving for oranges, and the thought that I would never have oranges again brought tears to my eyes. My lips were sore and blistered, and wouldn’t heal properly in the cold. Lynx still treated me like a helpless child, yet when I slept he was sometimes gripped by fear and woke me up. The cat continued to lie in my bed and was very affectionate towards me. I don’t know whether it was affection or a need for comfort. After all, she had lost her young and had been at death’s door.

  Very slowly we all returned to our usual life. Only Tiger’s little shade cast a pall over my pleasure in recovering. I think that if he hadn’t run away and the cat hadn’t been ill, my illness wouldn’t have affected me. I had often come home drenched to the skin in the past. But this time I hadn’t had any resistance. Worry had made me weak and a prey to disease. My stay in the alpine pasture had transformed me a little, and the illness continued the transformation. I gradually started to break free of my past and find a new way of organizing things.

  By mid-February I had recuperated to the point where I was able to go into the forest with Lynx and fetch hay. I was very careful and made sure not to exert myself too much. The weather stayed
moderately cold, and the deer seemed to have survived the winter. I hadn’t found any frozen or starved animals yet. It was delightful to be well again, to breathe the pure snowy air and feel that I was still alive. I drank a lot of milk and was more thirsty than ever. I tried to compensate Bella and Bull with especially loving care for the fear and distress my illness had put them through. But they both seemed to have forgotten everything long since. I curry-combed their coats and promised them a fine, long summer in the Alm, and carelessly broke off pieces from my salt-licks which I gave them as recompense. And they rubbed their noses against me and licked my hands with wet, rough tongues.

  If I think back on that time today, Tiger’s disappearance still casts a pall over it; I was almost glad that the kittens were stillborn, and that I was spared new love and worries.

  At the end of February Bella called ardently for Bull, and I gave in again and risked another try. My hope later proved to have been in vain. I decided I would definitely wait until May. I felt a great uneasiness about the whole matter which developed into a constant source of irritation. Bull was still growing, and didn’t seem to suffer from the cold. His coat grew thick and a little unkempt, and his big body always emanated a faint, tepid fragrance. Perhaps Bull would have been able to spend the whole winter in the open. I was still, of course, judging the animals’ bodies on the basis of my own defenceless one. But the animals behaved in quite different ways, too. Lynx could bear heat and cold equally well; the cat, who had a much longer coat, hated the cold, and Mr Ka-au Ka-au, although he was a cat as well, lived in the ice and snow of the forest in winter. I tended to feel the cold easily but neither could I have spent days lying in the warm stove door. And every time I saw a trout hovering in the pool shivers ran down my spine and I would feel sorry for it. I still feel sorry for the trout, because I simply can’t imagine that it can be comfortable for them down there among the mossy stones. My imagination is very limited, and doesn’t penetrate the smooth, white flesh of cold-blooded creatures.

  And how strange insects are to me. I watch them and am amazed by them, but I’m glad they’re so tiny. An ant the size of a man would be a nightmare to me. I think I exclude bumble-bees only because with their downy fur they look like tiny mammals.

  Sometimes I wish that strangeness would turn to familiarity, but I’m still a long way from that. Strangeness and badness are still one and the same thing for me. And I see that not even animals are free of this idea. This autumn a white crow appeared. It always flies a little way behind the others, and settles alone on a tree avoided by its companions. I can’t understand why the other crows don’t like it. I think it’s a particularly beautiful bird, but the other members of its species find it repugnant. I see it sitting alone in its spruce-tree staring over the meadow, a miserable absurdity that shouldn’t exist, a white crow. It sits there until the great flock has flown away, and then I bring it a little food. It’s so tame that I can get close to it. Sometimes it hops about on the ground when it sees me coming. It can’t know why it’s been ostracized; that’s the only life it knows. It will always be an outcast and so alone that it’s less afraid of people than its black brethren. Perhaps they find it so repugnant that they can’t even peck it to death. Every day I wait for the white crow and call to it, and it looks at me attentively with its reddish eyes. I can do very little for it. Perhaps my scraps are prolonging a life that shouldn’t be prolonged. But I want the white crow to live, and sometimes I dream that there’s another one in the forest and that they will find each other. I don’t believe it will happen, I only wish it very dearly.

  Because of my illness, February seemed very short. At the beginning of March it suddenly turned warm, and the snow melted from the slopes. I was afraid the cat would set off on her adventures, but she showed no sign of being in love. The illness had taken its toll on her. Often she would play like a young kitten, and then fall back, weak and drowsy. She was friendly and patient, and Lynx enjoyed being near her. They even ended up sleeping side by side in the stove door. This transformation unsettled me slightly, it seemed to be a sign that the cat still hadn’t quite recovered. I was still rather weak too, and that was dangerous. I absolutely had to regain my strength in time to do my work in the spring. I still had a little pain in my left side. I couldn’t breathe deeply, and whenever I fetched hay or chopped wood this shortness of breath was an obstacle. The pain wasn’t terrible, just troublesome, a constant reminder. I still feel it before a change in the weather, but since the summer I can breathe deeply again. I’m afraid the illness weakened my heart a little. But I can’t pay much attention to that.

  There was something tiring and dangerous about the whole of that March. I had to take care, yet I couldn’t go all that easy on myself. The sun tempted me to sit on the bench, but it made me too drowsy and I had to stop. It’s boring to have to think about one’s own health all the time, and I usually forgot about it entirely. The earth was still cold, and as soon as the sun had set the air grew wintry, raw and cool. The grass had survived so well under the snow that in places it had stayed green. The deer found enough to eat in the forest meadow.

  I spent the whole of March chopping wood. I worked slowly, since I was short of breath, but the wood-cutting was of vital importance and had to be done. Everything I did was a little dreamlike, as if I was walking on cotton-wool rather than the solid forest floor. I didn’t worry much, and oscillated between hectic gaiety and superficial concern. I realized I was behaving like the cat, who, because of her illness, had regressed to a childlike way of life. Before I fell asleep I often felt as though I was lying in my walnut bed beside my parents’ bedroom, listening to the monotonous murmur that penetrated through the wall to me and sent me to sleep. I kept telling myself I finally had to be strong and adult again, but I actually wanted to go back to the warmth and silence of the nursery, or even further back into the warmth and silence from which I had been torn into the light. I was vaguely aware of the danger, but the temptation to allow myself to fall after so many years was too strong for me to resist. It made Lynx unhappy. He urged me to go with him into the forest, to do this and that and shake off my drowsiness. My little childish self got very angry with Lynx and wasn’t wanting any of it. So I walked out in the moist gleam of the March days that had prematurely tempted the flowers from the earth. Liverworts, cowslips, larkspur and buttercups. They were all very lovely, and created for my delight.

  Who knows how long I would have gone on living like that if Lynx hadn’t intervened. He had got used to going on little expeditions off his own bat, and one afternoon he came back whining and showed me his bloody, squashed front paw. I suddenly became an adult woman again. It looked as if Lynx had got caught under a heavy stone. I washed the paw, and as I couldn’t establish if it was broken I made a splint with little bits of wood and wrapped a medicated bandage around it. Lynx gladly put up with all this, overjoyed by the interest I was showing in him. He spent the next two days lying in the stove door dozing. I reproached myself with the fact that it was my fault that the dog was in this state. I simply hadn’t paid him any attention; I had abandoned him. I examined the paw again and saw that it wasn’t broken. Lynx started to lick off the medication and I didn’t replace the bandage. Lynx himself knew very well what was good for him, and he wanted to be able to lick his wound. After a week he was running again, with a limp at first, but soon as well as he had done before. The paw was left a little broader and more shapeless than it had been.

  Suddenly the past few weeks struck me as entirely unreal. I thought about my work again and made plans to move to the Alm. Then winter started in once more. The snow buried the trees in the meadow by the stream and my dreams of the sheltered sleep of childhood. There was no certainty in my world, only dangers on all sides and hard work. And that suited me fine; the thought of what I had recently become repelled me.

  The woodpile near the hut had all been burnt, and I set about dragging logs through the snow from a pile a little further away. The snow was smoot
h and hard, and I began to enjoy the work. My hands were soon chapped again, and full of pitch and little splinters. The saw had blunted a little, and I didn’t dare sharpen it because I was afraid I would break the last blade in my clumsiness. So wood-cutting became hard work, and I went to bed completely exhausted every night. But in the end I worked up a hunger, and could even eat meat with relish. I soon noticed that I was getting stronger and more skilful again. Lynx ran all over the place with me, and didn’t seem to notice his paw any more. We were now three invalids, active invalids, since the cat had finally cheered up and cast aside her unnatural gentleness. Bull was growing even bigger and more magnificent, and the garage looked like a doll’s house to me, he filled it so thoroughly. I looked forward to the day when he would feel the meadows of the pasture beneath his hooves once more.

  Only the idea of the cat tormented me every evening when I thought of the move. There was no point in taking her. She would only run home again, and if I left her behind I could at least spare her the dangers of the long journey back. I watched her reverting to her prickly old self more and more, and could only hope she could cope with summer in the forest. If she had still been ill I should certainly have taken her with me. Her misfortune had made me so fond of her that the coming farewell quite spoiled any anticipation I might have derived from the Alm. I would much rather have stayed in the hunting-lodge. My incomprehensible antipathy towards the Alm, incomprehensible after so fine a summer, had not quite disappeared as yet. Perhaps this was only due to my laziness, which made me shy away from exertion. Perhaps I should have obeyed my instincts, but I thought I owed Bella and Bull another summer in the pasture.