Gargoyles (5 page)

And all the while she talked of her son, she told us, her mind dwelt on the thought that this room of hers was the one she was going to die in. It closed in on her at night, and she was afraid of suffocation. My father distracted her (and us) by talking about the Stub Alp. He described the stunted pines at the top, the cold autumnal air, the wind along the rocky peak, the rush of Lobming Brook down into the valley.

“I take my son with me more often nowadays,” my father said. “He has to get to know people; that’s going to be essential for him.… I live with my children but I can’t see inside them any more than they can see inside me. The difficulties between parents and children are growing worse all the time. After a while there’ll be no overcoming them, do what one will.”

To this day he had not comprehended his wife’s, my mother’s, death. But then everything was always incomprehensible.

Who would have thought, only five years ago, that he would suddenly be
alone
with me and my sister.

“A good person whom everything depended on suddenly no longer exists,” he said.

He knew I was doing all right at the Mining Academy in Leoben, he said. He wasn’t worried about me, only about my sister. She was so susceptible to every illness, had such a withdrawn life, left to herself with our housekeeper most of the time. And she was so sensitive that some days she was simply incapable of leaving her room.

My father spoke very affectionately about us. Frau Ebenhöh seemed to be listening attentively to him.

He needs someone to listen to him now and then, I thought. I recalled Bloch.

But he rather imagined my sister and I could lean on each other when he was not around, he said.

My interest in the sciences made him happy, he said. He was
disturbed
by my taciturnity, not
alarmed
, because it wasn’t morbid, just something I’d arrived at rationally. He thought my physical health was good.

“As far as I know his friends are all healthy young fellows, too,” he said. “I enjoy seeing them whenever I’m in Leoben. I usually have dinner with my son in the Gärner Restaurant. But the worst of it is, I’m always in a hurry.”

He was glad I had chosen my course of studies myself and was pushing on with them, to be finished as soon as possible. “He’s making wonderful progress—he’s better than all the others.”

Leoben was a good place for studying mining engineering, not too big and not too small, a town that offered what was necessary and nothing superfluous, he said. The climate wasn’t as good as up here at home, but still quite healthful. I took advantage of the amusements the town offered, but didn’t go overboard. That above all reassured him. It seemed to him fantastic that I was all of twenty-one.

He rather wished I could go in somewhat more for sports, but I surely knew best what I ought to be doing. All in all, since he didn’t scant me in any way, he could
expect
that I would act in good faith and fulfill his hopes. To do well always and everywhere took effort.

As for my sister, he’d been noticing things in her that were just like my mother, psychological and physical things. From day to day these elements grew stronger, her character more and more resembling our mother’s.

Inwardly she was never free from fear, and that bothered him. “She has the most sensitive organism imaginable.”

Her moods changed rapidly; she was constantly in danger, completely subject to her nervous system. She had been isolating herself from us more and more, withdrawing into herself. It had become a problem he didn’t know how to solve.

To me it seems that she has already moved too far away from us for us ever to catch up with her again. Both of us lost our mother at the most devastating moment, but for my sister this loss may possibly have been fatal.

At first, my father said, he had placed my sister in a boarding school on Lake Constance. But that had been the worst thing he could have done. Under the rule of stern, unyielding nuns she had plunged even more into melancholy, and from then on her state of hopelessness had been continuous.

For the past year at home she had fallen into a listlessness that cast a pall on the rest of us.

I keep trying to approach her, in letters from Leoben, but in vain.

It is not improbable, my father said, that her psychic illness is more and more affecting her organic state. “I’m always frightened for her.”

He had once taken her to Zeitschach, my father said, and stayed at an inn for two days. For the whole two days she did not speak to him. And yet it had been a lovely vacation spot, the countryside beautiful and the weather perfect. She had got up late and gone to bed early, as if distraught over the place and its surroundings. She had been unable to treat the stay there as a holiday, which he had meant it to be, but only as an ordeal.

Another time he had driven down to Laibach with her, and then on to Trieste and Fiume—all in all a six-day vacation,
during which he had arranged with another doctor to take his place at home. But he had not been able to alter her mood. She was visibly growing more depressed all the time. In general he had observed that her spirits sank even more whenever she moved into the light.

Among cheerful people who take life easily she was wretched. Pleasant surroundings irritated her. A bright day plunged her into still deeper melancholia.

When visitors came to the house, she withdrew and stayed in her room until they were gone, my father said. The kind of amusements that are customary in the country simply baffled her. She had no girl-friends either. Sometimes she would go out of the house in the middle of the night and wander around the village.

Her sleeplessness reminds me of my mother’s sleeplessness.

When she leaves for what is supposed to be a longish stay in the Tyrol, in Salzburg, in Slovenia, she returns next day.

In spite of all this, my father said, she is attached, with a fondness she herself does not always understand, to us, to her father and brother.

Everything is easier for me, my father said; for her everything is difficult. We have been living together for so long and don’t know one another.

Each of us is completely isolated, although we are so close.

All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.

I thought I had never heard my father speak so emotionally about us.

He could already see me finishing my studies and launching on a career that would not disappoint him, he said.

At this point he noticed that Frau Ebenhöh had fallen asleep. He stood up and looked to see whether I was still there. He felt embarrassed that I had been listening to him.

We looked out into the garden and saw a woman, the neighbor, I thought, coming toward us through the grass in rubber boots. She took off the rubber boots at the door and entered. She had bought all sorts of provisions for Frau Ebenhöh, as well as a bottle of red wine, which she placed on the table. My father knew her, and she him. Frau Ebenhöh awoke. Did we know about the murder in Gradenberg? the neighbor asked. Grössl had not yet been apprehended. This was the fourth crime this year in these parts, she said, and reminded Frau Ebenhöh of the strangled potter, the throttled schoolmistress, both from Ligist, and Horch, the Afling furrier, who had been shot. Unpacking the bread and butter, she said: “It’s the sultry weather.”

My father admitted that he had been to see the innkeeper’s wife that morning. She had died in Köflach, he said.

The neighbor straightened Frau Ebenhöh’s bolster, turned her, tautened the sheet. The sick woman had fallen asleep again when we took our leave.

Walking back across the Stiwoll marketplace to our car, we talked about my forthcoming examinations, about the relationships among the students in Leoben, about their boredom and their general weariness with life. About the frequent suicides precisely among the most capable students. It was remarkable, my father said, that it should be the wealthy who incline to suicide; first they succumb to boredom, the worst disease anyone can fall prey to in this world.

The Mining Academy in Leoben is good, I said, famous, and unjustly deprecated by its own students. I imagine it’s one of the three best in the world, I said. In Leoben things
are so arranged that you have to concentrate entirely on your studies to keep from going crazy.

I said I was not isolated, it was only that every day I had to exert myself anew to win the solitude I needed in order to make progress. Sometimes I was even rude, offended people I liked. But if my mind started to balk at studying, I would leave the dormitory, usually alone, and go walking along the bank of the Mur, thinking only of my work until I had conquered my restlessness. Often, however, I merely went down to the Mur, that brown, sluggish, viscous river, for the purpose of complete distraction. I would climb the northern hills and let myself dream while contemplating the outward aspects of nature. Whenever I looked at it, I said, and from any perspective, the surface of the earth struck me as new and I was refreshed by it.

Often, I went on, studying the quality of the air and tramping for miles northeastward, in the direction of the Semmering, gave me the greatest pleasure. It was almost a sense of rapture and probably stemmed from the feeling of being altogether free.

Speculating on the local geology near the Mur, I said, would often calm my mind and give me back the clarity I had lost by strenuous studying. My mind would feel receptive again.

For a long time now I had been regarding myself as an organism I could discipline on command by my own will power, I told my father. To be sure, I sometimes had relapses, but these did not plunge me into despair. It was worth making the maximum effort to shake off a tendency to despair, I said. Better to be terribly strained than despairing.

There were moments when I felt empowered to see right
through the whole of creation. “Moments of pure recreation,” I said, though they left me exhausted.

Every day I completely built myself up, and completely destroyed myself.

Self-control, I said, is the satisfaction of using your brain to make the self into a mechanism that obeys your command.

Only through such control can man be happy and perceive his own nature. But very few people ever perceive their natures. To let the feelings predominate, to do nothing against the normal gloominess of the emotions, delivers people up to despair. Where the reason is in control, I said, despair is impossible. “Whenever this state of total irrationality closes down on me, there is nothing but despair inside me.” Nowadays I only very rarely succumb to this state, I said. Life always seemed grim if you did not step outside it; the satisfaction came from enduring it rationally. Most people were governed by their emotions, not their reason, I said, and the result was that most sank into despair. “But the kind of reason I mean,” I said, “is completely unscientific.”

My father had been struck by my sudden loquacity. He commented that he too sometimes found himself talking about something, or even only seeing something he could not put into words, which was actually out of the question for people, was really humanly impossible.

Passing Bloch’s house, we drove toward Hauenstein to call on a more or less crazy industrialist whose name I have forgotten. From Abraham we took a short cut over Geistthal.

Students were always prey to a kind of restlessness, I said, because as long as they are at school they live in a no-man’s
land between the parents they have left behind and the world they cannot yet attain, and their instincts still draw them back to their parents rather than toward the world. There are often tragedies inside that no-man’s land, which happen when they realize that they can neither return to their parents nor step out into the world. In the last six months in my dormitory alone three students have killed themselves, I said. Up to the last, there had not been the slightest symptom of emotional or psychic trouble in any of the three.

I myself had never even thought of taking my life, I said. But my father remarked that the idea of suicide had always been a familiar one to him. Even as a child, when other ideas became too much for him, he had often sought refuge in this idea. But whenever the idea did come into his head, it had always taken the form of an alternative that made life possible, hence something rather restful, never something in its own right. Both of us were thinking how dangerous it was to have my sister continually absorbed in thoughts of suicide, either brooding about it or actually attempting it. From the time she was little she had inclined toward self-destruction. What had first been a bit of dramatics, my father said, might later develop into a genuine emotion that could end in the real thing.

Beyond Abraham the hills were covered with large orchards. The farmers had set out their casks of cider in the sun. The houses are old. There is hardly a more isolated region than that between Geistthal and Hauenstein.

We had stayed much too long in Stiwoll, my father said. He had been expected all morning in Hauenstein, which was where the industrialist had his hunting lodge. He had
retired there to devote himself to a literary work over which he agonized, even as it kept his mind off his inner agony. The man was not yet fifty; my father had known him for some two years. His half-sister shared his solitude with him; she was, as I would shortly see, perfect for this role—ideal, as the man himself put it. He had bought the hunting lodge some fifteen years ago from Prince Saurau, whom we would next visit at Hochgobernitz Castle. Even as long ago as that, the industrialist had began conceiving this literary work on a “purely philosophical subject” that he would never talk about. If he talked about it, the industrialist repeatedly told my father, if he even began talking about it, he would then and there ruin the work, which had made such notable progress. And he would no longer be able to start again from the beginning. He was wont to say that he worked day and night, writing and destroying what he had written, writing again and again and destroying again and again, but approaching his goal. Aside from his work he permitted himself no diversion except the briefest talks with his half-sister in the library or in the kitchen, and then only for the purpose of settling questions of the meals. Twice a week his half-sister would go to Geistthal to shop, mail letters, and fetch their mail. They had enormous supplies in their hunting lodge in case of what they called “the disaster,” which supplies were never touched. The half-sister was his mother’s daughter, by a Chilean father; and as we slowly neared Hauenstein, my father explained their relationship. They lived together like man and wife. She would withdraw to her room immediately after admitting my father to the lodge and reporting his presence, and she would reappear only to let my father out again.