Gargoyles (6 page)

The industrialist suffered from diabetes, my father said, and had to administer injections to himself every few hours. Twice or three times a month my father called to check on the state of his disease. As far as my father knew, the couple never received anyone else except himself. He had often asked people in the vicinity whether anyone ever visited the lodge, especially anyone from the city, but apparently no one ever did. The house certainly gave the impression of being inhabited solely by the industrialist and his half-sister. It felt as if no other soul had entered it for decades. It was not, as such hunting lodges usually are, filled with hunting gear, but was almost empty; it contained only the barest necessities. Even in the half-sister’s room there was nothing but a bed, a table, a chest, and an easy chair. No pictures on the wall, not a picture in the whole house. The industrialist said he hated pictures. He wanted everything as empty as possible, as bare as possible. What little there was had to be as simple as possible. He regarded the dense woods around the lodge as a kind of wall. The mailman was allowed to enter this wall with telegrams, but not step inside the house; he had to call until the half-sister came to the door. There was a spring behind the house, my father said—excellent water.

We were now in a high valley and driving through nothing but woods and more woods.

There was not a single book in the industrialist’s house, my father said; he deliberately kept books out of the house in order not to be irritated. After all, nothing is more irritating than books if you want to be alone, must be alone.

He allowed his half-sister to read newspapers, including
Le Soir, Aftonbladet, Le Monde
, and
La Prensa
—not a single German newspaper. But even these foreign papers had
to be at least a month old so that, as the industrialist said, they would have no power of destruction, would be already poetic.

The industrialist’s clothing was plain; my father had never seen him wearing anything but a shirt and slacks. He was said to speak not only all Central European languages, but also virtually all Far Eastern tongues.

Aside from a desk and chair, all he would have in his study was blank paper, so that he would be thrown entirely on his own resources and never diverted from his work. As for the subject-matter of his writing, he would say, he had the experience acquired in more than forty years in the metropolises of the world, in the industrial and commercial centers of all five continents.

His possessions were scattered throughout the whole world, chiefly in English-speaking countries. The industrialist ran his enterprises from Hauenstein; that took only an hour a day. A tremendously complicated apparatus, which was constantly in motion and included more than forty-thousand employees, was kept going from Hauenstein, and functioned better all the time.

When he was finished with his work—“which might possibly boil down to a single thought,” he had once said to my father—he intended to leave Hauenstein again, depart from the mountains, turn his back on them.

The simplest kind of food sufficed him, he would say. Long walks, deeper and deeper into the woods, into the impenetrable “evergreen metaphysical mathematics,” as he called the forests around Hauenstein, sufficed to keep his muscles from going slack. He was opposed to strolling and only walked in order not to “degenerate physically.”

A small iron stove warmed his room, my father said; there was a similar stove in his half-sister’s room. It was fortunate, he had once told my father, that he was diabetic, for that made it necessary for him to associate with one more person in Hauenstein beside his half-sister, namely my father. My father prevented “the perfect consistency of Hauenstein,” he had once said.

It was apparent that the industrialist rarely talked, and that when he did he was trying to fend off something that was a cruel irritation to him.

The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his; mind.

The industrialist’s sole occupation, aside from writing and walking in the forest and talking with his half-sister about the provisions, was shooting at a huge wooden target fastened to two trees behind the lodge. The desire to shoot overcame him from time to time, and of late more and more. “I’m practicing, but I don’t know what for,” he once said to my father. The gunshots could be heard throughout the vicinity, my father said; sometimes they went on for hours after midnight.

He alternated between total sleeplessness and total apathy for days at a time; there was no way for him to escape from this horrible state.

On normal days the industrialist rose at half past four in the morning and worked until half past one in the afternoon. Then he would eat a bite and work on until seven in the evening.

He allowed his half-sister the “greatest possible” freedom
in Hauenstein. But only six or seven weeks after they moved in he had spotted signs of insanity in her, “a madness rooted deep in clericalism.” This insanity, the industrialist thought, might recede at once if his half-sister were to leave Hauenstein. In her extreme loneliness she was always close to the point of taking her own life. But her half-brother could see that out of sheer consideration for him, for whom she did everything though she did not understand him at all, she did not even permit herself a single loud outcry, or thrashing about, which might bring her some relief. My father, for his part, could see she had the withdrawn look characteristic of women in insane asylums. Incidentally, she was obsessive about cleanliness.

“Probably her half-brother has forbidden her to talk to me,” my father said. “I always have the feeling that she would like to, but isn’t allowed to.”

He usually arrived in Hauenstein in the early morning, on the way to Prince Saurau in Hochgobernitz. “The air is purest then and the view of the Rossbach Alp at its most beautiful.”

The road we were now driving on, he commented, had been built by the industrialist at his own expense. The whole length of it belonged to him. Everywhere, hidden in the woods, the industrialist had posted unemployed millers, miners, and retired woodsmen as guards whose task was to keep people from disturbing him.

My father said he thought the industrialist could spend a while longer in Hauenstein, a few more years, perhaps. As yet my father had not detected the slightest signs of madness in the man, unlike the half-sister. But no human being could continue to exist in such total isolation without doing severe damage to his intellect and psyche. It was a well-known phenomenon,
my father said, that at a crisis in their lives some people seek out a dungeon, voluntarily enter it, and devote their lives—which they regard as philosophically oriented—to some scholarly task or to some imaginative scientific obsession. They always take with them into their dungeon some creature who is attached to them. In most cases they sooner or later destroy this creature who has entered the dungeon with them, and then themselves. The process always goes slowly at first. Yet my father was not inclined to regard the industrialist as an unhappy man. On the contrary, he was leading a life that suited him perfectly, in contrast to his half-sister, who on his account was compelled to lead a totally unhappy life.

At first such persons as the industrialist’s half-sister try to defend themselves, my father said. They do not want to be wholly at the mercy of their oppressor. But they soon see that fighting back is useless. They cannot help themselves. Then they become attached to their oppressor with a despair that systematically destroys them. “The cruel despair of servitude,” my father called it.

Because they are ruthless to the core, such people as the industrialist attain their goal, even though everyone else regards the goal as senseless and the method by which it is attained repulsive.

When we arrived at the hunting lodge, I saw that it indeed stood in a clearing and the whole picture conformed to what my father had said about it.

There was not a single trophy in evidence. The place did not look like a hunting lodge at all. I thought at once: a dungeon! A provisional dungeon! All the shutters were closed, as if the lodge were uninhabited.

The industrialist’s study was at the rear, my father said. The man never allowed himself more than a single open shutter.

Everything in the place had to further the industrialist’s concentration on his work.

We got out, and since my father was expected and our car must have been heard, the door was opened at once. The industrialist’s half-sister led us quickly into the vestibule, and it struck me that originally the place could not have been a hunting lodge, for there would not have been a vestibule in such a lodge, not in our district. Probably the building had once served some function in the Saurau system of fortifications. There was not a single movable object in the vestibule, aside from a heavy cord that hung from the ceiling. The purpose of this cord perplexed me.

My father said I was his son. The industrialist’s half-sister did not shake hands with me, however. She slipped away, leaving us alone in the vestibule. I was struck by how quickly she had bolted the front door again as soon as we had entered, thrusting a heavy wooden bar into a slot. Accustomed to my father’s visits, she did not apologize before she disappeared.

I followed my father through several rooms that received some faint light through the leaves of the shutters. The walls were whitewashed, the floors larch planks. We had to go upstairs to the second floor. There was a long corridor, just as dark, determinedly darkened. I thought of the interior of a monastery.

We walked cautiously, but nevertheless made far too much noise because the rooms were empty.

I wished I could scream at the top of my voice, and as I
screamed wrench open the shutters. But reason checked me.

At the industrialist’s door my father stopped, knocked, and entered without me when the industrialist called. I waited outside as we had agreed.

For a long time I heard nothing, then words (but could make out little of the context), finally a clear reference to the industrialist’s literary work. He had made enormous progress during the past week, he said, and expected to go on making enormous progress. “Even though I have destroyed everything I have written up to now,” he said, “I have still made enormous progress.”

He was now prepared to go on working for years. Possibly the work would destroy him. Then: “No,” he said, “I won’t let myself be destroyed.”

Then he spoke of his current business affairs, which were focused more and more on the African countries. He had received the most gratifying news from London and Capetown, he said. Africa was developing at tremendous speed into the richest continent in the world, and it was essential to exploit the fact that the whites were withdrawing from it. “The white race is done for in Africa,” he said, “but
I
am just beginning there!”

Coming back to his writing, he said that right now, “these past few weeks,” he had made discoveries that were decisive for his work. His isolation, “the emptiness here,” was enabling him “to reach out to a whole tremendous cosmos of ideas.” Now everything was coming to fruition inside him. And he was mustering all his strength to complete his work.

In order to have nothing around that might interfere with his work, he said, he had ordered destroyed “the last
real distraction I have had in Hauenstein.” He had ordered all the game that still remained in his forests to be shot, collected, and distributed preferably to “the poorest people” in the whole vicinity.

“Now I no longer hear anything when I open the window,” the industrialist said. “Nothing. A fabulous state of affairs.”

After a prolonged silence in the room I heard my father speak of me to the industrialist, saying that I had come home for the weekend from Leoben, where as the industrialist knew I was studying at the Mining Academy, and he had taken me on his rounds this morning. I was outside in the corridor now. But the industrialist was not tempted to call me in. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to see your son. A new person, a new face, will ruin everything for me. Please understand, a new face would ruin everything for me.”

The industrialist asked my father where he had been that day. It sounded like a routine question that he always asked.

“In Gradenberg,” my father said. “An innkeeper’s wife there was killed by a miner named Grössl. Then we were on the Hüllberg. And in Salla. And in Köflach. In Afling and Stiwoll.”

“Are you going up to Saurau now?” the industrialist asked.

“Yes,” my father said, “but before that I have to go down to the Fochler mill again.”

“No,” the industrialist repeated, “I prefer not to receive your son; I’d rather not meet him. When a new person suddenly turns up, it may be that he’ll destroy everything for me. Just one person turns up and ruins everything.” After a while the industrialist said: “Since all the rooms in this house
are completely vacant, I cannot knock into any object in the darkness that fills them.”

My father emerged. We went down to the vestibule. The industrialist’s half-sister let us out. Even the clearing had something oppressive about it. “We’ll drive to Geistthal for a bit,” my father said. In silence we drove through the woods along the same road by which we had come, back to Geistthal. We did not see a soul. I was appalled, imagining that there was no longer any game in the forest and that invisible sentinels were watching us. Shortly before we reached Geistthal, we saw the first people. It was noon. At first we thought to drive to the Fochler mill by way of the Römaskogel, but then after all drove by way of Abraham to Afling, where we went to a restaurant that my father knew well.

All the tables were occupied. We were invited to come into the kitchen, where we were given preferential service. We heard talk about the killing in Gradenberg, and about the dead woman. Grössl had not been caught yet. But his hiding place couldn’t be far away, someone said; sooner or later hunger would drive him into the open.