A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (7 page)

The following afternoon, on receiving the news of her death, I flew to Austria. The plane was half empty; it was a steady, quiet flight, the air clear and cloudless, the lights of changing cities far below. Reading the paper, drinking beer, looking out the window, I gradually sank into a tired, impersonal sense of well-being. Yes, I thought over and over again, carefully enunciating my thoughts to myself:
THAT DOES IT. THAT DOES IT. THAT DOES IT. GOOD. GOOD. GOOD.
And throughout the flight I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide. Then the plane prepared to land and the lights grew larger and larger. Dissolved in a boneless euphoria against which I was powerless, I moved through the almost deserted airport building. In the train the next morning, I listened to a woman who was one of the Vienna Choirboys’ singing teachers. Even when they
grew up, she was telling her companion, the Choirboys were unable to stand on their own feet. She had a son who was one of them. On a tour in South America, he was the only one who had managed on his pocket money. He had even brought some of it back. She had reason to hope that he, at least, would have some sense when he grew up. I couldn’t stop listening.

I was met at the station and driven home in the car. Snow had fallen during the night; now it was cloudless, the sun was shining, it was cold, the air sparkled with frost. What a contradiction to be driving through a serenely civilized countryside—in weather that made this countryside so much a part of the unchanging deep-blue space above it that no further change seemed thinkable—to a house of mourning and a corpse that might already have begun to rot! During the drive I was unable to get my bearings or form a picture of what was to come, and the dead body in the cold bedroom found me utterly unprepared.

Chairs had been set up in a row and women sat drinking the wine that had been served them. I sensed that little by little, as they looked at the dead woman, they began to think of themselves.

The morning before the funeral I was alone in the room with the body for a long while. At first my feelings were at one with the custom of the wake. Even her
dead body seemed cruelly forsaken and in need of love. Then I began to be bored and looked at the clock. I had decided to spend at least an hour with her. The skin under her eyes was shrivelled, and here and there on her face there were still drops of holy water. Her belly was somewhat bloated from the effect of the pills. I compared the hands on her bosom with a fixed point at the end of the room to make sure she was not breathing after all. The furrow between her nose and upper lip was gone. Sometimes, after looking at her for a while, I didn’t know what to think. At such moments my boredom was at its height and I could only stand distraught beside the corpse. When the hour was over, I didn’t want to leave; I stayed in the room beyond the time I had set myself.

Then she was photographed. From which side did she look best? “The sugar-side of the dead.”

The burial ritual depersonalised her once and for all, and relieved everyone. It was snowing hard as we followed her mortal remains. Only her name had to be inserted in the religious formulas. “Our beloved sister.” On our coats candle wax, which was later ironed out.

It was snowing so hard that you couldn’t get used to it; you kept looking at the sky to see if it was letting up. One by one, the candles went out and were not lit again. How
often, it passed through my mind, I had read of someone catching a fatal illness while attending a funeral.

The woods began right outside the graveyard wall. Fir woods on a rather steep hill. The trees were so close together that you could see only the tops of even the second row, and from then on treetops after treetops. The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature was really merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself. Apart from these countless treetops nothing counted; in the foreground, an episodic jumble of shapes, which gradually receded from the picture. I felt mocked and helpless. All at once, in my impotent rage, I felt the need of writing something about my mother.

In the house that evening I climbed the stairs. Suddenly I took several steps at one bound, giggling in an unfamiliar voice, as if I had become a ventriloquist. I ran up the last few steps. Once upstairs I thumped my chest lustily and hugged myself. Then slowly, with a sense of self-importance, as though I were the holder of a unique secret, I went back down the stairs.

It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupation with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretence at remembering, in the
form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment. Even now I sometimes wake up with a start, as though in response to some inward prodding, and, breathless with horror, feel that I am literally rotting away from second to second. The air in the darkness is so still that, losing their balance, torn from their moorings, the things of my world fly soundlessly about: in another minute they will come crashing down from all directions and smother me. In these tempests of dread, I become magnetic like a decaying animal and, quite otherwise than in undirected pleasure, where all my feelings play together freely, I am attacked by an undirected, objective horror.

Obviously narration is only an act of memory; on the other hand, it holds nothing in reserve for future use; it merely derives a little pleasure from states of dread by trying to formulate them as aptly as possible; from enjoyment of horror it produces enjoyment of memory.

Often during the day I have a sense of being watched. I open doors and look out. Every sound seems to be an attempt on my life.

Sometimes, of course, as I worked on my story, my frankness and honesty weighed on me and I longed to write something that would allow me to lie and dissemble a bit, a play, for instance.

Once, when I was slicing bread, my knife slipped; instantly, I remembered how in the morning she used
to cut thin slices of bread and pour warm milk on them for the children.

Often, as she passed by, she would quickly wipe out the children’s ears and nostrils with her saliva. I always shrank back from the saliva smell.

Once, while mountain climbing with a group of friends, she started off to one side to relieve herself. I was ashamed of her and started to bawl, so she held it in.

In the hospital she was always in a big ward with a lot of other people. Yes, those things still exist! Once in such a hospital ward she pressed my hand for a long while.

When everyone had been served and had finished eating, she would daintily pop the remaining scraps into her mouth.

(These, of course, are anecdotes. But in this context scientific inferences would be just as anecdotal. All words and phrases are too mild.)

The eggnog bottle in the sideboard!

My painful memory of her daily motions, especially in the kitchen.

When she was angry, she didn’t beat the children; at the most, she would wipe their noses violently.

Fear of death when I wake up at night and the light is on in the hallway.

Some years ago I had the idea of making an adventure film with all the members of my family; it would have had nothing to do with me personally.

As a child, she was moonstruck.

She died on a Friday, and during the first few weeks it was on Fridays that her death agony was most present to me. Every Friday the dawn was painful and dark. The yellow streetlights in the night mist; dirty snow and sewer smell; folded arms in the television chair; the last toilet flushing, twice.

Often while at work on my story I felt that writing music would be more in keeping with its incidents. Sweet New England. …

“Perhaps there are new, unsuspected kinds of despair that are unknown to us,” said a village schoolmaster in a crime-thriller series.
The Commissar
.

All the jukeboxes in the region had a record called
WORLD-WEARY POLKA
.

The first signs of spring—mud puddles, warm wind, and snowless trees. Far away, far beyond my typewriter.

“She took her secret with her to the grave.”

In one dream she had a second face, but it too was rather worn.

She was kindly.

Then again, something cheerful: in a dream I saw all sorts of things that were intolerably painful to look at. Suddenly someone came along and in a twinkling took the painful quality out of all these things.
LIKE TAKING DOWN AN OUT-OF-DATE POSTER
. The metaphor was part of my dream.

One summer day I was in my grandfather’s room, looking out the window. There wasn’t much to be seen: a street led uphill through the village to a building that was painted dark “
Schönbrunn
” yellow, an old-time inn; there it turned off to one side. It was a
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
, the street was
DESERTED
. All at once, I had a bitter-tasting feeling for the man who lived in that room; I felt that he would soon die. But this feeling was softened by the knowledge that his death would be a natural one.

Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind’s emptiness. A thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing more to think. Whereupon it crashes to the ground like a figure in a comic strip who suddenly realizes that he has been walking on air.

Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.

Written January—February 1972.

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