Gargoyles (14 page)

again, the uncanniness that invariably comes at me when Moser approaches. If Moser so much as entered the vestibule I would have felt that the place was soiled for a lifetime. The cunning with which these Mosers lie in wait for some poor devil and denounce him, the way these Mosers are always sniffing out circumstantial evidence on everything; these Mosers bring everybody into court, I think, or at least into disrepute. Because I did not shake hands with him, my son writes, and because I gave him no greeting at all, Moser has taken a step backward. These Mosers are always on the lookout for something that can involve others in criminality. What a nose they have for every slightest weakness, what an instinct for exploiting weaknesses. I think, my son writes: Imagine masses of Mosers who suddenly emerge from everywhere and begin running things everywhere and finally dominate everything! I have cheated Moser out of his preface, my son writes; now he has to come to the point immediately: the harvest! I said I had no time, my son writes; I said he was disturbing me, that I was working, that I imagine he is not unaware that I work by reading, that I am working on Marx’s dissertation, on his
Opinions on the Relationship of the Physics of Democritus and Epicurus
, on
The Difficulties in Regard to the Identity of the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus
. And I actually said a word to Moser for the first time, my son writes, the word
reading
, to indicate that I had no time for his pleadings. I said I wondered that Moser had come, my son writes. After all, he was aware of my decision to let the harvest rot, aware of my decision to let Hochgobernitz decay, to liquidate Hochgobernitz, aware of my consistent resolve to destroy Hochgobernitz, my son writes, Doctor. I said I did not understand his not understanding
what I am doing, but I know what I am doing, my son writes,” the prince said. “Nevertheless Moser now proposes to me, for the third time, imagine, my son writes, that I allow some of the townspeople, the majority recruited from the old-age home, into the Hochgobernitz fields, into
my
fields, so that they can harvest the crops! They would like to
harvest
before everything rots! Moser dared to say that already a good deal has rotted and furthermore to ask was I aware of that and, but he did not say this outright, that I am crazy and my father would turn over in his grave on my account, that only a madman did not harvest, only a madman would let such a flourishing farm run down. And actually, my son writes, Doctor, the fact that I am letting my paternal inheritance run down and be destroyed is in truth a monstrous act! Actually I am surely the only person in Central Europe who is letting nine thousand six hundred acres run down! Now for Moser’s world, the whole world of the township—the whole ordinary world is a Moser world, the whole state is a Moser state—it is in itself a monstrous act that for a reason they absolutely cannot fathom I have sold all the livestock, have sold off all the movable inventory from the Hochgobernitz fields, have driven all the people out of the house—within one week after the old man’s suicide I had them out of the house! Today that seems to me my greatest feat, my son writes,” the prince said. “My son writes: It is splendid that I also sent my father’s sisters packing, every single one of them! That with one fell swoop I had Hochgobernitz entirely to myself, that is splendid! But then, my son writes, everyone might have thought that I meant to run a completely automated farm, without livestock and without people.… But soon they saw that I was not running any
kind of farm at all, that my whole aim was to destroy the entire business, to destroy all of Hochgobernitz. Within a single morning I got rid of all the machinery and tractors. The monstrosity of my act surpassed their strength, and they informed the courts, the district and state governments. In vain.… All that comes back into my memory now, my son writes, the very moment that Moser again throws at me that word
harvest
. You see, Moser says, they’d like to
harvest
before everything rots. I can’t be serious about letting everything rot, he says! But Moser too knows there is no law that can prescribe what I must do on the combined estates that make up Hochgobernitz. Harvest! Again I hear what I have heard often before, about distress in the township, distress of the people, human distress, poverty, community,
race
, the problem of vermin, and so on, my son writes. But how does this man dare, he writes, to repeatedly bring up a subject that is finished with.
Hochgobernitz is finished!
I am totally committed to my consistent decisions. I say:
Herr Moser, you are disturbing me!
my son writes. That is all. I do not have the strength to turn my back, to ignore Moser. He is here! Moser is here! For a moment I see all the roads and paths leading to my fields, which I have blocked off. Everywhere signs have been posted :
No trespassing
. The town clerk, too, has to obey that prohibition, for here on my property trespassing is forbidden
to all, to everybody!
Except the deliverers of newspapers. I now see myself once more digging ditches in the roads, felling tree trunks over them, unrolling hundreds and hundreds upon hundreds of yards of barbed wire, my son writes. Doctor,” the prince said, “doesn’t all this strike you as
uncanny?
Naturally, my son writes, what I am doing cannot help seeming insane, but that does not disturb
me. The Moser tone has always pained me; these Mosers don’t give up, they keep trying again and again, always under some different pretext; but today there is an unbearable stench of insistence about him. He talks about public health! I am abandoning theory for practice, my son writes: But I discover, he writes, no trace of uncertainty in myself. At the moment the uncertainty is all Moser’s, and I think: I do not recall ever having greeted Moser, not a single time. And now, listen, Doctor, he writes: My father too never greeted Moser, but that did not prevent the town clerk, whenever I met him or whenever my father met him, every single time, from pushing his way into me or into my father for one painful moment by greeting us. The utter trickery of it! His purpose was to soil one or the other of us. Once the Mosers penetrate into you everything inside you is leprous, my son writes. Such a person can never be
tolerated
, he writes, no, such a person
can
never be tolerated. I hear, my son writes, that he has already recruited the people he needs for harvesting the Hochgobernitz fields, and he says
on behalf of the mayor, of course, and on behalf of public health
. They have all been told to be at the town hall at six tomorrow morning, he says; all they are waiting for is my permission! For permission from above, handed down from Hochgobernitz! I think that people are always obtaining permission from above, always handed down from a Hochgobernitz. But I will permit nothing! The township will supply the implements, the machines, Moser says. It is estimated, Moser says again and again, looking at me and not looking at me, my son writes, that the yield will suffice to feed a few thousand people for a period of more than half a year! No, I say, and Moser says that this year’s crop is the best
crop. The town clerk is clever at cutting his sentences short because he knows that even his hints are enough to get on my nerves.
Before everything rots
, Moser says emotionally. I hear him speak several times about doing good, but I am deaf to this notion; there is no such thing as doing good, I say. A high hourly wage has been agreed on for harvesting my fields, Moser says, but he does not say how high an hourly wage. No matter what the season, I think, this man always has the same winter woolens on, these cheap, heavy winter wartime woolens that his body slowly fills out, his body which I once saw completely naked, my son writes,” the prince said. “I see Moser’s flesh more and more growing into those wartime woolens. I once saw him naked by the river, together with his equally naked wife; I remember that infantile penis. There they were, indulging their pitiable Sunday connubiality behind the bushes, away from the clear water, where they thought they were alone and could indulge themselves in their revolting intimacies, succumbing to their stupor in the sunset. The harvesting had to be started at once, Moser said, otherwise
everything
would rot. A short while later I hear the word
inhumanity
repeated. Again and again I hear the word
inhumanity
. Now, at this third attempt to save Hochgobernitz, Moser dares to use that word, and I think: As long as I exist, nothing more will ever be harvested here, on my estates; that is going to be my object for all the future; I am destroying Hochgobernitz. He dares! the masses have become megalomaniac. The word inhumanity, which the masses through Moser have dared to utter here in the courtyard of Hochgobernitz, preoccupies me for some time, time that, failing in my attempt to return to my reading, to return to my science, I fill by reading through
sentences I do not understand. Moser has failed, I say to myself, but I too have failed. Moser is escaping, but I too am escaping. Where to? Moser’s defeat, the defeat of the masses, is also my own defeat. But my defeat is much more depressing a one than Moser’s, I think. Vexation gives way to a weariness that leads to nothing significant. I look out through the window, my son writes, and see Moser between the walls. A short while later I think: Moser walked there, walked away, I can see where he walked away.
Inhumanity!
I could no longer bear staying in the castle and put on my boots and went out of the castle and walked first on the inner and then on the outer walls, and peered down with my binoculars to determine to what extent everything has already rotted, my son writes,” the prince said. “Isn’t it curious,” the prince said, “so long a roll of paper and I see every word of it. So it is no longer a mystery to me what will happen after my death,” the prince said. “It is all perfectly clear to me.”

We were now walking on the outer wall of the castle. “Down there, do you see,” the prince said, “lies Hauenstein. And there is Stiwoll. And there Köflach. Last night,” he said, “I was down in the gorge. I intended to go into the mill, but I could not endure the noise the birds in the big cage behind the mill were making, that horrible screeching. I climbed up out of the gorge again at once,” he said. “Although I am not alone, I keep entirely to myself. Whereas I myself in the course of time have almost completely isolated myself from all society and no longer receive visits,” the prince said, “the women folk hurl themselves more and more into an absolutely bestial form of social absurdity. As you know, I have even given up playing chess with Krainer. I have discontinued everything that has to do with human associations.
Nowadays I associate only with people with whom I must associate. I maintain only the most minimal kind of business associations. Doesn’t the grain interest you, doesn’t the whole farm economy interest you any longer? I often ask myself. The foresters, yes, they still interest me, the workmen on the Saurau estates. No one else. It is different for the women. Their Wednesday evenings are unbearable to me. Their Saturday evenings still more unbearable. I refuse to appear at any of these evenings. But I can hear all the way up to my room the way they call out to each other—and they have been doing it this way for decades—the names of those who will be coming up to Hochgobernitz on Wednesday evening or Saturday evening. Miserable people. Most people have gone into liquidation on the day of their birth. Repulsive people from the city, but even more repulsive people from the immediate vicinity, boring, torpid neighbors. By Tuesday they are already moving chairs and benches and tables about the whole house for the Wednesday people, and by Friday for the Saturday people. I hear the clatter of dishes, and I can no longer work, I can no longer think! The clink of silver and of glasses dominates Hochgobernitz, you see. They call me, but I do not answer. They want me, but I will not go down to them. These Wednesday evenings cost a great deal of money, but the Saturday evenings cost even more. On these occasions our graves are opened for hours at a time, their stench released; the huge family graveyards are opened and their peace shattered by talk. The whole countryside is talked to pieces, until everyone is tired and in common disgust trudges out of the castle and back down into the lowlands. On Wednesday and Saturday human vermin dominate here at Gobernitz,” the prince said. “Human defectiveness,
the onanism of despair,” he said. His son could study his future life by the example of his father, he added. The aims for which his father has lived will also be his son’s aims, the father’s pleasures the son’s pleasures, the father’s disgust with the world also the son’s disgust with the world. After all, the son is going to die after his father, in a loneliness that can be entered and left only within his own brain. When the son looks at his father he sees the father’s wretchedness, just as the father constantly sees the son’s wretchedness. Father and son continually look at one another in their wretchedness. “But ultimately the son must be much more horrible than the father.” He often observed his family from the library window, the prince said, going back and forth in the courtyard in the midst of their conversations. “Locked up in their primitive vocabulary,
radically idle creatures
, my relatives are unthinkable without me,” the prince said. This thought would often drive away his boredom in favor of an irrelevant disgust for their bodies. “These bodies that have come from me,” he said, “begotten by me without the slightest partiality for life on my part.” Suddenly he remarked that at Hochgobernitz derangements often persisted for weeks. “What is the reason?” he asked. “I am not alone in being affected by these derangements,” he said. “We are all affected. We all live close together cramped into a building, don’t imagine it is big, and are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. We do not hear one another when we call. For weeks at a time we are ruled by the weather, like a catastrophic primal nervous system of which we are merely part. Until we have reached an ultimate degree of depression in which we suddenly begin to talk again, help one another up, begin to understand one another, only to revert once more to
our old estrangement. Who is it takes the first step toward intimacy, toward familial attentiveness?” he said. “We eat together again, drink together, talk together, laugh together, until we are separated again. But the time of closeness becomes increasingly shorter.” In past years, he said, his son had come back from England to rest up, to show himself, for talk, summertime conversations, and to see the performance of the play—“A three act play is performed at Hochgobernitz every year,” the prince said, “with prelude and postlude.” But this year his son had been expected not only for pleasure, but chiefly for conversations with his father, “of a legal nature, concerning the property.” In letters to his son, which the prince wrote almost daily, he had repeatedly alluded to his plans for Hochgobernitz. He had stressed his resolve to increase the size of the property while at the same time drastically simplifying the methods for its maintenance and administration. “But such fundamental changes cannot be explained in writing,” the prince said, “and after all not only Hochgobernitz is involved, but also Ötz and Terlan, the gravel pits near Gmunden, and the town houses in Vienna.” But all the while his son had been in Hochgobernitz, the subject had been passed over as quickly as usual, with not a single discussion of these problems. “He thinks he will stay another four or five years in London,” the prince said. “I don’t know what he intends, I can only guess. This thing he is writing is an altogether political work. Even during the holidays I noticed that he devoted most of his time to this scholarly, actually altogether political work. But he told me that the holidays this year had been
ideal
. Sometimes he too suffers from inability to concentrate,” the prince said. “He again made me aware that it is sometimes worthwhile interrupting
a prolonged scholarly task that demands the greatest effort to approach an intuitable though unattainable goal. On the Channel boat, he said, he realized that Hochgobernitz is wholly alien to him. I do not believe that is so. My son said he was afraid of Hochgobernitz, in spite of himself. On the one hand it is good to come home for holidays, he said; how easily an intellectual task can go wrong, he said, because one did not dare interrupt it at the decisive moment and at a crucial passage, because one did not obey nature. This decisive moment came for him, my son, shortly before the holidays. It had been right, he said, to interrupt the work at the moment that I wrote to him: Come here! But I wanted to have him in Hochgobernitz, with me, for a particular end. I did not attain this end. But the usefulness of his interrupting his work satisfied him,” the prince said. “I saw clearly, while my son was on his way from England and drawing nearer to Hochgobernitz, the rough spots, the deterioration in the relationship between us. They increased from hour to hour. Then my son arrived and I saw these faults distinctly. He said he was working on an essay he had been able to rescue. He lives in a perpetually sunless little room, bare and cheap, though in the vicinity of Hyde Park. My son has to exhaust himself,” the prince said. “Once he has utterly exhausted himself, he comes back.”