Gargoyles (17 page)

“In conversation,” the prince said, “people constantly feel as if they are treading a tightrope and are always afraid of falling down to the low level more proper to them. I too have this fear. Therefore all conversations are conducted by people who are treading a tightrope and constantly in fear of falling to their low level, of being pushed down to the low level. In the nature of things it sounds completely different,” Prince Saurau said, “when my son in England, in London, says at Victoria Station, for example, that he hates people, completely different from the way it sounds when I in Hochgobernitz say that I hate people, yet it is the same ridiculous hatred for the same ridiculous people. If in Victoria Station we call our mother or our father, it is the same as when we call our mother, our father, from here in Hochgobernitz. Do you see? If we walk consistently, and especially in books, we are in reality always walking through landscapes we have long known. We come upon nothing new. Just as we come upon nothing new in the sciences. Everything is prescribed.
The cold is inside me,” the prince said. “Therefore it makes no difference where I go; the cold goes along with me inside me. I am freezing from within. But in the library this cold is most bearable. Nothing but brains printed to death,” the prince said. “With every book we discover to our horror a human being printed to death by the printers, a man published to death by the publishers, read to death by the readers. Let’s say there’s a letter from a wool trader in Bombay to my younger sister, from a friend of her youth. The letter is lying in my sister’s desk. I know that. Nevertheless I ask my sister, after I have known for weeks that the letter is lying in her desk:
Where in the world is that letter from Bombay?
And she says, although she knows that I know that the letter is in her desk:
In the desk
. The absurdity in which people get up and in which they go to bed again,” he said, “always of course merits another sense of shock. Why not? After all there is always a different absurdity in their getting up and their going to bed. The absurdity in which we are now walking on the wall, for example—are you aware of this absurdity? And is your son aware of it? We face questions like an open grave about to be filled. It is also absurd, you know, for me to be talking of the absurdity,” he said. “My character can justly be called thoroughly unloving. But with equal justice I call the world utterly unloving. Love is an absurdity for which there is no place in nature.

“In the course of the changes I intend to make in Hochgobernitz,” he said, “everything here is going to be restricted. Everything will be enlarged and everything will be restricted. An enlargement of the estates involves a restriction of our lives. Again and again I reflect that I have been left alone. And I feel this to be the most loathsome of thoughts:
to be left alone. Loneliness is man’s route to loathsomeness. Age is an enormous loathsomeness. Youth is disgusting, but age is loathsome. My relatives go back and forth like the dead. Sometimes I have the impulse to summon them and shout into their faces that they ought to stop being permanently dead. It is the same every day,” the prince said. “It is cold in my room because it is cold in me; it is cold in Hochgobernitz because it is cold in me. I leave my room, I leave Hochgobernitz—in my thoughts, you understand—and everywhere I feel the same cold. I often think that it is my duty to write to my son in London and tell him what is awaiting him here in Hochgobernitz some day, when I am dead: cold. Isolation. Madness. Deadly monologuing. Madness emerging from himself and appearing as madness of the world, of nature. My father,” the prince said, “often spoke of selling Hochgobernitz and everything that belonged to it. At first he wanted to part with the gravel pits, then with the sawmills, then with the mills, then with Hochgobernitz itself, and he ordered his steward, a man named Gombrowicz, to work out a plan for liquidating the entire estate. For days he talked about freeing himself from Hochgobernitz, but when he thought of the workmen, of the gravel pit workmen, of the millers, of the sawyers, who were dependent on Hochgobernitz and therefore upon him alone, he threw up the plan again.… Toward the end he frequently said: I am tired, I am tired of Hochgobernitz, but I am too tired to give up Hochgobernitz, I would rather give myself up. It occurs to me,” the prince said, “that he imagined a marital union between the steward and my elder sister; he regarded such a union as a future fact. He disliked the steward’s looks, and his mind as well, but he
saw
this union and wanted to
bring it about. We owe everything to the steward, he always used to say. Then the steward plunged into the gorge and was buried, and another came. Toward the end,” the prince said, “my father more and more feared he would have to liquidate Hochgobernitz. But at the end he didn’t care about anything. He had a miserable end. His only contact with the women was when he was hungry; with me, to berate me, to curse me. He pushed a note under his door on which was written in red pencil what he wanted to eat or drink.” During the last two weeks these notes called only for bread and water, the prince said. He no longer opened the door. He no longer washed either, and sometimes in the early morning they heard him pacing in his room and talking loudly to himself, but they could not make out a word. Suddenly, two days before his suicide, he ceased his incomprehensible monologue. There was complete silence in his room. But it no longer disturbed them, because they had already been rendered completely apathetic. For two weeks old Saurau opened the windows of his room only to pour his excretions, which he took care of in a bucket, out of the window into the courtyard. Before he finally withdrew to his room his family had occasionally seen him sitting at his desk in the office, motionless. He had often left his room in the depths of the night and gone down to the office to seat himself at his desk. His son, who went to him in the office, asked whether he could help him, but his father remained silent. It seemed to the son again and again that the father had something important to say, but could no longer say it. For hours old Saurau would sit in increasing fixity, only to stand up suddenly and return to his room. “The moment my father was in his room,” the prince said, “he locked the door.” The
prince suspected that his father, locked in his room, wept. During the last days the women had been totally unable to do anything with him or for him. “Almost all the Sauraus have killed themselves,” the prince said. “Hochgobernitz has ended with suicide for almost all Sauraus.” The women had left everything to him, the madman’s son. He had had to bear the whole burden, he said. The prince described his father’s last day as follows: Until three o’clock in the afternoon he had heard nothing at all from his father’s room. He became suspicious about the quiet on his father’s floor. In the office he had negotiated with the gravel pit workers, with the sawyers, and then with the forestry apprentices, and during these negotiations he had kept thinking that it was not normal for it to be so quiet at this time. For previously he had always heard his father at least moving back and forth,
“creeping
back and forth,” the prince said, “but on that day, the last day of October 1948, I heard nothing.” After the gravel pit workers, the sawyers, and the forestry apprentices were gone, he had studied and arranged the papers that had arrived from the county commissioner’s office, “including those concerning the flood,” the prince said, and then gone into the kitchen and told the women that he would look in on his father. Upstairs, he had knocked on the door repeatedly, but nothing stirred inside the room. “Father!” Nothing. Usually his father had always replied, “though confusedly.” Nothing. The son then forced his way into his father’s room; he broke open the door with his shoulder. He found his father on the floor in the center of the room with a bullet hole in his head. On the dead man’s wrists he had noticed swellings, and immediately connected them with his father’s madness. When the district doctor (my father’s
predecessor) arrived, the prince had called his attention to these swellings, but the doctor denied any connection between the swellings and the madness of the prince’s father. “But I still believe, and more strongly than ever, Doctor,” the prince said, “that there was a connection between my father’s insanity and his swollen wrists. I must add, though,” the prince said, “that I have never believed in doctors and that to this day I don’t believe in medical art. You are not here to see me as a doctor, you know, not as a doctor,” the prince said, “and to this day I believe that doctors are of all people those farthest removed from human nature, who know least about human nature.” He could imagine, he said, that on the last day his father had been unable to get up and had only crawled around in his room. Quite aside from his madness, the weeks of strictly refusing nourishment had made him incapable of standing erect. “Toward the end he had no strength at all left, Doctor,” the prince said, “no strength at all.” It had not been hard, the prince had said at the time, to imagine, as he looked at his father laid out in the pavilion, all that his father had endured “in order to have the privilege of being dead at last. All over his body we discovered traces of cruel torments he had inflicted on himself,” the prince said. His whole body had been marked by self-inflicted bruises. “This highly intelligent person!” the prince said. “The crucial pages were ripped out of his favorite books, which he had taken from the library to his room. Pages from
The World As Will and Idea
, for instance. He had
eaten
them,” the prince said. “Schopenhauer has always been the best nourishment for me,” his father had written a few hours before his suicide, on a scrap of paper found by a member of the coroner’s commission. It was dated October 22, 1948. He
had torn open his jacket, cut it into narrow longitudinal strips, and twisted these into a rope. “At first he had intended to hang himself,” the prince said, “but at the last moment shooting seemed to him better. And so the last communication from him, written on a blank page torn from the front of
The World As Will and Idea
, consisted of the two words
shooting better.”
All the circumstances indicated that his father had shot himself hours before the prince found him, “while we were down at the river looking at the receding flood,” the prince said. Instinctively, the prince had opened the window of his father’s room and for a moment considered whether it might not have been an accident. “But it was certainly suicide,” the prince said. “My father shot himself with full deliberation. His madness did not exclude a deliberate intention to kill himself.” Even before he informed the women, the prince had telephoned the district doctor. “The fact that he refused to associate the swellings on my father’s wrists with his mental illness is a prime example of the ignorance, the narrowmindedness, of doctors,” the prince said. The women had stood in his father’s room, incapable of doing anything sensible, as if his father had killed them along with himself. A coroner’s commission had arrived by half past four—“young fellows,” the prince said, “who persistently talked about other incidents which had no bearing on our present concern. The women,” the prince said, “carried the body into the bathroom to wash it. Under the direction of the district doctor they tried to hold the shattered skull together with clothespins. They stuffed the bullet hole with cotton dipped in wax. Meanwhile a few workmen were clearing out the pavilion, so that we could lay Father out in there. Because of the play that had been given there a
few weeks before, inside the pavilion and not in the yard because of bad weather, the pavilion was still full of dozens of sets, props, costumes, and chairs.” He had been surprised at the speed with which the workmen transformed the pavilion into a mortuary hall, the prince commented. As the women carried the body across the yard to the pavilion, they let it drop, so the son had carried his dead father into the pavilion all alone. They merely wrapped him in sheets and covered him with sheets. For several hours blood had continued to flow from his head, and from his mouth and ears, which necessitated frequent changing of the sheets. His father’s body was already cold by the time the prince drove down into the town to make arrangements for the funeral. The women passed on the news to the rest of the family. “They have a fantastic routine for funerals,” the prince said. “As the cause of death they alleged sudden madness.
Sudden
madness?” the prince said. “The forestry apprentices, the sawyers, and the gravel pit workers were the first aside from our closest relatives to pay their respects to Father in the pavilion,” he said. “None of them understood him.” After the funeral the weeks rushed by, he said. The affairs of the property had devolved upon him so quickly that it had been at once painful and easy for him. “I am alone,” the prince said. And he said: “I cannot take you into the house because everything is in disorder, everything is in disorder.” He repeated, “I am alone,” while we were caught by the sudden darkness on the inner wall of the castle, “but that doesn’t bother anyone. In my solitude I am the most undemanding person of them all. I put on my old suits; in ten years I have not bought a new pair of shoes! I do without everything. Last night,” he said, “when my elder daughter returned
from an outing to Hohenwart, where she met her lover, I realized fully just how undemanding I am. You’re not really here any more, I thought, now
they
are here! As she told me about the visit, I thought that I have departed from my relatives, have come so far from them although I don’t know where I am headed, am moving away from them with such speed that I can never return to them. Hochgobernitz is also inside an ever-deepening pall,” he said. “Possibly the point in time at which it will be completely overcast is no longer far off. My sisters are talking with a dead man when they talk with me, I think. For my sisters I am only alive theoretically,” he said. “But I too have the feeling of talking only with the dead whenever I talk with anyone in the house in that whisper which has for years been the prevailing tone of voice here. The dead awaken and wash themselves and breakfast and talk and separate and crawl back into their beds,” Prince Saurau said. “A dead family,” he said. “When someone close to us has committed suicide,” the prince said, “we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.… We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide’s life—for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide’s existence—is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide. The act of suicide always strikes us as sudden. Why? Why, we wonder, were we surprised for so much as a single moment at his suicide? Laid out in the pavilion,” the prince said, “my father gave the impression of a man frightened to death. At night his shattered head often appears to me in the strangest contexts. His hands, which the women had folded
over the sheets, upset me. I often think of him now. But most of the time I do not see him living, but dead. It is extremely difficult for me to picture my father living. My relationship to him was complicated; but we did not use it against one another,” the prince said. “On the walls of the castle I can endure my solitude because I am completely alone on the walls. Have I always been alone? You should be able to say something about that, Doctor,” the prince said. “You are not alone, after all. Perhaps I ought to put it: You are not yet alone. Or: The father is always farther along than the son, and vice versa, the son always farther along than the father, and so on.… Yes,” he said, “sometimes I recall the scene I once saw in Brussels: A man is walking and looking into shop windows, walking and walking and constantly looking into windows, and finally he enters the shop and comes out of the shop again, this pleasing, polished person, I think, this refreshing person in the brisk Brussels morning, and you walk behind him and watch him. Suddenly this person falls to the ground, is dead; you see that he is dead and now you watch the other people, those who gather around the dead man and those who pay no attention at all to the dead man, and so forth … and you walk on. The newspapers,” the prince said, “are my only distraction for weeks. For weeks I lead my life only in the newspapers. I enter the newspapers, enter the world. If my newspapers were to be taken away from me from one day to the next, I would stop existing,” he said. “No better air than newspaper air, I often tell myself. Surrounded by this mountain air, Doctor, I prefer above all to breathe newspaper air. The victim of newspaper madness, I lose control of Hochgobernitz for weeks on end. The newspapers read like familiar fairy tales,” the prince said. “They